W.G. Sebald

Born Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald on May 18, 1944, in Wertach im Allgäu, a small village in the Bavarian Alps, Sebald grew up in a Germany that refused to speak of what it had done. His father, Georg, had served in the Wehrmacht and never discussed the war; Sebald later said he first learned about the Holocaust from seeing footage of Bergen-Belsen at school. He studied German literature in Freiburg and French-speaking Switzerland before moving to England in 1966, settling at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, where he would teach for the rest of his life, eventually holding the chair of European literature. He wrote academic studies in German for years before turning to the hybrid, uncategorizable prose that made his reputation. Vertigo (1990), The Emigrants (1992), and The Rings of Saturn (1995) blend memoir, fiction, history, and travelogue, punctuated by grainy black-and-white photographs whose relationship to the text is always suggestive, never certain. His prose moves in long, sinuous sentences that accumulate detail with the patience of grief. Austerlitz (2001), his final and most celebrated novel , the story of a man who discovers he was sent to England on a Kindertransport as a small child , was published to international acclaim just weeks before his death. On December 14, 2001, Sebald suffered a heart attack while driving near Norwich with his daughter Anna; his car crossed into oncoming traffic and struck a lorry. He was fifty-seven. The great subject of his work , how the past persists, uninvited, in the present , found its cruelest expression in a career cut short at its height.