麻豆社

WG Sebald created extraordinary fictions with Austerlitz, The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn, that hovered between the real and the imagined.

He died in 2001 aged 57. Will Self pieces together the writer's life and words.

With images and simple, yet fantastically powerful writing he told stories of loss, exile and loneliness that spoke to his own personal life. A German living in England, writing in his native tongue, haunted by history and existing in two worlds. That of his fatherland which had exterminated its Jewish populations and made a compact with memory and truth. And an England that had firebombed German cities during the war. The second silence in post war German writing and thought.

In works like Austerlitz, where the burden of memory and forgetting unhinges its central character, a former Kindertransport refugee, the past silts up before breaking through in unexpected ways. The Emigrants delicately portrays the lives in exile and return of German Jewish survivors whereas The Rings of Saturn evokes landscape and the past in unsettling yet subtle ways.

Will Self has long been drawn to the multi-layered worlds of WG Sebald's fiction. Here, in the company of Sebald biographer Carole Angier and former friend, poet Stephen Watts, Self moves through the Sebaldian landscape whilst exploring the archive devoted to one of the truly great writers of the late 20th Century.

Producer: Mark Burman

First broadcast on 麻豆社 Radio 4 in February 2022.