‘Gebranntes Kind’? W.G. Sebald's ‘Metaphysik Der Geschichte’

Abstract

AbstractThis essay investigates the relationship between Sebald's Luftkrieg und Literatur and the prose works on which his reputation primarily depends. Sebald's account of the bombing of German cities, particularly of Hamburg in 1943, reveals two significant intellectual affinities: first with Walter Benjamin, whose conception of history in Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels is linked through the ruins left by the bombing to Sebald's preoccupation with scenes of decay and dereliction in his fictional works, and secondly with Horkheimer and Adorno's critique of ‘progress’ in Dialektik der Aufklärung. Sebald sees the bombing campaign, along with the Holocaust, as part of the one great catastrophe of the Third Reich in which the history of ‘progress’ culminated – a history analysed at length in Sebald's Austerlitz. The ‘firestorm’ in Hamburg, emblematic of this destructive process, illustrates Sebald's recurrent use of the fire motif in his narrative works and is linked to comments on his own childhood in Nach der Natur. His entire oeuvre is at once an attempt to ‘memorialise’ individual victims of this destructive process and a critique of, and a resistance to, the tendency within post‐war German culture to complete the ‘liquidation’ of the past begun during the wartime bombing.