On Tuesday, 26 January, at 8.04 pm the Saarländischer Rundfunk (SR) will broadcast a 2.5 hrs programme on the writer W.G. Sebald. On the eve of Holocaust Memorial Day, the programme will discuss, amongst other topics, how Sebald’s literary writings dealt with the atrocities of the Holocaust. Infos on the programme can be found on the Sebald blog VERTIGO.
Among the experts interviewed is our colleague Uwe Schütte, whose PhD was supervised by Sebald. He will argue, however, that it is a mis-conception to regard Sebald as an author of Holocaust fiction. Sebald, in his view, actually questioned the uniqueness of the Holocaust, which he considered a part of an overarching destructive tendency he called the “natural history of destruction”.
You can listen to the programme via the SR Lifestream here.