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W.G. Sebald and the Politics of Melancholy

’s premature death from a heart attack, in December 2001, at 57—months after the publication of his novel Austerlitz propelled him to the height of his literary fame—has left his readers wanting more, and ever since, his publishers have increasingly delved deeper into his oeuvre for posthumous releases. Six full-length books have already appeared in English since his death, and now, 23 years after his death, we have the seventh—and perhaps last: Silent Catastrophes: Essays.

Through his reading of the writers who influenced him, these early writings make plain the ethical principle that guided Sebald’s great works: Melancholy, far from being defeatist, is itself a kind of political resistance, a way of pushing back against the machinations of fascism by preserving the past against erasure. There’s a frustrating lack of concession to the reader—it is presumed, for example, that you already know the writers he’s discussing—when, at best, only a handful (Thomas Bernhard, Franz Kafka, Peter Handke, Elias Canetti, and Arthur Schnitzler, whose Traumnovelle was adapted by Stanley Kubrick into Eyes Wide Shut) will be familiar to most nonspecialist English readers. Rather than approach Silent Catastrophes as a series of scholarly essays, I found it more rewarding to read the bookas a group portrait of a country and an empire in crisis, its writers both narrating the Fall while trying, in various ways and with various levels of success, to cling to some kind of meaning.

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