The traffic of memory.(memory as a motif in Sebald's works)(Sebald, W.G.)(Critical Essay)

THE GERMAN-BORN writer W.G. Sebald, whose elegiac and partly unclassifiable prose made him a literary star of the 1990s, died in a car accident on December 14, 2001--just months after the publication of his novel Austerlitz. This was the story of a five-year-old Czechoslovakian Jewish lad despatched to England on a Kindertransport and adopted by a childless Calvinist couple in the bleak nether reaches of north Wales. Later in life, when the burden of not knowing weighs more heavily than the horror of any revelation, the adult, a retired architectural historian, proceeds like a sleepwalker towards his past.

Sebald, who was for many years Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia (and whose colleagues included Lorna Sage and Malcolm Bradbury) was reserved about his blossoming commitment to prose, and at first his work was only published in Germany. The freedom with which he meanders through factual and fictional domains--where the chimerical might be more substantial than the material-is reflected in a comment he made to Susan Wyndham, who interviewed him in February 2000: "I always resented academic rigour and discipline, especially in its German form." He has expressed his affection for the University of East Anglia, where "nobody bossed you around".

In the very first chapter of Sebald's first novel, Vertigo, published in 1990 when he was forty-six, the leitmotifs for every piece of prose he wrote thereafter are unequivocally established. Ruminations are placed in the mouth of some fictional character who soon assumes monumental historical clarity; the untrustworthiness of memory and its stubborn refusal to be summoned at will are a source of anxiety, even panic; the pervasive clarity of the imagination, allowed to roam at will, conjures meta-facts, which when assembled provide some sort of jigsaw of the world mankind has made--and unmade-for itself; and finally, a mind always in turmoil "owing to the abnormal conditions ... prevailing everywhere".

Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgau--a sleepy, snow-bound village in the Bavarian Alps where Austrian, Swiss and German borders fuse--on May 18, 1944. His family was Catholic, anticommunist and working-class. His glassmaker father saw his fortunes rise at the end of the Weimar turmoil when he joined the German army in 1929. There he remained after the Nazis came to power, becoming a captain and finally a prisoner of war. When Sebald senior returned from a POW camp in 1947, he was a stranger to his three-year-old son, who, in his absence, had formed a close attachment to his grandfather.

Sebald remembered strangely unsettling images in his father's albums of photographs from the Polish campaign of 1939. These begin with innocuous snaps exuding a "boy-scout atmosphere" and finish with razed villages. He moved towards adulthood with the subliminal awareness that his homeland was a recent catastrophe, further burdened by a profound dose of self-induced amnesia. Thus, in much of his writing, life becomes real only with the multitude of imaginings and reconstructions of a world he could not grasp or respond to as a child.

While he was studying at Freiburg University in 1965, the trial began of those who had been involved in the running of the concentration camp at Auschwitz. "The defendants were the kinds of people I'd known as neighbours--postmasters or railway workers--whereas the witnesses were people I'd never come across-Jewish people from Brooklyn or Sydney ... You found out that they too had lived in Nuremberg and Stuttgart," he told Maya Jaggi of the Guardian in 2001. Sebald believed that much of the willingness not to remember was based on the fact that so many who were implicated held positions in government and industry.

He moved to French-speaking Switzerland to study German literature and arrived at Manchester University in 1966 as a foreign languages assistant. There was a brief return to Switzerland before he returned to England to teach modern German literature at the University of East Anglia, where he would remain for the rest of his life. Tired of being called "Miss Winifred Sebald" he chose to be called Max.