This essay explores the philosophical texts and ideas that exerted an influence on Sebald. His personal library was highly selective, containing the works of unconventional thinkers such as Elias Canetti, but omitting most of the major figures of German philosophy along with post-structuralist writers. Ludwig Wittgenstein, however, inspired Sebald’s early film scripts and his life provided biographical details in Austerlitz and Die Ausgewanderten. Sebald expressed an affinity for, and his literary style evidenced, the pre-rational assemblage of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s ‘system of bricolage’, in the way that his works can resemble a scrapbook of clippings, personal recollections, visual images, etc. Although he detested Heidegger, phenomenology pervaded Sebald’s work. For example, the Liverpool Street Station episode in Austerlitz evidenced Bachelard’s ‘theatre of the past’, and he made use of Merleau-Ponty’s ‘pre-human gaze’ in his essay on Jan Peter Tripp. Sebald’s liking for the pre-rational extended to an interest in Gnosticism, Zoroastrianism, superstition and other overlooked schools of thought and philosophy. Zoroastrianism, for example, influenced his early poetry. This essay concludes that Sebald’s deep interest in metaphysics is key for a full understanding of his critical and literary writings.

This essay considers the ways in which Sebald’s engagement with his literary predecessors expresses his aim, explored in all his major books from Nach der Natur (After Nature, 1988) to Austerlitz (2001), of understanding the historically constructed condition of ‘culture’. Beyond the impact of specific individuals on his work – from Thomas Browne to Joseph Conrad, from Thomas Bernhard to Vladimir Nabokov – the essay considers why the idea of a literary tradition was so important to Sebald’s creative project, and how his intertextual engagement with this tradition helped shape the very terms of his writing. What does it mean, we can ask of Sebald with Susan Sontag, to be ‘a European at the end of European civilization’?

This essay looks at the function of photography in Sebald’s literary and critical work. It focuses on the collaborative relationship between Sebald and the photographer Michael Brandon-Jones at the University of East Anglia and details the initial phase of their creative partnership from 1982. With particular attention given to the role photography in his published poetry and literary criticism published prior to Schwindel. Gefühle. (Vertigo) in 1990 it provides an account of the development of Sebald’s early image / text montages and the role of Brandon-Jones in their creation. By documenting Sebald’s interest in collecting images of ‘Art Brut’ during the 1980s, this essay argues that rather than being something the writer incorporates into his texts, the photographic image is the creative pivot around which Sebald reorientates his entire creative practice.

This essay provides an overview of literary scholarship on W.G. Sebald: the developments and trends as well as common themes and approaches. It highlights examples of existing scholarship that introduce Sebald’s life and work, discuss his literary criticism, and approach his works through a comparative lens. Special consideration is given to Sebald’s prose form, in particular the ethical implications of his way to combine fact and fiction. Finally, the essay suggests possibilities for future research that considers the unpublished materials (manuscripts, correspondence, and images) in Sebald’s literary estate, held at the German Literature Archive in Marbach, and that approaches his works via digital tools and methods (e.g., mapping, visualizing, network analysis, distant reading).

This essay presents congruities between Sebald’s juvenilia and his major works of prose fiction to reveal a portrait of a budding artist who never wandered far from his personal and literary origins and yet learned his lessons from these youthful ventures into writing. It introduces selections from his unpublished and fragmentary literary writings from the 1960s, which are housed in his literary estate at the DLA. These include the short narratives ‘Wartend’ (‘Waiting’) and the untitled story about Herr G. (Mr G.), along with the six-page play Der Traum ein Leben oder die Geschichte des Fr. v. Sch. (The Dream A Life, Or The Story of Fr. v. Sch.), and the two versions of his untitled novel. In these texts, one finds Sebald’s early critiques of capitalism and consumer culture, his interest in the uncanny, the agency of material objects, the crisis of the artist, the horrors of the past, the influence and violence of the totalitarian personality, the power of images, and the destruction wrought by nature. Sebald’s juvenilia make clear that they foreshadow the philosophical, historical, and sociological considerations in his mature prose fiction.

Over the past twenty years, as W.G. Sebald’s influence and prestige has grown, the Sebaldian has grown beyond a descriptor for traits evocative of Sebald’s works to a bona fide genre, with dozens of representatives in several continents, including Carlos Fonseca, Daša Drndić, and Maria Setapnova. Aspects of the Sebaldian include embedded photography, spurious photographs, and incorporation of archival matter.

This essay discusses W.G. Sebald’s use of biographical and autobiographical elements in his literary writing. A diachronic overview retraces Sebald’s evolving use of (auto-)biographical elements from After Nature, Vertigo and The Emigrants to The Rings of Saturn and finally Austerlitz. To do so, this essay outlines, firstly, which protagonists are based on real historical figures and which source-material Sebald used for their literary transposition. Secondly, this essay highlights the relationship between the biographies of persons of historical renown – such as writers like Franz Kafka, Vladimir Nabokov and Stendhal – and those biographies taken from Sebald’s private life. These Sebald modelled after the lives of friends and acquaintances. Their inclusion with changed names – such as Paul Bereyter, Max Ferber or Jacques Austerlitz, raise questions concerning the relationship between truth and fiction. A third, central concern is the discussion of Sebald’s literary techniques and the various ways he introduces and intersects (auto-)biographical texts, photos, and illustrations to create a biographical pastiche.

This essay discusses the role of East Anglia in the biography and literary works of Sebald. Sebald lived from 1970 until his premature death in 2001 in the eastern part of England, whose charm as a remote stretch of land has left its mark in his writings in many ways. As early as 1974, Sebald published a travelogue in the travel section of the newspaper Die Zeit, describing ‘A Leisurely Tour through Norfolk and Suffolk’. This journalistic piece anticipated the portrayal of East Anglia in his later narrative texts. Similarly, East Anglia repeatedly became a theme in Sebald’s poetry with motifs returning in the later prose. The essay focuses on After Nature and The Rings of Saturn, but also includes Austerlitz and the Corsica Project. To conclude, it examines the extent to which Sebald’s account can be understood as a faithful description of East Anglia, or rather, as the essay argues, as a poetic portrait of the area that constituted Sebald’s second “Heimat”.