An uncanny journey: W. G. Sebald and the literature of protest

Abstract

In an interview, Sebald distanced himself from the 1960s protest movements in West Germany, and his writings contain no evident reference to them. But more recent research indicates possible, albeit paradoxical or ambiguous links between Sebald’s life and works and the culture of the protest movements, and this essay will begin by synthesizing the results. In the light of these observations, a revealing comparison can be made between Sebald’s Schwindel. Gefühle. / Vertigo, especially its last section, ‘Il ritorno in patria’, and Bernward Vesper’s ‘novel-essay’ Die Reise, an emblematic text of the protest generation, which was written in 1969–70 and first published in 1977, since there are striking similarities between them, probably because both may be related to the conventions of ‘Väterliteratur’ (‘father literature’), one of the protest movement’s characteristic literary forms. This discussion will suggest that key issues which haunted the late 1960s remained unresolved at the start of the 1990s. It will thus permit a brief re-examination of protest literature and the painful positions it involved, which seem, on my argument, to have been culturally repressed, only to return, in an uncanny form, in Sebald’s work.