Silent Catastrophes: Essays

by W.G. Sebald

From the renowned author of Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn comes the first English translation of his extraordinary essays on the Austrian writers who shaped his life and work.

Silent Catastrophes brings together the two books W.G. Sebald wrote on the Austrian writers who meant so much to The Description of Misfortune and Strange Homeland, published in Austria in 1985 and 1991.

As a German in self-chosen exile from his country of birth, Sebald found a particular affinity with these writers from a neighboring nation. The traumatic evolution of Austria from vast empire to diminutive Alpine republic, followed by its annexation by Germany, meant that concepts such as "home/land," "borderland" and "exile" occupy a prominent role in its literature, just as they would in Sebald’s own.

Through a series of remarkable close readings of texts by Bernhard, Stifter, Kafka, Handke, Roth, and more, Sebald charts both the pathologies which so often drove their work and the seismic historical forces which shaped them. This sequence of essays will be a revelation to Sebald’s English-language readers, tracing as they do so many of the themes which animate his own literary writings, to which these essays form a kind of prelude. This is an essential new edition from “a writer whose life and work has become a wonderful vindication of literary culture in all its subtle and entrancing complexity” (The Guardian).

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, German Literature, Germany, Literary Criticism, Literature, Criticism

544 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald was a German writer and academic. His works are largely concerned with the themes of memory, loss of memory, and identity (both personal and collective) and decay (of civilizations, traditions or physical objects). They are, in particular, attempts to reconcile himself with, and deal in literary terms with, the trauma of the Second World War and its effect on the German people.

At the time of his death at the age of only 57, he was being cited by many literary critics as one of the greatest living authors, and was tipped as a possible future recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Reviews

[Luís · Rating 3 out of 5]

For Sebald, it is evident that the idea of ​​homeland («Heimat,» an untranslatable word that means home, the place where one person comes from and grew up) only gains its true meaning when it is lost; when, in that case, it becomes a concept abstract and ambivalent. Jean Améry, an Austrian, disowned Austria when he saw the Nazi "solicitude with which the country opened itself to invasion." Someone whose "moral intransigence" demanded that he become "certified stateless" finds Sebald a definition that satisfies him: homeland, "the more you have, the less you need." In other words, «what 'homeland' might mean for someone who is only a negative ex, in exile, is learned.» It is exiled, more specifically, the marks left by these exiles (geographic or psychological), which are treated in these essays. Fascinating are the analyses of the ghetto narratives produced by German-speaking Jewish writers (such as Leopold Kompert, Karl Emil Franzos, Sacher-Masoch, or Franz Kafka). The devastating dismantling of Hermann Broch's flaws and mistakes in his Bergroman, without failing to question "the great renown that Germanist waterers channelled towards him," and the brilliant intellectual, but also human, portraits of Peter Altenberg and Joseph Roth.

[Hendrik · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Je mehr von der Heimat die Rede ist, desto weniger gibt es sie."

Nach ›Die Beschreibung des Unglücks‹ ein weiterer lesenswerter Essayband von W. G. Sebald zur österreichischen Literatur.

Inhalt:

– Ansichten aus der Neuen Welt – Über Charles Sealsfield
– Westwärts – Ostwärts: Aporien deutschsprachiger Ghettogeschichten
– Peter Altenberg – Le Paysan de Vienne
– Das Gesetz der Schande – Macht, Messianismus und Exil in Kafkas Schloß
– Ein Kaddisch für Österreich – Über Joseph Roth
– Una montagna bruna – Zum Bergroman Hermann Brochs
– Verlorenes Land – Jean Améry und Österreich
– In einer wildfremden Gegend – Zu Gerhard Roths Romanwerk Landläufiger Tod
– Jenseits der Grenze – Peter Handkes Erzählung Die Wiederholung

[Paul Fulcher · Rating 2 out of 5]

As Sebald writes, ‘the high incidence of ill-starred lives in the history of Austrian literature is, to say the least, somewhat uncanny.'

Silent Catastrophes: Essays on Literature, 1972-1989 is Jo Catling's translations of pieces by the great WG Sebald, primarily drawn from two collections published in his lifetime: Die Beschreibung des Unglücks. Zur österreichischen Literatur von Stifter bis Handke (1985), whose title she translates as 'The Description of Misfortune - On Austrian Literature from Stifter to Handke' and Unheimliche Heimat: Essays zur österreichischen Literatur (1991), rendered by Catling as 'Strange Homeland - Essays on Austrian Literature.

Catling explains in her very helpful introduction:

In his Introduction to Unheimliche Heimat, Sebald rationalizes the differences between the two essay volumes thus: 'Whereas Die Beschreibung des Unglücks was more preoccupied with the psychological factors which govern writing, Unheimliche Heimat is concerned more with the social determinants of the literary world view, although naturally the one can never be completely separated from the other'.

Catling makes a case that, although these are essentially academic pieces, the boundaries between the essays and the 'prose fiction' for which Sebald later became justly famous are more porous than might at first appear, with Sebald's biographical approach to literary analysis finding it's echo in 'prose fiction' works such as Vertigo (particularly the sections on Stendhal and Kafka) and, although more fictional, The Emigrants.

That said, however, there are important stylistic differences which make it harder to recommend this to a fan of Sebald's novels. The academic essays assume more pre-knowledge from the reader, and typically focus on less well-known figures. as least outside of Austrian literature studies, and are also more clearly in dialogue (or rather monologue) with other critical takes on the same works. The same was true of Nach der Natur (1988), translated by Michael Hamburger as After Nature, but that felt more in dialogue with Sebald's own work.

Hard also not to notice that, some references to Ingeborg Bachmann aside, and those in a piece that focuses primarily on Jean Améry, WG Sebald's literary canon seems to consist entirely of men.

2.5 stars, rounded to 2, for reading experience. Any new translation of Sebald's writing is cause for celebration, but not a book I'd particularly recommend.

[Richard Wagner · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lesenswert aber auch phasenweise akademisch-sperrig

[Eric Boles · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘with which the mute spirit stands as if stunned and alone in the wild gigantic mill of the universe’