A Place in the Country

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Since then I have slowly learned to grasp how everything is connected across space and time, the life of the Prussian writer Kleist with that of a Swiss author who claims to have worked as a clerk in a brewery in Thun, the echo of a pistol shot across the Wannsee with the view from a window of the Herisau asylum, Walser’s long walks with my own travels, dates of birth with dates of death, happiness with misfortune, natural history and the history of our industries, that of Heimat with that of exile. On all these paths Walser has been my constant companion. I only need to look up for a moment in my daily work to see him standing somewhere a little apart, the unmistakable figure of the solitary walker just pausing to take in the surroundings.

What W. G. Sebald writes here, relating his first encounter with Robert Walser’s short text on the dramatist Heinrich von Kleist’s trip to Switzerland, “Kleist in Thun,” not only sets out in nuce his sense of affinity with Walser — indeed with all of the writers he discusses in this volume, to whom he wishes, as he claims in the Foreword, to “pay my respects … before, perhaps, it may be too late”—but also seems to encapsulate the themes and preoccupations of this collection as a whole. That these themes and preoccupations overlap with those of Sebald’s own creative works of “prose fiction” (as he terms them)—Vertigo, The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz—is surely no coincidence, in view of the fact that the first three of these works already enjoyed considerable success at the time he composed the main part of these essays in 1997.

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