It all started with a coincidence: on a train journey to London in the early 1980s, Sebald read a small book by the Austrian experimental writer Konrad Bayer. Der Kopf des Vitus Bering (The Head of VB) is a surrealist collage about the life and death of the seventeenth-century navigator who embarked upon his 1740 Arctic expedition accompanied by the German naturalist Georg Wilhelm Steller (1709–46). Sebald was struck by the fact that he shared his initials with the largely forgotten botanist and zoologist born in a place ‘which my mother visited when she was pregnant in 1943’. The web of coincidences piqued his curiosity and the ‘preoccupation with making something out of nothing, which is, after all, what writing is about, took me at that point’ (EM 99).

Shortly thereafter, Sebald, who had been writing occasional poems of increasing length since the 1960s, began to compose a narrative prose poem about Steller's life, adventures and death. He investigated the fascinating story of the naturalist's emigration to Russia, his journey, with Bering, to the ‘outermost sea’, his years as a scientific hermit amongst the Koryak people and his solitary death from exposure. The resulting text consisted of twenty-one brief passages laying out fragmented episodes from Steller's biography – a literary portrait, blending fact and fiction, that ultimately tells us more about the author than the ostensible subject. Sebald characterized his motive for engaging with Steller as the ‘temptation to work with very fragmentary pieces of evidence, to fill in the gaps and blank spaces and create out of this a meaning which is greater than that which you can prove’ (CB 152). Sebald submitted And if I remained by the Outermost Sea to the Austrian literary journal Manuskripte, where it duly appeared in October of 1984.

Another poetical prose-portrait followed suit, dealing with the mysterious figure of Matthis Grünewald: an eight-part meditation on the life and work of the reclusive German painter and the troubled times in which he lived. Though regarded as one of the foremost German Renaissance artists, alongside Albrecht Dürer and Lucas Cranach, Grünewald's identity remains strongly contested.