Negative Evolution. Zur Rezeption von Stanisław Lem bei W.G. Sebald
Negative Evolution. On W.G. Sebald’s Reception of Stanisław Lem

Summary/Abstract: This essay examines the previously unrecognised, profound influence of Stanisław Lem’s writings on Sebald’s essayistic and literary work. His discovery of the Polish author coincides with the moment when Sebald, a scholar of German literature, switched from literary studies to writ-ing literature. His first literary text is an unpublished script for a television film about the life and death of Immanuel Kant, written around 1981. In it, Sebald covertly quotes page-long passages from Lem’s Wielkość urojona / Imaginary Greatness to ironize and criticize the ideals of the En-lightenment embodied by Kant from a 20th century perspective. In Sebald’s essays of the first half of the 1980s on Peter Handke, Alexander Kluge and the of topic of the air war and literature, Lem has a constant but rather subordinate presence. This changes in Sebald’s 1983 essay written on the occasion of Franz Kafka’s 100th birthday. There, Lem emerges as one of the central influences for Sebald’s pessimistic philosophy of history – the concept of the natural history of destruction. From the second half of the 1980s, Lem largely disappear as a reference source for Sebald’s writing. How-ever, his thinking, especially Lem’s idea of negative evolution as expounded by GOLEM, continues to have a recognizable effect in Sebald’s literary writings.

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