Lost and Found: Disorientation, Nostalgia, and Holocaust Melodrama in Sebald's Austerlitz

Abstract

Bianca Theisen and I began discussing the then still-somewhat-mysterious expatriate German writer, W. G. Sebald, in 2001, just before the publication of his final book and his untimely death. In these conversations, we kept circling back to the sense of never having read anything quite like him. His insertion of images into fiction was not new,2 but we, like so many others, still sensed something peculiar in Sebald's form: the way he relentlessly pushed genre borders, especially by continually and ostentatiously placing himself into his books. Were these works facts or fictions? And, what is more, were they autobiographies, novels, short story collections, collages, or travelogues? This latter possibility-seeing Sebald as a writer of travelogues-fascinated us most, not least because of the apparent high/low contradiction: the relentlessly erudite writer of intellectual fiction loved the relatively degraded genre of the travel essay. Sebald,