Monatshefte

As international engagement with W. G. Sebald's exceptionally influential body of work continues to grow, Öhlschlaeger and Niehaus have produced what is likely to become a standard handbook for students and researchers working in the area of Sebald studies in German, amplifying such earlier publications as Saturn's Moons: W.G. Sebald—A Handbook (Catling and Hibbet, 2011) [ed. note: see review in Monatshefte 104.4, Winter 2012, 685–88]. The volume is thorough and comprehensive, its 325 pages densely packed with 53 authoritative entries covering a vast range of concerns inherent to Sebald's own complex work, methodology, biography, and reception. Significantly, while the entries, in keeping with the Metzler format, for the most part are no longer than five pages, in the main they go far beyond a descriptive or encyclopedic approach, instead offering critical perspectives both on Sebald's work and on the existing scholarship. Such an approach is, indeed, in keeping with Sebald's own, as Torsten Hoffmann points out in one of the most interesting interventions in the volume, "Polemik." Sebald himself reserved some of his most scathing polemic for works where he sensed "the methods of academic processing rather than an independent analysis" (Sebald 1973, 98, cited on 156). The high quality of independent analysis here, from established experts in Sebald studies, is one of the hallmarks of the volume. While the essays contain a valuable quantity of solid information about such essential matters to the student and scholar as publication history, intertexts, and literary debates, the majority also make significant, individual but interlinked interventions of their own.

In their introduction, the editors explain that, although they have kept to the standard Metzler handbook format, they have shied away from the usual detailed biographical section, due to an ethical refusal to intrude into the author's private life. Thus the handbook's biographical section focusses only on Sebald's literary and academic careers, making of "W. G. Sebald" a textual and intertextual construct not unlike the characters in his own fiction. The next section, "Schriften," contains essays summarizing and interpreting each of his literary texts individually, as well as his poetry, his academic publications, and his interviews. It is particularly welcome that a section here is devoted to Sebald's lyric poetry, which, as Sven Meyer acknowledges, is often seen as of secondary importance to the prose works. The inclusion of Sebald's Nachlass as a literary text is also unexpected and welcome; this essay is, appropriately, written by Ulrich von Bülow and Heike Gfrereis, curators of the Marbach exhibition Wandernde Schatten. W.G. Sebalds Unterwelt. Torsten Hoffmann's [End Page 168] short pieces on Sebald as interviewer and as interviewee are also insightful, drawing together common threads across the dozens of interviews given by Sebald to show their strategies of self-positioning and unreliability that mark their status as literary rather than factual.

The sections on materiality and mediality, and on themes and discourses, are perhaps the most provocative and intriguing, thanks to the unexpected and interdisciplinary choice of topics included among the more expected ones such as "Holocaust" or "Bricolage". Hoffmann's essay on "Polemik," mentioned above, taxonomises a hitherto undertheorised genre of writing across Sebald's oeuvre, one grounded in ressentiment against the German establishment and assimilated Jewish authors. J. J. Long structures his essay on travel exceptionally clearly, breaking Sebald's travels down into their various modes such as antitourism, migration, and memory. While Silke Horstkotte's piece on photography does a thorough job of surveying various approaches to a crucial and complex aspect of Sebald's work, Ulrich von Bülow's piece on Sebald's working method deploys a close focus on his fragmentary and abandoned Corsica project to deduce Sebald's methods of research, writing, and recycling. Thus, piecing their way through a number of subtly different approaches to Sebald's main methods and contexts, from the magisterial to the critical to the archival, readers become drawn into the labyrinthine process of Sebald criticism itself.

The section on "References" confines itself to essays on six of Sebald's main intertextual touchstones, Kafka, Walser, Nabokov, Benjamin, Améry, and Tripp; at the same time, every essay in the volume necessarily also deals with aspects of Sebald's intertextuality, including Richard T. Gray's systematic study of intertextuality and networking in his work. The final section, on reception, contains survey pieces on Sebald's reception in Germany, the English-speaking world, France, and the internet, as well as a note from Anthea Bell about translation. It is here that the volume could possibly have been more far-reaching in its explorations, given Sebald's increasing importance in scholarly fields such as postcolonial studies, ecocriticism, and animal studies as well as for artists in media from painting to autofiction to nature writing. A whole generation of German and international authors can now be considered to be writing "after Sebald," and it would have been exciting to read more sustained analysis on Sebald's intertextual links with writers as diverse as Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk or Enrique Vila-Matas, and on his reception beyond the global North.

A great strength of this volume is the roster of distinguished Sebald scholars that contribute, from the editors themselves to such defining figures in the field as Sven Meyer, Uwe Schütte, or Jan Ceuppens. Some essays develop the authors' existing work on Sebald, as in von Bülow's exploration of the Corsica project, or as in Michael Niehaus's critical revisiting of Schwindel. Gefühle as an inherently heterogeneous, transitional text, while others, such as Meyer, cast new light on the publication history of Sebald's Campo Santo, which he put together at a time when Sebald's archival material was not yet available. While the volume is a rigorous introduction to the key texts and themes of Sebald's work, it also contains genuinely new and provocative material for all readers of Sebald and of Sebald criticism. [End Page 169]