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W. G. Sebald

Jehle sees everyone in Tynset apart from the narrator as guilty. The narrator proclaims his innocence despite being haunted by the ghost of Hamlet's father, and Celestina turns to alcohol to cope with her guilty secret. Everyone the narrator rings in Germany is riddled with guilt, and flees at the anonymous telephone warning. Hildesheimer has intimate knowledge of German guilt from his work as an interpreter at the Nuremberg trials from 1947 to 1949. On 5 February 1947, even before his first assignment, he wrote to his parents: "The material that you're given, and also the witness statements you hear from the doctors' trials, sometimes exceeds anything imaginable".

Tynset ends with the resignation of the narrator pressed into his bed, according to Jehle, an innocent "in a world of the guilty" for whom only "retreat, isolation, and flight remains".