Links

Antonia points me to this great article about W. G. Sebald's life and early inspiration for his literary career.

Readers have sometimes expressed discomfort with this connection, accusing Sebald of inappropriately identifying with the Jewish victims of National Socialism, as if he, too, were an "exile" of history. The objection is misguided, however, for Sebald never forgot the distinction between the forced exile of the Nazi period and his own voluntary postwar emigration; his entire work offers an eloquent tribute to the memory and memorialization of that historical difference. However, his literary imagination naturally sought out points of contact and continuity. For his book about four aging "emigrants," he deliberately avoided the term exilierte, preferring instead the capacious and somewhat antiquated term ausgewanderte (literally, those who have "wandered" or "gone out") in order to include his own family history of emigration. The Jewish exiles of National Socialism are but one, admittedly central part of a much broader pattern of modern displacement reaching back to the French Revolution (with an implicit titular reference to Goethe's Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten) and the economic emigrations of both Jews and Germans from Central Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sebald's semiautobiographical literary work is thus premised on a dual identity: as the son of a Wehrmacht officer who bears witness to the victims of German violence, but also as a member of his grandfather's nonmilitary, emigrant family who identifies with these victims existentially.

The article is actually a part of biographical study of Sebald that the author, Mark Anderson, is working on. It is interesting how little information about his personal life is available. I was surprised for example when I read in the book Understanding W G Sebald that he was a very cheerful and lively person in real life. His books contain some of the most eloquent portraits of melancholic figures that I have ever encountered in literature, either as the narrators themselves or the people they talk about in the book. I hope I will get a chance the read the book.

Also there is another old article written by the same author on Thomas Bernhard which I came across recently. He has translated Bernhard's The Loser too.

Finally a link to "Kierkegaard Blog Carnival" which features my "review" of a Kierkegaard biography. I wrote the review without even finishing the whole book (it runs to almost thousand pages), but other links look good. I haven't read anything yet, but I am going to.

P.S. Anurag is now asking me to change the name of my blog to "Sebald and Bernhard."