W.G. Sebald died ten years ago. Across the Land and the Water, a selection of poems, will be published in November. ‘I Remember’ is one of only two poems in the book originally written in English.
The day in the year after the fall of the Soviet Empire
I shared a cabin on the ferry to the Hoek of Holland with
a lorry driver from Wolverhampton. He & twenty others were
taking super- annuated trucks to Russia but other than that
he had no idea where they were heading. The gaffer was in control &
anyway it was an adventure good money & all the driver said
smoking a Golden...
In a series of lectures on German responses to the wartime bombing of their country, delivered in Zurich in the autumn of 1997, W.G. Sebald asked why ‘the sense of unparalleled national...
Philip Larkin once wondered what it would be like for a lover to step inside his skull. ‘She’d be stopping her ears,’ he decided, ‘against the incessant recital/Intoned by...
Above all else we are concerned, in whatever form we let it take us, with memory. The idea of memory enables us to believe we can grasp the vanished past, historical or personal, and restructure...
Change and decay in all around we see. As one of W.G. Sebald’s epigraphs points out, the rings of Saturn are probably fragments of a moon, broken up by tidal effect when its orbit decayed....
This curious, mesmerising book, a hybrid of fiction and memoir which tells the life stories of four unhappy exiles, is the work of a German writer until now almost unknown in this country. It has...
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