Before he was a novelist Sebald was a straight scholar. What insight into his enigmatic literary oeuvre can we ascertain from these newly published essays?
Twenty-four years after his death, Sebaldian is an established term to describe the German author’s mood and influence. What makes a writer into an adjective? Even the great modernists of the twentieth century proposed just one signal innovation each. ‘Make it new’ (Pound) meant inventing a rhythm (Stein, Beckett), exploding a form (Joyce, Woolf). During the 1990s Sebald’s novels arrived like an austere but ironic assertion that modernism was not finished; but nobody seemed quite sure where his newness might reside. Was it in Sebald’s fogging of distinctions between essay, fiction, biography, travel writing? Or in the punctuation of his books with mysterious photographs? His main invention was surely tonal, a matter of melancholic drift and hallucinatory tableaux: a style it was easy to caricature or, for admirers (mea culpa, many times), very tempting to imitate.
Where had this tone come from? Why was it Sebald’s chosen medium by which to explore – in works such as The Emigrants (1992), The Rings of Saturn (1995) and Austerlitz (2001) – the legacies in Europe of colonialism and the Holocaust, the predicaments or privileges of exile and the discontents of modernity in general? There are clues all over the fiction: direct invocations of Stendhal, Proust and Conrad; passing allusions to Adorno, Barthes and Benjamin, steals from contemporaries like John Banville. But before he was a novelist Sebald was a straight scholar, specialising mostly in Austrian literature. Silent Catastrophes collects two of his academic books – The Description of Misfortune (1985) and Strange Homeland (1991) – newly translated by his university colleague Jo Catling. Here is Sebald on death, messianism, authority and exile in Kafka’s The Castle (1926); on eroticism, hysteria and misogynist dread in Arthur Schnitzler’s 1926 novel Dream Story. Much of Sebald’s literary-critical work was a prelude to his fiction, or an expression of frustration with the limits of academic writing. (But not, it seems, with the canon: there are almost no women among his writerly influences.)
The main themes that emerge across these two books are perhaps predictable. The subject of exile and the idea of home – translated into a thoroughly ideological feeling for lost Heimat – are most acutely dealt with in ‘A Lost Land’: an essay on the Holocaust survivor Jean Améry, whose sense of a lost homeland was so strong that he could never return to Austria after the war. The most moving exile story is that of Joseph Roth, eking out between the wars the sort of untethered freelance existence that allowed him to see disaster coming in the smallest details of urban life. The melancholy that saturates Sebald’s later books is itself a concern here, but also the fury lurking inside it, best expressed in an essay on Thomas Bernhard, the long-winded complainer who inspired Sebald’s vast paragraphs.
All the reviews I’ve read have complained that Silent Catastrophes is an academic volume, of interest only to specialists and written in a prolix and dull scholarly jargon. God forbid anglophone book reviewers learn a thing or two about European literature; but more to the point: this book is full of strange and tender moments when Sebald’s feeling for his subject – he’s essentially a biographical critic – translates into scenes and images that might have come straight from Austerlitz or The Rings of Saturn. The innkeeper’s wife Gardena in The Castle, ‘vegetating in her bed like a carnivorous plant’. In Roth’s The Radetzky March (1932), an atmosphere of death with ravens ‘sitting motionless in the trees in their hundreds announcing the catastrophe with loud croaks’. At such exaggerated, almost parodic moments, where often he is paraphrasing but intensifying the writer concerned, you can feel Sebald pushing past literary history, criticism or biography to another, visionary realm. This is the critic asking: surely there is something more than academic criticism, an image of disaster we must confront, even if it offers no salvation?
Silent Catastrophes: Essays in Austrian Literature by W.G. Sebald, translated by Jo Catling. Hamish Hamilton, £25 (hardcover)
From the March 2025 issue of ArtReview – get your copy.
