W.G. Sebald and the Politics of Melancholy

Sebald was born in rural Germany in 1944 but spent most of his adult life in Norwich, England, and he wrote these books as an immigrant in Thatcher’s Britain; it’s hard not to feel echoes of those disastrous years in the background of the book. As Jo Catling, editor and longtime Sebald scholar, lays out in her introduction, the essays in Silent Catastrophes trace the output of writers for whom Austria as a homeland became unheimlich: “not just ‘unhomely’ but both hostile and uncanny, strange in both senses.” For someone who may be feeling, in 2025, that their own homeland has become hostile and uncanny, there’s much here to help make sense of that feeling of eeriness, and a repeated attempt to chart some kind of path forward. One easy way in is by focusing on those works that are already well known in America, including Franz Kafka’s The Castle and Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power, both of which Sebald discusses here at length. In both works, one written well before the Third Reich an ... Read full article.