W. G. Sebald as a critic of Austrian literature

Abstract

Rejecting the conservative study of German literature that he encountered as a student, Sebald found inspiration in Walter Benjamin and the Frankfurt School. He re-reads Austrian literature as an expression not of conservative attachment to a home, but of displacement from any home. He also explores the instabilities of the bourgeois age as revealed in fiction by Sealsfield, Stifter, Schnitzler and Hofmannsthal, and places their narratives within a wider history of colonial exploitation and ecological destruction. He then argues that the dislocation of language by schizophrenics like the poet Ernst Herbeck discloses a primitive substratum prior to the estrangement from nature and subjection to the administration of modernity. Reflections, especially Kafka's, on the death of the individual, humanity and ultimately the universe itself, lead Sebald to empathize with the messianic images found in Benjamin and other Austrian writers.

Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History and the Work of Ethical Remembrance in W.G. Sebald

“…But progress has also given us rational efficiency applied by administrative states for unspeakable ends, including the Holocaust. 3 For Benjamin progress is thus actually a violent storm, one that creates debris that is invariably left behind in its cumulative story. Progress is an ideology producing inconvenient victims and wreckages while simultaneously excluding them from its optimistic metanarrative.…”