W. G. Sebald

Winfried Georg Sebald, known as W. G. Sebald and, as he preferred, Max Sebald, was a German writer and academic born in Wertach, Bavaria, on 18 May 1944. He grew up in the shadow of the Second World War, spending much of his youth in nearby Sonthofen between the ages of about four and nineteen. At the time of his death in 2001, aged 57, he was described by The New Yorker as widely recognized for his extraordinary contribution to world literature.

Sebald was the second of three children of Rosa and Georg Sebald, and their only son. His father had joined the Reichswehr in 1929, served in the Wehrmacht under the Nazis, and took part in the Invasion of Poland in 1939. Held as a prisoner of war until 1947, he remained a detached figure in Sebald’s early life. The strongest male presence for the boy was his maternal grandfather, Josef Egelhofer, a small-town police officer. At school in Oberstdorf, Sebald was shown images of the Holocaust and later recalled that no one knew how to explain what they had seen.

He studied German and English literature at the University of Freiburg and then at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, where he received a degree in 1965. From 1966 to 1969 he was a lector at the University of Manchester. He married his Austrian-born wife, Ute, in 1967. In 1970 he became a lecturer at the University of East Anglia, where he completed his PhD in 1973 with a dissertation on Alfred Döblin’s novels. He acquired habilitation from the University of Hamburg in 1986, was appointed to a chair of European literature at the University of East Anglia in 1987, and became founding director of the British Centre for Literary Translation in 1989.

Sebald is best known for a group of prose works that mix fact, apparent fact, recollection, and fiction, often accompanied by indistinct black-and-white photographs. His major novels include Vertigo, first published in German in 1990, The Emigrants in 1992, The Rings of Saturn in 1995, and Austerlitz in 2001. The English translation of Austerlitz by Anthea Bell won the 2002 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. Sebald also wrote poetry, including After Nature, For Years Now, and Unrecounted.

Memory, loss of memory, decay, warfare, persecution, and the trauma of the Second World War run through his writing. In On the Natural History of Destruction, published in 1999, he examined the wartime bombing of German cities and the absence, in German writing, of any real response to it. His concern with the Holocaust appears in several books that delicately trace his own biographical connections with Jews. He also rejected the mainstream of West German literature of the 1950s to 1970s and chose an intentionally old-fashioned, elaborate form of German prose.

Austerlitz brought Sebald worldwide recognition in 2001, and he was spoken of as a possible future winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. That same year, he was in high demand by literary institutions, radio programmes, newspapers, magazines, and journals across Western Europe and the United States. Aware of a congenital cardiac insufficiency, he died in December 2001 while driving near Norwich, after suffering a heart attack before his car collided with an oncoming lorry. He is buried in St. Andrew’s churchyard in Framingham Earl, close to where he lived.