Germanists have long lamented the lack of comprehensive bibliographies of past and present literature, particularly in the areas of Frisian, Old English, Old High German, and, most notably, Old Saxon. The compilers of this bibliography deem it crucial to fill this lacuna before embarking on two further volumes project to complete this series: I. Texts, and II. Maps and Commentaries. NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER: The publication of the two further volumes (I. Texts; II. Maps and Commentaries) has been canceled.

This book uses the annotations in W.G. Sebald's private library (held in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv, Marbach) to construct an interpretation of his prose style as fundamentally dialectical. Alongside his readings of writers such as Benjamin, Bernhard, Bassani, and Lévi-Strauss, it uses in particular Adorno's and Horkheimer's "Dialektik der Aufklärung" to help develop a close reading of Sebald's syntax and narrative structures. The key concern of Sebald's prose emerges not as the Holocaust, but rather the dialectical processes of ,progress' and ,regression' inherent in history.

First published in 1933, this book forms one of two volumes on the ethnography of the Gothic, German, Dutch, Anglo-Saxon, Frisian and Scandinavian peoples.