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Before Sebald Was Great

By looking at his early work, we can better understand who the German writer was beyond his persona as the melancholy intellectual and serious man of letters.

Sebald’s writing is known for four things: its thematic preoccupation with the after-effects of the Holocaust and the Second World War; the interspersion of photographs, documents and reproductions of paintings and other visual media throughout the texts; the floridity, antiquarianism and melancholy tone of its prose; and, finally, its so-called ‘metaphysics of coincidence’, the way an apparently associative series of random details and incidents makes it difficult to tell how one sentence follows from the next, only for the whole to reveal itself, in the end, as having operated according to a complex, lattice-like order from the beginning. He also explores some subjects that are rare in his fiction, particularly erotic desire and perversity, as illustrated in the works of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler (whose Dream Story is best known here as the loose source material for Stanley Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut). Sebald insists that something contradictory is at work under this pretty surface: “The scrupulous registering of the most minute details, the endless enumeration of what–strangely enough–is actually there: all bear signs of a lack of belief, and mark the point at which even the bourgeois doctrine of salvation could no longer be sustained.” The nature that Stifter inventories so carefully, as if to preserve it, is already well on the way toward annihilation.

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