It is often said of our culture, especially of our literary culture, that it is fragmented, even balkanized. That no figure enjoys both critical acclaim and commercial success; is taken seriously by moralists and aesthetes alike; is formally complex without being perceived as snobbishly difficult; is popularly beloved without being tarnished by association with the necessary evils of marketing campaigns and the prize economy; whose personal conduct and political views have not distracted from or complicated an appreciation of the work itself. If one had to nominate a recent exception to this general rule, however, one could do worse than W. G. Sebald, the author of four books that are regarded in the uk and us as modern classics: Vertigo (1990), The Emigrants (1992), The Rings of Saturn (1995), and Austerlitz (2001). What light can the first full English-language biography, Carole Angier’s Speak, Silence, shed on this anomaly?

Winfried Georg Sebald—or Max as he later preferred to be known—was born in the small Bavarian-Alpine village of Wertach in Allgäu on 18 May 1944. His father, Georg, had grown up in rural poverty and left school at the age of thirteen to learn the locksmith’s trade. He spent the Weimar years of hyperinflation doing odd jobs, until he was admitted, in 1929, to the Reichswehr, slowly climbing the ranks despite his lowly social origins. In his 1936 wedding photo, Georg wears the uniform of a junior officer in Hitler’s Wehrmacht, with the swastika-bearing Reichsadler on his cap. During the War he served as a driver, a technical inspector, and then as head of the transport unit of a Panzer Division. His return to his family in 1947, after three years in a French prisoner-of-war camp, ended young Winfried’s idyll in the company of his mother Rosa, elder sister Gertrud and beloved maternal grandfather Josef Egelhofer. Within a few years Georg had moved the family to an ugly social-housing block in nearby Sonthofen and, after a short stint in the local police, joined, for the third and final time, the reconstituted Bonn Republic version of the German Army.

‘Conventional, Catholic, anti-communist—the kind of semi-working-class, petit-bourgeois background typical of those who supported the fascist regime’, was how Sebald would go on to describe the milieu of provincial Sonthofen. Angier suggests that Georg’s loyalty to the Hitler regime was primarily a matter of careerism. It appears that he never participated in any atrocities—though he may have witnessed the aftermath of the ss massacre at Tulle, in central France—but as an nco in the Wehrmacht, he was unquestionably complicit. Yet Sebald’s expression of his lifelong hatred of Georg primarily in terms of the latter’s Nazism, which is often taken as a central biographical datum, was largely an ex post facto rationalization of the instinctive antipathy of independent-minded sons for rigid, authoritarian fathers the world over. Georg was far from innocent, but he was not even the worst case among the townspeople of Sonthofen, some of whom had been enthusiastic Nazis. Despite the stifling atmosphere in the village and at home, which became especially acute after the death of his grandfather in 1956, Sebald managed to form a small circle of like-minded friends drawn from the local Gymnasium and supplemented by two free-spirited exchange students from France, Marie and Martine. With members of ‘the Clique’, as they styled themselves, he was able to explore his literary leanings—an early article attacking German theatres for refusing to stage Brecht was published in Der Wecker, the school newspaper he edited—and put the first cracks in his parents’ generation’s ‘conspiracy of silence’ about the Third Reich.

This pattern repeated itself at the University of Freiburg, where Sebald enrolled in the Philology faculty to study Germanistik, Anglistik and Philosophy in 1963. Repelled by the social conservatism of life at Freiburg, he fell in with a group of older students at the international Studentheim on Maximilianstrasse, which the administration had, against its better judgement, afforded a degree of autonomy. In his professors’ outdated syllabi and their emphasis on werkimmanente Kritik, a Nazi-era cousin of New Criticism, which held that the meaning of a work of literature should be sought exclusively in its formal properties and not in the social conditions of its production, he saw ‘premeditated blindness’ aimed at sealing off German literature and literary scholarship from any questions about its own complicity with fascism and its antecedents. Characteristically, the young Sebald also rejected the leading alternative—Lukács’s dialectical materialism—in favour of the approach taken by the Frankfurt School, above all, by Adorno, whose polemical style, leftist melancholy, mandarin modernism and attention to seemingly insignificant details would remain touchstones for Sebald throughout his academic and literary career. Insofar as his rebellion against his German upbringing and his father’s fascist past was political, its politics were not to be located in the familiar coordinates of far-left agitation, countercultural communalism or even in the post-nationalist Europhilia some of his readers would later project onto him, but took place privately, as Adorno’s did, in belles-lettres.

Likewise, Sebald’s decision to leave Germany—first for the University of Fribourg in Switzerland in 1965, then for doctoral study at the University of Manchester, with his bride Ute, the following year—may have amounted to a de facto ‘emigration’ when he took a job in the School of European Studies at the recently founded University of East Anglia, but the moves were driven more by personal and practical concerns than ones of politics or principle. From the first he was ambivalent about living in England: he left Manchester for a year to work at a private school in St Gallen; he took a leave of absence from East Anglia to teach at the Goethe Institute in Munich; and as late as 1985, he was still toying with the idea of returning to Germany for work. Although he spent the entirety of his adult life employed by educational institutions, he was not temperamentally well suited to the rigours of scholarship. His Master’s thesis and doctoral dissertation on, respectively, the Wilhelmine playwright Carl Sternheim and the novelist Alfred Döblin—two converts from Judaism—displayed a wilful indifference to the relevant secondary literature and academic protocols of citation, instead including subjective judgements, speculative psycho-sexual diagnoses of his subjects on the basis of their biographies, made-up references, misquotations, spelling errors, and even a footnote from a fake letter attributed to Adorno. (‘A careful examiner would have failed it’, Sebald’s uea friend and colleague Richard Sheppard would write of the thesis on Sternheim; instead, in recognition of the detectable brilliance beneath its author’s disregard for academic norms, Sebald passed with distinction.)

Still, apart from regular threats to the School of European Studies—from funding cuts and declining enrolment rates to Thatcher’s ‘Stalinization’ of the English university system, starting with the dreaded Teaching Quality Assessments—the uea wound up being an excellent home for Sebald. Many of the subjects of his teaching—Kafka, Hofmannsthal, Canetti, Weiss and Kluge, for example—would make their way into his non-academic books. Despite his course load, an increasing number of committee assignments and a founding role in the uea’s Centre for Literary Translation, supplemental funding from the Arts Council and the eu provided him enough time to write a Habilitationsschrift, two unproduced television scripts (on Kant and Wittgenstein), a book of poetry, two collections’ worth of literary essays, and Vertigo, The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn, whose recognition—combined with the cunning agenting of Andrew Wylie—earned him a six-figure advance from Hamish Hamilton for Austerlitz and a transfer to uea’s most prestigious department: its Creative Writing programme.

When Sebald died, probably of a heart attack, while driving with his daughter Anna to Norwich on 14 December 2001, he was fifty-seven and at the height of his fame. The four books on which his reputation rests were warmly received in Germany, but to this day he remains less popular in his native country than in the English-language world, where, thanks largely to the ministrations of Susan Sontag, his reception, starting with The Emigrants, the first translated of his books, has bordered on the rapturous. Each bears the impress of Sebald’s decades with one foot firmly planted in academia and one foot out the door, which has endeared them to reading publics with a historically unprecedented number of advanced degrees. Generically, they are unclassifiable: they combine fiction and memoir; biography and history; travel writing and nature writing; literary, art and architectural criticism. His friend, the poet and translator Michael Hamburger, who makes an appearance in The Rings of Saturn, called them ‘essayistic semi-fictions’, and the description will probably not be improved upon. Aside from this, Sebald’s writing is known for four things: its thematic preoccupation with the after-effects of the Holocaust and the Second World War; the interspersion of photographs, documents and reproductions of paintings and other visual media throughout the texts; the floridity, antiquarianism and melancholy tone of its prose; and, finally, its so-called ‘metaphysics of coincidence’, the way an apparently associative series of random details and incidents makes it difficult to tell how one sentence follows from the next, only for the whole to reveal itself, in the end, as having operated according to a complex, lattice-like order from the beginning.