The German author and literary scholar W. G. Sebald, whose novels explore the work of mourning and remembrance, refers to his reading experience with Weiss's Abschied von den Eltern (1961, Leavetaking) and Fluchtpunkt (1962, Vanishing Point) as the beginning of his own efforts to think through the recent history of German violence. Weiss's notebooks and semiautobiographical novels are permeated by self-critical remarks about the precariousness of turning one's life into a text. Shortly after the subsequent deaths of his mother and father in 1958 and 1959, Weiss wrote two major works of autobiographical fiction. The narrator of Abschied von den Eltern examines his complicated relationship to his parents. At the beginning and at the end of the text, the narrator expresses his intense regret about his prolonged lack of communication with his parents:

The terrifying childhood experience of hearing his mother calling his name out loud merges with the narrator's fear of and desire for closeness to the maternal body (64–65).