Responsible Ruins: W. G. Sebald and the Responsibility of the German Writer

Ward, Simon

Abstract

THIS OBSERVATION from Andreas Huyssen comes in the context of a generally positive consideration of the work of W. G. Sebald. In the same article, Huyssen expresses admiration for this work, “which gains some of its power precisely because it remains outside of such reductive alternatives.” The reductive alternatives (autonomous aestheticism or social engagement) are the terms in which the responsibility of the German writer is couched in the so-called Literaturstreit of the 1990s. In both his essays and his literary writings, Sebald's position appears on the surface to have little to do with those terms. Yet our reading of how Sebald configures the writer's responsibility has to take into account the fact that Huyssen's admiration is tempered by his disquiet that in his later writings, and particularly in his lectures on Luftkrieg und Literatur, Sebald “had yielded to the temptation […] to interpret the most recent historical developments simply as natural history.”2 This is, in Huyssen's eyes, irresponsible, since “the discourse of the natural history of destruction remains too closely tied to metaphysics and to the apocalyptic philosophy of history so prominent in the German tradition.”3 Huyssen's concern is shared by other critics, such as Peter Morgan, who have found that Sebald fails to take “responsible ownership” of history. For Morgan, despite the works' “intertextual complexity and European urbanity […], Sebald's ‘linke Melancholie’ […] is the manifestation of extreme disappointment with the outcomes of quotidian post-enlightenment rationality in its social, cultural and political aspects. He is a traumatised …

Citation

Ward, S. (2006). Responsible Ruins: W. G. Sebald and the Responsibility of the German Writer. Forum for Modern Language Studies, 42(2), 183-199. https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cql007

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Apr 1, 2006
• Deposit Date: Jan 13, 2014
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 12, 2015
• Journal: Forum for Modern Language Studies
• Print ISSN: 0015-8518
• Electronic ISSN: 1471-6860
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 42
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 183-199
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cql007
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1445664