NATURAL HISTORY IN W. G. SEBALD’S WORKS

Abstract

The German writer W. G. Sebald (1944 - 2001) dedicated his literary work and essays to the theme of catastrophes of the modern period in the European context. On the Natural History and Destruction, for example, specifically addresses the impact of the aerial bombing on German cities in the last years of World War II and how the post-war writers failed to "record what they saw and preserve it for our memory". According to the author, either the eyewitness accounts neither journalistic information they were able to realize "a reality that, in its raw form, rejects the description." Aware of this deficiency, Sebald seeks to formulate a way out of this impasse through literature. As Walter Benjamin reader, Sebald discusses the relationship between the narrative arising from oral tradition and modern historiography. The contrast that Benjamin does in The Storyteller between the historian, who is obliged to explain in one way or another the episodes that read", and the chronicler, representing such episodes as "models of world history", prefigures which in Sebald we find the narrative model of the natural historian, one that brings together the qualities of the medieval chronicler, the protoscientist and the sage.