9 - The Kafkaesque in H. G. Adler's and W. G. Sebald's Literary Historiographies

Summary

H. G. Adler and W. G. Sebald as both writers and scholars share more than a few interests, as the introduction to this volume points out. Especially in their approaches to what might best be described as literary historiography, they follow a similar ethics of witnessing, memory, and poetics. Both also share an interest in Franz Kafka. As the following pages will try to demonstrate, an examination of the kafkaesque elements in Adler's and Sebald's works serves to elucidate each writer's concept and practice of literary historiography. W. G. Sebald's interest in Kafka, demonstrated both in his scholarly articles and as intertextual reference point in his literary work, has certainly been noted before; on the other hand, the role Kafka played for H. G. Adler has not been discussed as prominently. There is a quite noticeable imbalance in general in scholarly attention to these two equally brilliant writers—in order to alleviate this somewhat at least in this contribution, the main focus will rest on the lesser known of the authors and discuss kafkaesque notions of administration, language, frustration, and hope in both his historiographical and his literary work. The use both of Adler's work and Kafka's Das Schloß for his Austerlitz will then illustrate Sebald's mode of literary historiography as surveying the “landscape of death.”