Skip to content

Sebald at the Bar

In 2003, W.G. Sebald’s German publisher Carl Hanser Verlag issued a small promotional catalog of recently published books, including Sebald’s Campo Santo. Spread across the back and front cover was a drawing of fourteen of their authors behind a bar.I’m afraid don’t recognize the German authors except for Sebald (fourth from right, looking over his eyeglasses), but I do spot three North American authors: Michael Ondaatje is just to the right of Sebald, T.C. Boyle is third from the left, and Phillip Roth is fifth from the left.Artist Quint Buchholz is credited with creating the drawing from individual author photographs.Can anyone help fill in the blanks for the ten authors I cannot identify?

sebald-at-the-bar-lg.jpg

3 Comments Post a comment
  1. selfdivider #

    i’m pretty sure the second one from left is peter carey. the bearded one next to roth could be george saunders. the white haired dude next to sebald might be john berger. and the red haired woman to the far right looks like a younger jelinek to me. (i just happened upon your site today. i love sebald’s work and this is a GREAT site…)

    July 3, 2007
  2. Thanks for the comments and the guesses. I tend to think that all of the authors at the bar ought to be among the fifty or so authors whose books are included in this Hanser catalog. Unfortunately, John Berger, George Saunders, and Elfriede Jelinek are not included in the catalog. Skoal, anyway!

    July 4, 2007
  3. This painting was originally painted for a poster celebrating the 75th birthday of the Carl Hanser Verlag, the publishing house where many of W. G. Sebalds books were published in Germany.
    The autors are, from left to right:
    John Berger, Harry Mulisch, T. C. Boyle, Elke Heidenreich, Philip Roth, Jostein Gaarder, David Grossman, Raoul Schrott, Rafik Schami, Magriet de Moor, Lars Gustafsson, W. G. Sebald, Michael Ondaatje, Antonio Tabucchi, Margriet de Moor.
    On the original painting there is also Michael Krueger – the publisher of Carl Hanser Verlag – standing on the left as the barkeeper.

    August 7, 2007

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: