One Misfortune After Another: On W. G. Sebald’s “Silent Catastrophes”

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In 1985, a small publishing house in Austria, Residenz, brought out Die Beschreibung des Unglücks (The Description of Misfortune), a collection of literary criticism by an obscure but controversial scholar working at the University of East Anglia—W.G. Sebald. The book was a departure from Residenz’s normal fare. The essays were academic, in form if not in tone, and largely biographical. They focused exclusively on Austrian writers, several of whom were also published by Residenz. These included Thomas Bernhard and Peter Handke, close contemporaries who also shared with Sebald a taste for provocation. A few years earlier, during a conference on Alfred Döblin, he had denounced the author of Berlin Alexanderplatz as a protofascist and necrophiliac. One of the author’s sons was in attendance. Despite Döblin’s Jewish heritage and his persecution by the Nazi government, Sebald viewed him as thoroughly compromised, due to the graphic violence depicted in his novels and his sympathies with the German revolutionaries of 1918—armed politics of any kind laid the trackway for concentration camps. So Residenz had on its plate something considerably spicier than the usual bland gruel of university Germanistik. For its complicity in the Nazi project, Sebald believed that the literature of German-speaking peoples, both in its study and in its practice, had to be remade. This was far from a novel conclusion for writers of his generation. As young children, not yet complicit in the wrongdoing of their elders, they experienced the Second World War primarily through Allied bombing campaigns and subsequent return of paternalistic authorities—fathers, uncles, mayors, teachers, professors—all of whom were guilty of crimes on an unimaginable scale. This was the generational conflict that animated Bernhard’s and Handke’s work. But Sebald took up their provocations and channeled them toward a novel but sweeping set of conclusions. His Austrian peers and predecessors were at once sufferers of a pervasive mental sickness within bourgeois life, diagnosticians of that sickness, and a tonic against its most deleterious effects. Six years later, Residenz published Unheimliche Heimat (Strange Homeland), a follow-up collection that further elaborated his thesis. But it was also a kind of valediction. Though Sebald would continue to teach and fulfill administrative duties at the UEA for the remainder of his life, by 1991 he had largely abandoned formal academic writing, not that he was constrained much by its conventions in the first place. The interim was productive in other respects, with a collection of poetry, Nach der Natur (After Nature), and a novel, Schwindel. Gefühle (Vertigo), appearing between the essay collections. These books display the qualities of Sebald as a mature writer, his elliptical blend of fiction, memoir, travelogue, and essay. Begun in private, to stave off professional frustration, this “potting shed” writing would, in less than a decade, come to define Sebald as a world-renowned literary figure. But this was merely trading one misfortune for another, and his rising fame put a strain on his academic obligations as well as his health. Since his premature and sudden death by heart attack in 2001, Sebald’s gloomy intimations regarding the literary life, speaking for both himself and others, have taken on the force of prophecy. Nevertheless, his scholarly writings deserve more exacting scrutiny, since, in at least in their information-giving capacity, they are confounded by the doomsaying that makes him otherwise such a compelling writer

Silent Catastrophes, published last spring by Random House, combines Sebald’s two books of criticism on Austrian literature into a single, convenient, if somewhat unwieldy volume. Translated by Jo Catling, one of Sebald’s colleagues at the UEA, it will likely strike more casual readers of Sebald, at least those without a background in German studies, as simultaneously more straightforward and more obscure than his better-known work. A Place in the Country, a 1998 essay collection also translated by Jo Catling, covers a similarly obscure range of authors, but with a salutary focus on Sebald’s own formative experiences, such as reading the beloved humorist and almanac writer Johann Peter Hebel. But personal circumstance informed his academic interests no less than his “potting shed” writing. Until he met Sebald in 1983, Residenz’s editor, Jochen Jung, believed that the writer was Austrian himself—who else could have written about the country’s literature on such intimate, often hostile terms? Sebald had also cultivated that assumption among his UEA colleagues, sometimes telling them outright that he was Austrian. Linguistic as well as geographic proximity might have given this fabrication the ring of truth. Sebald’s childhood village of Wertach is within walking distance of the Austrian border. He grew up speaking the local Allgäu dialect, which is largely unintelligible to the rest of Bavaria, let alone Germany, but can be understood in the neighboring Austrian regions of Tirol and Vorarlberg. There is also temperamental affinity to consider. As the title of the first collection indicates, no other national literary tradition epitomized misfortune better than the one next door:

The high incidence of ill-starred lives in the history of Austrian literature is, to say the least, somewhat uncanny. Raimund’s premature phobia of dying, Nestroy’s fear of being buried alive, Grillparzer’s bouts of depression, the case of Stifter, Schnitzler’s references on almost every page of his journal to his fits of melancholy, Hofmannsthal’s feelings of alienation, the suicide of poor Weininger, Kafka’s fourty-year-long tactical withdrawal from life, Roth’s addiction to alcohol, Horvath’s apparently so logical end…

An impressively miserable lot, to be sure, but once Sebald advances from the general to the particular, distortions emerge in his gloomy but picturesque vision, though in ways that are unlikely to register outside the academic context in which the essays first appeared. As personal interpretations, as notes toward an individual style, they are a triumph. As reports of actual people, as diagnostic instruments for the all-too-real misfortune that befell Austria, the essays sometimes come up short, sometimes spectacularly.

By misfortune, Sebald means, above all, the lives of Jewish writers. Of the fourteen or so figures profiled in Silent Catastrophes, nine have such ancestry to varying degrees. The cultural excellence of the secular, bourgeois German-speaking Jewish population in Austria is well-trodden territory. Sebald’s innovation is in characterizing this excellence as an essentially provincial rather than a cosmopolitan phenomenon. As he imagines them, the Jewish communities in Prague and Vienna were no less confined than a minuscule Alpine village. Franz Kafka, inevitably, is the representative figure here. Sebald demonstrates how the haunted atmosphere in The Castle is achieved by playing up elements already present in rural Bohemia, “a dark desolate wintery landscape stretching away in the twilight of mock suns, timeless, as in a dream.” Along with a flair for dramatic summaries, Sebald also possesses a workman’s eye for the mechanics of storytelling. He makes much of The Castle’s protagonist K. owning a handgun in early drafts of the novel. A novelistic bent is also evident in Sebald’s essay on Elias Canetti, where the writer’s aversion to food is treated at length. Canetti’s notebook entries on the subject would not be out of place in the mouth of Jacques Austerlitz or another of Sebald’s morbidly obsessive protagonists: 

Ever since I saw a human stomach, nine-tenths of a human stomach, within less than two hours after it was cut out, I know even less why we eat. It looked just like the pieces of meat that people roast in their kitchens, it was even the size of an ordinary schnitzel. Why does like come to like? Why the circuitous route? Why must meat incessantly go through the bowels of other meat? Why must this be in particular the condition of our life?

Alongside Kafka and Canetti, Sebald also profiles Jean Améry and Joseph Roth, noting a particularly strong attachment these writers felt to Austrian culture, over and above their Jewish heritage, before the country was absorbed by the Nazi Reich in 1938. Roth died only a year later, in Paris, from pneumonia and the effects of alcohol withdrawal; Améry’s fate was more protracted. He died by suicide in 1978, a consequence of his torture by the Gestapo and imprisonment at Auschwitz. It’s a dynamic still at play in contemporary life, though thankfully with less severe consequences: the heritage of so-called Western culture preserved and perpetuated by the very people it ostracizes. In many ways, Sebald would find the cultural landscape of 2026 depressingly familiar.

As its presence in the title Strange Homeland would indicate, the German concept of Heimat is an essential (and essentially troubled) concept. It runs through Sebald’s life and work like a vein of dark ore. Following Germany’s defeat, nationalism, especially the pan-Germanic variety advanced by Adolf Hitler, was replaced in schools and mass media by a pastoral localism that was, at least on its surface, untainted by associations with the former regime. Cinemas were filled with Heimatfilme, sentimental movies about village life set in the Alps or the Black Forest, far away from the cities leveled by Allied bombing campaigns. In primary school, Sebald was taught Heimatkunde, local geography and history, two abiding preoccupations, by Armin Müller, a beloved teacher who became the model for Paul Bereyter in The Emigrants. Like his fictional counterpart, Müller was persecuted as a Mischling or “half-breed” for his Jewish ancestry under Nazi Germany’s racial purity laws. Learning of this later in life, the apt-pupil Sebald felt an enormous ambivalence toward his education, but it could not be discarded at will like so many turnip tops. Instead, he turned the perversion of Heimat into a theory of literature. It is the very status of outsider, so Sebald argues in Silent Catastrophes, that allows one to write so perceptively about provincial life. 

But who counts as an outsider? This is an especially salient but fraught question in Sebald’s treatment of “pathological cases,” writers suffering mental illness and unresolved psychological trauma. Much like the subject of Heimat, there is a close connection here with Sebald’s fiction and academic writing. The schizophrenic poet Ernst Herbeck, whom the Sebald-narrator visits at a nursing home in Vertigo, is also featured in Silent Catastrophes. The material poverty of Herbeck’s life, so he argues, necessitates a minoritarian view of the culture surrounding him, exemplified by the totemistic depiction of animals and the bricolage-like methods by which the poet assembles logically incommensurate elements. If this interpretation of Herbeck’s work seems theoretically overdetermined, too dependent on the theories of Deleuze and Lévi-Strauss, it is rather sober compared to Sebald’s treatment of Adalbert Stifter, the nineteenth-century giant of Heimat literature, who goes through a bizarre reckoning. It is indisputable that some kind of mental pathology was an abiding and malevolent force in the Stifter household. An adoptive daughter, Julia, ran away multiple times and was eventually found drowned after a final attempt. Stifter, who suffered from depression and extreme fluctuations in weight, died in an emaciated state by slitting his own throat. And yet there is no hard evidence to claim, as Sebald does, that Stifter was a pedophile, and the textual evidence he musters, passages in fiction, do not stand out in context. By our contemporary standards, Stifter places a disturbing emphasis on the sexual innocence of young girls, but he is far from an extreme case, at least compared to Edgar Allan Poe or Lewis Carroll. By Sebald’s standards, Charles Dickens is a demonstrable pedophile as well. It’s a bizarre charge especially in light of Sebald’s treatment of the Viennese essayist, Peter Altenberg, who took intimate photos of young, sometimes visibly prepubescent girls and wrote autobiographical accounts of seducing them. This pathology is entirely neglected by Sebald in his essay on the writer. Instead, he focuses on Altenberg’s frugal living habits and refusal to travel outside the narrow confines of Vienna and the Salzkammergut. Why confect such unwholesome details with Stifter? Some of Sebald’s own preferred medicine—biographical criticism—might serve to clarify matters. Stifter was a lifelong favorite of his mother, Rosa, his maternal grandfather, Joseph Engelhofer, and of Sebald himself. The claim of pedophilia upset Rosa, a foretaste of the embarrassment and social isolation she would experience as a result of the fictionalized portrait Wertach in Vertigo. It could be that an uncomplicated appreciation of Stifter ran counter to Sebald’s desire to expose and confront the pathological elements of Austrian society. It could also be that Altenberg’s pedophilia was sufficiently well-known as to make him an unsuitable target for tendentious criticism. Stifter’s turbulent life, in a mental, physical, and social sense, rendered him unable to live conventionally, a profound lack that is, so Sebald argues convincingly, reflected in the eerily harmonious world of his supposedly realist fiction. But it’s a gross exaggeration to claim that Stifter’s unease in aristocratic circles, a conventional feature of his bourgeois background and his occupation as a private tutor, qualifies him as an “internal exile.”  And yet, as perverse as his reading of Stifter is on some details, on the whole it is not destructive. Rather, it highlights what makes him such a strangely compelling writer when so much of his contemporaries’ writing strikes us as dull and saccharine. Behind the ostensibly placid façade of Austrian society, a profound sense of loneliness and insecurity follows Stifter’s child (and childlike) protagonists through their ceaseless travels, their desire for knowledge, like an invading alien intelligence guiding them, in the absence of conventional plotting and narrative stakes, toward rapturous experiences of nature so profound as to be apocalyptic. But poetic as it is, the intensity and intensely personal nature of Sebald’s reading distorts, erases, and even falsifies important particulars about Stifter, as it does for other authors that Sebald profiles. Among a professional readership, which was the sole readership Sebald had at the time, such problems were spotted immediately, but Catling is circumspect about his academic controversies in the introduction, alluding to them only indirectly. Certainly, it is not within the translator’s remit to confirm or deny an author’s claims in detail. Nevertheless, Stifter’s canonical status, in conjunction with the English-speaking world’s general unfamiliarity with Austrian literature, gives Silent Catastrophes an aura of veracity and moral authority that it did not have when the books were in their original German publication. But these decades-old academic disputes, narrow as they are, cut against the bland postmortem image of Sebald as a literary saint. It takes a brazen head—not to mention a degree of professional irony—to write, “It is well known that a pronounced pedagogic talent often goes hand in hand with repressed paedophiliac desires. This, no doubt, will also have been true of Stifter, who appears to have been, or aspired to be, a ‘begnadeter Lehrer’ (gifted teacher).” 

Though scholarly breadth and polemical weight are present in abundance throughout Silent Catastrophes, the elegant monotone of Sebald’s mature style is notably absent. This is not due to any lack of skill on the part of Catling. Her work on A Place in the Country could measure up against any of Sebald’s more celebrated translations. The uneven reading experience is mostly due to the utilitarian character of academic prose and the difficulty of presenting it to a general audience. But in one respect, Silent Catastrophes is considerably easier to digest than Sebald’s fiction: There are no long untranslated passages. The Czech in Austerlitz, for instance, is likely to be just as unfamiliar to the reader as it is to the narrator. The difficulty of the passages mirrors the protagonist’s difficulties in recovering a language that was stolen from him in early childhood. Further explication would have betrayed the memetic function of the prose—not understanding is the point. Catling makes the sensible choice of providing English translations of French and Italian passages when they appear, though the apparatus of brackets and endnotes doesn’t make for a smooth reading experience. Take, for instance, this concluding passage in the essay on Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s unfinished novel Andreas:

It is profoundly appropriate to the fetishistic tendency, which conceals the libido precisely where no one would think of looking for it. Only in such images is it possible—in the most painful way imaginable—to see restored the joy [Glück] of those better times from which we believe we have lapsed. “Nessun maggior dolor” [no greater suffering]—as Hofmannsthal also noted for his Andreas novel—“che ricordarsi del tempo felice—nella miseria.” 

The footnotes appended to this passage trace the quotation from Hofmannsthal to Dante’s Inferno: “There is no greater suffering than to remember happy times—from a state of misery.” This very Sebaldian dictum is blunted somewhat by having to go to the back of the book—there are two endnote sections, one for Sebald and one for Catling—to fish out the English translation and its provenance. The distracting presence of brackets invalidates any general case to be made against in-text translations or footnotes, as does the inconsistency of the apparatus, since footnotes are used in an essay on Thomas Bernhard, where they are uniquely unhelpful. Long quotations—for Bernhard, this means a sentence or two—are reproduced in small font at the bottom of the page, not ideal for the explication of a difficult writer. 

Already disgusted by experiences as a German university student, Sebald grew increasingly jaded about the state of higher education in England as well. Catling’s introductory notes provide some vivid anecdotes in this regard, especially regarding his very professorial disgust with administrative matters. “Eine ungute Sache,” he would say habitually, “a dreadful business.” He was outraged by the austerity measures inaugurated by Margaret Thatcher, but these developments did not elicit any public protest from him, save for a passing reference in the Rings of Saturn. As vociferously critical as he could be regarding the pathologies of his native and adopted cultures, this stance did not redound to any easily legible political position. Indeed, Sebald is quite ecumenical in Silent Catastrophes, noting with approval that Bernhard and Handke’s opposition to Austrian society is unburdened by left-wing politics. If we can use his attack on Döblin as a guide, aversion to revolutionary violence might be a factor in this quietism. This would be unproblematic but for the emancipatory claims Sebald makes about his method of criticism: “When, with a fixed stare, Melancholy considers once more how things could have come to this, it becomes clear that the mechanics of hopelessness are identical to those which drive our knowledge and insight. The description of misfortune contains within it the possibility of its overcoming.” But overcome how? Communism is out of the question, of course, but so are liberal regimes shorn of their social democratic elements. And what would overcoming look like? A sort of answer comes in the form of Peter Handke’s 1986 novel Weiderholung (Repetition). In it, a man of mixed Austrian and Slovenian heritage, Filib Kobal, makes a trip on foot over the mountains into what was then a unified Yugoslavia, searching for his lost elder brother. The parallels between Repetition and Sebald’s fiction are strong and numerous, from the narrator standing in for the author, from their unhappy portraits of childhood immediately the Second World War, down to their rich descriptions of Alpine landscapes. Once the Kobal crosses the border, the novel becomes a pastoral idyll, suspended in time, preoccupied with the particulars of orchard keeping or the grammar of the Slovene language.  Kobal discovers himself in this picture postcard landscape, one very similar to Austria, except without the troublesome presence of all those the Austrians: “What delights Kobal most about the crowd on the streets of the Yugoslavian cities ‘was what it lacked, the things that were missing: the chamois beards, the hartshorn buttons, the loden suits, the lederhosen: in short, no one in it wore a costume.’” For Sebald as well as for Handke, this lack of Austrian folk culture, this apparent lack of a Heimat outside the vessels of language and landscape, has political as well as aesthetic weight. Presented as it is in Silent Catastrophes, this attitude is marginal marginal, one propounded by outsiders against the dominant culture, but it’s actually quite a common attitude in German-speaking lands, even held by those with otherwise conservative cultural politics. This apparent contradiction is buried under the provincial maxim: “Everybody does it the wrong way, except for us.” I vividly remember having conversation with a stranger on a train while I was on my way to a Carnival celebration in the Austrian town of Bad Aussee, deep inside the mountainous region of the Salzkammergut. My companion agreed that the bright Commedia dell’arte–influenced costumes in Bad Aussee were quite respectable, much better than “the silly yodelers in lederhosen.” We were surprised then to see, as we stepped onto a platform to change trains, a group of yodelers dressed in lederhosen. I laughed, charmed by the coincidence, but my companion was livid and trudged away without a word. For him, it wasn’t a laughing matter, just as it was for Sebald. “Kitsch is the evil value in a system of art,” he writes, and its lack, along with the lack of guilt from the Second World War, provides for him, as it does for Handke, a vision of paradise. But it is precisely here, in this Yugoslavian idyll, that Handke banishes himself from the status of moral writer, at least by Sebald’s standards. What are we to make of Handke’s “otherwise” in light of his denial that genocide occurred in Bosnia at the hands of the Serbian armed forces? What are we to make of this “otherwise” in light the eulogy Handke delivered at President Slobodan Milošević’s funeral in 2006? These were actions undertaken within Sebald’s lifetime, but I have yet to come across anything in the copious academic literature about the two authors that would indicate how Sebald might have felt about the matter. There are many possible reasons why he might have been disinclined to criticize Handke, whether it was from a stance of anti-interventionism or active political partisanship, or whether it was from a sense of literary or generational kinship—this reviewer can’t know for sure, at least with the information at hand. What is striking is that Sebald, who was otherwise quite willing to stoke controversy, sometimes on the flimsiest of pretexts, chose to sit this particular controversy out. No minor academic squabble, Handke’s involvement in the Yugoslav Wars became a volatile subject again by his winning the Nobel Prize in 2019. But reading the scholarly literature, you would be forgiven for thinking that the whole sordid affair just didn’t exist. 

In any case, it’s an object lesson in the ethical as well as epistemic limits of Sebald’s interpretative method. As an enabling condition for his own creative work, the criticism of Silent Catastrophes is an unqualified success. Given the horrific guilt of society he was raised in, it would have been impossible for Sebald to write uncomplicated narratives about the subjects that had mesmerized him since childhood: local history or geography, provincial authors writing about peasant life. He needed to dig deeper, to excavate what was worthwhile from the heaps, or rather mountains of sentimental kitsch that surrounded him. He succeeded, but not without cooking the books a little. His horror of academic complicity in Nazism gave his attacks on Germanistik a moral and political weight, but this was undercut by a tendency to exaggerate and fabricate details that suited his agenda. Fiction proved a far sounder vessel for such editorial interventions. Sebald could conscience pastoral literature, so long as the landscape was colored according to his palette, bereft of folkloristic detail, filled with people very much like Sebald himself, constantly intimating disaster, fundamentally at odds with their culture, even if the record states otherwise. With a writer of such stature, even at this early period, the information-giving function of criticism can be suspended, replaced with the appreciation of a criticism that is, in itself, of literary-historical interest. But Sebald’s account of Austrian literature is, at critical points, gravely distorted. For outsiders, for Ausländer to gain a more accurate picture of Austrian literature, another, more reliable narrator is needed.