Die Küste als transkultureller Erinnerungsraum in W.G. Sebalds Die Ringe des Saturn

Abstract

In W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn a walk along the coast of East Anglia triggers numerous memories about catastrophic events, leading to a variety of stories about people living under conditions of transit, exile, homelessness, and precarious identity. It is no coincidence that all these people are connected with the coast, a paradigmatic motif for processes of erosion and extinction, exchange and amalgamation, border-crossing and hybridity. This article investigates the narrative construction of the coast as a place for transcultural memory and describes the different functions of this specific literary scene for structuring and making visible processes of identity negotiation in Sebald’s text. Furthermore, the article focuses on the coast’s potential to provoke reflection upon processes of imagination and multiperspectival writing. Title: The Coast as a Place of Transcultural Memory in W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of