ABSTRACT
I first got to know W. G. Sebald, who has since come to be regarded as a literary voice sui generis, not as an author but as a university teacher and mentor. When I arrived at the University of East Anglia in autumn 1994 to study English and Comparative Literature, and later to write a doctoral thesis under his supervision, he did not yet exist on my map of contemporary literature. Thus I did not, in the beginning, see him as the mournful, melancholy traveller who roams through many of his prose texts and who is so familiar a figure from the critical reception of his works (particularly in the German press). It was only later that I noticed the discrepancy between the two images of Sebald and the roles that were assigned to each of them: the pragmatic and (in the best sense) inscru tably humorous university teacher Max, and the author Sebald, who became identified professionally by the initials W. G. and was soon to be internationally renowned.
