Winfried Georg Sebald both began and ended his life on the periphery. Born in the waning days of the Second World War in a very rural corner of South Germany, the angry young man left his fatherland at a time when the impact of Nazi values was still felt in German society. That also applied to the University of Freiburg where he read German and English literature: ‘When I began my own studies,’ the narrator in Austerlitz explains, ‘I had learnt almost nothing from the scholars then lecturing in the humanities there, most of them academics who had built their careers in the 1930s and 1940s and still nurtured delusions of power’ (A 43). Sebald did not tolerate this, as he felt, deeply deplorable situation and he decided to expatriate himself.

First, he went to the French-speaking part of Switzerland to complete his BA at the Université de Fribourg. From this picturesque medieval town Sebald moved on to the grimy industrial city of Manchester in 1966. He was shocked by his new environs: ‘I thought I had arrived on another planet and it took me a long time to get used to it. The experience cast me in a considerable depression which lasted until Christmas’ (CB 149), he later recollected. Sebald's first venture to England barely lasted two years. After a sojourn back in Switzerland, where he spent an unhappy academic year as a teacher of German at a private boarding school, he returned to Manchester at the end of the Sixties to start work on his doctorate. Sebald was determined to start a career as an academic in England, and he succeeded: in 1970 he earned a teaching position at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich. Little could he have known at the time that he would eventually spend his entire academic career at UEA.

First, it seemed as if all was going to plan. Sebald spent happy years working in the progressive, recently founded institution. But the situation at the university worsened because of the many reforms that were increasingly introduced by inept politicians following neoliberal agendas.