'I don't think one can write from a compromised moral position," remarked the German writer W.G. Sebald, who died on December 14th aged 57. That scruple put him at odds with much of contemporary writing. Scorning the Holocaust "industry", and what he referred to as an official culture of mourning and remembering, he disliked feel-good sentimental portrayals of terrible events - such as Thomas Keneally's Schindler's List. He claimed no false intimacy with the dead.
He wanted to find a literary form responsive to the waves and echoes of human tragedy which spread out, across generations and nations, yet which began in his childhood. In the ruined cities and towns of post-war Germany the causes of the destruction of an entire society were never discussed. His father, who came home a stranger to his three-year-old-son in 1947 after being released from a POW camp in France, said nothing about the war. Silence and forgetting were conditions of his early life.
He doubted whether those that had never experienced Theresienstadt or Auschwitz could simply describe what occurred there. That would have been presumptuous, an appropriation of others' sufferings. Like a Medusa's head, he felt that the attempts to look directly at the horror would turn a writer into stone, or sentimentality.
It was necessary, he found, to approach this subject obliquely, and to invent a new literary form, partly a hybrid novel, part memoir and part travelogue, often involving the experiences of one "W.G. Sebald", a German writer long settled in Britain. He was reluctant to call his books "novels", because he had little interest in the way contemporary writers seemed to find all meaning in personal relationships, and out of a comic but heartfelt disdain for the "grinding noises" which heavily plotted novels demanded. "As he rose from the table, frowning . . ." was precisely the type of clumsy machinery, moving a character from here to there, which he mocked.
In four books published in translations since 1996 (The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo and Austerlitz), W.G. Sebald was compared to Borges, Calvino, Thomas Bernhard and Nabokov. The narrative voice in his books was an inventive one, richly delineated. Reviewers grasped for the right comparison. Was it a gloomy Proustian. Or was it Jamesian?
The persona or mask in his prose fictions, subtle and persuasive, was admirably serviceable for a writer devoted to an intense privacy. Paradoxically, for this most private of persons, he delighted in using the "real" world as springboards for meditations upon writing, history and the inner life.
Readers sometimes wrote to him, pointing out mistakes of one kind or another (the clock at an Italian railway station was in the wrong location), but the deliberate "mistakes" were, for writerly purposes, adjustments to the historical truth. But only small things, and never the big issues were to be changed.
W.G. Sebald, who was a devoted photographer, used images in his novels. Sometimes they were found objects, postcards, or something from an old newspaper. The photographs appear without caption and acquired meaning from the surrounding text.
"Max" Sebald - he preferred the short form of one of his middle names, Maximilian, to his first name - grew up in a Bavarian village, one of four children of Rosa and Georg Sebald. His father, from a glass-making family, struggled in the disastrous period after the first World War, and joined the German army in 1929. He remained in the army after the Nazis came to power, and the family prospered under the Third Reich. The Sebalds came from an intensely Catholic, anti-communist rural world, wedded to local traditions and hostile to foreigners.
While studying at the grammar school at Obersdorf, he and his class were shown newsreel films from Belsen. He recalled that there was no discussion afterwards, and no one knew what to think about what they had just seen, and how to explain it. He studied German literature at Freiburg University, taking his degree in 1965.
It was while at Freiburg that the Auschwitz trials took place at Frankfurt. The discovery that the defendants were ordinary people, like those he knew and had grown up with, came as a disturbing revelation. The witnesses for the prosecution, Jews who had survived Auschwitz and had come to Frankfurt from Brooklyn and Sydney to speak in a German courtroom, were disturbing in another way.
In 1988 he published Nach Der Nature: Einelementargedicth, a meditation in unrhymed verse on the destruction of nature, to be published as After Nature in 2002. It was followed in 1990 by Schwindel Gefuhle (Vertigo) and Die Ausgewanderten: Vier Lange Erzahlungen in 1992 (the Emigrants), Die Ringe Der Saturn: Eine Englische Walfahrt in 1995 (the Ring of Saturn, without the subtitle "An English Pilgrimage").
He is survived by wife Ute and daughter, Anna.
Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald: born 1944; died, December 2001