Elysäische Trümmer. W.G. Sebalds Manchester und die Poetik des Verfalls

This essay explores W. G. Sebald’s literary representation of Manchester as a topography of memory and as a site of poetic reflection on decay, exile, and remembrance. Drawing on Sebald’s years in Manchester (1966–1968, 1969/70) and the relevant archival material extant in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, the article traces Sebald’s engagement with Elias Canetti, Ernst Bloch, and Walter Benjamin. Through a close reading of the Manchester passages in The Emigrants, it demonstrates how Sebald transforms industrial ruins into vessels of collective memory, poetically reimagining the city as “fallow Elysian Fields.” Combining literary topography, intertextuality, and poetics, the essay interprets Sebald’s Manchester as a liminal space in which document and fiction, past and present, hope and destruction converge into a single, haunting continuum.