W.G. Sebald in Context came out last September with thirty-eight essays on the writer by thirty-eight different authors (including myself). The writers are a who’s who of Sebald specialists from across Europe, Great Britain, the Middle East, and the United States. The editor, Uwe Schütte, studied under Sebald, knew him well, and is now widely recognized as one of the most respected Sebald scholars. If you are interested in Sebald at all, this is an important book that succinctly covers nearly every aspect of his life, career, and writings. It’s a terrific starting point to learn more about Sebald, especially since the writing is very accessible. The essays are short, as each was limited to 3,500 words. The volume is divided into four sections: Biographical Aspects, The Literary Works, Themes and Influences, and Reception and Legacy, and over the next month or so I will write up a brief synopsis of the essays for each of these. The first section of seven essays covers the Biographical Aspects of Sebald’s life.
1. Kay Wolfinger writes about Sebald’s ambiguous feelings about Allgäu, Germany, the place of his childhood, and his complex feelings about the idea of heimat, or the sense of having a German homeland.
2. Christoph Steker writes about the key person in Sebald’s childhood, his grandfather Josef Egelhofer. His grandfather became a father figure to him because Sebald’s own father was frequently absent and had become tainted in his eyes due to his service as a German soldier who had served in Poland during World War II. Josef introduced Sebald to some of the key German authors who he would write about later on, and Sebald came to link the image of his grandfather with the important German writer Robert Walser, since he felt they were very similar in several important ways. Steker suggests that the death of his grandfather when Sebald was twelve was the “original trauma” for the young boy.
3. Catherine Annabel explores the impact that the city of Manchester had on Sebald when he came to teach there in 1966. He was totally unprepared for a city so degraded by industrialization. Michel Butor, who had preceded Sebald as a young lecturer at the University of Manchester, wrote L’Emploi du Temps (Passing Time) in 1956, a novel that greatly influenced the works that Sebald wrote about that dealt with Manchester—the “Bleston” poems, the book-long poem Nach der Natur, and the “Max Ferber” section of The Emigrants.
4. Jo Catling examines the extent to which real East Anglia, a part of England that seems to be “at the end of the world,” matches the East Anglia that appears in Sebald’s books.
5. Florian Radvan writes about Sebald’s difficult relationship with German academia throughout his life. From the beginnings of his university career, Sebald seemed determined to rebel against the conservative German academic establishment, which he felt had “swept under the carpet” the recent German past. Radvan describes Sebald’s MA dissertation as full of “controversial theories [that] consciously sought to antagonize,” marking him as an “academic enfant terrible” and thus making him unwelcome in German academia. As a result, Sebald took up a series of teaching positions in English universities, finally settling into the University of East Anglia, where he taught until his death.
6. Duncan Large writes about the British Centre for Literary Translation, which Sebald founded in 1989 at the University of East Anglia. Three years later, Sebald’s dean said that it was “the most successful applied humanities venture the university has known.” The Centre continues to operate today.
7. Sebald, a German who spent his entire professional life living and working in England, inhabited—a “no man’s land of the in-between,” according to Rüdiger Görner. In his essay Between Germany and Britain, Görner muses on the odd position in which Sebald deliberately placed himself when he emigrated to England yet continued to write almost exclusively in German. In the end, Görner suggests, this state enabled Sebald “to penetrate the [German] past without being overwhelmed by it.”
W.G. Sebald in Context is part of Cambridge University Press’ Literature in Context series, which now numbers more than seventy volumes, offering “comprehensive information and comment to clarify and illuminate the life and work of the literary figure concerned.”