ABSTRACT
The work of German expatriate writer W. G. Sebald is not much studied by postcolonial theorists or critics.3 But the issues his work raises concerning the literary mediation of the hidden endings of empire, including the ending of the Nazi empire, are highly pertinent. Sebald’s work expresses a preoccupation with memory, nostalgia, and exile grounded in a deep knowledge of the multiple histories, including colonial histories, that continue to haunt us in the present. And by ‘us’ here I mean not only the fi rst readers of Sebald, that is to say Europeans, but also all those touched in one way or another by the grip of empire, and its various ends.
