WG Sebald’s Last Interview

Onetti_tripp1 I recently stumbled across this, the last interview of WG Sebald before his tragic death in a car accident in 2001.

“My parents came from working-class, small-peasant, farm-labourer backgrounds, and had made the grade during the fascist years; my father came out of the army as a captain. For most of those years, I didn’t know what class we belonged to. Then the German “economic miracle” unfolded, so the family rose again; my father occupied a “proper” place in lower-middle-class society.

It was that social stratum where the so-called conspiracy of silence was at its most present. Until I was 16 or 17, I had heard practically nothing about the history that preceded 1945. Only when we were 17 were we confronted with a documentary film of the opening of the Belsen camp. There it was, and we somehow had to get our minds around it – which of course we didn’t. It was in the afternoon, with a football match afterwards. So it took years to find out what had happened. In the mid-60s, I could not conceive that these events had happened only a few years back.”