Sebald’s literary life began in Manchester. The short period he spent there (1966-70) left a lasting imprint on his writing, which this essay will explore through the three texts most directly inspired by the city: his 1967 poem ‘Bleston: A Mancunian Cantical’, the long prose poem Nach der Natur, and the fourth section of The Emigrants (‘Max Ferber’). These works reveal the aspects of Manchester most significant to Sebald: his encounters with an ‘industrial wasteland’, the Mancunian Jewish community, and Michel Butor’s 1956 novel, set in a fictionalized version of Manchester, L’Emploi du temps.

This essay discusses the role of East Anglia in the biography and literary works of Sebald. Sebald lived from 1970 until his premature death in 2001 in the eastern part of England, whose charm as a remote stretch of land has left its mark in his writings in many ways. As early as 1974, Sebald published a travelogue in the travel section of the newspaper Die Zeit, describing ‘A Leisurely Tour through Norfolk and Suffolk’. This journalistic piece anticipated the portrayal of East Anglia in his later narrative texts. Similarly, East Anglia repeatedly became a theme in Sebald’s poetry with motifs returning in the later prose. The essay focuses on After Nature and The Rings of Saturn, but also includes Austerlitz and the Corsica Project. To conclude, it examines the extent to which Sebald’s account can be understood as a faithful description of East Anglia, or rather, as the essay argues, as a poetic portrait of the area that constituted Sebald’s second “Heimat”.