The Rings of Sarajevo: W.G. Sebald and the Bosnian War

While W.G. Sebald’s prose fictions are routinely celebrated as a singular expression of post-Holocaust literature in the late twentieth century, Sebald’s relationship with contemporary crisis remains relatively understudied. Sebald’s travelogue chronicling a solitary walk along Suffolk’s shoreline, The Rings of Saturn (1995), can be historicized in relation to the Bosnian War (1992–1995), which Sebald once credited as being central to the genesis of his book. Yet, despite weaving into his narrative a number of violent episodes from Yugoslavia’s past, especially during the two world wars, Sebald makes no explicit reference to the conflict occurring in his own present. The forms that this reticence takes in Sebald’s travelogue draw a more ambivalent picture of Sebald’s status as a chronicler of history, aligning him closer to the intellectual climate of his age.