Sebald Coverage

A Common Reader is doing a summer series on Sebald, starting with Austerlitz.

The character Austerlitz shares Sebald’s interest in architectural history, having what Sebald describes as an “astonishing professional expertise”. They are both interested in “monumentalism”, the tendency of 19th governments to “erect public building which would bring international renown to the aspiring state”. Four examples from the early parts of the book are Lucerne railway station (destroyed by fire in 1971), The Palace of Justice in Brussels, the Great Eastern Hotel in London, and the Belgian fort of Breendonk (which was used as a concentration camp by the Nazis). Sebald’s fascination with these huge buildings evokes a sense of dread, an almost agoraphobic fear of the vast spaces inside them with their closed-off rooms, endless corridors and maze-like structures. He records Austerlitz as saying, “we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them and are designed from the first witn an eye to their later existence as ruins”.

These places have the power to infest the mind with their embedded memories for days after the visit. Sebald describes a visit to Breendonk and writes that the building “seemed to be like the anatomical blueprint of some alien and crab-like creature”. While walking down one of the many tunnels inside it, he “had to resist the feeling taking root in my heart, one which to this day often comes over me in macabre places, a sense that with every forward step, the air was growing thinner and the weight above me heavier”.

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1. On Representing a Scream in Literature It is curious to see how the two books typographically depict this string of As. In Sebald’s Austerlitz, on the left, the run of vowels...
2. Sebald's First eBook Terry at Vertigo has a write-up of it. And he’s also made a LibraryThing catalog of fiction with photos embedded within. I’m sure he’d appreciate...
3. Sebald Interview Even though it’s ten years old, I thought I’d link to this Sebald interview since it has been making the rounds. (By which I mean,...
4. How Sebald Explains Modernity: J.J. Long’s W.G. Sebald In the introduction to his book on Sebald, W.G. Sebald, J.J. Long rather amorphously states that his intention is to discuss how Sebald’s works deal...
5. Sebald Guides From New Directions Just as I'm finishing up my first reading of Vertigo, New Directions has made available guides to The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. (via...

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