This chapter contends that writing is a practice of taking responsibility for restitution. I focus on works by W. G. Sebald, Alexander Kluge and Heimrad Bäcker. In his last speech before his death, Sebald stated ‘only in literature […] can there be a form of restitution’. I look at the way two of his novels, The Emigrants (1992) and Austerlitz (2001), are literally put together and examine how they correspond to this restitutive obligation. In addition, I examine short stories by Alexander Kluge from 1962 and 2013 and the form of their response to the NS regime. I also show how the concrete poetry of Heimrad Bäcker in his work transcript (1986) demonstrates a writing practice of fragmentation and citation in its confrontation with the NS legal archives. The works in this chapter span three different literary genres and all show a struggle with the persona of the author and the practice of writing – its possibilities and its responsibilities – in the aftermath of the NS regime and the Holocaust.

The essay discusses the theme of the Holocaust in Sebald’s texts, though not in the pre-established framework of ‘Holocaust literature’. Its aim is rather to explore a different set of questions: Whom did Sebald choose to write about? What determined his choice and what stories do his characters tell? The two examples examined in this context are the painter Max Ferber and the architectural historian Jacques Austerlitz. The essay argues that the protagonists mirror Sebald’s biographic quests to come to terms with the Nazi past and the legacy of the Holocaust. This explains, for instance, why the Jewish characters Sebald invented had hazy, all-but-forgotten Jewish origins and could know no more about themselves than Sebald knew about them: when he grew up, there was no memory of the Jews in post-war Germany.