W. G. Sebald - Life

Life

Sebald was born in Wertach, Bavaria, one of three children of Rosa and Georg Sebald. From 1948 to 1963, he lived in Sonthofen. His father joined the Reichswehr in 1929 and remained in the Wehrmacht under the Nazis. His father remained a detached figure, a prisoner of war until 1947; a grandfather was the most important male presence in his early years. Sebald was shown images of the Holocaust while at school in Oberstdorf and recalled that no one knew how to explain what they had just seen. The Holocaust and post-war Germany loom large in his work.

Sebald studied German literature at the University of Fribourg, where he received a degree in 1965. He was a research student at the University of Manchester from 1966 to 1969. He returned to St. Gallen in Switzerland for a year hoping to work as a teacher but could not settle. In 1970 he became a lecturer at the University of East Anglia (UEA). Sebald married his Austrian-born wife, Ute, in 1967. In 1987, he was appointed to a chair of European literature at UEA. In 1989 he became the founding director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. He lived at Wymondham and Poringland while at UEA.

Sebald died in a car crash near Norwich in December 2001. The coroner's report, released some six months later, stated that Sebald had suffered an aneurysm and had died of this condition before his car swerved across the road and collided with an on-coming lorry. He was driving with his daughter Anna, who survived the crash. He is buried in St. Andrew's churchyard in Framingham Earl, close to where he lived.

In 2011, Grant Gee made the documentary Patience (After Sebald) about the author's life in Suffolk.