By

Shortly before his death in 2001, W.G. Sebald made what amounts to a mission statement for his literary endeavors under the title ―Ein Versuch der Restitution ‖ (An Attempt at Restitution). In this brief address, Sebald maintains that his work can be seen as an attempt to make amends for a history of catastrophe. I argue in this dissertation that Sebald‘s self-appointed and self-proclaimed mission of mending history‘s tragedies corresponds to a view of the modern world as broken and needing redemption that Sebald adopted as he read Max Horkheimer‘s and Theodor Adorno‘s Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of Enlightenment). Sebald came to see the modern world as broken by instrumental reason and in need of redemption. He rejected, however, the strategies others had adopted to realize a better world. Sebald remained estranged from organized religion, eschewed the kinds of political engagement adopted by his contemporaries, and ultimately even refused Horkheimer‘s and Adorno‘s own solution, the application of supposedly ‗healthy ‘ reason to counteract instrumental reason. What was left to him was the creation of an idiosyncratic ―literature of restitution ‖ which relied on willed association rather than on the discovery of causal relationships to structure the episodi