SOURCE: Bere, Carol. “The Book of Memory: W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants and Austerlitz.” Literary Review 46, no. 1 (fall 2002): 184-92.

In the following essay, Bere explores Sebald's effort to recover the Holocaust's legacy of individual suffering, displacement, and repressed memories in The Emigrants and Austerlitz.

“And so they are ever returning to us, the dead.”

—The Emigrants

The tragic death of W. G. Sebald in a traffic accident on December 14, 2001 in Norwich, England, occurred at a time in his relatively brief career when he had just begun to receive major international recognition. Sadly, it is an irony that Sebald, always attuned to the inexplicable or random nature of experience, might well have understood. By most standards, his success was something of an anomaly. Sebald did not begin writing until his mid-forties, wrote only in his native German, and his reputation rests, for the most part, on the four books...