On W. G. Sebald’s birthday, revisit James Wood on the “Austerlitz” author’s life and work. There was a drifting melancholy about Sebald that, as in his prose, he made almost comic.
The contrast with Sebald’s childhood landscape must have been acute. He was born in 1944, in a village in the Bavarian Alps, not far from the Austrian and Swiss borders, and today about two hours by car from Munich—a region of lakes, rivers, and mountains that loom over daily life like natural cathedrals. Sebald’s father was away, fighting in the German Army; he didn’t return till 1947, having spent about two years in a French P.O.W. camp.
By most accounts, the young Sebald was an unassuming presence at Manchester. When he was not teaching or writing his master’s thesis, he visited junk shops and walked a great deal, taking photographs of the city’s disused factories and cleared slums.
Sebald’s work can put you in mind of Diderot selling his library to Catherine the Great: he seems to be downloading everything he has ever read. There is the ghost of the nineteenth-century Austrian writer Adalbert Stifter ; of Walter Benjamin ; of Thomas Bernhard ; of Peter Handke; and, above all, of Kafka.
Next morning, at first light, the Germans did indeed march into Prague in the middle of a heavy snowstorm which seemed to make them appear out of nowhere. When they crossed the bridge and their armored cars were rolling up Narodní a profound silence fell over the whole city. People turned away, and from that moment they walked more slowly, like somnambulists, as if they no longer knew where they were going.
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