W.G. Sebald: A “Grenzgänger” of the 20th/21st Century

To establish the twentieth-century German-language author W.G. Sebald as a “Grenzgänger,” one must explore the borders that he crossed, challenged, and broke down. In considering the implications of his nationality, literary language, and the reception of his works, one also explores the borders of world literature itself. Relevant to this discussion is the claim of Sebald’s “self-imposed/voluntary exile” in England, which has gained currency in recent research. This claim must, however, be challenged, for it collapses the historical perspective from which the status of “exile” needs to be considered, a perspective that Sebald’s works precisely emphasize. Sebald was born in 1944 as Winfried Georg, but from his time in England on he was known to his friends as “Max.” Although separated generationally from the tradition of postwar German authors, from an early age Sebald engaged with the questions surrounding Germany’s past that these authors raised in their texts. His critical and literary texts offer a continuation of the question of Vergangenheitsbewältigung that was born out of the previous generation’s literary productions. Sebald deeply felt the silence surrounding the Nazis’ crimes and the complicity of ordinary people that dominated postwar Germany, often describing this as “a conspiracy of silence.” He recalls having seen in primary school newsreels with footage of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and how the students were not given the chance to ask questions. The films were simply not discussed, perpetuating the silence around the atrocities of the not-too-distant past. While at the University in Freiburg in the early 1960s, Sebald’s disillusionment crystallized, and he recalls having sensed an “atmosphere of falseness” in higher education. During his time as a university student, the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt highly publicized the crimes of the concentration camps, and professors were revealed as having been former Nazi party members. Sebald stated that the Auschwitz trials were “the first public acknowledgement that there was such a thing as an unresolved German past.” Reproachful of Germany’s Gedächtnislosigkeit, “lack of memory,” and frustrated by the “conspiracy of silence,” Sebald took a teaching assistantship in England at the age of 22, where he remained until a tragic automobile accident took his life in 2001.The delay which dominates Sebald’s exposure to the Holocaust can perhaps be read as a parallel to the slow excavation and revelation of the past in his literary works. This is most prominently seen in a form of reverse chronology in several of his works. Sebald’s decision to leave Germany in the 1960s and eventually to take up permanent residence in England has prompted scholars to suggest his “self-imposed” or “voluntary” exile, a designation which is both problematic and questionable. Although Sebald never explicitly referred to his living arrangement as one of exile, he expressed his awareness of the liminal status of his life and work in England, “In England nur gastweise zuhause, schwanke ich auch hier zwischen Gefühlen der Vertrautheit und der Dislokation.” [“Only a guest in England, I still hover between feelings of familiarity and dislocation there too.”] In this same speech, made on the occasion of his acceptance into the German Academy, Sebald expressed a distance towards his homeland, his feelings of being “a traitor to [his] country and a fraud” and that only in a distance from Germany, while in England, was he able to form “ideas of [his] native country.” Sebald was fluent in English, but his life in England nevertheless meant that he constantly dealt with issues of both linguistic and cultural translation, issues which in turn manifest themselves aesthetically and thematically in his literary works. On various occasions, Sebald reflected upon his …