SPEAK, SILENCE

Searching biography of the German writer, who wrestled with the horrors of the Holocaust.

Working without authorization of the Sebald estate but without its opposition either, biographer Angier (Jean Rhys, Primo Levi) delivers a careful portrait of Winfried Georg “Max” Sebald (1944-2001) replete with astute literary analysis. Its title echoing a favorite book of Sebald’s, Nabokov’s Speak, Memory, Angier’s life centers on her subject’s learning of the Holocaust as a young student and of his father’s willing service in the Wehrmacht. The moment was critical. “He had always been notably intelligent,” writes the author, “but now he began to pull away from his classmates. He became a wide, unorthodox reader, and more and more critical of accepted opinions.” When he was 21, he moved to England, where he taught at the University of East Anglia, where he wrote such significant works as The Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz, and On the Natural History of Destruction. Even though he was an expatriate, Angier remarks, Sebald insisted on teaching courses in German so that he would not lose connection with the language of a people from whom he was deeply alienated. As Angier notes, Sebald’s work resists easy classification: One publisher listed his titles as fiction, travel, and history all at once. Fire is a central image in his work, to which Angier gives sensitive attention, finding linkages between his life and writing and those of Friedrich Hölderlin, a poet of two centuries earlier. The author considers Austerlitz to be Sebald’s “masterpiece…the peak of his imaginative identification with the victims of the Holocaust, and of his psychological investigation of trauma.” She also places his death—not of the automobile accident he caused, but of an aneurysm that killed him behind the wheel—in the context of his certainty that he was destined to die early, having assumed so much of the weight of guilt and sorrow.

Every serious reader of Sebald’s will find much of value here.