A life-long academic, the writer W.G. Sebald kept a critical distance from his discipline of German studies. His scholarly work tested and shaped the poetological premises that determine his literary work. Literary techniques such as intertextuality and bricolage first become the subject of Sebald‘s critical essays before they are applied in his literary works. Themes and motifs decisive for Sebald’s prose texts are also first dealt with in his essays, for example his poetics of coincidence and correlation. Over time, Sebald’s scholarly prose emancipates itself more and more from the conventions of German Studies, developing into a form of essay writing that hardly differs from his narrative prose and thus becomes part of his literary work.