When W.G. Sebald died in a car crash in 2001 at the age of 57, he was eulogized by the Anglophone literary world as the author of four singular novels. Artfully fusing fact and fiction and interlarded with grainy and blurry photographs, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, and Austerlitz revolve around real-life characters and invented figures who are either buffeted and displaced by historical forces or afflicted by dread, melancholy, and disorientation on soul-searching pilgrimages. In each of these beguilingly allusive, evasive, discursive, and meditative novels, Sebald addresses the difficulties in grappling with the past. Memory is “a kind of dumbness,” he writes in The Emigrants. “It makes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds.”
However, there was more to Sebald’s oeuvre than what he called his “prose fiction,” and over the last two decades, English-language readers have seen the posthumous publication of several nonfiction titles that were previously released in the author’s native Germany. Some gathered together his travel writing and cultural criticism. The remarkable On the Natural History of Destruction included a profound piece that once again centered on memory — in this case the collective amnesia that was prevalent in postwar Germany about the wholesale horrors the country suffered and inflicted.
The latest book of Sebald’s essays to appear in English is not one collection of essays but two. Silent Catastrophes comprises The Description of Misfortune and Strange Homeland, published in German in 1985 and 1991, respectively, while Sebald was living in England and teaching at the University of East Anglia. Both volumes focus on Austrian writers from the last two centuries, a period that, according to Sebald, saw Austria undergo a “traumatic” evolution from “the vastness of the Habsburg Empire to a diminutive Alpine republic.” As Sebald homes in on each author’s work, we learn not just about their artistic approaches but also how their shared themes — dislocation, identity, exile, loss — came to inform his own writing.
The first volume shines a light on what he considers to be a key characteristic of Austrian literature, namely “ill-starred lives.” It gets underway with an essay on one of Sebald’s favorite authors, Adalbert Stifter, whose own ill-starred life culminated in suicide in 1868 following years of illness and depression. Sebald makes sense of the “difficult beauty” of Stifter’s works, particularly that of his classic bildungsroman Indian Summer. In his novels, we encounter people who feel like strangers in their own land and indeed their own marriages. Sebald argues that the only male protagonists who are happy, “that is to say inconsolable in a bearable way,” are those who have either not married or those who have lost their wives. Stifter’s men may lose their wives, but throughout his books, “there always lurks the fear that tomorrow all might be lost — not only love for another person, but also everything with which we have surrounded ourselves.”
Staying with the 19th century, an essay on Arthur Schnitzler, the great chronicler of fin-de-siècle Viennese decadence and desires, looks at how his books challenge “love’s habitual arrangements.” But they are not solely preoccupied with affairs of the heart. Sebald goes on to show how “Schnitzler’s decidedly nuanced critique of the ideal of love also repeatedly crosses over into a critique of society itself.” Moving into the 20th century, Sebald’s subjects include Thomas Bernhard, whose bleak outlook and caustic comedy provoked laughter in the dark. Sebald asserts that Bernhard’s unique brand of humor is derived from “the tension between the madness of the world and the postulates of rationality.”
The collection’s second half throws a spotlight on writers whose life and work are synonymous with the concept of Heimat. This translates as “homeland,” with the implied sense of belonging — a home very much where the heart is. The word appears with regularity throughout these pages like a watermark. Sebald, who left his home country, regards crossing a border and leaving a homeland as a central theme in 20th-century Austrian literature, and his examination of departures, migrations, and attendant feelings of estrangement is illuminating.
A study of Jean Améry describes how the essayist dissociated himself from Austria, drawing on several of the writer’s essays. In one, Améry declares that his homeland became an enemy land on the day of the Nazi Anschluss in 1938, when Hitler’s troops marched across the border and were greeted by Austrians waving flags — “the blood-red cloth with the black spider on a white field.” In another essay titled “How Much Home Does a Person Need?” — a variation on Tolstoy’s story “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” — we learn that when a Polish Jew asked Améry where he came from, he was unable to give a proper response.
Sebald also covers Peter Handke, the 2019 recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature, who in a book tracked a journey across the Austrian border into Slovenia. “At last,” says the narrator making the transition from one country to the other, “I was stateless: instead of being always present, I could be lightheartedly absent.”
No book on rootless Austrian writers would be complete without mention of the great Joseph Roth, who wrote so poignantly about a Heimat that was no more after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and who, as a persecuted Jew, spent his last years drinking, on the move, and running out of luck, money, and options. “Roth’s characters all yearn for home,” Sebald writes. “For the wandering Jews, however, among whose number Roth counts himself,” he adds, “Heimat is nowhere — and thus the epitome of utopia.”
Many books that appear after an author’s death constitute leftover literary scraps. This is not the case here. Silent Catastrophes is a substantial work — at times forbiddingly so. At first glance it resembles Sebald’s earlier collection, A Place in the Country, which for the most part consisted of what he modestly classed as “extended marginal notes and glosses” on writers who had inspired him; closer inspection reveals it to be a weightier tome comprising essays that are more academic.
The book’s translator, Jo Catling, warns of trouble ahead in her introduction: “There are many dense and complex passages freighted with technical terms (not to mention occasional jargon) from psychology, sociology, anthropology, philosophy and critical theory.” Two overly scholarly essays on Kafka’s The Castle do little to decode his enigmatic novel. References to Stifter’s “ultramontane consciousness” or Roth’s “mythopoetic method” only muddy the waters. Perhaps the main stumbling block, though, is the lack of biographical detail in each essay. Peter Altenberg, Charles Sealsfield, and Ernst Herbeck are not familiar names for English speakers, and more information on who they were would have given us added insight into what they wrote.
HEARING FROM THE COLLATERAL DAMAGE IN UKRAINE
Still, Sebald makes interesting connections with the authorial tidbits he does manage to serve up, whether exploring the appropriately “rambling oeuvre” of Viennese flâneur Altenberg or analyzing the “schizophrenic ideals and images” in the poetry of Herbeck, who spent much of his life in a psychiatric institution. Some of Sebald’s close readings and arguments may prove demanding, but there is no denying the rigorous inquiry and joined-up thinking that underpins them. The best essays here are stimulating and do what all good literary criticism should do, that is encourage the reader to go off and discover for themselves the books under scrutiny.
Newcomers to Sebald should begin with his novels. Everyone else will find this is Sebald with a difference. The going isn’t always easy and the rewards are seldom instant, but perseverance pays off.
Malcolm Forbes has written for the Economist, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. He lives in Edinburgh.