In 1988, W. G. Sebald took part in a symposium held in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of Austrian author and Holocaust survivor Jean Améry's suicide. Sebald himself presented a paper with the title “Jean Améry und Primo Levi,” which was published in a volume of the conference's proceedings in 1990. Though short, this article is significant in its ability to shed light both on Sebald's appreciation of first-generation testimonial literature and on his own approach to writing after and about the Holocaust. And though relatively rarely discussed in Sebald scholarship, the critical responses it has elicited may be said to be indicative of broader trends in the reception of Sebald's literary reflections on and of the Holocaust. In both respects, “Jean Améry und Primo Levi,” especially when read alongside other critical and fictional pieces by Sebald, can also further our understanding of his literary “relationship” with that other first-generation Holocaust author whom the article does not mention by name but whose presence may be felt in the background, here as in other instances of Sebald's writing: with H. G. Adler.

In its opening paragraphs, “Jean Améry und Primo Levi” covers ground with which we are familiar from Sebald's better-known criticism. Naturgeschichte” (Between History and Natural History, 1982), and anticipating the Luftkrieg und Literatur lectures (1997, On the Natural History of Destruction, 2003), the article begins with an indictment of the German postwar literary scene, criticizing it for its deficient aesthetic and moral standards, and diagnosing it with an “almost constitutional inability to tell, or want to get to the bottom of, the truth” (115).