Tracking Max: Winfried Georg Maximilian “Max” Sebald (1944–2001)

This Story, a Documented Fragment, begins in a village in a remote corner of southern Germany and concludes in Norfolk on the main road leading from Norwich to London.

The writer W. G. Sebald was born in the Bavarian village of Wertach “at the back of a valley” (Sebald 2002, 86) in the mountains of the Allgäu in Southern Germany to Rosa, née Engelhofer, and Georg Sebald (McCulloh 2003, xv). In Sebald's own words, “Wertach was a village of about a thousand inhabitants, in a valley covered in snow for five months a year. It was a silent place” (Jaggi 2001b). He was born on 18 May 1944, Ascension Day, the feast that commemorates the completion of the Jesus pilgrimage from the appearance of the archangel Gabriel to Mary, with the message from God that she will conceive and bear a son who will be the Son of God — The Messiah, the Savior of the World, The Anointed One (the “Christos”). The ironic resonance of that ubiquitous Sebaldian date, which appears in his last text without any gloss like an eloquently silent annunciation (Sebald 2001b, 415), reflects the inauguration of the Christian narrative by a “messenger” (Jaggi 2001a) — a moment handed down in textual tradition to mark the birth and also the death of God's Messiah, both mortal and immortal, a metaphysical disclosure promising redemption from death, a principal preoccupation of Sebald's oeuvre.