Winfried Sebald - Campo Santo

“To the Brothel by Way of Switzerland: On Kafka’s Travel Diaries” ( Via Schweiz ins Bordell. Zu den Reisetagebüchern Kafkas ). DieWeltwoche , 5 October 1995, p. 66.

“Dream Textures: A Brief Note on Nabokov” ( Traumtexturen. Kleine Anmerkung zu Nabokov ). Die Zeitschrift der Kultur 6 (1996), pp. 22–25.

“Kafka Goes to the Movies” ( Kafka im Kino ). Frankfurter Rundschau , 18 January 1997.

“ Scomber scombrus , or the Common Mackerel: On Pictures by Jan Peter Tripp” ( Scomber scombrus oder die gemeine Makrele. Zu Bildern von Jan Peter Tripp ). Neue Zürcher Zeitung , 23/24 (September 2000).

“The Mystery of the Red-Brown Skin: An Approach to Bruce Chatwin” ( Das Geheimnis des rotbraunen Fells. Annäherung an Bruce Chatwin ). Literaturen 11 (2000), pp. 72–75.

“ Moments musicaux ” ( Moments musicaux ). Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , 7 July 2001.

“An Attempt at Restitution” ( Ein Versuch der Restitution ). Stuttgarter Zeitung , 18 November 2001.

“Acceptance Speech to the Collegium of the German Academy” ( Antrittsrede vor dem Kollegium der Deutschen Akademie ). In: “Wie sie sich selber sehen” (How They See Themselves). Acceptance speeches to the Collegium of the German Academy by members. With an essay by Hans-Martin Gauger. Ed. Michael Assmann, Göttingen, 1999, pp. 445–46.

this page: Quint Buchholz, Die Befragung der Aussicht ( III ) (“Questioning the View”), 1989. Pen and colored ink drawing on paper.

this page: Jan Peter Tripp, Das ungeschriebene Gebot (“The Unwritten Commandment”), 1996. Acrylic on paper and wood, diameter 90 cm.

this page: Jan Peter Tripp, Endspiel (“Endgame”), 1999. Acrylic on canvas and wood, 50 × 50 cm.

W. G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany, in 1944. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland, and in Manchester. He taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, for thirty years, becoming professor of European literature in 1987, and from 1989 to 1994 was the first director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. His previous books— After Nature, The Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants, Vertigo , and Austerlitz —have won a number of international awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the L.A. Times Book Award, the Berlin Literature Prize, and the Literatur Nord Prize. He died in December 2001.

Anthea Bell was born in Suffolk and educated at Somerville College, Oxford. She has worked as a translator for many years, primarily from German and French, and her translations include works of nonfiction (biography, politics, social history, musicology, and art history), literary and popular fiction, and classic German works for young people. Anthea Bell has also served on the committee of the Translators Association and the jury panel of the Schlegel-Tieck German translation prize in the U.K., and has received a number of translation prizes and awards, including, in 2002, the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize (U.K.) and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Prize (U.S.) for W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz . She lives in Cambridge, England.

Published in English as On the Natural History of Destruction, and also including the essays on Jean Améry and Peter Weiss, which in the original German are part of the present volume published by Hanser.

Pasquale Paoli (1725–1807) was known as the “Father of the Corsican Nation.” He drew up the Corsican constitution.

Feuding Conflict and Banditry in Nineteenth-Century Corsica (Cambridge University, 1988).

Of the forests I have seen, Bavella is the loveliest.… Only, if the tourist wishes to see it in its glory, he must make haste!

My husband, who always used to come home with five or six partridges, got only one.

The Kasperl play is the German version of a Punch and Judy show.

A film by the director Gustav Ucicky, starring actors Paula Wessely, Peter Peterson, and Attila Hörbiger. The film was called Heimkehr (Homecoming).

The title of a 1931 novel filmed by the Austrian director Bernhard Wicki in 1961; the plot concerns the miraculous removal of a dance hall called the Garden of Eden from the city where it is giving offense.

Friedrich Ebert (1871–1925) was the first president of the Weimar Republic, and had become chairman of the Social Democratic Party in 1913. Gustav Noske (1868–1946) was also a prominent politician during the Weimar Republic period.

Kafka geht ins Kino, Hanns Zischler, 1996; trans. by Susan Gillespie as Kafka Goes to the Movies, Chicago, 2003.

The famous poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) grew up in Nörtingen near Stuttgart. He had an unhappy love affair with the wife of his employer, the banker J. F. Gontard, in whose house he was a tutor. Around 1802 he showed the first signs of psychological distrubance, and spent most of the rest of his life suffering from mental illness. Much of his poetry celebrates the ideals of ancient Greece.

E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Der Goldne Topf of 1814.