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W.G. Sebald's private library, which is held in part in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, contains a copy of Walter Benjamin's Illuminationen. This essay seeks to establish a theoretical framework for Sebald's narrative technique by investigating his annotations in the closing essay of the book, "The Narrator". With the help of his underlinings and marginalia, Sebald's own narrative structures can be interpreted as a means of depicting "natural history", as an aesthetic response to a philosophical concept. Two principles can be derived from this perspective: the strategy of "interlocking layers" (Einschachteln), and the strategy of montage. It is the dialectic between these two principles that drives Sebald's prose style. The tension in his work between fact and fiction derives ultimately from an uneasy relationship between his artfully constructed prose-style on the one hand and its quasi-documentary realism on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The numerous intertextual references between Vertigo and the work of Kafka are part of a process of poetic self-confirmation; for Sebald the rejection of the traditional gestus of realistic narration is fundamental. The "Kafkaisation" of Sebald's biography could be understood as an attempt to integrate a version of his life with events that are very distant to it into a particular order of literary formation. Kafka's work presents Sebald with building blocks that allow him to create in his own work a dense texture of motifs and symbols in which one picture, time and again, becomes the focus of the narration: the heightened, often overstimulated perception of the homeless, migrant poet. But Kafka's story of "Gracchus the Hunter" is also being transformed and its narrative continued - albeit on the basis of the co-ordinates prescribed by Kafka. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sebald's literary-critical works are framed by two studies in which Sebald, whose technique of literary description and narration is characterised by great sensibility and intertextual refinement, attacked two authors with polemical fury, namely Carl Sternheim and Alfred Andersch, who he 'finished off' as blind producers of ideology and as non-writers. The two authors dealt with by Sebald in his studies - Carl Sternheim. Critic and Victim of the Wilhelminian Era (1969) and The Author Alfred Andersch, (1993) - are at the centre of this essay that tries to give answers to two questions: Which concept of literature does Sebald argue here, ex negativo? And: Is there a possible inner connection between Sebald's own literary texts and his literary polemics? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looking for his individual history the protagonist of Sebald's Austerlitz passes through various areas of cultures and memories. This gives the narrative the structure of a topo-logic in the literal meaning of the word. The narrator's and protagonist's act of remembering is evoked by historical monuments, oral and written narrations and visual presentation. The visual segments of the text in particular trigger an interactive reaction in the reader. Thus, Sebald shows the close correspondence between psychological processes and the transformation of immediate perception by photography and film. The crucial point is that Sebald's text presents violence not only as historical fact but also as an effect of different media. The only escape from this order of things can be found in the production of imaginary worlds: Sebald's text confronts the order of suppression with the strategies of poetic subversion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]