On the top shelves of these crystal repositories, paperback copies lie open at specific pages like pinned butterflies with wings outspread, while on the lower levels, the source materials informing those pages, with the relevant passages indicated by clip-on arrows, give the impression of floating up from the depths of memory or the subconscious. Sebald's notes on Fred Astaire and a paragraph about a bow-legged man called Austerlitz marked with parallel pencil lines in the margin of Kafka's diaries, for instance, betray the fiction in his final work, while Stower Grange, the brutal Welsh school described therein turns out to be a restaurant outside Norwich. An illustrated magazine article about St Sebald's tomb in Nuremberg Cathedral hovers below its exposure in The Rings of Saturn and keeps company with the child's Look About You book of moths and Peter Handke's History of the Pencil with the line "ganz Baum ganz ich"- "whole tree, whole me" - highlighted. Sebald was deeply affected by the silent destruction wrought by the 1987 storm. The trees did not come crashing down as one might expect, as he recalls in The Rings of Saturn, but were bent to the ground by the force of the hurricane until their roots were torn out to wave helplessly in the air like the spindly legs of Kafka's beetle.

The opening of the Sebald exhibition drew people from his past. Juergen Kaeser arrived from Sebald's Bavarian hometown of Sont-hofen. They were schoolfriends in the class of Paul Bereyter (real name Armin Mueller), described in The Emigrants, and played table tennis, skied, swam and shared literature. "He introduced me to Herzmanovsky-Orlando and said he would ‘shake the marrow from my bones'," said Kaeser. The Kaesers were a refuge for Sebald who did not get on with his father Georg. He was a prisoner-of-war in France when Sebald was born and remained so until 1947. He therefore spoke of his sister and himself having to "become accustomed to their father", in a lecture for the opening of the Literaturhaus in Stuttgart in November 2001, his last public appearance. (The Literaturhaus maintains a Sebald exhibition, making a trip to Baden-Württemberg doubly worthwhile.) Kaeser stressed that Sebald senior had never been a Nazi and in the 1950s campaigned for the left-wing Social Democrats. As we wandered among the exhibits, Kaeser became intrigued by an alphabetical list of episodes in The Emigrants' display. Under L, oddly, was Manchester; under M, Marie.

"This must be the Marie de Verneuil with whom Jacques Austerlitz went to Bad Marienbad," I said.

"Yes," Kaeser confirmed.

"Is the episode autobiographical? Did Sebald have an affair?"