From acclaimed critic novelist and academic W. G. Sebald author of Austerlitz and The Rings
of Saturn a collection of essay on the Austrian writers who inspired himSilent Catastrophes
brings together for the first time in English the two books W.G. Sebald wrote on the Austrian
writers who meant so much to him: The Description of Misfortune and Strange Homeland published
in Austria in 1985 and 1991. As a German in self-chosen exile from his country of birth Sebald
found a particular affinity with these writers from a neighbouring nation. The traumatic
evolution of Austria from vast empire to diminutive Alpine republic followed by its annexation
by Nazi Germany meant that concepts such as 'home land' 'borderland' and 'exile' occupy a
prominent role in its literature just as they would in Sebald's own. Through a series of
remarkable close readings of texts by Bernhard Stifter Kafka Handke Roth and more Sebald
charts both the pathologies which so often drove their work and the seismic historical forces
which shaped them. This sequence of essays will be a revelation to Sebald's English-language
readers tracing as they do so many of the themes which animate his own literary writings to
which these essays form a kind of prelude. Unhappiness and misfortune are at the heart of
Silent Catastrophes but as Sebald writes the description of misfortune contains within it the
possibility of its overcoming and melancholy - the contemplation of disaster in progress - is
itself a form of resistance.
