Relatively late in his career W. G. Sebald began attracting wide attention for his semi-autobiographical books written in a dense and digressive style and incorporating black-and-white photographs and postcard images. These images intimate some of the more profound costs of nineteenth- and twentieth-century European civilization. Evoking the aftermath of wars, genocides, and environmental devastation in such books as Vertigo, The Rings of Saturn, and The Emigrants, Sebald has attracted a growing body of scholarly criticism that tends increasingly to examine his literary engagement with traces of past suffering under the rubric of trauma. In discussing Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur, his polemic on a purported German literary silence about the destruction of German cities by Allied bombers, one reader describes Sebald as trading on “the now-common currency of trauma and memory” in order to explain how “the devastation of the bombing war” resulted in “apathy, self-anaesthesia and suppression.” In a volume dedicated to Sebald’s visual aesthetic, the editor claims that “Sebald seems less interested in photos that are able to wound us than in those on which past wounds have left their traumatic mark.” In another analysis, Sebald’s overall project is characterized as symptomatic of a condition of “transgenerational traumatization,” a form of trauma based on suffering that was not directly experienced.

There are good reasons to consider the nature and significance of Sebald’s work in terms of trauma. Not the least of these is his own explicit and self-conscious use of the language of trauma, for example in his analysis of postwar German literary responses to the destruction of German cities by Allied bombers: “Doch wird vielleicht aus dergleichen Erinnerungsbruchstücken begreiflich, daß es unmöglich ist, die Tiefen der Traumatisierung in den Seelen derer auszuloten, die aus den Epizentren der Kata strophe entkamen.” In addition, Sebald engages with the work of major figures in the trauma theory canon, including Roland Barthes, who identified a “theoretical trauma posed by photographic representation and its affiliation with death.” His pathbreaking essay, “La chambre claire,” is described by Sebald as “wonderful.” Finally and most compellingly, there is Sebald’s longstanding concern to delineate the nature and significance of failures of memory provoked by human catastrophes and suffering, both collective (for example, the German population’s postwar repression of the memory of the devastating effects of the air war) and personal (for example, the struggles of the protagonist of Austerlitz to recover the childhood memories he lost in the wake of being sent alone to England by his desperate Czech-Jewish mother just before the outbreak of the Shoah).