Atrocity and Agency: W.G. Sebald’s Traumatic Memory in the Light of Hannah Arendt’s Politics of Tragedy

Relatively late in his career W. G. Sebald began attracting wide attention for his semi-autobiographical books written in a dense and digressive style and incorporating black-and-white photographs and postcard images. These images intimate some of the more profound costs of nineteenth-and twentieth-century European civilization. Evoking the aftermath of wars, genocides, and environmental devastation in such books as Vertigo , The Rings of Saturn , and The Emigrants , Sebald has attracted a growing body of scholarly criticism that tends increasingly to examine his literary engagement with traces of past suffering under the rubric of trauma.