Silent Catastrophe: Essays

By W.G. Sebald

"This handsomely fashioned volume of essays on Austrian literature was dismissed upon arrival as “academic” and “sterile” by some gatekeepers of W. G. Sebald’s posthumous reputation. I find it warts-and-all wonderful! Having lived with most of these texts in the original German for years, I am grateful to the editor and translator, Jo Catling, for her labor of love. Now I can draw my American friends’ attention to Sebald’s uneasy exploration of the “uncanny homeland,” which is also my birthplace and cultural home. Sebald, a German, who spent most of his life as an exile in England summons his relics from the Austrian Wunderkammer like veiled self-confessions. His “contemplation of disaster” is often saturated with a keen kindness for his subject’s “silent catastrophes.” The best texts—on Joseph Roth, Adalbert Stifter, or the schizophrenic poet Ernst Herbeck—offer poignant insights into literary liminalities and melancholic acts of writing in dark times, while still harboring a radical radiance, without which life would be a mistake. Never mind the grumblers: this is a magnificent book and I highly recommend it."
–Herbert Pföstl

Silent Catastrophes brings together the two books W.G. Sebald wrote on the Austrian writers who meant so much to him: The Description of Misfortune and Strange Homeland, published in Austria in 1985 and 1991.

As a German in self-chosen exile from his country of birth, Sebald found a particular affinity with these writers from a neighboring nation. The traumatic evolution of Austria from vast empire to diminutive Alpine republic, followed by its annexation by Nazi Germany, meant that concepts such as "home/land," "borderland" and "exile" occupy a prominent role in its literature, just as they would in Sebald’s own.

Through a series of remarkable close readings of texts by Bernhard, Stifter, Kafka, Handke, Roth, and more, Sebald charts both the pathologies which so often drove their work and the seismic historical forces which shaped them. This sequence of essays will be a revelation to Sebald’s English-language readers, tracing as they do so many of the themes which animate his own literary writings, to which these essays form a kind of prelude. This is an essential new edition from “a writer whose life and work has become a wonderful vindication of literary culture in all its subtle and entrancing complexity” (The Guardian).

2025; hardcover; 8.6" x 5.8"; 544 pages; ISBN: 9781400067725.