Meine mir unbekannte herkunft : German identity and history in the works of W. G. Sebald, Botho Strauss and Peter Handke

Abstract

This thesis analyses the work of W. G. Sebald in comparison with two other major German writers of his generation, Botho Strauß and Peter Handke. It compares Sebald's novel Austerlitz with Strauß's novel Der junge Mann and Handke's novel Die Wiederholung, using the Bildungsroman tradition as a point of departure, and also analyses the crisis of masculinity in Sebald's earlier works, Nach der Natur, Die Ausgewanderten and Schwindel.Gefuhle. Using both genealogical and contemporaneous models of intertextuality, the thesis examines the interrelation of masculine identity and German history in the prose fiction of the three authors. It employs a set of methodologies that draw on theories of discourse analysis, psychoanalysis and intertextuality, tracing patterns of literary inheritance and generational memory. It demonstrates how Sebald's membership of the 1968 generation informs his political and poetic concerns, and also traces the influence of his contemporary Handke on his work. It shows that the three writers attempt to bridge the historical caesura of the Nazi period by bringing the traditions of German Bildimg and Romantic poetics into their poetics. It therefore shows how Sebald's work both resembles and is influenced by Strauß's and Handke's projects of aesthetic nostalgia. It also shows that Sebald is as indebted to a Romantic conception of subjectivity as much as are Handke and Strauß.