Abstract
With few exceptions, the contributions to W. G. Sebald in Context reflect the current state of Sebald studies, not new research. Indeed, many simply rework previously published material. Furthermore, even after Carole Angier’s recent biography, Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald (2021), biographical information on Sebald is relatively scarce, at times contradictory, and not always reliable. ‘Part I. Biographical Aspects’ therefore supplements the known facts with analyses of Sebald’s published work and statements, effectively allowing him to (co)write his own (literary) (auto)biography. ‘Allgäu’ (Kay Wolfinger) opens with two factual paragraphs about Sebald’s place of birth before dedicating ten pages to the concept of homeland (Heimat) which he later developed in his work. After half a page of facts, ‘Grandfather’ (Christoph Steker) turns to the importance Sebald assigned Josef Egelhofer, his maternal grandfather, decades after his death in 1956. ‘Manchester’ (Catherine Annabel) says more about Sebald’s literary portrayal of the city than about the urban and social environment in which he lived between 1966 and 1970, and ‘East Anglia’ (Jo Catling) also presents the area where Sebald spent his life from 1970 forward largely through the lens of his work. Finally, ‘Between Germany and Great Britain’ (Rüdiger Görner) gives generic observations and analyses of publications precedence over facts on Sebald’s dual linguistic and cultural position.
One must, of course, understand Sebald’s view of his own life, but he has seldom been fact-checked and was silent on many subjects. The danger of reaching misleading conclusions is thus not to be underestimated. Görner, for example, claims ‘Sebald was not prone to [. . . ] a true desire to return to German-speaking lands’ (p. 59). In reality – although, for obvious reasons, he never publicized it – Sebald assiduously applied for professorships in these lands throughout the 1980s (Speak Silence, pp. 315–316). He was not successful but would have gladly accepted a post at a German, Austrian or Swiss university. Two chapters in Part I are, however, largely immune to this problem since Sebald seldom mentioned his ‘day job’ and other sources of information about it are more plentiful. ‘Academia’ (Florian Radvan) is a solid overview of Sebald’s academic career and ‘The British Centre for Literary Translation’ (Duncan Large), which includes new research, is an excellent portrait of Sebald as the BCLT’s founder and first director.
As the title suggests, Cambridge University Press’s ‘Literature in Context’ series focuses on the context of a body of work, not the work itself. However, since a major goal of this volume is to make the ‘German Sebald’ available to an English-speaking audience (pp. xxvi-xxvii), it also presents unpublished works and lesser-known projects, available, if at all, only in German. ‘Part II. The Literary Works’ thus dedicates chapters to his ‘Unpublished Juvenilia’ (Melissa Etzler), ‘Film Scripts’ (Michael Hutchins), ‘Corsica Project’ (Lisa Kunze), ‘Poetry’ (Iain Galbraith) and ‘World War Project’ (Richard Hibbitt). Etzler’s chapter is unbalanced. It passes over the juvenilia Sebald wrote in 1961–1965 in virtual silence, dedicates nearly six pages to a discussion of three short pieces from ca. 1968 that themselves total only 11 pages, and then spends just over a page on more than 200 pages of a novel Sebald wrote in two versions in 1966–1967. The other chapters are fine introductions to the works or projects in question.
Part II also addresses Sebald’s five major literary works indirectly: ‘The Prose Project’ (Paul Whitehead) focusses on an unpublished precursor to Schwindel. Gefühle. (Vertigo) and Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants); ‘Auto-/Biography’ (Christoph Singer), on the role of autobiography and biography in the five major creative works; ‘Natural History and the Anthropocene’ (Bernhard Malkmus) traces its theme in Nach der Natur (After Nature) and Die Ringe des Saturn (The Rings of Saturn); and ‘Interviews’ (Torsten Hoffmann) shows how Sebald presented, and further fictionalized, his creative prose in published exchanges with critics and journalists. All are solid, although Malkmus at times indulges in the ‘rebarbative idiom’ the volume pledges to avoid (p. xxv), and one might wish Hoffmann, the acknowledged expert on the interviews, had done new research, but the target audience will be pleased to have his work, the origins of which date back nearly 15 years, in English for the first time.
‘Part III. Themes and Influences’ contains 14 chapters, 9 of which are clearly relevant and fit in the section: ‘Franz Kafka’ (Ritchie Robertson), ‘Literary Predecessors’ (Ben Hutchinson), ‘Walter Benjamin’ (Luisa Banki), ‘Philosophical Models’ (Paul Thompson), ‘History’ (Lynn L Wolff), ‘Holocaust’ (Jakob Hessing), ‘Painting and Ekphrasis’ (Leonida Kovač), ‘Travel Writing’ (David Anderson), and ‘Ecocriticism and Animal Studies’ (Lisa Kunze). All are excellent except that by Kovač which lacks a consistent argument and ends with the implausible claim that Aby Warburg – whom Sebald cannot be shown to have read and never mentioned – somehow informs his use and descriptions of images (p. 248).
The importance of three of the other five chapters in Part III extends beyond the section. ‘Critical Writings’ (Sven Meyer) and ‘Minor Writing’ and ‘Polemics’ (both by Uwe Schütte) overlap not only with each other but also with Part II since Sebald’s critical writings, far more than his juvenilia, scripts and earliest poetry, were essential precursors and companions to his literary work. His critical and fictional work were, in effect, as Meyer notes, ‘two sides of the same coin’ (p. 154). Schütte modifies this metaphor, describing the established writers Sebald criticized harshly in his polemics as ‘teachers ex negativo’ (p. 215), that is, they provided opportunities to learn precisely what not to do when he turned to creative writing, and his compassionate engagement with minor writers mirrors the sympathetic portrayals his fictive title characters receive.
One is, however, surprised to find ‘Media Theory’ (Florian Leitner) and ‘Photography’ (Nick Warr) in W.G. Sebald in Context since neither represents established scholarship. The secondary literature has never previously connected media theory with Sebald, and Leitner, who has not previously written on Sebald, does not convincingly argue that it should do so, a series of fortuitous coincidences between the lives of Sebald and Friedrich Kittler, the ‘father . . . of German Media Theory’ (p. 250), notwithstanding. A chapter on the photographs in the six book-length works Sebald published between 1990 and 2001 would have been extremely relevant. However, after touching on them in his introduction, Warr spends 10 pages on an apparent personal interest: why, purportedly between 1982 and 1988, Sebald had Michael Brandon-Jones produce 35-mm slides of many completely different photographs. Although Sebald’s literary estate in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach (DLA) makes clear that these images were never included in a typescript, mentioned in correspondence with publishers, or published during the period in question, Warr argues that Sebald’s intent had been to publish all of them in texts – and that some in fact were. All Warr’s claims are problematic, but only one can be addressed here, namely that images of paintings by Matthias Grünewald (the subject of one of the three sections of Nach der Natur) which Brandon-Jones produced in 1985 were published in the Dutch translation of ‘As the Snow on the Alps’ in Het Moment in late 1986, and that Sebald specified their placement (pp. 232–236). In Shadows of Reality, a book co-edited by Warr, Brandon-Jones states that ‘colour slides [were] for teaching’ and ‘prints [were] for academic publications’ (Shadows of Reality, p. 66). In March 1985, Brandon-Jones did make colour slides of photographs of Grünewald paintings (ibid., p. 101), which Sebald thus might have used in a class or perhaps studied while writing ‘As the Snow on the Alps’. However, none were published, in Het Moment or anywhere else. The correspondence in the DLA with his Dutch translator and editor, Huub Beurskens, indicates that Sebald never submitted anything to Het Moment, not even a typescript. Beurskens had already read the poem as published – without images – in manuscripte in June 1986 and translated that version. His recollection, as reported to this author, is that he never discussed images with Sebald and that Het Moment, which focused on literature and fine art, decided to publish images, which to include, and their placement. Nor would this be surprising. Photographs by Thomas Becker accompanied the original German version of Nach der Natur in analogous circumstances in 1988.
The chapters in ‘Part IV. Reception and Legacy’ that mainly regard how Sebald was received during his lifetime tell us more about him. ‘Sebald in Translation’ (Martin Schauss) is particularly important for anglophones since Sebald not only achieved his breakthrough in English but was heavily involved in those translations and, so, shaped their reception. ‘Literary Prizes’ (Uwe Schütte) is crucial to understanding how Sebald was perceived in the German, anglophone, and French literary scenes. The remaining chapters largely address Sebald’s legacy and say at least as much about the ‘Sebald industry’ (p. xxiv) as about the man himself. ‘Sebald Scholarship’ (Lynn L Wolff) is an excellent summary of his afterlife in academia, from which he had once hoped creative writing would allow him to escape, and ‘The Cult of Sebald’ (Ian Ellison) describes his ‘canonization’ (p. 342), above all in the anglophone world. By contrast, ‘The Sebaldian’ (Adrian Nathan West), ‘Film’ (Andrew J Webber), ‘Pop Music’ (Hendrik Otremba) and ‘Visual Arts and Exhibitions’ (Terry Pitts) assess his diverse legacy in the arts. One should note, however, that the adjective ‘Sebaldian’ was in part coined to ‘define’ much that was perceived as indefinable in his work, and that this indefinability and Sebald’s enduring popularity make claims to have been influenced by him not only hard to assess but also, regardless of their veracity, at least potentially self-serving.
W.G. Sebald in Context is ‘mindful of the significant difference between the “German Sebald” and the “English Sebald”’ (p. xxvi). The man and his work were perceived more critically by German than by anglophone readers, but the difference is less extreme than Schütte the contributor would have us believe. For example, he claims that Sebald’s ‘savage attacks’ in critical works led to resistance from cultural figures such as Günter Grass (pp. xxiii–xxiv) and ‘offended’ Büchner Prize jurors, who then denied him the country’s most prestigious literary award (p. 323). This author was told by Dieter Stolz, an expert on Grass, who knew him personally, that he is not aware of Grass ever criticizing Sebald publicly or privately; and by Anke Leonhardt, the responsible archivist, that, in 1997, the first year Sebald was considered for the Büchner Prize, his critical essays were not an issue and that the jury instead wanted to await one more work of fiction. Unfortunately, this next book, Austerlitz, only came out in 2001 and Sebald’s death that year prevented it from ever being considered. In reality, Sebald had more supporters than detractors in Germany, his sales were good if not spectacular, and the nine prizes he was awarded in his native country far outnumber those he won in any other.
Finally, one should note the impact of Schütte’s previous publications and editorial role. Unsurprisingly, no one having written more on Sebald, the ca. 75 mentions of Schütte’s works by contributors in the ‘Notes’ and ‘Further Reading’ sections dwarf citations of any other scholar. By contrast, the disclosure of editorial ‘rewrites and additions’ in chapters by Meyer, Radvan, and Thompson (p. xxxiii) is surprising in a volume made up of ‘leading experts’ (p. i). Although Schütte censures such scholarship (p. xxvii), Thompson has no German and could not independently research his contribution (https://whatthehellisart.wordpress.com), which discusses authoritatively many works available only in that language. In addition, coincidence or not, some contributors express views previously found only in the editor’s work. Steker, for example, who has never before written on Sebald’s grandfather, links Sebald’s ‘melancholic disposition’, ‘mourning work’, and ‘engagement with the legacy of the Holocaust’ to ‘the traumatic experience’ of Egelhofer’s death (p. 19). Schütte, who has often written on Egelhofer, has made statements containing identical or virtually identical language. Angier quotes from and disagrees with three of them in her biography (Speak, Silence, pp. 109 and 480).