"Connected but not Congruent": W.G Sebald and the Writing of his Generation

Abstract

W.G. Sebald is widely perceived as a literary phenomenon, and critics assert the uniqueness of his prose fiction, and its position in the context of post-war German literature. In this study, I challenge the widely-held view that the narrative prose of W.G. Sebald is aloof from that of his generation, and demonstrate that his writing reveals not only significant thematic connections with that of his generation, but an intensification of the resentment and ambivalence that mark the earlier writing of his generation. My study is a comprehensive comparative reading of Sebald’s narrative prose and the writing of the German “second” generation, and builds on a small body of work by Morgan, Taberner, Davies and others. Exploration of Sebald’s prose fiction within a generational paradigm reveals significant connections between his writing and the literary, social, and political preoccupations that define the earlier, ambivalent writing of his generation. My study challenges the widespread perception of Sebald’s uniqueness, as well as the tendency to mystification that exists in critical appreciation of Sebald’s writing. Situating Sebald in a generational context has significant implications for our reading of his work: it allows us to identify his narrative prose as a belated, intensified, and elaborately figurative confrontation with the inheritance that troubled his second-generation cohort. My readings show that Sebald’s narrative prose continues to reflect the ambivalence towards national identity and recent traumatic history that marks the conflicted writing of his generation, born during or shortly after the war, and expressed in the anti-authoritarian writing of the 1960s, the intergenerational conflicts of the Väterliteratur, and the neo-Romantic writing of the 1980s. Placing Sebald in a generational context exposes the incongruity of his position in relation to the trajectory followed by many writers of his generation: while their concerns change over time to reveal a more empathetic approach to the National Socialist past and the imbrication of the parent generation in it, Sebald continues to express the discourse of loss and resentment that characterizes the earlier writing of this generation.