SILENT CATASTROPHES

The first English-language publication of two collections of essays by the noted German writer.

Published in German in 1985 and 1991, these scholarly essays were written while Sebald was pursuing a university career, before the publication of such unique blends of fact and fiction as Austerlitz and Vertigo. The pieces show their academic roots: Ranging from relatively well-known writers (Arthur Schnitzler and Franz Kafka) to those likely to be unfamiliar to English speakers (Adalbert Stifter and Charles Sealsfield), they are dense critical exegeses peppered with phrases such as “In this paper I will try to determine the nature of [Thomas] Bernhard’s political, moral, and artistic credo,” or “Names such as [Josef] Weinheber and [Karl Heinrich] Waggerl will suffice to demonstrate the idea of Heimat which persisted well into the 1960s.” Heimat, generally translated as homeland but also connoting a sense of belonging, is an important concept in these essays, or rather—unsurprisingly for Sebald, who spent most of his life as an expatriate—the loss of homeland and/or a feeling of being estranged from it. This notion comes across most powerfully in “A Kaddish for Austria,” on Joseph Roth, the Austrian Jewish writer who saw the Holocaust coming; and in “Westwards—Eastwards,” about the ambivalent feelings of Jews who left their shtetls for the cities of the Hapsburg Empire. Other themes Sebald discerns as running through Austrian literature from the late 18th century through the 20th include the destruction of nature, the inadequacy of science, psychiatry, and rationalism to completely understand human behavior, and, as translator Catling deftly puts it in the introduction, “the crises of consciousness and identity, particularly bourgeois identity.” In addition to the previously mentioned essays, one on Schnitzler and two on Kafka are of general interest, but most are likely too specialized for the average reader.

Best suited to academics and those with a serious interest in Austrian literature.