WG Sebald

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Winfried Georg Sebald (known as WG Sebald ; born May 18, 1944 in Wertach , Allgäu ; † December 14, 2001 in Norfolk , England ) was a German writer and literary scholar .

Life

WG Sebald grew up in Wertach as the middle of three children of his parents Rosa, geb. Egelhofer, and Georg Sebald. He has an older sister, Gertrud, born in 1941, and a younger sister, Beate, geb. 1951. The father, son of a railroad worker, came from the Bavarian Forest , trained as a locksmith, joined the Reichswehr in 1929 and rose to become captain in the Wehrmacht . Until 1947 he was a French prisoner of war. From the mid-fifties to 1971 he served in the Bundeswehr (most recently as a lieutenant colonel). The most important male caregiver for Sebald was his maternal grandfather, a village gendarme .

From 1954 visited Sebald first the grammar school "Maria Stern" in Immenstadt , then in 1955 the secondary school in Oberstdorf , where 1963 he the High School took off. Released from military service for health reasons, he began studying German and English at the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg in 1963 . In 1965 he moved to the University of Friborg , where he graduated in 1966 with the License ès lettres . In the same year he emigrated to England , where Sebald and his girlfriend from late school were married in 1967. In 1976 he moved with his wife and daughter into a Victorian rectory ( The Old Rectory ). There he won an extensive garden from the scrubby wilderness, thus creating an East English flower garden.

In 1968 he submitted his master's thesis on Carl Sternheim . Sebald then worked as a lecturer at the University of Manchester ; For a year he also taught at the private boarding school Institut auf dem Rosenberg in St. Gallen . From 1970 he taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich and received his doctorate in 1973 on Alfred Döblin . In 1986 , Sebald completed his habilitation at the University of Hamburg with the work The Description of Unfortunate . In 1988 he became Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of East Anglia. Since 1996 he has been a member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry .

Sebald died on December 14, 2001 as a result of a heart attack in a car accident. His burial place is on St. Andrew's Churchyard (Framingham Earl, Norfolk NR14) near Poringland near Norwich , Norfolk . Sebald rejected his first names Winfried and Georg . Winfried was a "real Nazi name" for him ; he was called "Max" by family and friends. He had a close friendship with the writer Michael Hamburger . He translated several of Sebald's works into English.

Writing idiosyncrasy

Sebald's literary work has essentially been created since the late 1980s. While he was only noticed in Germany in the mid-1990s, he found great popularity even later in Great Britain, the USA (where Susan Sontag in particular stood up for him) and France. Today Sebald is one of the most discussed German-speaking authors.

Many texts are characterized by a melancholy tone. The question of the meaning and function of memory and memory in his texts is important. Sebald is dedicated to traumatized people: emigrants who, like the Sebald-like narrator, have left their homeland and are trying to reorient themselves abroad. For Sebald, the problem of the German-Jewish relationship is of particular importance. Even as a teenager, he was outraged by the silence of his father generation about the events of the war and the Holocaust . He later directed his criticism against the silence with which literature and society had passed over the destruction of German cities by the Allied bombings.

The argumentation method of the essayist and critic Sebald is not without controversy . Inexorably (and attackably intolerant) Sebald behaved in a controversy that he sparked in 1993 with an essay on the moral integrity of Alfred Andersch during the Nazi era . Until recently, Sebald campaigned strongly for German studies abroad in Great Britain and for the mediation of German-language literature in the Anglo-Saxon region.

Single descriptions

According to nature. An Elementary Poem (1988) is Sebald's first literary work in the narrower sense. The first parts deal with the painter Matthias Grünewald and the doctor and natural scientist Georg Wilhelm Steller from Windsheim (participant in the second Kamchatka expedition ); the last third takes place in Wertach. In the background there are existential questions about humanity and the author's biography.

In dizziness. Emotions (1990), in four closely interwoven travel stories, Sebald contrasts his own experiences and memories with the melancholy attitude of Stendhal and Kafka .

The emigrants. Four long stories (1992) contains life stories of four people, some of which are based on authentic documents. With Paul Bereyter, Sebald describes his primary school teacher in Sonthofen. As a Jew during the Nazi era, the historical role model Armin Müller was prohibited from teaching German children. Sebald turns the fictional great-uncle Ambros Adelwarth into the butler of a rich Jewish American who dies mentally deranged, haunted by visions of horror from the First World War . Johannes Naegeli, the friend of the protagonist in the first story, bears features of Sebald's grandfather. The Luisa Lanzberg story in the last part creates memories of Thea Frank-G, who was born in 1891. in literary form.

The book The Rings of Saturn (1995) - the subtitle of an English pilgrimage - is a travelogue . The first-person narrator wanders through the English county of Suffolk in a melancholy mood . The book is actually not a travelogue. For Years Now (2001) contains a collection of short poems in English.

In Luftkrieg und Literatur (1999), Sebald reproaches German-language post - war literature , especially Group 47 , of having failed both morally and aesthetically before the air war was portrayed . It contains excerpts from violent counter-reactions and an essay full of uncompromising criticism by Sebald of Alfred Andersch and his work. In the aftermath of this discussion, the works of post-war author Gert Ledig were rediscovered and published. His anti-war novel Retribution from 1956 apocalyptically depicts the American air raid on a German city. A detailed examination of Sebald's theses can also be found in Witnesses of Destruction (2003, updated 2008) by Volker Hage , who comes to the conclusion: “The gap that was not only felt by Sebald is less a matter of production than of reception - Many novels and stories about the air war have been published, but they were quickly and thoroughly forgotten, if they were even noticed. "

Austerlitz (2001) is considered Sebald's "masterpiece". The sixty year old Jacques Austerlitz's search for his origins is described. Therein HG Adler and his scientific work Theresienstadt 1941-1945. Mentioned the face of a coercive community . The book has sparked a discussion about the way in which Sebald usurped real biographical material. In 2015, this novel was chosen by the BBC's selection of the best 20 novels from 2000 to 2014 as one of the most important works of this century to date. Uwe Schütte, one of Sebald's doctoral students and author of several books about Sebald,does not ratethe quality of the novel Austerlitz so highly.

Campo Santo (2003) contains prose fragments, essays and speeches from the estate. Some of these are previously published parts of an older project of a book about Corsica that was abandoned in 1996 .

Untold (2003): Sebald was a friend and admirer of the painter and etcher Jan Peter Tripp , about whose work he has written several essays. The jointly planned book with its 33 pairs of eyes and 33 short prose miniatures is the legacy of a long friendship between artists. Sebald's texts contain many references to his own biography.

The poetry collection Über das Land und das Wasser contains poetry from the years 1964 to 2001. In addition to previously published texts, there are fifteen previously unprinted poems.

His works have been translated into many languages.

Works

Literary works

Essay and literary works

  • Carl Sternheim: Critic and Victim of the Wilhelmine Era. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1969.
  • The myth of destruction in Döblin's work. Ernst Klett, Stuttgart 1980.
  • The description of the accident. On Austrian literature from Stifter to Handke. 1985.
  • A radical stage: theater in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. ( Radical Stage - Theater in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. ) Edited by WG Sebald. Berg, Oxford 1988.
  • Eerie home. Essays on Austrian literature. 1991.
  • Accommodation in a country house. (Author portraits about Gottfried Keller , Johann Peter Hebel , Robert Walser and others) 1998.
  • Air War and Literature . With an essay on Alfred Andersch . 1999.
  • I want to go down to them and cannot find the way. On the novels of Jurek Becker. In: Sinn und Form 2/2010, pp. 226–234 (first publication, originally written for a collection of materials on the work of Jurek Becker published in 1992, but the inclusion of Sebald's essay was rejected at the time.)

conversations

  • Torsten Hoffmann (ed.): "On incredibly thin ice". Talks 1971 to 2001 . Fischer-Taschenbuchverlag, Frankfurt am Main 2011, ISBN 978-3-596-19415-5 .

Radio play adaptations

  • Aurach's mother . Radio play based on the novel The Emigrants . With Corinna Kirchhoff (mother), Michael König (son). Editing and direction: Ulrich Gerhardt . BR 1995.
  • Ferber's mother . Radio play with Corinna Kirchhoff, Michael König. Editing and direction: Ulrich Gerhardt. BR 2004.
  • Now the night is coming. Views from the life and death of Immanuel Kant . Radio play based on the script by WG Sebald. With Michael Schenk, Martin Reinke, Matthias Bundachuh, Udo Schenk, Tom Zahner, Rainer Homann, Peter Harting, German Gorst, Wolf Anoil, Martin Bross, Yvon Jansen, Ulrich Marx. Realization: Claudia Johanna Leist. WDR 2015.
  • Max Aurach . Radio play with Bruno Ganz , Michael König. Editing and direction: Ulrich Gerhardt. BR 1994.

Awards

Memorials

Sebald way

As a reminder, the municipality of Wertach has designated and designed the eleven kilometer long path from Oberjoch to the house where WG Sebalds was born as the “Sebald Path”. In Il ritorno in Patria (chapter in Vertigo. Emotions ) he describes the section of the path: on six steles there are text pieces related to the respective topographical location.

Sebald Copse

In the grounds of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, a circular bench surrounds a copper beech , planted in 2003 by the W. G. Sebalds family in memory of the writer. Together with other trees that were donated by the writer's former students, the square is called 'Sebald Copse' (“Sebald grove”). The bench, the shape of which is reminiscent of the rings of Saturn , bears a quote from Untold (in German): “The story of the averted faces remains untold”.

German Sebald Society V.

In 2019, the German Sebald Society was established in Kempten (Allgäu) . V. founded. Its chairman is the physician Ricardo Felberbaum. The aim of the initiative is to open up WG Sebald's work to a wider audience; the reception of his work by authors should also be promoted. For this purpose, the association (in conjunction with the cities of Kempten and Sonthofen as well as the municipality of Wertach ) awards the W. G. Sebald Literature Prize endowed with 10,000 euros every two years. In the competition entries, an artistic examination of the Allgäu region or of the person and work of Sebald should take place. In response to the first call in November 2019, 900 texts were submitted, which were assessed by a five-member jury in an anonymous process. It included: the literary scholar and editor of S. Fischer Verlag Hans Jürgen Balmes, the literary scholar Claudia Öhlschläger, the literary scholar Jürgen Ritte , the cultural journalist and winner of the Alfred Kerr Prize Marie Schmidt and the literary scholar Kay Wolfinger. The first winner of the 2020 competition, which had the theme of “Remembrance and Memory” as a leitmotif, is the author and translator Esther Kinsky . She received the award for her text Kalkstein .

estate

Sebald's estate is in the German Literature Archive in Marbach . Parts of it can be seen in the permanent exhibition in the Museum of Modern Literature in Marbach, in particular materials on Austerlitz and The Emigrants and Sebald's camera.

literature

  • Elena Agazzi: La grammatica del silenzio di WG Sebald. Artemide, Rome 2007, ISBN 978-88-7575-046-6 .
  • Marcel Atze / Franz Loquai ( eds .): Sebald. Readings. Ed. Isele, Eggingen 2005, ISBN 3-86142-363-4 .
  • Marcel Atze: Sebald in Freiburg. Deutsche Schillergesellschaft , Marbach am Neckar 2014 ( traces series , issue 102), ISBN 978-3-937384-89-4 .
  • Heinz L. Arnold (ed.): WG Sebald. Text + criticism , Heft 158, München 2003, ISBN 3-88377-728-5 .
  • Klaus Bonn: Homoeroticism, Hazard, Hysteria, among others. On the figuration of masculinity at WG Sebald. In: Forum Homosexuality and Literature , No. 49, Siegen 2007, ISSN  0931-4091 , pp. 5-40.
  • Theo Breuer : One of the best: WG Sebald. In: Ders., Kiesel & Kastanie. Of new poems and stories. Monograph on contemporary poetry and prose after 2000. Edition YE, Sistig 2008, ISBN 978-3-87512-347-0 .
  • Ulrich von Bülow et al. (Ed.): Wandering shadows. WG Sebald's underworld. Marbach Catalog, No. 62, Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, Marbach 2008, ISBN 978-3-937384-45-0 .
  • Jo Catling / Richard Hibbit (eds.): Saturn's Moons, WG Sebald - A Handbook. LEGENDA Modern Humanities Research Association and Maney Publishing, 2011, ISBN 978-1-906540-02-9 .
  • Scott Denham / Mark McCulloh: WG Sebald: History - Memory - Trauma. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2006, ISBN 3-11-018274-2 .
  • Thomas Diecks:  Sebald, WG. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 24, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-428-11205-0 , p. 106 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Anton Distler: No understanding without a fundamental ontology. A philosophical analysis of the work of WG Sebald based on the “existential psychoanalysis” of Jean-Paul Sartre. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-8260-3812-9 .
  • Anne Fuchs: “The traces of pain in history.” On the poetics of memory in WG Sebald's prose. Böhlau, Cologne 2004, ISBN 3-412-08104-3 .
  • Jon Gestermann: Presentations of the past. Historical images in WG Sebald's prose. Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2020, ISBN 978-3-8498-1563-9 .
  • Rüdiger Görner (ed.): The Anatomist of Melancholy: Essays in Memory of WG Sebald. Iudicium, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-89129-774-2 .
  • Rüdiger Görner: WG Sebald - Conversation with the living and the dead. Bogen 48, Hanser, Munich / Vienna 2001, ISBN 3-446-20032-0 .
  • Mario Gotterbarm: The violence of the moralist. On the relationship between ethics and aesthetics at WG Sebald. Wilhelm Fink, Paderborn 2016, ISBN 978-3-7705-6068-4 .
  • Christina Hünsch : Text events and battle pictures. A sebaldian poetics of the event. Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2012, ISBN 978-3-89528-903-3 .
  • Kai U. Jürgens : Closing ranks with a hobbyist. About parallels in the work of WG Sebald and Arno Schmidt. Bargfelder Bote , Lfg. 415–416, October 2017, pp. 3–17, ISBN 978-3-921402-50-4 .
  • Gerhard Köpf (ed.): Messages about Max. Marginalia to WG Sebald. Laufen, Oberhausen 1998, ISBN 3-87468-142-4 .
  • Michael Krüger (ed.): WG Sebald for memory. Accents. Journal of Literature , Issue 1, 2003.
  • Florian Lehmann: Reality and Imagination. Photography in WG Sebald's “Austerlitz” and Michelangelo Antonioni's “Blow Up”. University of Bamberg Press, Bamberg 2013, ISBN 978-3-86309-140-8 .
  • Franz Loquai: WG Sebald. Edition Isele, Eggingen 1997, ISBN 3-86142-103-8 .
  • Sigurd Martin, Ingo Wintermeyer (ed.): Transfer stations of memory. To the work of WG Sebald. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2007, ISBN 978-3-8260-3384-1 .
  • James P. Martin: The crisis of cultural knowledge in Michael Koehlmeier 's “Telemach”, Christoph Ransmayr 's “ Morbus Kitahara ” and WG Sebald's “The Rings of Saturn”. Washington 2004, OCLC 177275147 ( Dissertation Georgetown University Washington DC 2004, 227 pages, English ).
  • Mark McCulloh: Understanding WG Sebald. University of South Carolina Press, Columbia, SC 2003, ISBN 1-57003-506-7 .
  • Tanja Michalsky : Between the pictures. WG Sebalds tissue of memory. In: Peter Geimer, Michael Hagner (eds.): Afterlife and reconstruction. Past in the picture. Wilhelm Fink, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-7705-5339-6 , pp. 251-275.
  • Bettina Mosbach: Figurations of the Catastrophe. Aesthetic procedures in WG Sebald's "The Rings of Saturn" and "Austerlitz". Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2008, ISBN 978-3-89528-645-2 .
  • Michael Niehaus, Claudia Öhlschläger (eds.): WG Sebald. Political archeology and melancholy tinkering. Erich Schmidt Verlag, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-503-07966-1 .
  • Nikolai Jan Preuschoff: With Walter Benjamin. Melancholy, history and storytelling at WG Sebald. Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg 2015, ISBN 978-3-8253-6404-5 .
  • Susanne Schedel: “Who knows what it really was like before?” Text relationships as a means of representing history in WG Sebald. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2004, ISBN 3-8260-2728-0 .
  • Fridolin Schley: Catalogs of Truth: For the staging of authorship at WG Sebald. Wallstein, Göttingen 2012, ISBN 978-3-8353-0960-9 .
  • Peter Schmucker: Border crossings: Intertextuality in the work of WG Sebald. De Gruyter ( Spectrum Literaturwissenschaft / Spectrum Literature ), Berlin / New York 2012, ISBN 978-3-11-027835-4 .
  • Uwe Schütte: Because what cannot be cannot be. Notes on WG Sebald's essay on Jurek Becker's novels. In: Sinn und Form , 2/2010, pp. 235–242.
  • Uwe Schütte: WG Sebald. Introduction to life and work. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2011, ISBN 978-3-8252-3538-3 .
  • Uwe Schütte: Approaches. Seven essays about WG Sebald. Böhlau, Vienna / Cologne / Weimar 2019, ISBN 978-3-4125-1382-5 .
  • Frank Schwamborn: WG Sebald. Moralism and Prosody. Iudicium, Munich 2017, ISBN 978-3-86205-505-0 .
  • Susan Sontag : A Mind in Mourning , in: The Times Literary Supplement , February 25, 2000 ( online)
  • Paul Whitehead: Offside. WG Sebald's Aesthetics of the Marginal. Aisthesis, Bielefeld 2019, ISBN 978-3-8498-1274-4 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Saturn's Moons: WG Sebald - A Handbook her. Jo Catling and Richard Hibbitt
  2. ↑ Uwe Schütte: WG Sebald. P. 17.
  3. ^ WG Sebald: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea - Alfred Andersch. Disappearance in Providence. In: Lettre International , Issue 20, I. Vj./93.
  4. ↑ Volker Hage: "Fear must sit in the neck" . In: Der Spiegel . tape January 1 , 1999 ( spiegel.de [accessed January 11, 2019]).
  5. ↑ Volker Hage: Witnesses to the Destruction . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-596-16035-8 , pp. 119 f .
  6. ↑ WG Sebald: Austerlitz . Hanser, Munich 2001, ISBN 3-7632-5201-0 , p. 331 eff .
  7. ↑ Helen Finch et al. a .: HG Adler / WG Sebald Conference: Witnessing, Memory, Poetics (10-11 October 2012). October 2012, accessed January 4, 2018 .
  8. ↑ Uwe Schütte: The wrong book. In: Friday of May 16, 2019, p. 17.
  9. ↑ Michael Opitz: Prose that sounds like music. Review by Deutschlandradio Kultur on January 30, 2009, accessed on March 1, 2011.
  10. ↑ Interview with Prof. Dr. Ricardo Felberbaum on the German Sebald Society: Digitized
  11. ↑ Felicitas von Lovenberg: Exhibition on "The Soul": A layering of time in space . In: FAZ.NET . ISSN  0174-4909 ( faz.net [accessed January 11, 2019]).
  12. ↑ Campaigns of a Conqueror. In: FAZ of December 4, 2012, p. 30.
personal data
SURNAME Sebald, WG
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Sebald, Winfried Georg; Sebald, Max
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German writer and professor of German studies
DATE OF BIRTH May 18, 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH Wertach , Allgäu
DATE OF DEATH December 14, 2001
Place of death Norfolk , England