Although the cliché of the melancholic loner often determined his public perception, W.G. Sebald was an author who frequently engaged in conversation. From 1990 onwards, the start of his literary career, he willingly gave over 80 interviews for television, radio, magazines and newspapers in both German and English. In these interviews, Sebald talked about his own writing more openly and in greater detail than anywhere else, yet at the same time he toyed with the fusion of fact and fiction in his decidedly autofictional literature. The interviews also provide Sebald with an opportunity to install a certain authorial image of himself, though at the same time he often attempted to defend himself against misperceptions, such as the classification as a Holocaust author. Last but not least, the interviews show Sebald as an author who - which is by no means the rule in interviews with writers - repeatedly questions and ironizes himself.

This essay provides an overview of Sebald’s work in relation to the literary topos of ‘travel writing’. Considering his work from Nach der Natur to the Korsika Project, it illuminates some of the sources on which he drew (including Thomas More and Thomas Mann), the contexts within which he worked, and the contribution of his work itself to contemporary modes of travel writing. The essay marks out the key waypoints in the history of the form, including its implication in the history of imperial expansion as well as its connection with the ‘grand tour’, while also sketching out some more recent interpretations as they have been conceived by writers like Bruce Chatwin. Within Sebald’s work, it suggests that the idea of the contemporary travel writer as an ‘outmoded’ figure is key to an ‘atmospherics of lateness’, and even that the coinage ‘Sebaldian’ inheres in a distinctive interweaving of the creative and the critical staged within the context of travel. Lastly, the essay outlines some specific issues relating to Sebald’s presence in Britain, taking into consideration the particularities of East Anglia as well as his reception by contemporary British ‘psychogeographers’.

The essay sketches the development of W.G. Sebald’s poetry from its beginnings in the mid-1960s through the unpublished writings of the 1970s, the 1980s long poem Nach der Natur (After Nature), and the poems written for the volumes For Years Now and Unerzählt (Unrecounted) shortly before his death. The first section introduces Sebald the poet with several general remarks, touching on a poem from the 1960s, passages from Nach der Natur (After Nature) and two poems from the 1990s. This is followed by sections illustrating effects of the non-simultaneous reception of After Nature in German and English and considering the influence of Southern German, Austrian and Swiss prose on the language of Sebald’s poetry. The final section visits the poet’s ‘lyrical workshop’, in other words the development of his poetry in manuscript form between the 1960s and mid-1980s, and the integration of a significant part of the manuscript ‘Across the Land and the Water’ into the final two sections of After Nature. The essay concludes that Sebald wrote poems throughout his life, and that it is likely he would have published further volumes of poetry had he lived longer.

This essay considers Sebald as an academic. Arguably, the acdemy as an institution shaped his entire life. Originating from a non-academic background, studying in Freiburg was his escape ticket from the Allgäu province. His transfers to the universities of Fribourg and Manchester in turn determined his life as an expat and his profile as a Germanist abroad. By remaining at the university, his academic profession provided the basis for his intellectual career and secured his livelihood. His literary work emerged as a frustrated reaction to the neoliberal reforms of UK HE; Sebald conquered his own free space through the writing of literature. In the second part of the essay, Sebald’s teaching style and didactics are examined, not least on the basis of the author’s personal experiences. Sebald was an unorthodox university teacher who aimed to encourage his students in their own talents and abilities.

This essay examines W.G. Sebald’s relationship to the region of his birth, the Allgäu and explores its significance for his literary work. In his stories, he refers several times to his region of origin, to places and memories there, making his Allgäu past on the one hand a point of repulsion and on the other a reservoir of themes and images from which he draws for his prose. In this way, his “Heimat” (homeland) becomes literarily charged in a way that makes Sebald’s literary writings both fascinating and revelatory in terms of their poetics.

As an academic and writer in England, W. G. Sebald’s intellectual baggage was distinctly German with only a small minority of texts explicitly devoted to Anglophone literature. Yet, the atmosphere that permeated his essayistic narratives was distinctly English. In that sense, Sebald occupied a literary space in the in-between, oscillating between times past and times present. This article examines in three steps Sebald’s approach to this space in terms of thematic scope, style and perspectives that characterized his German wanderings in England. It assesses the interplay of memory and imagination in this creative process firmly located in this space of overlapping concerns, mainly rooted in the experience of exile, both real and, in his own case, simulated.

Shortly after completing the manuscript of Austerlitz in the year 2000, W.G. Sebald was awarded a NESTA Fellowship in order to research his next book, which he referred to as the ‘W. W.’ (World War) Project. His grant application refers to ‘an extensive narrative which will encompass the period 1900-1950’. Over the next eighteen months he visited France and Germany several times in order to visit sites, archives and people. This essay examines Sebald’s plans for the project as well as interviews and recollections from the time, including reflections on his own family history and his late schoolfriend, Barbara Aenderl. It considers how the finished book might have developed the more traditional approach to narrative evident in Austerlitz, culminating in a comparison with Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a text which also combines fiction, history and critical reflection. Through considering both Tolstoy’s view of history and Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay on the subject, it suggests that Sebald’s unfinished World War Project would have constituted a similar panoramic attempt to interrogate both history and fiction as modes of writing.

In order to outline W.G. Sebald’s perspective on media technology, it is instructive to consider the similarities between Sebald and Friedrich Kittler, who is generally considered the founding father of German Media Theory. Sebald’s use of the photocopier – in order to intentionally degrade the images used in his works – is reminiscent of Kittler’s interest in ‘noise’, i.e. disturbances that distort the information a medium is supposed to relay. Also, the portrayals of visual apparatuses in Sebald’s texts – as found in painting, photography, film, and video – often focus on these disturbances or ‘noise.’ The reader’s attention is thus directed away from the medial messages and onto the materialities involved in conveying them. Furthermore, Sebald’s descriptions of photography, film, and video repeatedly illustrate how medial noise intereferes with practices of memory. Against this background, media technologies in Sebald appear as a transitory and stubborn materiality which refuses to convey universal meaning.

The writings of W. G. Sebald have inspired visual artists, who have found kinship with him through a wide variety of shared common themes. Sebald himself undoubtedly emboldened such a vibrant response from visual artists, first by imaginatively using photographs and other images as an integral part of his own books and then by collaborating with living artists in the making of two books of his poetry late in his life. Visual artists could relate to the places that he wrote about, especially the landscape and ecology of adopted home of East Anglia. Other themes that artists frequently felt they had in common with Sebald included exile, memory, trauma, the archive, history, war, colonialism. As more and more artists came to use Sebald’s writings as a jumping off point for their own work, curators began to respond by organizing major exhibitions of such work for important museums in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe.

This essay considers the question of Sebald and cinema both in terms of how his texts engage with the medium and how film, in its turn, has treated the author and his works. The argument takes its cue from the essay ‘Kafka im Kino’ (translated as ‘Kafka Goes to the Movies’) in order to discuss the imprint of filmgoing experience that Sebald takes from Kafka, in dialogue with his own. The experience of film viewing raises issues that are central to Sebald’s writing, turning on the potential for identification and community of experience, the reliability of visual evidence and the vicissitudes of memory. These run through the references to film – ranging from early narrative cinema to different modes of documentary film and the French and German new waves – across a set of works by Sebald. The references, extending to medial avatars and intermedial relations, form a ramified network of association, not least in relation to projection and doubling. And the same preoccupations are also seen to reverberate through the cinematic afterlives of Sebald: films in different fictional, documentary and essayistic forms that have drawn – and continue to draw – their inspiration from his writing, also in its intermeshing with his biography.

This essay examines the period between the publication of The Rings of Saturn (1995) and Austerlitz (2001). During this six-year time span, the concept of the ‘natural history of destruction’, Sebald’s negative philosophy of history, gains more and more prominence in his writings. This especially applies to the unfinished Corsica Project and in his Zurich Lectures on air war and German literature (resulting in: On the Natural History of Destruction). The Corsica Project examines various forms of human aggression: hunting, blood revenge, deforestation, and pyromania. The origin of these forms of aggression against nature are attributed to nature itself, thus forming part of an all-encompassing natural history of destruction. The destructive instinct of human beings is presented as an innate, natural characteristic and thus as beyond personal moral responsibility. In On the Natural History of Destruction, this pessimistic idea is applied to contemporary history, with the phenomenon of firestorms in the bombing raids of World War II becoming emblems of the natural history of destruction.

Throughout his work, Sebald engages intensively with ecological issues which this essay examines, using the theories of Ecocriticism and Cultural and Literary Animal Studies. Two aspects of Sebald’s concept of ‘nature’ are particularly important. First, the notion of ‘nature’ in his writings proves inherently contradictory: nature is at both a self-destructive force and a precious good, subject to human destruction. Therefore, humans appear sometimes as helpless victims of the forces of nature, and sometimes as ruthless destroyers of nature. Second, in Sebald’s concept of ‘nature’ , culture and nature do not constitute opposites. Instead, man is not seen as a counterpart of nature, but as an integral part of it, as a product of a nature through which it accomplishes its self-destruction. The destruction of nature is accordingly understood as an interplay of different actors. Non-human nature (plants and animals as well as landscapes) are perceived as actors in a system in which each element contributes to the self-destruction of earth, connecting man, animals and natural world by their shared suffering.

The essay discusses the theme of the Holocaust in Sebald’s texts, though not in the pre-established framework of ‘Holocaust literature’. Its aim is rather to explore a different set of questions: Whom did Sebald choose to write about? What determined his choice and what stories do his characters tell? The two examples examined in this context are the painter Max Ferber and the architectural historian Jacques Austerlitz. The essay argues that the protagonists mirror Sebald’s biographic quests to come to terms with the Nazi past and the legacy of the Holocaust. This explains, for instance, why the Jewish characters Sebald invented had hazy, all-but-forgotten Jewish origins and could know no more about themselves than Sebald knew about them: when he grew up, there was no memory of the Jews in post-war Germany.

This essay analyses the reception of W.G. Sebald during his lifetime based on his track record of literary prizes awarded to him inside and outside Germany. His increasing recognition, both in Germany and in the anglophone world, is reflected in the literary prizes he received. Likewise, the literary prizes reveal significant differences in Sebald’s domestic and foreign reception, which result from the fact that in Germany his aggressive critical essays, attacking major literary figures, resulted in reservations of many juries awarding prizes and other recognitions.