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EN
The text originates from: Searching for Sebald: Photography After W.G. Sebald (ed. Lise Patt, Christel Dillbohner, Institute of Cultural Inquiry, Los Angeles 2007).
EN
This text analyses works by W. G. Sebald from the viewpoint of the paradigm of “musical historiosophy”. Contrary to heretofore interpretations, the author created a constellation of meanings associated with the dialectic of sound and subjecting to it the dimensions of spatial and visual presence. From this transition he derived the conception of the catastrophe both as an apocalypse of the language and a permanent disintegration of the world. Due to this shift of the analytical dominant the author constructed the conceit of “prosthetic memory”, i.e. one that cannot manage without a certain mnemotechnical surplus rendering possible a redistribution of traces of the past and history.
EN
The text of an essay about W. G. Sebald (broadcast on 9 December 2011; BBC3).
EN
A record of a conversation about the oeuvre of W. G. Sebald held with Małgorzata Łukasiewicz, an expert on Sebald’s works and their translator into Polish.
EN
Max’s enemy everywhere is the totalising overview. His art is designed to correct or subvert this kind of cognitive aberration which can be so misleading and dangerous. His narratives of East Anglia offer melancholy fragments with a wide historical and cultural range of possibilities. I begin this essay with an example of my own from a masterpiece of German culture in order to frame my account suggestively in relation to Max’s own lifelong struggle with the land that bore him and which he felt impelled to reject, while acknowledging its colossal contribution to human knowledge and experience. Like Walter Benjamin Max values most the kind of quincunx-links that arise intuitively and spontaneously (as in the work of Sir Thomas Browne, the great Norwich writer and thinker) between domains of experience that cannot be connected by a totalising overview. The vivid images that his works embody are similarly at odds with the ever-sharper digitised perceptions that we now experience on a daily basis but which lack any kind of depth of field and so have no experienced life in them. My only quarrel with Max’s way of working is that in his pursuit of his “illuminations” he is inclined to set aside what may already have been thought and said by other writers. The effect of this is a foreshortening that may be a kind of distortion. A historian once said to me that despite his fascination with history Max was not a historian. For me this does not constitute a weakness, but I think it is a fact.
EN
Works by W. G. Sebald, brimming with citations and references and examining the relation between fact and fiction, have been the topic of multiple interpretations. The popularity of his oeuvre among researchers is connected with the ease of its translation into the contemporary academic discourse. One should ask, therefore, whether today novels and essays by this German man of letters could comprise a topical proposal for the critics, considering that they had been already studied in so many ways by academics. The presented text attempts to deliberate on this problem via an analysis of the relation between Sebald’s works and the reflections of Walter Benjamin or, to put it differently, by presenting the manner in which W. G. Sebald revived and tested ideas conceived by the author of On the Concept of History.
EN
A presentation of an exhibition and accompanying catalogue: Waterlog. Journeys Around An Exhibition (ed. Steven Bode, Jeremy Millar, Nina Ernst, Film and Video Umbrella, London 2007).
EN
Seven poems and portraits from a book written jointly by W. G. Sebald and Jan Peter Tripp: Unerzählt (Carl Hanser Verlag, München 2003).
EN
This attempted analysis focuses on the motif of empathy in the oeuvre of W. G. Sebald from the historical perspective and within the context of relations between the text and the image in Austerlitz. The argument is based on a fragment in which the titular protagonist, seeking an image of his mother, comes across a Nazi propaganda film made in the Theresienstadt ghetto at the end of the war. Apparently, the path towards an empathetic encounter with one’s past and the traumatic history of Europe leads across montage, in which observed images become rendered as problems and salvaged.
EN
This text comes from: Searching for Sebald: Photography After W. G. Sebald (ed. Lise Patt, Christel Dillbohner, Institute of Cultural Inquiry, Los Angeles 2007).
EN
This text comes from the catalogue: Waterlog. Journeys Around An Exhibition (ed. Steven Bode, Jeremy Millar, Nina Ernst, Film and Video Umbrella, London 2007).
EN
A commemoration and remembrance firework in honour of the extraordinary life and oeuvre of W. G. Sebald was ignited by the artist Jeremy Millar alongside the A146 near Framingham Pigot, on the spot where Sebald died in a car accident on 14 December 2001.
EN
The text comes from the catalogue: Waterlog. Journeys Around An Exhibition (ed. Steven Bode, Jeremy Millar, Nina Ernst, Film and Video Umbrella, London 2007).
EN
An interview with W. G. Sebald from The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W. G. Sebald (ed. Lynn Sharon Schwartz, New York 2010).
EN
A presentation of the exhibition Pierścienie Saturna (The Rings of Saturn) held in the former Ballestrem Palace in Wrocław as part of the 15. Media Art Biennale 2013: Pioneering Values. May – June 2013.
EN
The Emigrants is a book more closely integrated as a narrative than The Rings of Saturn but still not a novel in any obvious way. I have called it “a novel in a kaleidoscope”, since it keeps getting shaken up by the presiding “fokusnik” (Russian for “conjurer”, a word Nabokov loved) and its focal point shifts accordingly, on both sides of the grave. An abyss keeps opening exactly where the narrator is standing, just as it does in many of Nabokov’s fictions. A shameless appropriation of photographs, some private as if really from the family album, some from the public domain, supports the narratives that seem to be emerging to clarify family histories but actually cast a further veil of darkness and death. Nabokov asks what the “real life” of his character (Sebastian Knight) is, and the answer is the page in front of your nose. Kantor wonders at the disappearance of his father but sees no point in setting out in his pursuit. Photographs simply confirm the deadly encroachment of time on anything we may think significant. We have all emigrated from a world we do not remember, as Nabokov reminds us in Speak, Memory. We are now on our way to another world from which no-one has ever returned. Our fate is a lonely one, like that of the principal protagonists of The Emigrants. Death shadows it, as it shadows Hersch Seweryn, or Henry Selwyn, in his Gothic house and garden not altogether unlike Max’s. The reported accident that took the life of Henry’s alpine guide friend emphasises what so many holocaust survivors felt: that they had no right to be living at all when so many had been murdered or had their lives utterly ruined. Paul Bereyter is an extraordinary embodiment of the falsifications of Nazi history and racial theory. Max gives him enough sympathetic attention to make us feel the tragic loss of a man of goodwill and culture. His suicidal depression might have been averted. But how? The Ambros Adelwarth story is perhaps over-complex but it is a bold attempt to grasp the nettle of American Jews and their astonishing creativity. To follow them consistently through their zig-zag progression over the “dream-bright” map of America is a challenge. To cap it, Max brings himself “home” to Norfolk, whence he travels to revisit the now successful artist friend from his Manchester days, Ferber.
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