When W. G. Sebald died in 2001 his status as the pre-eminent European author of his generation was at its height. For Susan Sontag, he represented rare proof that ‘literary greatness is still possible’, and he was widely tipped for the Nobel Prize. Part of his appeal was that, appearing at the end of the 20th century, his prose fictions memorialised the victims of that century and helped us to understand the impact of its horrors and vicissitudes.
A quarter of a century on, why read – or re-read – Sebald today? There has been an increasing othering of people in the current political and social climate around refugees and asylum seekers. As Rowan Williams wrote in a recent Guardian piece, ‘To speak as though these people are anything other than ordinary is to reinforce the violence they have already experienced, the refusal to see them humanly.’ Sebald can help us find the antidote to this lack of understanding and humanity. In a different context, but one with universal applications, Sebald sought an empathic connection with the victims of 20th century history, the displaced and the deracinated. His unique literary project found new ways to establish a personal connection – through his listening narrator-figure, his ‘bricolage’-like combination of multiple sources, his haunting use of photographs, and his determination to let people speak for themselves. As a member of the generation of Germans who grew up in the shadow of World War II, Sebald’s key insight came when he came face to face with his first Jewish victim of the Holocaust in the 1960s, which he later expressed as Truth can only really be grasped through the encounter with real individual persons. Sebald found ways to stage this encounter in literature of profound beauty and insight.
Join us in a reading of The Emigrants (1993) this autumn to explore Sebald’s achievement in depth.
