Since the deplorably premature death of W G Sebald in a road accident in , Jo Catling, a former colleague of his at the University of East Anglia, has been among the most dedicated keepers of his flame. Written mostly in the s, these essays preceded the semi-fictional works, culminating in Austerlitz , that made Sebald internationally known. They represent something rare in German but common in English: literary criticism, occupying the space between academic study and journalistic discussion.
And they say more, and say it more searchingly, profoundly and pithily, than a cartload of academic monographs. Sebald rapidly became alienated from the old-fashioned Germanistik he encountered at the University of Freiburg in the early s. The professors, he felt, had culpably failed to reflect on the relations between literature and the recent German past.
He found intellectual and ethical stimulus in the thinkers of the Frankfurt School, particularly Theodor Adorno and the idiosyncratic, always marginal genius Walter Benjamin. Why Austrian literature? Sebald was not Austrian, though his south German birthplace, Wertach, was within walking distance of the Austrian border.
Austrian literature appealed to his feeling for marginality. One notably empathetic essay concerns an actual schizophrenic, Ernst Herbeck β91 , who was confined for fifty years in a mental hospital near Klosterneuburg, north of Vienna, where Sebald visited him.
Although these poems yield nothing to academic exegesis, they not only linger in the memory but may also, Sebald suggests, reveal the primitive processes through which poetic language arises.
