The Emigrants

The Emigrants is a 1992 fictional work by German writer W.G. Sebald. Composed as a mosaic of semi-autobiographical narratives, Sebald’s work traces the stories of four immigrant men as an unnamed narrator encounters them during his travels. Framed in these personal encounters and interspersed with monochrome photos that enforce a realist narrative context, each successive tale reveals a different perspective on emigration, history, loss, and global identity. Despite its characters’ unique pasts, the book also follows the experiential threads that connect people separated from their nation of birth, constructing a modern form of subjectivity that grapples with the problem of rationalizing the loss of personal and national identity and not always succeeding.

The first section highlights Henry Selwyn, an elderly Lithuanian doctor. While searching for a room to rent in England, the narrator discovers his house, a house overgrown with vegetation. The disorder of the house mirrors Selwyn’s disengagement with his time and place and a disordered memory fraught with homesickness and alienation. Having left Lithuania in 1899 at the age of seven, he confides in the narrator his recent outgrowth of repressed memories from childhood. Despite their temporal remoteness, the images of his lost homeland have become clear and immediate in his mind, rendering him unable to integrate into a new way of life. Yet, when Selwyn becomes cognizant of this cognitive dissonance, his narrative ultimately poses the possibility of managing and recovering from it.

In the second section, the narrator hears the news that his favorite teacher from his former German primary school, Paul Bereyter, has committed suicide by stepping into the path of a train. While reading the obituary, the narrator is struck by a seemingly innocuous footnote that Bereyter had once been unable to follow his passion for teaching. Investigating further, he learns that Bereyter was one-quarter Jewish. He was caught in a double bind during World War II because, though he was not Jewish enough to experience persecution directly, he was considered German enough by the Nazi regime to be drafted into military service for Hitler. Forced to be an accessory to the devastation of his homeland, and then an educator of children whose families had exiled him for his heritage, Bereyter never fully came to terms with Germany after the war. Rather, his teaching stifled the inescapable realities of German history until they destroyed him.



In section three, the narrator travels to New Jersey to visit family who left Germany before World War I. He stays with an aunt who shares the narrative of his great uncle, Ambros Adelwarth. Multilingual and intrepid, Adelwarth compensates for his lack of a formal education with his industrious mindset, moving to America and becoming the butler for a wealthy Jewish family, and later the lover of a wealthy European aviator, Cosmo Solomon. After they travel throughout Europe, both ultimately fall into a deep depression. After losing Solomon, Adelwarth commits himself to the same mental facility, unwittingly consenting to the rule of a fanatical director who subjects him to electroconvulsive shock therapy. The therapies ultimately fail to help Adelwarth rationalize the human problems of identity and loss. Finally, the narrator tracks down the derelict facility; there, he internalizes the suffering and alienation his previously unknown relative experienced.
The final section illuminates the life of the painter Max Ferber, whom the narrator encounters in a visit to a bleak Manchester. As a Jewish teenager, Ferber fled Nazi persecution in Germany. His parents were intercepted during an attempt to flee to England by plane and placed on a deportation train to Latvia, ultimately dying at the hands of Nazis. Isolated so abruptly from his family, Ferber spends his time painting in solitude in a dark studio, attempting to use his artistry and imagery from sites imbued with memory to reconstruct parts of his lost childhood. Going deeper and deeper into these visual sites of past atrocity and trauma, Ferber succeeds in learning more about himself, but also exposes himself to a host of hidden emotions that reinforce his depression. His narrative suggests that exposing one’s trauma is not a universally therapeutic process; rather, it can open one up to extremely difficult subjectivities.

The Emigrants is informed by Sebald’s own experience of World War II; the semi-autobiographical character sketches each grapple with the Holocaust or other wars, both global and internal, as they try to establish an identity and continuity with pasts interrupted by atrocity. Sebald grounds this web of interconnected identities in highly rhythmical and descriptive prose that casts his characters in a realist light. The cumulative effect of the four narratives is a kind of aerial perspective on the conscious and unconscious structures, forces, and expectations that operate in people forced to emigrate from the places and relationships that make life intelligible and survivable through modern atrocity. Sebald’s work, while containing few happy endings, poses the possibility of recovering from trauma and alienation by granting them explicit narrative forms and negotiating them in a found community.