Silent Catastrophe: Essays

By W.G. Sebald "This handsomely fashioned volume of essays on Austrian literature was dismissed upon arrival as “academic” and “sterile” by some gatekeepers of W. G. Sebald’s posthumous reputation. I find it warts-and-all wonderful! Having lived with most of these texts in the original German for years, I am grateful to the editor and translator, Jo Catling, for her labor of love. Now I can draw my American friends’ attention to Sebald’s uneasy exploration of the “uncanny homeland,” which is also my birthplace and cultural home. Sebald, a German, who spent most of his life as an exile in England summons his relics from the Austrian Wunderkammer like veiled self-confessions. His “contemplation of disaster” is often saturated with a keen kindness for his subject’s “silent catastrophes.” The best texts—on Joseph Roth, Adalbert Stifter, or the schizophrenic poet Ernst Herbeck—offer poignant insights into literary liminalities and melancholic acts of writing in dark times, while still harbo