Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%

Ruins, relics, memento mori

The artistry of the critical essay
by
July 2025, no. 477

Silent Catastrophes: Essays in Austrian literature by W.G. Sebald, translated from German by Jo Catling

Buy this book

ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.

Ruins, relics, memento mori

The artistry of the critical essay
by
July 2025, no. 477

In Too Soon Too Late: History in popular culture (1998), Meaghan Morris evokes Walter Benjamin’s ‘poor angel of history’, whose wings, ‘encrusted’ with scholarly citation, now beat ‘sluggishly in the service of a not very lively professionalism’. The critical discourse around W.G. Sebald (1944-2001) sometimes produces a similar feeling of fatigue, not least in its relationship to Benjamin, whose influence on Sebald’s melancholic oeuvre is well documented. ‘When I came across Benjamin, I stared at what he had written in amazement,’ Sebald said in a 1999 interview with Toby Green. Against this background, and the accompanying suspicion that the Benjamin-inspired version of academic melancholia might have already exhausted itself, the English-language publication of Sebald’s essays on Austrian literature feels like a timely reanimation of tropes – exile, homeland, revenant and ruinthat have assumed the immobility of an allegorical frieze around the stone foundation of the twentieth century’s horror.

Silent Catastrophes: Essays in Austrian literature

Silent Catastrophes: Essays in Austrian literature

by W.G. Sebald, translated from German by Jo Catling

Buy this book

ABR receives a commission on items purchased through this link. All ABR reviews are fully independent.

From the New Issue

You May Also Like

Leave a comment

If you are an ABR subscriber, you will need to sign in to post a comment.

If you have forgotten your sign in details, or if you receive an error message when trying to submit your comment, please email your comment (and the name of the article to which it relates) to ABR Comments. We will review your comment and, subject to approval, we will post it under your name.

Please note that all comments must be approved by ABR and comply with our Terms & Conditions.