Book review: The secret trauma that inspired W.G. Sebald
Lauded as one of the world’s greatest writers when he died aged 57 in a car crash 20 years ago, Sebald always had a troubled relationship with his father, a German soldier who fought in the second world war, the biography will show
His books are saturated with despair. Over and over again, his emotionally traumatised characters are caught – inescapably – in plots that doom them to a life of anguish. Often, they kill themselves. Now, the psychological wounds and suicidal thoughts that blighted WG Sebald’s own life and secretly inspired him to begin writing fiction are to be laid bare for the first time in a forthcoming biography.
Speak, Silence: In Search of WG Sebald; by Carole Angier
Reviewed by Donna Ferguson
“What lay behind his writing was this great trauma that he was expressing and suffering,” said Carole Angier, author of Speak, Silence: In Search of WG Sebald, the first major biography of the German author who wrote The Emigrants and Austerlitz. The book, which will be published later this month, sheds new light on why Sebald often chose to write about the Jewish and German tragedy of the Holocaust. Lauded as one of the world’s greatest writers when he died aged 57 in a car crash 20 years ago, Sebald always had a troubled relationship with his father, a German soldier who fought in the second world war, the biography will show.
He fought with his father – an “old-fashioned authoritarian man” – his whole life, but their relationship took a turn for the worse when, at the age of 17, Sebald was shown a film at school about concentration camps. It was the early 1960s, and at the time, Angier says, “the Holocaust was never spoken of in German families. That was Sebald’s first visual and visceral encounter with it.” The film traumatised him. “He saw his father as a Nazi, who had served without question in Hitler’s army….
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