SOURCE: Rosenfeld, Sidney. Review of Unheimliche Heimat, by W. G. Sebald. World Literature Today 66, no. 1 (winter 1992): 127-28.

In the following review, Rosenfeld commends Sebald's insightful analysis in Unheimliche Heimat.

The subtitle of W. G. Sebald's book Unheimliche Heimat posits a distinct identity for Austrian—as opposed to German—literature, and in the nine essays collected here Sebald finds a variety of instructive approaches to this long-debated and ultimately unresolvable question. Certainly, writers such as Jean Améry, Hermann Broch, Peter Handke, Franz Kafka, and Joseph Roth have found their place within the greater corpus of German-language writing. But whether Sebald is dealing in his separate interpretations with them, or with Karl Postl, Leopold Kompert, Karl Emil Franzos, Peter Altenberg, or Gerhard Roth, his focus on the specifically Austrian social determinants of their alienation from their “unheimliche Heimat” yields fruitful results. That seven of the ten writers he treats...