Silent Catastrophes brings together two collections of essays, Die Beschreibung des Unglücks (The Description of Misfortune) and Unheimliche Heimat (Strange Homeland), first published in German in 1985 and 1991 respectively. It is a blessing that Sebald’s critical writing, as Jo Catling’s introduction to the book points out, tends more towards an anglophone conception of critique than to the style of academic prose associated with what Sebald, in a rare moment of pique, calls the ‘dutiful dogsbodies of Germanistik’. Each of the two component volumes has a distinct focus suggestive of the natural-historical framework captured, albeit elusively, in Benjamin’s image of the angel blown from paradise into a future that realises itself only as the accumulation of history’s debris. Nature as an idyllic homeland turns out to be a melancholic projection of historical forces, while those forces in turn succumb to the natural transience that precipitates their ruin. As Benjamin put it in The Arcades Project, first published in German in 1982: ‘No historical category without its natural substance, no natural category without its historical filtration.’ Although The Description of Misfortune foregrounds ‘the psychological factors which govern writing’, and Strange Homeland foregrounds ‘the social determinants of the literary worldview’, in both cases it is the misplaced idealism of bourgeois life that runs up against the ‘unhappiness or misfortune [Unglück] of the writing subject’, for whom the promise of history turns out to be a ‘loss-making business’ bound up with the contemplation of disaster and the alienation of modernity.

As an exploration of how the minutiae of literary production can transport us into the disquiet of this worldview, Sebald’s essays are both subtle and audacious. The opening essay on the nineteenth-century novelist Adalbert Stifter establishes their guiding preoccupations. The initial suggestion that the ‘conflicts underlying the very deliberate order of Stifter’s prose’ are predominantly psychological in character cannot conceal the fact that their provenance is also bound up with the pervasive sense of ruin afflicting modern life. We are at a ‘point in history where the notion of a universal meaning is beginning to atrophy’, where the ‘bourgeois doctrine of salvation could no longer be sustained by the progressive unfolding of the Weltgeist [World Spirit]’, and where the ‘dissolution of the metaphysical world order is reflected in the shattering materialism’ pervading an oeuvre that Sebald reads for its ability to salvage, through the force of observation, something of what has been lost. In Sebald’s discussion, Stifter’s prose presents a material inventory of mute, everyday objects and idyllic landscapes that seem to exist outside time. It is a sensibility that ‘painlessly accommodates itself with that which it dominates’, since ‘descriptions of nature – including literary ones – only came about with the commercial exploitation of the nature world’. The sense of an environment, or a way of being, that has become a textual copy of itself extends, crucially, to Stifter’s subversive relationship to bourgeois sexual morality. The ‘morbid’ aspect of his love stories and the related traces of fetishism that attach to his female characters suggest both the artifice and the fragility of the idyll.

This gravitation to the estrangement nesting within platitudinous conceptions of nature, intimacy, futurity, and the social order informs Sebald’s explorations of the decadent eroticism in Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Story (1926), the pornographic subcurrents in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s novel fragment Andreas (1932), the necrotic character of bureaucratic power in Franz Kafka’s The Castle (1926), the descent into madness in Peter Handke’s The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick (1970), the unrelenting pessimism of Thomas Bernhard’s novelistic visions of a rotting provincialism, and the decay of language itself in the poetry of Ernst Herbeck.

The achievement of these essays hinges on their ability to move seamlessly between a psychological register in which, for example, the ideal of love succumbs to the commodification of sex – with fashion, fetishism, and the corpse as its signifiers – and a broader horizon in which nature becomes legible predominantly by virtue of its objectification within capitalist modernity, which is to say as estranged from itself. Sebald models a critical intensity worthy of the thinkers he cites (not just Benjamin, but Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari), while preserving an acute sense of the essay as an art form in its own right: supple, curious, digressive, and, above all, committed to the writers he discusses.

The ethos of estrangement finds its most topical, or at least accessible, articulation in the second part of the book, ‘Strange Homeland’, which plays out against the background of a country that was once at the centre of the Habsburg Empire, was reduced to the status of an ‘Alpine republic’ after World War I, and ended up as an annexed province of Nazi Germany. From the travel and adventure writing of the itinerant Charles Sealsfield in the early nineteenth century to Peter Altenberg’s nomadic Viennese existence in the early twentieth century, to the expatriation of Joseph Roth and the Auschwitz survivor Jean Améry, to postwar itinerants like Peter Handke and Gerhard Roth, Sebald evokes a sensibility in which notions of belonging are constantly being displaced into patterns of spatial disorientation linked to internal migration and exile. While Sebald’s affiliation with the Jewish-Germanophone imagination is evident throughout, it is here that he engages most directly with Jewish modernity and the possibility of a Jewish Heimatliteratur. The process of assimilation, of migration from shtetl to city, he suggests, produced a form of disidentification with bourgeois life much more radical than what one otherwise finds in the Viennese culture of the fin de siècle. Nature, now in the sense of Heimat, emerges as an object of nostalgic fixation and aesthetic obsession only at the point at which it is no longer available, except as an expression of its impossibility.

That Sebald’s singular contribution to the field of contemporary literature emerges from his investment in literary history is abundantly clear. The interest in excavating hitherto occluded dimensions of experience that we find in works like The Emigrants (1992), The Rings of Saturn (1995), and Austerlitz (2001) is fully evident in the movement between literary biography and textual encryption that typifies these essays. Like Benjamin, Sebald believes that the ‘true storyteller owes his allegiances not to history but to natural history’, which is to say to what Benjamin, in The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), called ‘the facies hippocratica of history’: ruins, relics, memento mori. In the process he offers a terrifically illuminating sense of how sexual transgression intersects with critical theory’s allegorical gaze, and how the idiosyncratic materiality of the literary text can make that intersection apparent. And he does this in prose that is remarkably free of jargon and disciplinary obscurity. Still, it would be misleading to claim that there is something here for everyone. The essays extend well beyond the limited range of translated writers with whom anglophone readers are likely to be familiar. That Sebald’s canon consists exclusively of male authors also points to the particularity of his concerns and the limits of his framework. But for anyone already interested in his work or invested in the artistry of the critical essay, Silent Catastrophes will be an immensely generative experience.