W. G. Sebald

His father had joined the Reichswehr in 1929 and served in the Wehrmacht under the Nazis.

Winfried Georg Sebald (18 May 1944 – 14 December 2001), known as W. G. Sebald or (as he preferred) Max Sebald, was a German writer and academic.

At the time of his death at the age of 57, he was according to The New Yorker ”widely recognized for his extraordinary contribution to world literature.”

Sebald was born in Wertach, Bavaria, the second of the three children of Rosa and Georg Sebald, and his parents' only son.

His father remained a detached figure, a prisoner of war until 1947; his maternal grandfather, the small-town police officer Josef Egelhofer (1872–1956), was the most important male presence during his early years.

Sebald was shown images of The Holocaust while at school in Oberstdorf and recalled that no one knew how to explain what they had just seen.

The Holocaust and European modernity, especially its modes of warfare and persecution, later became central themes in his work.

From 1948 to 1963, he lived in Sonthofen.

Sebald completely rejected the mainstream of Western German literature of the 1950s to 1970s, as represented by Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass: "I hate [...] the German postwar novel like pestilence."

He took a deliberate counter-stance.

Sebald's distinctive and innovative novels (which he mostly called simply: prose ("Prosa") ) were written in an intentionally somewhat old-fashioned and elaborate German (one passage in Austerlitz famously contains a sentence that is 9 pages long).

Sebald closely supervised the English translations (principally by Anthea Bell and Michael Hulse).

They include Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz.

Sebald studied German and English literature first at the University of Freiburg and then at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, where he received a degree in 1965.

He was a Lector at the University of Manchester from 1966 to 1969.

He returned to St. Gallen in Switzerland for a year hoping to work as a teacher but could not settle.

Sebald married his Austrian-born wife, Ute, in 1967.

In 1970 he became a lecturer at the University of East Anglia (UEA).

There, he completed his PhD in 1973 with a dissertation entitled The Revival of Myth: A Study of Alfred Döblin's Novels.

Sebald acquired habilitation from the University of Hamburg in 1986.

In 1987, he was appointed to a chair of European literature at UEA.

In 1989 he became the founding director of the British Centre for Literary Translation.

He lived at Wymondham and Poringland while at UEA.

In On the Natural History of Destruction (1999), he wrote an essay on the wartime bombing of German cities and the absence in German writing of any real response.

His concern with The Holocaust is expressed in several books delicately tracing his own biographical connections with Jews.

Contrary to Germany's political and intellectual establishment, Sebald denied the singularity of the Holocaust: "I see the catastrophe caused by the Germans, dreadful as it was, by no means as a singular event – it developed with a certain logic from European history and then, for the same reason, ate itself into European history."

Consequently, Sebald, in his literary work, always tried to situate and contextualize the Holocaust within modern European history, even avoiding a focus on Germany.

The 2001 publication of Austerlitz (both in German and English) secured Sebald worldwide fame: "Austerlitz was received enthusiastically on an international scale; literary critics celebrated it frenetically; the book established Sebald as a modern classic."

He was tipped as a possible future winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

With grown and still growing reputation, he was now in high demand by literary institutions and radio programmes throughout Western Europe.

Newspapers, magazines and journals from Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Britain and the U.S. urged him for interviews.

"Condemned to unrest I am, I am afraid", he wrote to Andreas Dorschel in June 2001, returning from one trip and setting out for the next.

For a considerable time, Sebald had been aware of a congenital cardiac insufficiency; to a visitor from the US, he described himself in August 2001 as "someone who knows he has to leave before too long".

Sebald died while driving near Norwich in December 2001.

The event threw the literary public into a state of shock.

Sebald had been driving with his daughter Anna, who survived the crash.

The coroner's report, released some six months after the accident, stated that Sebald had suffered a heart attack and had died of this condition before his car swerved across the road and collided with an oncoming lorry.

W.G. Sebald is buried in St. Andrew's churchyard in Framingham Earl, close to where he lived.

Sebald's works are largely concerned with the themes of memory and loss of memory (both personal and collective) and decay (of civilizations, traditions or physical objects).

They are, in particular, attempts to reconcile himself with, and deal in literary terms with, the trauma of the Second World War and its effect on the German people.