ABSTRACT
Schwindel. Gefühle. is possibly the queerest of Sebald’s texts. The disorientation of the masculine German subject in ‘Ambros Adelwarth’, and the hopes contained in it for a redemption from the catastrophic path of German-Jewish history, are found everywhere in the first three sections of Schwindel. Gefühle. This is a text that is queer on the level of subject matter, as the Sebaldian narrator and the shade of Franz Kafka haunt each other in scenarios infused with homoerotic longing. It is also queer on the level of textual coherence. Perhaps more than any other of Sebald’s texts, it dissolves the direct lines of heterosexual narrative, in particular the inherited patriarchal structures of the Bildungsroman, the Odyssey, and the detective novel, to create an associative, rhizomatic text informed by a queer textual erotics. ‘Beyle oder das merckwürdige Factum der Liebe’ [A Madness Most Discreet] bids farewell to masculine, Enlightenment structures of the self and structures of narrative, while ‘All’estero’ and ‘Dr. K.s Badereise nach Riva’ are associative textual structures that combine queer desire, messianic longing, and paranoia. This chapter explores both the queer sexuality and the radically queer textuality of these narratives.
