“W. G. Sebald exemplified the best kind of cosmopolitan literary intelligence–humane, digressive, deeply erudite, unassuming and tinged with melancholy. . . . In [Campo Santo] Sebald reveals his distinctive tone, as his winding sentences gradually mingle together curiosity and plangency, learning and self-revelation. . . . [Readers will] be rewarded with unexpected illuminations.” –The Washington Post Book World This final collection of essays by W. G. Sebald offers profound ruminations on many themes common to his work–the power of memory and personal history, the connections between images in the arts and life, the presence of ghosts in places and artifacts. Some of these pieces pay tribute to the Mediterranean island of Corsica, weaving elegiacally between past and present, examining, among other things, the island’s formative effect on its most famous citizen, Napoleon. In others, Sebald examines how the works of Günter Grass and Heinrich Böll reveal “the grave and lasting deformities in the emotional lives” of postwar Germans; how Kafka echoes Sebald’s own interest in spirit presences among mortal beings; and how literature can be an attempt at restitution for the injustices of the real world. Dazzling in its erudition, accessible in its deep emotion, Campo Santo confirms Sebald’s status as one of the great modern writers who divined and expressed the invisible connections that determine our lives.

Natural Materials of the Holy Land and the Visual Translation of Place, 500-1500, focuses on the unique ways that natural materials carry the spirit of place. Since early Christianity, wood, earth, water and stone were taken from loca sancta to signify them elsewhere. Academic discourse has indiscriminately grouped material tokens from holy places and their containers with architectural and topographical emulations, two-dimensional images and bodily relics. However, unlike textual or visual representations, natural materials do not describe or interpret the Holy Land; they are part of it. Tangible and timeless, they realize the meaning of their place of origin in new locations. What makes earth, stones or bottled water transported from holy sites sacred? How do they become pars pro toto, signifying the whole from which they were taken? This book will examine natural media used for translating loca sancta, the processes of their sanctification and how, although inherently abstract, they become charged with meaning. It will address their metamorphosis, natural or induced; how they change the environment to which they are transported; their capacity to translate a static and distant site elsewhere; the effect of their relocation on users/viewers; and how their containers and staging are used to communicate their substance.

Between Jerusalem and Europe: Essays in Honour of Bianca Kühnel analyses how Jerusalem is translated into the visual and material culture of Europe, and in what ways European encounters with the city have shaped its holy sites.

This third volume of the new serial publication »Schlüteriana« continues the commemoration of the 300th anniversary of Schlüter’s death and is dedicated solely to the funerary monuments created by the sculptor, his school, and followers in Berlin and the Brandenburg region of north-eastern Germany. The single text presented here is subtitled »Part Two: Germany« and serves as the second installment of a comprehensive, in-depth survey focused on this highly important genre in the sculptor’s oeuvre. It completes the examination initiated by »Part One: Poland« published in Schlüteriana II which dealt with Schlüter’s tomb art created during his earlier sojourn in Polish territories. The primary aim of this current publishing project is to bring about a more complete, overall understanding of the artist’s production from both his Polish and German years. In these two articles, we have concentrated on his funerary sculpture by providing – in an essay/catalogue format greatly enhanced by an exhaustive photographic documentation of each object discussed – a fundamental description of monuments closely associated with the artist and his circle including comparative analysis based upon key examples from European Baroque art. Certain sepulchral monuments created by the sculptor and his assistants in Berlin may already be somewhat better known to the lay public and art historians, however, those works from his Polish years have thus far still been somewhat neglected and inadequately received into the realm of Schlüter’s total output. This two-part study, which attempts to present all the works together along with supplemental commentary on pertinent historical, social, and iconographic contexts of the times when this art was created, will hopefully begin to enrich our understanding of the inter-relationships they share and contribute to a fuller reconstruction of Andreas Schlüter’s artistic development throughout his entire career. »Schlüteriana III« is being published in remembrance not only of Schlüter’s death in 1714, but also as a tribute to a Berlin scholar who spent many years of her career deeply involved with research into the master’s greatest work of architecture – the Berlin Stadtschloss. Her kindness and generosity in the free-exchange of information led to many stimulating discussions about the artist which still, after more than two decades, inspire this author’s own studies until today.