W. G. Sebald was not simply drawn to the past, to history, biography, buildings and places that retained an aura of people and events long disappeared. He travelled, in fact and imagination, in memory, his own and that of others, to remote times and places to which he felt a thread of connection, obscure sometimes, a product, perhaps, of echoes and seeming chance. The dead exerted a particular pull, as if they were the conservators of knowledge, holding the answer to mysteries which defied easy understanding. At times they seemed to speak to him.

He was attracted to the work of Peter Weiss for a number of reasons but perhaps this was one cause of his feelings of affinity. After all, Weiss himself remarked that ‘we live with our dead. Each of us has memories of persons no longer present. As long as we exist they also endure. We often get into conversations with them. Our very existence is a consequence of theirs … I live with many dead.’ As Sebald would move, in his career, towards a fascination with the dead of the camps, and the anguished survivors, so, too, did Weiss. Friends had died in the camps. He tried to secure the release of one of them, Lucie Weisberger, from Theresienstadt. Perhaps that was why, many years later, when he wrote a play about the camps, The Investigation, it was the fate of one young woman that clearly fascinated him.