"Yes," said Kaeser. "She was called Marie France and was in our circle of friends when we were 16 or 17. Nothing happened then. Later she was divorced, heard Max [as Sebald was known] was in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and came looking for him."

"Did Ute know?" I asked, referring to Sebald's widow.

"Yes," said Kaeser. "When Max died, Ute rang Marie with the news."

"So they were friends?"

"No. They were not friends."

The extent to which genuine autobiography finds its way into invented biography remains a matter of speculation and although the exhibition provides clues, it does not set out to answer specific questions about Sebald's life. The layout of texts and other exhibits reflects the layers of memory and the often poetic clause-within-clause syntax in the stories which enwraps meaning like the rings of fortifications around Antwerp, described by Sebald in Austerlitz. Meanwhile, researchers are left to strain their necks to try to read items too far back in the display cases. They will have to wait until after the exhibition to fill in a docket and send a man scurrying to the archive store for items they wish to study privately.

As a teacher, Sebald was quietly indulgent. While others harangued me for including quotes, even Goethe's, in English in my German dissertation, Sebald thought content more important. At his suggestion I spent my year abroad with his friend, Reinbert Tabbert, principal of a teacher training college near Stuttgart, who also turned up at Marbach. Tabbert was with Sebald in Manchester in the 1960s, rescuing him from a bed-sit above a chip shop and sharing a flat with him in Didsbury which "on Sundays had its mouth full of church bells, summer hats and gardening", as Sebald writes in the just-published poetry collection, Über das Land und das Wasser (Over the Land and the Sea). Tabbert looked after his friend. "We were opposites," he said, "I was from the north, he from the south. I was Protestant, he Catholic. But we formed a relationship and remained friends. He gave me a copy of the manuscript of a first, unpublished, novel which his widow also has. It's about his early life in the Alps and his student days in Freiburg. He tried for years to find a publisher without success. His agent has seen it now, but my advice was to publish it only in his collected works as juvenilia as it is not up to the standard, I believe, of the later works."