A 2001 interview with The Guardian
|
W. G. Sebald |
Maya Jaggi reports on her meeting with writer and academic W. G. Sebald in September 2001: 'Under lowering skies in East Anglia, days after the Manhattan apocalypse, Max Sebald is troubled by Hitler's fantasy of setting New York ablaze, as the blitz did London. The spectre of the past haunts Sebald, a German born under the Third Reich, though he was a babe-in-arms on VE Day. "I was born in May 1944 in a place the war didn't get to," he says of the Bavarian village of Wertach im Algäu. "Then you find out it was the same month when Kafka's sister was deported to Auschwitz. It's bizarre; you're pushed in a pram through the flowering meadows, and a few hundred miles to the east these horrendous things are happening. It's the chronological contiguity that makes you think it is something to do with you."' [
Read More]
Also at A Piece of Monologue: