ABSTRACT
nHow far [...] must one go back to find the beginning?', asks W. G. Sebald in the third part of his long narrative poem Nach der Natur (After Nature), and then suggests an answer himself: Wie weit überhaupt muß man zurück, um den Anfang zu finden? Vielleicht bis zu jenem Morgen des 9. Januar 1905, an dem der Großvater und die Großmutter bei klirrender Kälte in einer offenen Kutsche von Kloster Lechfeld nach Obermeitingen fuhren, sich trauen zu lassen. Die Großmutter im schwarzen taftenen Kleid mit einem Papierblumenstrauß, der Großvater in der Uniform, den messingverzierten Helm auf dem Kopf. [How far, in any case, must one go back to find the beginning? Perhaps to that morning of January 9 1905, on which Grandfather and Grandmother in ringing cold drove in an open landau from Kloster Lechfeld to Obermeitingen, to be married. 17Grandmother in a black taffeta dress with a bunch of paper flowers, Grandfather in his uniform, the brass-embellished helmet on his head.] 2 Sebald is speaking here of his maternal grandparents, Josef Egelhofer and Theresia Harzenetter, who indeed were married on that date and shortly afterwards established themselves in Wertach im Allgäu, a small mountain village where Egelhofer had recently found work as the regional constable. The marriage would produce four children, including the youngest, Rosa Genoveva ('Rosi'), Sebald's mother. It was here that she met Georg Sebald, a young soldier in the Wehrmacht on a skiing holiday with his division, and here that they married in 1936. And although she followed her husband when he was stationed in Bamberg during the war, it was to the relative safety of her parents' home in Wertach that she returned in late summer 1943, where she gave birth to a son, Winfried Georg, on 18 May 1944. Sebald spent the first eight years of his life in this remote setting on the northern edge of the Alps in what was, or so it seems, a happy, even blissful childhood.
