Memory's martyr. (Books).

Je mehr von Heimat die Rede ist,

desto weniger gibt es sie.

(The more talk about home,

the less it exists.)

- W. G. Sebald from Unheimliche Heimat

Major Works by Winfried Georg Sebald:

1988 Nach der Natur (From Nature, untranslated)

1991 Unheimliche Heimat (Eerie Homeland, untranslated)

1992 Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants, trans. Michael Hulse [New York: New Directions, 1997])

Die Ringe des Saturns (The Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse [New York: New Directions, 1998])

1994 Schwindel Gefuhle (Vertigo, trans. Michael Hulse [New York: New Directions, 2000]).

1999 Luftkrieg und Literatur (Air War and Literature, currently being translated)

2001 Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2001)

On December 14, 2001, the fifty-seven-year-old German-expatriate writer Winfried Georg Sebald was, as the media in his country put it, "mortally mishapped" (todlich verungluckt), i.e., killed when he lost control of his car--perhaps stricken by a heart attack -- and swerved into an oncoming truck in Norfolk, England. (His daughter Anna, riding with him in the car, was severely injured.) Critics and readers around the world mourned the loss of this deeply engaging, quirky, elegiac writer, who had moved in a few years from near-total obscurity at the University of East Anglia to the ranks of the Nobel Prize candidates, but Sebald himself seems to have expected something like this. (His alter-ego Jacques Austerlitz describes himself, shortly before the end of Sebald's very last book, as "thinking I was about to die of the weak heart I have inherited, from whom I do not know....")

All of Sebald's life was overshadowed by death. In one of the prose poems in his first publication Nach der Natur ([drawn or painted] From Nature), Sebald notes that on the day he was born, Ascension Thursday, 1944, there were storm clouds hanging over the Alps in his Bavarian hometown of Wertach im Allgau; and one of the baldachin-bearers in the church procession through the fields was struck dead by lightning. Elsewhere in Europe, of course, death was raining down from the skies in a far more devastating and frightful manner. Later, at the age of fourteen or fifteen Sebald recalls asking his religion teacher at the Oberstdorf Gymnasium how Providence could have allowed the air-raids on nearby Sonthofen (whither his family had moved in 1952) to destroy neither the barracks nor the Hitler Youth "fortress," but the parish church and the hospital chapel, killing about one hundred civilians. Whatever the priest's answer, Sebald was so unimpressed that he forgot it.

Sebald was destined to spend his life wandering from place to place asking similarly unanswerable questions in his own unique form of meditative monologue: dense, detailed, meticulously researched recitatives in an old-fashioned, elaborate, mellifluous periodic style (dubbed by German commentators, who never met an Anglicism they didn't like, the "Sebald-Sound.") Language was, in the end, the closest thing to a homeland he ever found. "When I began to write at forty," he once said, "at first it was only to carve out some free space for myself in the everyday world." Once he started carving, he couldn't stop.

Postwar Germany, absorbed in rebuilding and mesmerized by its prodigious Wirtschaftswunder, deliberately forgetful of both the horrors it had caused (Auschwitz, etc.) and those it had suffered (Dresden, etc.), was unthinkable as a homeland. England's memory of such things was keener (many RAF bombers raiding Germany had taken off from around Norwich, where Sebald wound up spending more than half his life), but even in the Victorian brick house he settled in, Sebald characterized himself as "chronically unsettled....I've lived here for thirty years, but I don't feel in the least at home."

What Sebald essentially did, both in his critical and quasi-novelistic work, was to retell stories, above all, episodes from the lives of troubled, rootless, haunted outsiders like himself: Thomas Browne, Joseph Conrad, Roger Casement, Edward Fitzgerald, and Chateaubriand in The Rings of Saturn; Holocaust survivors Dr. Henry Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, and Max Ferber in The Emigrants; Stendhal and Kafka in Vertigo; and the mysterious Jacques Austerlitz, a Czech Jew sent alone to England as a four-and-a-half-year-old child in 1939 and raised by a Welsh minister, in Sebald's final book). Though generally spared the worst kind of suffering themselves, these men have all been wounded by the cruelty and stupidity of the world, which they can only chronicle, not change. (Casement, who championed the downtrodden, whether in Ireland or the Belgian Congo, was, of course, executed by the British for high treason; Selwyn and Bereyter committed suicide long after the war, like Paul Celan or Primo Levi.)

Sebald dreamily accompanies his heroes on their wanderings through a desolate, tormented world, except in The Rings of Saturn, where he goes off on his own melancholic "English pilgrimage" all over Suffolk. The archetypal landscape for young Sebald was the bombed-out streets of postwar Munich; and in fact everywhere he ventures, he seems to find nothing but a postindustrial wasteland, littered with all sorts of ruins, from the merely depressing tumbled-down castle of Somerleyton to the utterly horrific (though still intact] Belgian fortress of Breen-dank, "a monolithic, monstrous incarnation of ugliness and blind violence." Built just before World War I, it was occupied by the Nazis, who tortured the Austrian Jewish writer (and future suicide) Jean Amery, among others, within its walls.

There are no buzzing, thriving, tree-lined metropolises in Sebald's world, only grim urban deserts (e.g., Theresienstadt - Terezin), for which Sebald or one of his stand-ins is the mournful archaeologist, supplying not just minute descriptions but old photographs and illustrations to document the vanished past and the miserable, amnesiac present. In a typical scene from Austerlitz the protagonist reflects on the devastation caused by the building of the Liverpool and Broad Street Stations:

Around 1860 and 1870, before work on the construction of the two northeast terminals began, these poverty-stricken quarters were forcibly cleared and vast quantities of soil, together with the bones buried in them [the previous page shows a contemporary photograph of four skulls unearthed by workers], were dug up and removed, so that the railway lines, which on the engineers' plans looked like muscles and sinews in an anatomical atlas [the adjacent page provides one such blueprint], could be brought to the outskirts of the City. Soon the site in front of Bishopsgate was nothing but a gray-brown morass, a no-man's land where not a living soul stirred. The little river Wellbrook, the ditches and ponds, the crakes and snipe and herons, the elms and mulberry trees, Paul Pindar's deer park, the inmates of Bedlam and the starving paupers of Angel Alley, Peter Street, Sweet Apple Court, and Swan Yard had all gone, and gone now too are the millions and millions of people who passed through Broadgate and Liverpool Str eet stations day in, day out, for an entire century.

By an impossible sort of paradox, Sebald's version of history offers no gains, only losses, deaths but no births, disintegrations without restoration, much less any valuable new buildings. Entropy is everywhere. In The Rings of Saturn, which may be Sebald's finest book, the author explores, among other things, the staggering losses of the 8th British Air Fleet in World War II (9,000 planes and 15,000 crewmen engaged in the cruel and pointless campaign to break the morale of Germany's civilians by carpet-bombing its cities), the spread of unemployment and illiteracy in and around Lowestoft, the ominous dwindling of herring catches, the bitter death in their Ukrainian exile of two Polish patriots who happened to be Joseph Conrad's parents, the incurable lifelong loneliness of Edward Fitzgerald, the horrific massacres of the Taiping Rebellion, and the decline of sericulture in Europe.

All this mourning might have become tedious (or unintentionally comic), were it not for Sebald's vivid, loving use of his Nabokovian-Borgesian encyclopedic lore (is there anything, one wonders, that he doesn't know?) If it doesn't quite transform his elegies into celebrations of the past, it does rescue, momentarily at least, fragments of that past from all-engulfing oblivion. Thus, Jacques Austerlitz ingeniously manages to trace his dead father back to the internment camp at Gurs in France and his mother to Theresienstadt (his parents never married). Beyond that looms the abyss of Nazism, but Austerlitz-Sebald has gone as far as he can go.

"Might it not be," he asks, "that we...have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak?" The question is rhetorical--he spent his whole life as a writer keeping such appointments.

Sebald, it might be objected, isn't really a very convincing story-teller--but he doesn't try to be. The narrator in Austerlitz, for example, scarcely bothers to explain or motivate the strange encounters he keeps having with Austerlitz in Brussels, Paris, and London. He's forever, interrupting his tale for brilliant setpieces on topics as diverse as Antwerp's Centraal Station, the battle of Austerlitz, the geography of Wales, the habits of moths, the Holocaust in Czechoslovakia, and the site of the wretched new Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. Nor does Sebald much bother with beginnings, middles, and ends--a world that actually had such things, Aristotelian or otherwise, wouldn't be ours.

He prefers instead to recount the (seemingly) chance-encounters with other "pilgrims," people such as the Ashburys, a family of displaced, penniless aristocrats living in a decaying mansion near the Slieve Bloom Mountains in central Ireland, who inevitably turn out to be Sebaldian kindred spirits. Catherine Ashbury, for example, describes herself and her clueless offspring as "lebensuntuchtige Phantasten" (dreamers incapable of coping with life) and then adds, in English, "It seems to me sometimes that we never got used to being on this earth and life is just one great, ongoing, incomprehensible blunder" (The Rings of Saturn). Sebald couldn't have put it better himself.

And that, in fact, may be his biggest flaw: his inability, or refusal, to get out of his own skin or modulate his register. Despite his vast frame of reference, his staggering vocabulary, his polyglot virtuosity, Sebald can't avoid a certain obsessive sameness, a fact he implicitly acknowledges with his metaphor of the rings of Saturn. The Brockhaus Enzyklopadie, which he quotes, defines them as consisting "of ice crystals and presumably meteoric dust particles that revolve around its [Saturn's] equatorial plain in circular orbits. They are probably fragments of an earlier moon that came too close to the planet and was destroyed by the effect of its tides."

To put it crudely, we are all scattered bits of an imagined integral paradise that came too close to the real world and was shattered by it, leaving us to spin forever in its baleful gravitational field. At best, we can take our bearings, remember (while memory lasts) our earlier positions, and compare-contrast them--by writing the sorts of books that Sebald wound up writing.

No particle in that kind of planetary system would stand much chance of achieving real novelty or meaningful change; and now any alteration in Sebald's sad perspective has been rendered once and for all impossible. W.G.S. wouldn't have been in the least surprised. But he was well served by his translators, especially Anthea Bell: and now it looks as if he is going to get his due from readers around the world, too late for his personal satisfaction, of course. But Sebald was a shy, self-effacing man; and, as for those now joining him on his guilty, tenderminded, secular-pious (weltfromm) pilgrimage through the past, he would surely have said better late than never.

Peter Heinegg is CrossCurrents's Book Editor.