Before Sebald Was Great

Before Sebald Was Great

By looking at his early work, we can better understand who the German writer was beyond his persona as the melancholy intellectual and serious man of letters.

David Schurman Wallace 

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 Since his death in 2001, the reputation of W.G. Sebald has become formidable, even imposing. At times, he feels like a totem: the Western world’s last Absolutely Serious Writer. The German English author of novels (or simply works of “prose” if you prefer, as he did) has cast a long and melancholy shadow over the literature of the 21st century: Deeply erudite and formally inventive, his work absorbed the weight (or burden) of European history and literature and established a new model for writers. For those unconvinced by “merely” aesthetic novelties, he was unafraid to wrestle with ethical questions, most famously Germany’s confrontations with historical memory and its inability to fully process the Holocaust. For many—he does have his detractors—he was the capstone of literature in the 20th century, both burnishing and waving goodbye to a sophisticated culture on the wane.