W. G. Sebald: Einführung in Leben und Werk (review)

In keeping with the UTB tradition of scholarly accuracy and reliability, Uwe Schütte has produced a masterful and long-awaited comprehensive introduction to W. G. Sebald’s life and work. As a student of Sebald’s at the University of East Anglia and as a colleague in the intervening years, Schütte got to know Sebald well, and he writes with confidence and a keen eye for detail. The book suggests an intimacy not often encountered (certainly not in Sebald scholarship), and is also written, appropriately, in a straightforward style rare in academe, especially in Germanistik. I have the distinct impression, judging from opinions Sebald expressed during his career, that he would have approved of Schütte’s affecting but sensible, down-to-earth treatment.

The author weaves the threads of his teacher’s personality, personal and professional experience, and his writing—all of his writing, critical and fictional, prose and verse. But lest this review be misunderstood, the book is hardly a fawning encomium. Schütte is frank about a certain stubbornness vis-à-vis technology, for instance, and notes that Sebald could be playfully but not always appropriately deceptive (in one instance he invented, during an interview, a story of a former editor’s suicide—all out of whole cloth). Sebald, fond as he was of polemical rhetoric, could also be unfair (Schütte notes that Sebald’s antipathy towards his own father was probably quite exaggerated, especially considering the elder Sebald’s political engagement with the SPD—and that in a region dominated by right-wing politics). Sebald has been charged with dubiously harsh judgments before, particularly in regard to his critical works that attempt to explain writers’ “pathologies” or, for instance, their autobiographical revisionism. In the case of the latter, there were fervent objections when Sebald published an attack on Alfred Andersch in an appendix to Luftkrieg und Literatur, a book which blamed, some said far too sweepingly, German writers for not confronting German suffering in World War II. In any case, Sebald seems to have made no effort to avoid controversy in such matters. Schütte’s book also makes clear that Sebald sought out the most amenable and savvy editors and agents to promote his books—he hardly resided in an ivory tower once it became clear his career had taken wing.

Schütte’s book proceeds chronologically, beginning with the prose poem Nach der Natur (1988), which was translated into English and published thirteen years later, only after his first three novels had appeared in German and English and established his reputation. To my knowledge, Schütte’s analysis of the poem is the most thorough, critical, and informed to date and serves to refine the scholarly assessment of Sebald’s writerly focus; he was first and foremost a poet. (At least one of his poems appeared posthumously in translation in The New Yorker.)

As befits the German hermeneutic tradition, Schütte goes to great lengths to trace the origins of Schwindel: Gefühle (1990) and the other prose works throughout the rest of the book. Thus we learn, for instance, that Sebald picked up a copy of Stendhal’s De l’amour in a bookstore in Lausanne, recognized a “convergence” between the personality and works of Stendhal (Henri Beyle) and Kafka, and the novel that would appear in English as Vertigo (1999) was born. Schütte places the maturation of Sebald’s technique of “periscoping narrative” in the third section of Die Ausgewanderten (1992), the chapter titled “Ambros Adelwart.” From the period of this writing onwards, Sebald increasingly cites numerous sources for his composite characters and hybrid narratives. An elucidation of Sebald’s next prose work follows, namely Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt (1995). While useful, especially for those new to Sebald, little that is new or original is contributed here. In his treatment of the final book, Austerlitz (2001), Schütte aims, as always, for objectivity, pointing...