At the entrance to the exhibition, in cavities in a movable glass wall, lie three of the manuscripts, the handwriting fluent and spaced on alternate lines in expectation of a marker's comments - the way Sebald required students, including myself from 1976 to 1980, to present essays. He marked in pencil, sharpening down to the last half-inch and keeping the stubs of varying lengths in a case. There is an example of his handwriting in the published texts in his forgery of Ambros Adelwarth's script on the visiting card illustration in The Emigrants: "Have gone to Ithaca!" The exhibition includes a sheet on which he practised performing the deception. In seminars he reduced Wittgenstein's philosophy to a single idea: that the problems of the world come down to misunderstandings of language. He wrote in German and spoke it with rolled "Rs", preferring not to trust his impeccable English that he spoke with a soft Bavarian acccent. He elaborated his Wittgensteinian perception by creating a literary art form that occupies the grey twilight between fact and fiction.

The first room contains personal effects and items of poignant interest like Sebald's glasses, camera and a diary open at a page where under each date the entry reads simply "Nebel", or fog. The second room, a larger space, is devoted solely to the novels: Vertigo, an account of travels through Europe including his home village, which upset his former townsfolk; The Emigrants, four tales of emigration, both Jewish and non-Jewish; The Rings of Saturn, wanderings through Suffolk, time and the mind; and Austerlitz, the "true fiction" of a Kindertransportee searching for his parents. The novels are, in a sense, dismembered and placed in four extensive glass display cases standing at angles to the wood-panelled walls, which are partly covered by huge, jutting mirrors so that, on peering into the gloom, one cannot immediately decide what is real and what reflection.