Sebald, W.G.

Winfried Georg (W.G.) Sebald was born near the end of the Second World War in the Bavarian mountain village of Wertach where his mother had moved to get away from the bombing of the town of Bamberg. His parents, Rosa and Georg, had three children. His father, an officer of the Wehrmacht who had participated in the invasion of Poland, was a prisoner of war until 1947, but mentioning the war was taboo in Sebald's family, and the attempts at not speaking about the atrocities and the Holocaust, and pretending that nothing had happened, later became one of the author's chief literary themes. The inability to talk about what happened to him in the war alienated Sebald from his father. Instead, he found a father figure in his maternal grandfather.