Silent Catastrophes: Essays in Austrian Literature

Ritchie Robertson at Literary Review:

Why Austrian literature? Sebald was not Austrian, though his south German birthplace, Wertach, was within walking distance of the Austrian border. Austrian literature appealed to his feeling for marginality. Its major writers, from Franz Grillparzer via Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Kafka to Peter Handke, do not fit easily into the pattern of German literature, stretching from Goethe via Thomas Mann to Günter Grass. They excel, in Sebald’s view, in exploring psychological states ranging from obsession and melancholia to schizophrenic breakdown. One notably empathetic essay concerns an actual schizophrenic, Ernst Herbeck (1920–91), who was confined for fifty years in a mental hospital near Klosterneuburg, north of Vienna, where Sebald visited him. Herbeck wrote a large number of poems with enigmatic lines, such as ‘the raven leads the pious on’. Although these poems yield nothing to academic exegesis, they not only linger in the memory but may also, Sebald suggests, reveal the primitive processes through which poetic language arises.

Herbeck’s poems are at the furthest distance from the modern, bureaucratic, administered world which Sebald, like the Frankfurt School, wanted to resist. He traces its development in 19th-century bourgeois literature, in which Enlightenment reason is converted into prescriptive rationality, and emotional and erotic impulses are subjected to the discipline of bourgeois marriage.

more here.

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