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Ritchie Robertson: No Way Home - Silent Catastrophes: Essays in Austrian Literature by W G Sebald (Translated from German by Jo Catling)

Its major writers, from Franz Grillparzer via Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Kafka to Peter Handke, do not fit easily into the pattern of German literature, stretching from Goethe via Thomas Mann to Günter Grass. With similar scepticism, Sebald reads Hofmannsthal’s unfinished novel Andreas, supposedly a Bildungsroman depicting the path to personal integration, as a narrative about the dissolution of a weak and unstable self, haunted by sadistic fantasies, that reveals a crisis in bourgeois masculinity. A further stage in that crisis, schizophrenic breakdown, Sebald finds documented with great sensitivity in Peter Handke’s Die Angst des Tormanns beim Elfmeter(‘The Goalie’s Fear of the Penalty Kick’).

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