I forget exactly when I first discovered the German writer, W. G. Sebald. It was in the few years after his death from a heart attack in 2001, at age 57. He had been publishing books in German since the late 1980s, and it was only with the English publication of his book The Emigrants in 1996 that he gained recognition in the anglophone literary world. He only achieved (not to say enjoyed) widespread international fame in the year of his death with the publication of his book Austerlitz. That book put him on track to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he might have done had he lived longer.
I have yet to read that most famous book, but I’ve read most of the others, starting with The Emigrants, which remains my favorite so far, and the one I recommend to anyone as an introduction to his work. Its four separate narratives each display his genre-defying storytelling style that combines fiction, memoir and historical non-fiction.
Although Sebald is now considered one of the world’s best and most original writers since the Second World War, he remains controversial in his native Germany, and it was only with the publication of his translated works that he gained widespread recognition. Some of the controversy stems from his stories in The Emigrants and, later, in Austerlitz — narratives about Jews who had survived the holocaust. That is controvertial in itself, given the problematic situation of a German narrating supposed Jewish experiences in the aftermath of WWII. But he has also been criticized for certain uses of source materials, and for the ways that his fictions strike many readers as accurate depictions of historical events and persons when they are demonstrably not.
He has also written poetry and non-fiction. His book, On the Natural History of Destruction, is one of the most heart-stopping descriptions of the aftermath of WWII within Germany. I don’t think any other writer, until its publication in 1999 (2003 in English), had managed to put into book form the indescribable collective trauma that played out within Germany’s borders in the post-war years. In fact, much of the book deals with the literary descriptions of that aftermath and their inevitable inadequacy. The book, though it reads as non-fiction, is quintessentially Sebaldian in its mix of first-person narration, painstaking research, descriptive writing, and un-captioned photographs — the latter being one of his most striking and characteristic innovations.
THE VIRGO RISING CHART
W. G. (Max) Sebald was born on May 18, 1944, in the Bavarian town of Wertach. To my knowledge, no timed birth chart exists for him. But recently, when I was re-reading his poem series from 1988, Nach Der Natur (published in English as After Nature), I came across this passage in the final poem in the series. Here is the passage from the Michael Hamburger’s English translation (2002):
At the moment on Ascension Day of the year ’forty-four when I was born, the procession for the blessing of the fields was just passing our house to the sounds of the fire brigade band, on its way out to the flowering May meadows. Mother at first took this as a happy sign, unaware that the cold planet Saturn ruled this hour’s constellation and that above the mountains already the storm was hanging which soon thereafter dispersed the supplicants and killed one of the four canopy bearers.
The astrological concept that I assume he is referring to here is planetary hours. I personally don’t work with planetary hours, but I know the concept, and I know how to look it up. So that’s what I did. It turns out that Saturn was the planetary ruler on the day of his birth in Wertach, Germany, from 1:15PM until 2:30PM. Conveniently, only one sign was coming over the eastern horizon during that time: Virgo. To be more precise, during that 75 minute period the Ascendant went from 4 to 18 degrees of Virgo.
The above passage can’t be taken as definitive proof of a birth time given Sebald’s reputation as a fictionalizer of his own life. But it is also well-within reason to think that Sebald would have been versed in astrology and acquainted with the idea of planetary hours. He had clearly given enough thought to the meaning of astrological Saturn to include it in his autobiographical poem. And, indeed, this reference to Saturn accurately reflects what would become known as his main themes as a writer: memory, loss, depression, history, collective trauma, etc.
I have drawn this chart for 1:52PM, which gives him an 11-degree Virgo rising, halfway between 4 and 18 degrees.
This time has his MC at 6 degrees Gemini, within two degrees of a conjunction with Uranus. Uranus on the MC (or in the tenth house generally) fits a writer (Gemini) known for his uniqueness (he is often called “sui generis” by critics) and his innovations. He described how he developed his literary style as a rebellion against the confining restrictions of academic publishing.
His Sun and Venus and his ASC and MC ruler, Mercury, are all in Taurus in the 9th house. This fits someone who would be a lifelong academic. He traveled widely, often on foot, to do research for his writing. He lived most of his adult life in a foreign country: England.
Saturn is at 25 Gemini in his tenth whole-sign house (less than 3 degrees from my own natal Saturn), and Saturn makes no aspects to the other traditional planets. Saturn’s one aspect, traditional or modern, is an out-of-sign square to Neptune. Saturn placed prominently in the tenth house fits his reputation as reserved and deeply pessimistic. He was not without humor, which was generally sardonic and self-deprecating. The fact that his Saturn is largely without aspects to or from other planets reflects his feeling of being out of step with the rest of life. It was said that part of his originality as a writer stemmed from a ghostly quality to his writing, as if his narrators were speaking to the present day from a previous century.
Sebald’s Aries Moon makes aspects to only the three outer planets: It is opposite Neptune in Libra, trine to Pluto in Leo, and sextile his tenth-house Uranus. Otherwise, the Moon makes no close traditional aspect to any of the traditional planets. However, it does make a mutual reception with Mars in Cancer, which some would consider to be similar to an aspect. His Moon is also in the “bad” eighth house, which deals with inheritance, among other things. To me, this Moon reflects his preoccupation with the the issues of collective history and trauma, especially of war (of which Aries’ ruler, Mars, is the patron god). It has been suggested that his focus on WWII was partly related to his own father’s involvement. His father had been a soldier for the Nazis during the invasion of Poland. The elder Sebald became a prisoner of war until the 1950s, and Sebald’s main male role model as a child was his maternal grandfather. Whereas most of the post-war and baby boomer generations in Germany simply moved on and chose not to think about the past, Sebald seems to have thought of little else.
I want to mention one more thing that some students of Hellenistic Astrology can confirm for themselves, and that is the zodiacal releasing technique. Using this birth time, I found that the times in Sebald’s career when he received the most recognition and fame coincided with peak periods in terms of zodiacal releasing from the Lot of Spirit. He was having a Level 1 peak period from 1978 until the end of his life. A Level 2 “loosing of the bond” occurred in 1996, when his book, The Emigrants, was published in English. The next Level 2 peak period began in 2001, when his best-known work, Austerlitz, was published. The year 2001 was also a 10th house profection year as well as his second Saturn return. And as many astrologers will recall, 2001 was the year of the Saturn/Pluto opposition in Gemini/Sagittarius. All of these factors would have affected his public and private lives for both good and ill within that single year, as his sudden fame and then untimely untimely death in December of that year proved.
This post is by no means meant to be the final word on rectifying Sebald’s chart. I hope that other Sebald fans might find this and do their own research into the life of this fascinating writer. If this is interesting or helpful, or you’d like more information, please let me know!
Chadwalk's Astrology 