W.G. Sebald and the Politics of Melancholy

Sebald was born in rural Germany in 1944 but spent most of his adult life in Norwich, England, and he wrote these books as an immigrant in Thatcher’s Britain; it’s hard not to feel echoes of those disastrous years in the background of the book. As Jo Catling, editor and longtime Sebald scholar, lays out in her introduction, the essays in Silent Catastrophes trace the output of writers for whom Austria as a homeland became unheimlich: “not just ‘unhomely’ but both hostile and uncanny, strange in both senses.” For someone who may be feeling, in 2025, that their own homeland has become hostile and uncanny, there’s much here to help make sense of that feeling of eeriness, and a repeated attempt to chart some kind of path forward.

One easy way in is by focusing on those works that are already well known in America, including Franz Kafka’s The Castle and Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power, both of which Sebald discusses here at length. In both works, one written well before the Third Reich and one written in its wake, Sebald traces similar threads of how authoritarian power works: Born of a hatred of chaos and disorder, authoritarian power tries to exert violence over the land in its quest to enforce a sterile order. As he notes in his gloss of Canetti’s work, “Longing for total order has no need of life.” In fact, such a longing for order “is a murderous one. The Reich as a desert, and the dwelling place as a mausoleum in which the creator of order can rest for eternity, in a pose of his own choosing and in absolute safety—these are, as it turns out, the ultimate models to which the paranoid imagination aspires.” Pathological in its hatred of difference, strangeness, and messiness, such violence valorizes Egyptian pyramids and mausoleums, bloodless Roman columns, and the antiseptic concrete megastructures that Albert Speer conjured for his Führer.

Such power, as Sebald identifies in Kafka’s The Castle, is “anything but creative; it is completely sterile and its sole aim seems pointless self-perpetuation.” The despots in Kafka’s works, who endlessly bleed life from the oppressed, fundamentally have no stated rationale for committing such violence, beyond their own vampiric need to feed continually on the living. Kafka, Sebald notes, recognized fundamentally that power is “parasitic rather than powerful.” We can, in other words, stop asking what billionaires want, since by now they don’t want anything but power itself; for all of their actions and violence, they have paradoxically lost all agency, incapable of doing other than simply existing for the sole purpose of accumulating more.