This essay aims to shed light on Sebald the polemicist and provocateur, draw attention to a central component of his literary criticism that is often ignored from an anglophone perspective. The essay first deals with the two academic monographs in which Sebald violently attacks the German-Jewish writers Alfred Döblin and Carl Sternheim, disparaging them as trailblazers for the Nazis. The consistently negative academic reviews Sebald writes from 1970 onwards as a junior academic are discussed as his personal way of participating in the political upheavals of the 1960s. After the rather quiet decade of the 1980s, Sebald’s polemical impetus flares up again, parallel to his emergence as a literary author. Jurek Becker, another German-Jewish author (and Holocaust survivor) once more serves as target of his polemics. What emerges from an examination of his polemical writings are two major findings: first, Sebald tried to learn lessons from the writers he attacked, avoiding what he saw as their flaws in his own writing. Second, Sebald’s lifelong urge to polemicize was closely tied to the issue of upward social mobility, the aggression arising from feeling to be a perpetual outsider in the social environment of academia.

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.

This chapter is divided into three sections examining Brecht’s literary influences, his achievements as a writer of fiction, and his legacy. It considers Brecht’s admiration for prose writers including Döblin, Büchner, Grimmelshausen, Wodehouse, Kipling, and Hašek. It argues that these readings, alongside Brecht’s interest in Nietzsche and the Vienna Circle, helped to inform his understanding of language as a form of practical intervention. Brecht sees language as a rhetorical tool kit, a “handle” that can be used to change reality. The chapter also argues that Brecht’s fiction is characterized by “blunt thinking,” employed as a means of ideological critique. This is shown by a consideration of Brecht’s two masterworks of short philosophical fiction, Stories of Mr. Keuner and Refugee Conversations, and his three experimental novels, Threepenny Novel, the Tui-Novel, and The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar. The chapter concludes with some brief observations about Brecht’s enduring significance for German prose fiction from the mid-twentieth century until the present day, also noting his influence on the Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.