Episode 32: Carole Angier on W.G. Sebald

Although he did experience some fanfare in his lifetime, German writer, academic, and novelist W.G. Sebald—Max to his friends and colleagues—died 20 years ago in a car crash near his adoptive home in Norwich, England. He was only 58. His postmodern novels—Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz—were written in quick succession in a period of less than 10 years, and they were all published in English translations in less than five years, making him one of Germany’s biggest authors, almost overnight. Before his death, Sebald had taught in the British university system for decades, mainly at the University of East Anglia, where he helped found the literary translation department. He really did not begin writing in his signature style—a mix of travelogue, memoir, historical fiction with embedded pictures and ephemera—until middle age, however. Walter Benjamin famously opined that any great writer creates their own genre; Sebald accomplished this with just a brief collection of books. Through his unique, poetic prose style of writing, his books grab hold and immerse readers in a world of memory and loss like no other novelist. Trauma runs through his work and his characters seem so real because, like most fictional creations—at least in part—they are based on real people. Sebald’s distinctive style got him into trouble, both when he was alive and certainly posthumously. Some readers have taken issue with his re-purposing of Jewish folks’ true-life stories. He has been accused, in some cases, of exploiting these stories for personal gain through novelization. When I first began to read his work, shortly after his death in 2001, I interpreted his work to be an homage to the Jewish lives he chronicled, written by a German who grew up in the shadow, silence, and shame of the horrors of WWII. Sebald’s father was a military man—a Nazi officer during the war and a member of the re-constituted German army in the post-war years. Sebald grew up in the beatific surroundings of Bavaria in Germany and had a deep hatred for the Nazi regime and his own family’s complicity. The fate of the Jews—and other minorities targeted by the Nazi war machine—is a mournful thread that Sebald tears at throughout all of his novels. He also wrote a nonfiction study of the bombings of German cities, entitled On the Natural History of Destruction. Enter biographer Carole Angier, whose previous books include studies of novelist Jean Rhys and Italian physicist and writer Primo Levi. Angier, who grew up in Canada before returning to the UK, is of Viennese descent. She is also Jewish and roughly the same age Sebald would have been had he lived. It took her seven years to finish Speak, Silence (Bloomsbury, 2021). The title, of course, a nod to Nabokov’s famous memoir, Speak, Memory, one of Sebald’s favorite books. Angier and I caught up recently to discuss her 600-plus-page doorstopper of a book. One of the reasons I wanted to talk with her about it—apart from my longtime love of Sebald—was to ask for her thoughts on the controversy his work still seems to generate, even 20 years after his death. A great deal of the reviews of Speak, Silence, in the States at least, were hyper-critical of Sebald playing fast and loose with some facts in his fiction. But all great fiction writers pluck characteristics and facts to shape their fictional worlds and, so, while Sebald’s use of real photographs and ephemera in his work for visual effect made his narrative style offensive to some, it also made it more potent for others. In this interview, Angier speaks to this subject, and many more.