The Emigrants

by W.G. Sebald, Michael Hulsa (Translator)

The four long narratives in appear at first to be the straightforward accounts of the lives of Jewish exiles and émigrés in our calamitous century. Following (quite literally) in their footsteps, the narrator traces routes which lead from Lithuania to London, from Munich to Manchester, from the South German provinces to Switzerland, France, New York, Constantinople and Jerusalem. Each story is studded with photographs, creating the impression that the reader is poring over a family album, trying to tease out the separate truths behind the fading images. But gradually, as Sebald's prose, which ranges the borderland between documentary description and almost hallucinatory fiction, exerts its powerful magic, the stories merge into one overwhelming evocation of exile and loss.

Winner of the Berlin Literature Prize.

Genres: Fiction, German Literature, Historical Fiction, Germany, Literature, Novels, Literary Fiction

237 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

About the author

Winfried Georg Maximilian Sebald was a German writer and academic. His works are largely concerned with the themes of memory, loss of memory, and identity (both personal and collective) and decay (of civilizations, traditions or physical objects). They are, in particular, attempts to reconcile himself with, and deal in literary terms with, the trauma of the Second World War and its effect on the German people.

At the time of his death at the age of only 57, he was being cited by many literary critics as one of the greatest living authors, and was tipped as a possible future recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Emigrants: four human lives, four broken fates… W.G. Sebald, himself an emigrant for many years, knows how it does feel to live far away from a homeland.

Dr. Selwyn and I had a long talk prompted by his asking whether I was ever homesick. I could not think of any adequate reply, but Dr. Selwyn, after a pause for thought, confessed (no other word will do) that in recent years he had been beset with homesickness more and more. When I asked where it was that he felt drawn back to, he told me that at the age of seven he had left a village near Grodno in Lithuania with his family.

Nostalgia is just one aspect of emigration. And there is a whole gamut of negative moments in the psychological climate of exile…

Even as a child I used to be horrified when the frog pond was frozen over, and we played curling on the ice, and I would suddenly think of the darkness under my feet. And now, nothing but black water all around, day in, day out, and the ship always seeming to be in the selfsame place. Most of my fellow travellers were sea-sick. Exhausted they lay in their berths, their eyes glassy or half closed. Others squatted on the floor, stood leaning for hours against a wall, or tottered along the passageways like sleepwalkers. For a full week, I too felt like death.

Even if one is lucky in another land, the fear and anxiety remain. Angst may grab one and never let go and a mental health often turns out to be in danger…

Since mid May 1969 – I shall soon have been retired for fifteen years – I have spent my life out of doors here, in the boathouse or the apiary, depending on the weather, and I no longer concern myself with what goes on in the so-called real world. No doubt I am now, in some sense, mad; but, as you may know, these things are merely a question of perspective.

Happiness, it is hard to find… Misfortune, it is everywhere and it is in abundance. Life ends and how often there is nothing left but the grey and faded photographs in the family album.

[Gaurav Sagar · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are some faculties of human mind which have been haunting human beings since time immemorial, for so less we've been able to comprehend about our brain- we might have stepped out of our home to look for other (probable) homes but the enigma of our mind is still very much elusive for us. Mankind has regularly witnessed the immense destruction wrought by natural disasters. Similarly destructive to human life have man-made atrocities, like war and genocide. Those who were lucky enough to survive either type of cataclysmic event must have then begin the process of confronting and reconciling the memories of the catastrophe that befell them; and most of our poetry and art have taken birth as post-memorial commemorations of these catastrophic events. The memories associated with such events surge up out of our beings and perhaps get mingled with those of others but when our beings encounter such memories- which exists on their own and are self-conscious, such rendezvous may impart an allusion of completeness to them.

The Emigrants is a collection of narratives built around memory, trauma, and alienation; it's quite strange to observe that we are going away from nature as we're (supposedly) becoming 'civilized', but we're so proud of it and which is very frightening; during the tiny history of human existence on this planet, we've come a long way and perhaps gradually but certainly getting rid of most of our natural (or animalistic) characteristics- sensitivity is one of those. We've become increasingly insensitive even to our fellow 'cousin' human beings but people, who have been inflicted upon by misery due to the 'heroic' events in the history of human kind, chose to deal with these events in different however sometimes startling manners. It's hard to put the book in any specific genre since it's neither like a traditional war story nor like a memoir but rather it's the story of four people, who choose to deal with the misery, alienation inflicted upon them due to the precarious events in the history of human civilization however (though not surprisingly) man keeps boasting about them, mixed with the own impressions of Sebald from Holocaust and World War. Dr. Selwyn dwells on the story of a man he met in Switzerland in the time immediately prior to World War I, and explains how he felt a deeper companionship with this man than he ever did his wife. He also divulges how his family emigrated from Lithuania when he was young, and tries to get the narrator to reveal how he feels being an emigrant from Germany living in England.

The characters of 'The Emigrants' suffer from memory of World War and perhaps feel a (sub) conscious compulsion to obliterate it, the realization that a person has survived these holocausts while those he loved have not developed a very deep melancholia which itself is difficult to be named but which is rooted so deep in the consciousness that it effects the ability, of those who suffered, to differentiate between dream and reality and a profound sense of alienation, displacement is formed. The impact of these harrowing experiences may be so profound that the very sense of human existence might be stripped to nothingness and one may feel that what is point of the very existence of humankind if the life itself is just a matter of few ferocious bangs, what is whole meaning of boasting about our 'consciousness' if the entire history of human dominance here on earth may go for toss with in a matter of few moments, the idea is very frightening and heart wrenching which gives birth to feeling of nausea towards our very existence itself. The angst, develops from the memory of War in those who have suffered by the hands of it, is the central idea around which the stories of four narrators revolves. The theme, which the books deals with, is the impact of World War II and the Holocaust on German nationals, particularly on those of Jewish heritage. All the characters are emigrants who have left Germany have their specific nuances. The collection of narratives deals with the memorabilia of the characters about their homeland-to which they are emigrants- and how they deal with memory related to it.

The mastery of Sebald as a writer could be realized from the fact that he has been able to bring out a very unique but poetic prose built around intermingled stories of four narrators with his life itself. Sebald has also used photographs in between, for which he is known for too, to create very profound fictional album of sufferings of people out of realistic set up in his life. The reader may feel to be invited as an explorer, in the lives of these people, the reader can sympathize with narrators, can feel their alienation, distress and angst towards their exiled life but he can not touch upon them.

It's my first experience with Sebald, though I've read and heard a lot about him from fellow readers and the chaotic world of internet but I myself have never attempted it before and I must say it's totally worth. The book leaves you with a kind of strange hollowness in your heart as if something has broken inside you, as if you yourself have just came back from journey which has deeply impacted and somehow become a part of your consciousness, though from the eyes of some one else, such is the impact of the harrowing spell created by poignant narrative of Sebald.

4.5/5
Highly recommended.

[Orsodimondo · Rating 5 out of 5]

DISTRUGGETE ANCHE L’ULTIMA COSA, IL RICORDO NO



Quattro racconti di cui il primo è il più corto e l’ultimo il più lungo, come se Sebald avesse dovuto acquistare confidenza in se stesso.

Quattro biografie, quattro incontri, quattro saggi di finzione, quattro espedienti per raccontare altro, e altro ancora, quattro storie e ricerche sull’orrore nazista e le sue conseguenze, quattro viaggi che diventano di più, quattro vite di persone che hanno lasciato la terra d’origine e si sono trasformati da emigranti in emigrati, quattro essere umani del secolo breve (due ebrei, uno per tre quarti ariano, e uno, il prozio di Sebald, interamente ‘ariano’, ma omosessuale) che si sono scontrati con la follia della pura razza, quattro occasioni per Sebald di ribadire un concetto che gli sta particolarmente a cuore, la rimozione collettiva del popolo tedesco, la Germania senza lutto dopo i dodici anni che sembrarono mille:

Sentivo in misura crescente che l’impoverimento spirituale dei tedeschi e l’assenza di memoria che mi circondavano e l’abilità con la quale si era ripulito tutto cominciavano ad aggredirmi testa e nervi.


Questa, e le due immagini che seguono, sono tratte dal documentario di Grant Gee “Patience (After Sebald)” del 2012.

Il tempo non sana le ferite, il male non passa, e il passato resta un luogo dal quale è impossibile sfuggire, se non con il gesto estremo: di conseguenza, il suicidio dei primi due e il lasciarsi morire degli altri due si configurano come un ritorno a casa, l’heimat (non per caso, Ambrose, il protagonista del terzo racconto, va a morire in una clinica di Ithaca, USA, e l'Itaca di Ulisse, si sa, è la madre di tutte le patrie).
Tutti e quattro ricordano, non riescono a dimenticare, quindi soffrono, sono sopravvissuti alla morte dei propri cari, e sembrano non riuscire a perdonarselo.

Il quinto personaggio è il narratore, Sebald stesso, che come gli altri in Germania non riesce a stare, anche lui emigra presto in Inghilterra, si fa carico della memoria collettiva, raccoglie e intreccia le voci degli altri quattro per spezzare il silenzio e l’assenza di memoria che appestano la terra d’origine.



La parola nazismo appare raramente in queste pagine: ma ‘cenere’ e ‘treno’ acquistano un peso speciale e riescono facilmente a evocarla.

A impreziosire il tutto, come sempre, l’affascinante prosa di Sebald, che le foto alternate alla scrittura, avvalorano e completano senza bisogno alcuno (in realtà, secondo me, le immagini accrescono il mistero delle parole), le improvvise frasi in lingua originale lasciate senza traduzione…

Momenti indimenticabili: Paul, il protagonista del secondo racconto, è in ospedale con gli occhi bendati dopo un intervento di cataratta, e con la più nitida chiarezza dei sogni vedeva cose che non pensava che fossero ancora presenti in lui. Il prozio Ambrose, che aveva scelto di indossare un cappello Homburg, si sottopone volontariamente a sessioni di elettroshock, per cercare l’oblio, fino a morirne (e trovarlo?)…

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am usually not able to read on airplanes for various reasons, not least of which is that I need to concentrate on operating my imaginary foot pedals to ensure that the plane doesn't plummet to the earth and crash in a fiery eruption of cheap diamond-patterned blue upholstery, molten plastic, and of course several dozen charred, unidentifiable human remains. The most I can hope for in the way of diversionary reading is that crappy catalog of shit that no one in their right mind (which doesn't rule out most fliers) would ever want that I find crumpled and (no doubt) covered with DNA in the filthy pouch of the seat back in front of me. In this latest catalog, there was a ridiculous inflatable apparatus that one (if one were reasonably insane) was intended to bring aboard a plane, position on one's tray, and lie face forward on it. It was like a giant cheese wedge. It was completely ridiculous and yet kind of awesome in a way, and I don't think I'd ever in my life forget a (hypothetical) person who endeavored to use it. It's the sort of recumbent technology that actually takes guts to use.

The moral of the story is that I have a difficult time focusing my attention on airplanes. There are so many weird, smelly freaks, chatty losers, obese space infringers, people urinating at twenty-minute intervals, and bitter stewards and stewardesses for whom the beverage cart is their own Sisyphean boulder that it's incredibly difficult to, say, give someone like Proust or Dostoevsky his due.

W.G. Sebald, however, overpowered my situational A.D.D. with this miraculous, sublime little book called The Emigrants. Again, I want to emphasize that Sebald earned my devoted attention against all odds. On the Phoenix-to-Chicago portion of my sojourn, I was delighted (but leery) that the plane seemed ready for take-off, but my neighbor had not arrived. Then -- as if in cruel comeuppance for every awful thing I've ever said or done (many of them on this website) -- I espied a man roughly resembling Baron Harkonnen from David Lynch's film adaptation of Dune lurching down the aisle. My fate for the next three hours or so had been thereby telegraphed. Besides clocking me with this carry-on and then having the self-deprecatory nerve to say to me, 'Excuse my immense bulk' as he sat down (I mean, how am I supposed to respond to that?), he then got out the sweat rag... some kind of handkerchief that he opened across his lap and blotted his face and neck with throughout the entirety of the flight. Lastly, it needn't be pointed out that the arm rest between us had to remain up so that his girth could spill over into my seat -- which left me in the awkward position of thrusting my head and shoulder out into the aisle (to avoid uncomfortable closeness) which only earned my poor dear head a few good hits from the stewardess's ample swaying, polyester-sheathed buttocks.

And -- yes! -- despite all this I was somehow enthralled by Sebald's The Emigrants, which really isn't the kind of book you'd expect to 'enthrall' anyone. I didn't even pull out the airline magazine once. But you know what? I still think most people will probably not like this book. This isn't an weird elitist thing where I say, 'Oh, yeah. I totally "get" this book, but the rabble should just stick with their Robert Ludlum.' Not that I am immune to sentiments like that, but it's not what I mean in this case.

You know how people talk about soul mates, and you inevitably roll your eyes because... hell, there's something like a jillion people on the fucking planet, so should we really be awestruck that one or two of them like the same books and music as you or have the same favorite color and, besides, were born under a compatible astrological sign? I understand the cynicism very well. But statistically speaking, when you're someone (i.e., someone like me) who often feels strangely out-of-step with the outside world and finds his tastes contradictory in many ways to the golden mean, it's 'special' to find a book that feels as though it were written with you in mind. It might be pure hokum, sure, (not to mention narcissistic) because these are textbook Alienation 101 feelings we're talking about here and lots of people have them (Cross-reference: The Breakfast Club), but my meaning doesn't need to have meaning for your meaning, so suck it.

Sebald's The Emigrants was meant for me, or I for it. Take your pick. It's a compilation of four exceptionally subtle and delicate historical-biographical sketches about four displaced men -- all of whom have a complex but indeterminate relationship to their pasts. The sketches (which are neither fictional or non-fictional in the rigorous sense of the terms) are suffused with a fuzzy melancholy... a longing... a regret... a realization that is only hinted at or alluded to sideways. Although the narratives are fairly direct, the mood is not. While you read these stories, in other words, you tend to think about how 'normal' they seem, how unremarkable in their narrative style, how uncluttered with explicit emotion or baroque psychology, but halfway in, you inevitably are left wondering at Sebald's gift: How does he accumulate so many small, inconspicuous moments into such a powerful net effect? Where does it come from? If you look back through the book, you can't decipher the machinery and mechanisms of the writer at work. They're invisible.

Despite the extensive narrative detail in these sketches, they are anything but narrative-driven. The matter is transcended and becomes elegy -- which is why this book is difficult to 'recommend' in the conventional sense. The ideal prospective reader of Sebald's The Emigrants is a deliberate, ruminative reader who seeks some measure of kinship in the alienation and displacement of others. Don't get me wrong. This isn't self-pity. Not at all. There's nothing gratuitous about the melancholy which flits in and out of these stories until finally the story itself is effaced and all that remains is mood. And this is why I think Sebald is intended for a very particular (not necessarily better) audience: one which seeks the expression of its quiet desperation -- but quietly. The words on the pages, collected, do not amass into an ostentatious gloom or self-indulgence, but like the most perfect melancholy, merely allude to something that will never be understood in absolute clarity.

[Garima · Rating 5 out of 5]

My tale was heard and yet it was not told,
My fruit is fallen, and yet my leaves are green,
My youth is spent and yet I am not old,
I saw the world and yet I was not seen;
My thread is cut and yet it is not spun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

~ Tichborne's Elegy

It’s hard to fathom the way memories assume their role in our lives. Sometimes like a long lost companion and sometimes like an unwelcome guest, they walk the slippery road of our yesteryear excursions and become the unreliable source of bittersweet nostalgia or a perpetual torment. And when we become privy to such memories which belong not to us but to someone else, then unwittingly a new journey begins and the stories encountered after taking each new turn quietly merge into our being and become a part of our life as if we were incomplete before. I had nothing save few wild guesses in my backup when I started out on this literary trip with Sebald. I was aware about his reputation as an esteemed writer but that conveyed only so much and now I know what I was missing all this while.

There is neither a past nor a future. At least, not for me. The fragmentary scenes that haunt my memories are obsessive in character. When I think of Germany, it feels as if there were some kind of insanity lodged in my head. Probably the reason why I have never been to Germany again is that I am afraid to find that this insanity really exists. To me, you see, Germany is a country frozen in the past, destroyed, a curiously extraterritorial place, inhabited by people whose faces are both lovely and dreadful.

Four lives, four emigrants and four solitudes bound together by one common tragedy, dealing in their own way with the vagueness of their destiny inflicted by the treacherous forces of World Wars. There are unkempt houses and well-tended gardens, the grandeur of Moab Mountains and Lasithi Plateau and snapshots’ depicting the same fateful longing of being at home that has plagued the mankind since time immemorial. This book epitomizes the intensity of screaming silence, anguish and beauty; like that of Van Gogh’s The Starry Night and Munch’s Scream. Sebald has explored the word ‘Emigrant’ here by moving further and further away from its standard meaning and offered us the purity of a sublime visual. Going to a strange land, living among strangers and recapturing past through blurry mental impressions to once again retain the citizenship of a land one originally belongs to even if such native place has mercilessly entangled the lifelines of billion people.

In search of lost time and lost relationships, it’s difficult to assess as to what keep certain things together and what contributes in the withering away of expectations from future. When the remaining choices brings out not death but rather a compromised life then little by little such compromise takes away the brittle threads of an already discarded blanket of modest desires that could no longer save us from the harsh cold of a grievous past. Sebald has gathered here the ambiguities associated with ineffable mind games by extracting bloody colors from black and white photographs and created a poignant fictional narrative from non-fictional happenings. How one wish for an alternative truth and a felicitous reality after reading such books but in the wake of viciousness, wishful thinking has a long way to go.

In the end it is hard to know what it is that someone dies of.

[Adam Dalva · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sebald as comfort; Sebald as an embodiment of experimental genius; Sebald, again, does the impossible. This is a hugely admirable linked story collection (basically, though no one would probably call it that), whose connections are at once subcutaneous and massive. The influence of Nazism on this strange, spectral, melancholy work is fascinating, as is the slow, steady realization that Nabokov (!) is a supporting character who appears in all 4 segments, mostly unnamed, as the butterfly man. Sebald is peripatetic, as ever, and his use of photographs is a marvel. If I had to choose a favorite of the four parts, it would be the second one, of the unnamed leads teacher, but this is a cohesive accomplishment.

[Algernon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Words fail me when I most need them. This is one of the saddest books I have ever read. Also a necessary book, a much needed testimonial for those whose lives have perished with their song unsung, victims of the last century’s ethnic cleansing and forced exile. A quiet desperation permeates almost every page, a slow dissolving into nothingness, a loss of innocence, a disconnect between generations that translates into a decaying present. Bad Kissingen was once a gem of a town, a Bavarian baroque extravaganza. Few landmarks survive today to illustrate its past glory.

When I reached the gate it turned out that neither of the keys fitted the lock, so I climbed the wall. What I saw had little to do with cemeteries as one thinks of them; instead, before me lay a wilderness of graves, neglected for years, crumbling and gradually sinking into the ground amidst tall grass and wild flowers under the shade of trees, which trembled in the slight movement of the air.

Old pictures in family albums, faded pages in leather-bound journals, childhood recollections, letters from parents sent to gas chambers, hazy memories of old people waiting for the final curtain – W G Sebald erases the border line between fact and fiction, between novel and documentary evidence, between family life and history.

The longer I studied the photographs, the more urgently I sensed a growing need to learn more about the lives of the people in them.

A Dr. Selwyn, retired from a business practice in England, talks to the author about his yearning for his homeland in Lithuania. The author’s childhood professor, Paul Berrutyer, is an enigma that he tries to unlock through interviews with the people that knew him. Sebald’s great uncle Adelwarth goes to America and befriends there a young wealthy scion of a famous family. They travel the world together before Adelwarth retires to a solitary room. The author himself revisits his youthful days in soot stained Manchester, where he meets an expatriate painter named Max Ferber.

In 1960, when I had to give up my practice and my patients, I severed my last ties with what they call the real world. Since then, almost my only companions have been plants and animals. Somehow or other I seem to get on well with them, said Dr. Selwyn with an inscrutable smile, and, rising, he made a gesture that was most unusual for him. He offered me his hand in farewell.

What brings these people together is their solitude, their alienation in a foreign land, their attempts to find solace in things that grow (a counterpoint to the wholesale destruction of the war?), and the dignity of choice, the last thing that truly belongs to them being the decision to leave this sorry world behind.

As I remember it, he even turned away in order to conceal from us the sob that rose in him. It was not only music, though, that affected Paul in this way; indeed, at any time – in the middle of a lesson, at break, or on one of our outings – he might stop or sit down somewhere, alone and apart from us all, as if he, who was always in good spirits and seemed so cheerful, was in fact desolation itself.

>><<>><<>><<

Paul spent a lot of time gardening, which I think he loved more than anything else.

>><<>><<>><<

The whole house was always very neat and tidy, down to the last detail. Often it seemed to me as if Uncle Adelwarth was expecting a stranger to call at any moment. But no one ever did.

>><<>><<>><<

He felt closer to dust, he said, than to light, air or water. He himself once remarked, studying the gleam of graphite on the backs of his hands, that in his dreams, both waking and by night, he had already crossed all the earth’s deserts of sand and stone.
>><<>><<>><<

Since mid May 1969 – I shall soon have been retired for fifteen years – I have spent my life out of doors here, in the boathouse or the apiary, depending on the weather, and I no longer concern myself with what goes on in the so-called real world. [Dr. Abramsky]

The gardening could also be a metaphor for the need of roots, a need to belong to a community, a need for continuity of traditions and family values – all of which have been destroyed in the Holocaust. Sebald is focused not on the grisly details of the extermination camps, but on the effects on those displaced or left behind, whose scars are not always visible from outside. Uncle Kasimir, another member of the family who emigrated to America remembers:

In those days, he began, once I had managed to steer the talk to the subject of emigration, people like us simply had no chance in Germany.

Even when business picks up and a new family is formed, the yearning and the sadness remains a constant in their lives, illustrated in a visit to the Jersey shore and a blurry, dark snapshot:

This is the edge of darkness, he said. And in truth it seemed as if the mainland were submerged behind us and as if there were nothing above the watery waste but this narrow strip of sand running up to the north and down to the south. I often come out here, said Uncle Kasimir, it makes me feel that I am a long way away, though I never quite know from where.

Sebald’s emigrants are moving like slow dancers in and out of focus, both attracted by an idyllic past and repulsed by memories of outrage, their silent eyes accusing us for our indifference out of old-fashioned sepia photographs, now only names on tombstones in locked-out places nobody cares to visit. Who now plays with cockchafer bugs, or collects Hummel figurines? Who remembers what a tea-maid is, or a candlewick bedspread?

Mother wrote not a word about the events of the moment, said Ferber, apart from the odd oblique glance at the hopeless situation she and Father were in; instead, with a passion that was beyond his understanding, she wrote of her childhood in the village of Steinach, in lower Franconia, and her youth in Bad Kissingen.

Sebald strives for putting these things in perspective, accumulating hundreds of minor details that put together might wove back the tapestry of the past. The poet in him sees this work as similar to climbing up in the Jura mountains and gazing over the wide, sparkling expanse of Lake Geneva.

Memory, he added in a postscript, often strikes me as a kind of dumbness. It makes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspective of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds.

With the bluring between fact and fiction that I already mentioned, it is difficult to know which parts of the novel come from imagination and which from personal experience. I am sure though that Sebald knew all there is to know about alienation and decay intimately. Most evocative for me are the passages where the author describes the early days of his first visit to Manchester in the 1960’s.

As for myself, on those Sundays in the utterly deserted hotel I would regularly be overcome by such a sense of aimlessness and futility that I would go out, purely in order to preserve an illusion of purpose, and walk about amidst the city’s immense and time blackened nineteenth-century buildings, with no particular destination in mind. On those wanderings, when winter light flooded the deserted street and squares for the few rare hours of real daylight, I never ceased to be amazed by the completeness with which anthracite-coloured Manchester, the city from which industrialization had spread across the entire world, displayed the clearly chronic process of its impoverishment and degradation to anyone who cared to see.

A city that once boasted to rule the industrial world is now slowly breaking down into ruin, yet memory can still recall the glory days, and a writer’s job is to capture these images like prehistoric insects in a drop of amber.

Given the motionlessness and deathly silence that lay upon the canal now, it was difficult to imagine, said Ferber, as we gazed back at the city sinking into the twilight, that he himself, in the postwar years, had seen the most enormous freighters on this water. They would slip slowly by, and as they approached the port they passed amidst houses, looming high above the black slate roofs.

A final word proved to be as elusive to capture for me as the introduction, but Sebald comes to the rescue like the English teacher he once was, reminding me that time has not the fixed value claimed by science books:

... but time, he went on, is an unreliable way of gouging these things, indeed it is nothing but a disquiet of the soul.

[Sean Barrs · Rating 2 out of 5]

We all have bad memories. We all have memories that we’d rather forget. And as we age we gain more and more of them, but this is nothing exceptional. This only speaks of the everyday. What Sebald shows us is that some memories are so fantastically good, that remembering them is like stabbing oneself in the chest.

Sebald’s characters speak of a time when they were happier, more content, younger and perhaps even loved. Since that time they have grown older and the things that made them happy have withered and gone away. They no longer have that feeling of completeness, but are instead left with cold emptiness as they long for a time past. And this is why these memories are so dangerous. To think about these times is to cause intense feelings of sadness and self-pity. The present never matches up with the past; thus, they enter dangerous and self-destructive mind sets.

Indeed suicide becomes their best option, a means of escaping from a world they have grown to loathe. So this is a very sad book. It’s also extremely hard to follow. It’s never really clear who is narrating the story, and then there are so many layers added to it as time goes on. We have characters recounting the memories of other characters that are being narrated by Sebald. It becomes confusing to who is actually speaking. I found myself continuously losing the thread of the writing, and by the end I’d had enough so I didn’t read the last story. They’re all pretty much the same in terms of meaning; they just have different plot points.

Memory escapes us after a time, which is something captured here. At times the book enters an almost dream like reverie through this overall effect. This in itself is a feat, but it’s not a very enjoyable one to read about. The prose is flat and lifeless, droning on with endless lists and pointless description. It’s also rather hopeless. Granted, for some people life is hopeless, but for the characters in here I felt like they could have turned their lives around had they truly wished. We are all haunted by the past, and past versions of ourselves, though that doesn’t mean we can’t move on and carry on living despite how shit things become.

For the right reader this book could be moving, exceptional and profound. For me though, it was lifeless and far too self-defeating. I want some positive energy! I would hesitate to recommend this to anyone.

[Maryana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fragile power

Memories help us understand, navigate, and make predictions about the world. They provide the foundation for a sense of one’s self and one’s life - sometimes our memories can feel so vivid that one could compare them to a set of audiovisual records replayed again and again, but as we go through our lives, acquire new experiences and create new recollections, our memories develop and change. While in a sense, we are what we remember, it is astonishing how relying on something so fragile is one of the essential characteristics that make us human.

The narrator in W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants seems to be aware of this fragility of memory:

Memory makes one's head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds.

Journey into the past

Reading this novel felt like going on a journey through infinite layers of time, memory, history, identity, just to end up with nothing concrete, yet something profoundly evocative.

But time, he went on, is an unreliable way of gauging these things, indeed it is nothing but a disquiet of the soul.

Besides time, space is equally important. In The Emigrants places are presented as living history: we travel across Bad Kissingen, Manchester, New York, Jerusalem, Constantinople, Ithaca (the island kingdom of Odysseus or a city New York?), Jungfraujoch in the Swiss Alps (the highest railway station in Europe), distant Kyoto...

While traveling we go through the journals, letters, oral retelling and magnificent photographs as memories weave a complex tapestry with the past, present and future tenses. People and their memories come alive through rather ordinary details:

Back to those days, I see shades of blue everywhere - a single empty space, stretching out into the twilight of late afternoon, crisscrossed by the tracks of ice-skaters long vanished.

It is possible to make out four narratives, four lives who escaped in time to a promised neverland, running away from a destructive monster, whose name is never mentioned, but who has left a mark forever.

Although composed of those four “main” narratives, there are so many other narratives and versions of those narratives. On the other hand, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that there is only one narrative - that of displacement, loss and exile.

An elegy in prose form with Nabokov as a secondary character

Is this fiction or nonfiction? Probably both. Before reading this novel, I had heard that Sebald was quite an esteemed, maybe slightly underrated author. Experiencing Sebald’s writing just exceeded my expectations: his approach is so sensitive and emphatic. For some time now I’ve been reading fiction and non-fiction which concern time and memory. While there are some similarities with writers such as Marcel Proust, Javier Marías, Annie Ernaux, I would say that W.G. Sebald is one of a kind.

Recently I’ve noticed that the Holocaust has been a subject of several literary hoaxes and pieces labeled as misery porn or misery lit used for entertainment or voyeurism purposes. To each their own, but I believe there are but a few authors who can do justice to this subject.

Besides having lost a relative to the Holocaust, I find its history and remembrance indispensable. I feel Sebald is an author I can trust and recommend for The Emigrants is a quiet elegy in prose form. A brilliant tour de force about memory, loss and exile as well as a way of meditation on the preciousness of every human life.

∞/5



Le Papillon by Pablo Picasso

[Paul Bryant · Rating 2 out of 5]

No book is beyond criticism but a book of mournful elegiac wistful anguished memorialising of Jewish Germans before, during and after the Third Reich might come close. Honesty compels me to admit that where everyone else found in The Emigrants profoundly moving narratives of trauma, loss and emigration spooling ribbons of intense melancholia, I, wretch that I am, could only keep tripping over maunderings about gardening and breakfasts and photograph albums and schoolrooms and upholstery and rooms and houses and illnesses and more houses until it because very clear that this was as much not the right book for me as it was the exact right book for everyone else with their garlands of stars; at which point I tiptoed backwards and away.

[Agnieszka · Rating 5 out of 5]

You said: ”I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
Find another city better than this one

These verses from Cavafy at once came to my mind as only I started reading The emigrants . Sebald takes us for a journey back into the past, travelling across Switzerland, France, America, England, Jerusalem, Constantinople. We can see him collecting maps, diaries, photographs of people and places, houses, railways and furniture, in detail depicturing all migration traces through cities, hotels, glaciers and oasis. It’s like looking through a family album.

It’s like an exercises from memory and loss. Four people. Four stories, different but somehow the same. Exiles. The emigrants. People belonging to non – existent world. At first I thought it would be another story about Holocaust, and yes, war is still present here, but as though overshadowed. Sebald with tenderness and nostalgia is talking about people deprived of country, alienated and uprooted.

Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
And my heart - like something dead – lies buried

One of them is Sebald’s great uncle Ambros Adelwarth, who of his own free will undergoes pioneer method electroshock therapy not in purpose to be cured but just the opposite, to lose finally his skills to remembering and thinking. His travel to Ithaca, to asylum where his friend Cosmo had died, has a symbolic meaning as well. Another one, doctor Selwyn emigrant from Lithuania who prefers gardening and animals than other people and counting the blades of grass as his pastime. He’s still mourning his alpine guide who had missed years before. Later, after doctor Selwyn’s death Sebald has found out about discovering in glacier his remains. It’s like a symbol too.
And so they are ever returning to us, the dead. At times they come back from the ice more than seven decades later and are found at the edge of the moraine, a few polished bones and a pair of hobnailed boots.

The emigrants is a story about longing and persistence of memory, interwoven from snatches of conversations and reminiscences. It’s a book about phenomenon of memory, loss of childhood’s country, about time and passing. It’s a tale about impossibility of throwing away own past.

You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere
There’s no ship for you, there’s no road.
Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
You’ve destroyed it elsewhere in the world .

[Nidhi Singh · Rating 5 out of 5]

For years the images of that exodus had been gone from his memory, but recently he said, they had been returning once again and making their presence felt.

I have never come across a writer who evokes the beautiful, tragic, calamitous struggle and engagement between a person and the past as Sebald does in ‘The Emigrants’. In this devastatingly beautiful exploration of loss and exile, of history and biography, of the lives and memory of these four lost souls, there is the undertow of soft whispers, the same wondering questions that look into what holds them together and what tears them apart; these unanchored souls faraway from and headed to something unknown. There is a longing for an escape that is essential for survival but it leaves behind an existence that is parched and empty, and on which the past still rests with its deadening weight.

Memory, he added in a postscript, often strikes me as a kind of a dumbness. It makes one's head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds.

There are contrarieties in our longings, and there are conflicts in our own relationships with the past; the hold we have in the seeking and erasing of episodes. In the gathering of the leaves fallen off the intermittent narrative that memory allows. It evokes a deep sense of belonging, a deep seated incomprehensible hatred for some space and memory. Memory transforms itself like a shimmering impression, bringing us closer to the flickering images living in the past, to the vividness of the flame, so that some lingering picture grows more real than the present itself. Is this a comfort or a tease and a torture? Does it change shapes, inhabit unrecognizable forms, once revisited; what just lies across the fragile surface of remembrance and forgetfulness. There are images buried beneath which are discovered in the moonlit reveries. They blur the line between fact and fiction, reality and imagination and induce that pain and the pleasure of having to go through it again.

‘In the end it is hard to know what it is that someone dies of.'

We think we understand the pain of the past, its victims, but we have little idea what is inside them. When someone else’s past is reconstructed, there is also this incredulity, this futility in the endeavors to imagine someone else’s life and death. It is intersected with the outsider’s perspective that seems to interrupt the privacy of personal moments, memory, and tragedy. Perhaps that is the reason that leaves so much unsaid and unwritten, giving the narrative a shadowy, sketchy character with fractured impressions. The black and white photographs seem like the tidied up bits and pieces of a dismantled sculpture. But this does not dilute the empathetic observation with which the desolateness and suffering have been conveyed of those who struggle with their memory; their need to look for something particular from the past, the strength and the silence with which the present is endured. A silence sometimes so frozen that one cannot tremble it with speech and reflection. They live in an empty space in which memory offers both confinement and release. There is self-destruction and a 'self-impaired, patchy knowledge of the past' and suddenly its reconstruction becomes important. As if the very thing one had been avoiding becomes the one hope of redemption and nothing could be saved if that did not arrive at the right moment.

‘..for that reason, telling stories was as much a torment to him as an attempt at self-liberation. He was at once saving himself, in some way, and mercilessly destroying himself.’

But with such ache and longing, grief and loss, homelessness and isolation, indelible vestiges of the past, in the end, one does not really know how they went on living and what they died of.

[Lyn Elliott · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Emigrants is such a mighty book that it has taken me some time to think about what I can say about it, and in the end I've decided to start my review with these paragraphs from its Foreword:

‘At first The Emigrants appears simply to document the lives of four Jewish emigrés in the twentieth century. But gradually, as Sebald’s precise, almost dreamlike prose begins to draw their stories, the four narrations merge into one overwhelming evocation of exile and loss.
‘Written with a bone-dry sense of humour and a fascination with the oddness of existence The Emigrants is highly original in its heady mix of fact, memory, fiction and photographs’.

Ambiguities abound, allusive references to backgrounds – I’m intrigued that some reviewers recognise only three of the characters are Jewish, whereas I, and the unnamed writer of the Foreword, believe they all have Jewish backgrounds.

Nothing is self-evident, connections must be sought, allusions caught and interpreted. Readers glimpse each character through the eyes of different narrators, sometimes through an unidentified first person narrator who may or may not be drawn from Sebald himself, some through narratives offered by the subject of each story, and some through additional information from people who knew the subject.

Always we are aware of the power of memory to shape the lives of the memory holders, the protagonists themselves and those who knew them. In my notes I find this quote [apologies to the author, I have lost the reference].: ‘The significant issue for Sebald is not memory in an overall generic sense, however, but the point at which the cost of not remembering supersedes protective strategies for survival, the moment later in life when early, often horrific repressed knowledge or experience move center stage in a person's life’.

The tag line for the first story, Dr Henry Selwyn, is ‘And the last remnants memory destroys’. All four of the principal characters are haunted by their memories and exile. Two of them commit suicide late in life (Selwyn and Bereyter). Ambrose Adelwarth seeks oblivion by voluntarily subjecting himself to the legalised torture of deep Electro-convulsive therapy. Max Ferber, whose parents died in a concentration camp, muses ‘that tragedy in my youth struck such deep roots within me that it later shot up again, put forth evil flowers, and spread the poisonous canopy over me which has kept me so much in the shade and dark in recent years’.

Sebald's damaged people have suppressed knowledge of the past--whether consciously or unconsciously--until their lives are overtaken by melancholy. The Holocaust of European Jewry is the ‘political crisis that leads to a series of devastating personal crises’ for Sebald’s characters, according to Long*. It is not something they have experienced directly as primary victims but ‘as perceived from distant shores or after the fact. The light, like the pain, that is refracted in Sebald's prism is quite gray, a numb gray, the color of emptied cities, the color of ashes, of dust, of strayed lives that end long before death comes. Grayness lowers over the black-and-white photographs scattered throughout the book, as it does over the characters who people it: unfinished spectral beings, hollow, sapped, bruised, hopelessly and quite futilely homesick’ (Aciman*).

The grainy photographs, with unidentified and mostly unidentifiable images can stand as a metaphor for the book as a whole, muted, allusive, indirect, melancholy, out of place. They are integral parts of the narratives, "talking" across the frames, documenting history, commenting on and reflecting individual memories, but there is no certainty that they actually belong in these stories rather than others.

Some places and people recur throughout the book. The Alps; mountain villages; beetles; the man with the butterfly net who appears in all stories and is never explained, his identity revealed as Vladimir Nabokov to those who recognise the visual and word imagery, those already in the know. These recurring motifs are like scenes from an old black and white silent film, flickering in and out with no explanation nor obvious connection. But their reappearance from different angles in different stories indicates they have meaning, even if we are not sure what it is.

The title forces us to think about what the word ‘Emigrant’ means. In Sebald’s work it is not the common meaning of somebody who has moved physically from a home country to another country, but someone who suffers displacement from a home culture as a result of a crisis. Displacement may take place within the home country itself, if one is alienated, effectively expelled, by political and social exclusion as happened in the Nazi Germany lying behind all these stories. Paul Bereyter survives the Nazi regime within Germany, for instance.
All the protagonists are, or become, profoundly melancholic - not a romantic or sentimental melancholy, but identity overwhelmed by loss, loneliness, grief and despair, released only by death.

And yet, the book hums with life, with small sources of delight in everyday details. Even dark, depressed Manchester is enlivened by the character of the narrator’s landlady, former Salvation Army flugelhorn player Mrs Gracie Irlam. Her dressing gown is candlewick and so are the bedspreads ‘a material found only in the bedrooms of the English lower classes’. Most of the customers in her cheap hotel were ‘traveling gentlemen that come and go’. After hours on weekdays they came and went, with their garish women: ‘the gentlemen’s travelling companions’ Gracie called them. Gracie later goes on to make a surprise appearance as the subject of one of Ferber’s portraits, dressed in candlewick. So that's where she went on her fortnightly Sundays!

This is the first of Sebald’s works I’ve read, and I have read it twice in the last month. I may read it again, will certainly read more, perhaps after I have drawn breath for a while. And in the way that one thing leads to another, I have tracked down Nabokov’s Speak, Memory as my next major read and that may illuminate some of what I have read in Sebald. I hope so.

* Aciman, André. "The Emigrants." Commentary June 1997: 61+. Expanded Academic ASAP. Web. 18 July 2016.
* Long, J.J. Intercultural Identities in W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants and Norbert Gstrein's Die englischen Jahre; Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 2004, Vol.25(5-6), p.512-528

Update August 2016
Andre Aciman has a recent article on an elderly couple who contacted Sebald after reading Emigrants and whose stories influenced Austerlitz. Aciman has thought so much about Sebald's writing that this article is worth pursuing for anyone interested in Sebald. http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-t...

[Φώτης Καραμπεσίνης · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ανέμενα κάτι πιο ιδιαίτερο από τον Sebald, έχοντας βέβαια υπόψη πως δεν πρόκειται για το magnum opus του. Σαφώς και υπάρχει συγγραφική δεξιότητα, ενδιαφέρουσα προσέγγιση στο θέμα της μνήμης, της νοσταλγίας, των αλεσμένων στις μυλόπετρες της Ιστορίας ζωών, αλλά το κράμα αυτό δεν μπόρεσε ποτέ να "απογειωθεί" – τουλάχιστον στον δικό μου εσωτερικό…αεροδιάδρομο.

[Ulysse · Rating 5 out of 5]

What have I been reading?
What have I been dreaming?
Have I been dreaming somebody else’s dreams?
Do I want to wake up?
Who are the four melancholy gentlemen who haunt these pages?
Did they really exist or did the author make them up?
It this fiction disguised as non-fiction or vice versa?
Is the protagonist of these stories the author W.G. Sebald?
Who is W.G. Sebald?
Is he the fifth melancholy gentleman of this book?
Is this a book about the holocaust?
Did the author really visit all those places?
What was it precisely he was looking for?
Did he take some of those pictures himself?
And the ones he didn’t take, in what drawer or photo album or wrinkled envelope did he find them?
Why does he feel absence so poignantly?
Why is he drawn to old manors that have seen better days?
Why does Sebald seem interested in conversing solely with the dead?
Why do the Alps loom on every page so ominous and beautiful?
Why does Nabokov make four brief appearances in his book?
Why does Sebald sit on so many trains?
Why does he write as though a landscape were unrolling endlessly past his window?
Why is he lured by gambling houses and abandoned factories?
What has become of the young dervish?
Why do madness and despair lurk behind every tree, every clipped rosebush?
Why can’t I remember the particulars of what I’ve read and yet know for certain I am not the same person I was before I started reading The Emigrants?
When has sadness ever tasted so sweet?
When has absence ever felt so present?
Am I asking these questions or is the ghost of a long-dead gentleman asking these questions?
Am I a melancholy gentleman too?
Why can I only ask questions?
Why don’t I care if there are any answers?
Why am I haunted by the ghost of W.G. Sebald?
Why?
...?

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 5 out of 5]

 
Vanished Lives

On the surface, this is a very simple book: separate biographical memoirs about four men known to the author, who, like him, were emigrants from their native Germany. But despite the numerous photographs and wealth of confirming detail, this is fiction, and the subjects are pure invention or at most composites.

The book is an apparent impossibility: a Holocaust novel that is rich and gentle rather than searing. Born of a Catholic family in 1944, Sebald was not a direct victim of the Third Reich, yet he bears its scars, and his books are an attempt to understand them. But he approaches his goal obliquely, not describing the Holocaust but treating it as negative space, as a fellow reader so beautifully expressed it. In consequence, this is an entrancing book, full of human interest and very easy to read. Sebald has a poet's eye for the quirky and odd, but also for everyday normality; in his hands, even lists of place-names or occupations take on a lyric beauty.

Sebald's four subjects have quite different stories. Two of them emigrated at the very start of the century; a third, a schoolteacher from Sebald's own village, spent increasing periods in France or Switzerland, but did not leave completely; only the fourth, a celebrated artist, has a conventional Holocaust story, but the latter part of his story is suffused with the beauty of the normal life of German Jews earlier in the century. Indeed, the whole book is a moving lament for a vanished age and lost way of life, whether it be the grand hotels and great European watering places of the start of the century, or everyday existence in rural Bavaria. This is a requiem for Jew and Gentile alike.



The one section in the book where the photographs virtually drop out is, curiously, the fourth part, about the painter. I imagine that this is for copyright reasons. Although given a pseudonym, Max Ferber, the subject is clearly Frank Auerbach (self-portrait detail above), a Jewish emigrant and friend of Sebald’s. Known especially for his portraits, his paintings in heavy impasto seem to speak equally of violent trauma and human resurgence—a striking parallel to Sebald’s theme.



The Emigrants is the third book by Sebald that I have read. Austerlitz is still my favorite, but this comes close; (I found Vertigo slightly less compelling). I read this immediately after Anne Michaels' Fugitive Pieces, which also traces the post-Holocaust life of a survivor through poetic allusion and images, but I find Sebald even more powerful, by reason of his exquisite simplicity. Earlier this year, I also read Carol Shields' The Stone Diaries, which tells the life of an ordinary woman through a similar accumulation of objective detail, rumination, and old photographs. In the right hands, it is a most effective medium.

[Margaret · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5

This quiet and beautifully written novel tells of four men who survived World War II, and who emigrated to other countries, leaving their countries of origin behind in order to settle elsewhere. Even though the four main characters all escaped with their lives, there is no real peace for any of them as the effects of the war remain, washing wave after wave of sadness and muted memories of loss over their entire lives. W. G. Sebald keeps his readers distant from his protagonists by telling their stories through the voice of a narrator or perhaps several narrators—it’s not always clear who is narrating. Further distance is created when the narrators report what yet others (relatives, friends, and acquaintances) have said and refer to newspaper stories and diaries, telling stories and back-stories about the four men and the people they knew. Even as the details about these four men who do not know each other and whose life stories do not intersect, even as the one common emotion of the book (the unending sorrow, sadness, and loss caused to all by the horrors and evils unleashed by the war) is everywhere around us, diving deeper and further into details shows us how these four men manage to avoid the devastating truths about their (and, indirectly, our) post-war lives in the latter half of the twentieth century.

The stories themselves are fully told, if told at a distance, and we do get a real feel for the time and place. That feel is enhanced by the use of photographs. The photographs throughout give us the sense that this is memoir, and who knows, maybe some of it is. We see pictures of our characters, of their families, and of the places they went. Occasionally, as I read, I would look up a hotel to see if the photo in the book matched up with a “real” photo of the place. The photos did match. So there is a sense of real world and real history here. At the same time, the book as a whole moves so as to fill us up with detail giving us an increasingly soft-focus rather than clear vision of the truth. Each of the separate narratives is longer than the one before and despite added details and a longer, fuller story, Sebald takes us further and further from the person at the heart of each story. At the same time the four epigraphs that lead into the four separate narratives with their abstract language outline the ominous, if unspecific, horror at the heart of each of these men’s lives. The more detail we know, the further we get from any confrontation with the actual horrors of the war that damaged the souls of these four men. The feeling is there even if the facts are not. These epigraphs ( And the last remnants memory destroys, There is mist that no eye can dispel, My field of corn is but a crop of tears, They came when night falls to search for life) remind us of all that has been left unsaid, and it is the unsaid that holds the power.

[Momčilo Žunić · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rafinirana melanholija "Iseljenika" zamaman je i posve zebaldovski način da se u celoživotnom zapretavanju nezalečivo nostalgičnog, ali i kroz (ne)zaobilazno istorijsko, napusti sopstveno prognaništvo, upija u (nanovo uspostavljene) druge, u spori hod i lepotu njihovog urušavanja, i, ujedno, nimalo ne žureći dopre do frekvencije smislenih slučajnosti - otuda u svakom od poglavlja u "nečijoj" ruci mrežica za leptire - osobite normalnosti i apartnije posložene kreposti. Naposletku, nisu li normalnost i životnost ove četvorice (pre)minulo samstvujućih fražilnika

- učitelja koji drži najlepše školske časove ni iz čega, dekorativnog pustinjaka koji razbraja vlati trave, batlera koga samo još kaput preči da se ne razaspe ili slikara kome je puderasta prašina (siva somotska siga koja nastaje kada se materija razlaže "u ništa") draža od svetlosti, vazduha i vode -

neuobičajenost, naspramnost u odnosu prema normativnom (koje nikada ne može biti normalno), ono večito izmeštano, nesviknuto  i samoubi(v)stveno. Život je i dalje neizdrživ, i nezadrživ.

A Zebald? Da, Zebald je, poput lovca na leptire (podrazumeva se i onaj klasik koji je presađenik u tuđ jezik), tu da ne dopusti da u(s)hićena senka ptice u letu ne ispari na suncu ili se ne razlije i izgubi na kiši, da upamti, bez glačanja, svaku moguću neravninu,... i da ne napiše roman, naravno, jer roman je normalnost. Prokazana.

[Will Ansbacher · Rating 4 out of 5]

These are four enigmatic and haunting stories of increasing length and complexity, where the narrator is not necessarily the same person in each - but I’ll call him N anyway.

Despite some very moving passages and a tremendous sense of loss, I didn’t at first feel the whole was very successful, a 3-ish star at best. The narratives can be bleak and heart-wrenching, certainly, but they run on and on - sometimes stalled in a recall of quite impossible detail, then skipping abruptly to another topic. In that I suppose they are much like unrehearsed monologues, but in reading I had the sense that each one was spoken to me in a flat monotone, without emotion and without pausing for breath.

Henry Selwyn, a retired doctor, reveals to N that he has recently become desperately homesick for Lithuania, which he left as a child for England, and where he anglicized his name to get ahead.

Paul Bereyter was briefly, N’s elementary school teacher in Switzerland, but his story of exile (before and during WW2) and return is revealed only second-hand when N talks to a woman whom Bereyter befriended quite late in life.

Ambros Adelwarth was N’s great-uncle who emigrated to the US. His story, which I thought was the least successful, unfolds through conversations with N’s aunt and uncle, a doctor who was with Adelwarth at the end of his life, and through a diary that the young Adelwarth kept on a voyage.

Max Ferber, a painter in Manchester is befriended by N (this was the one that resonated with me the most). At the time, N never thinks to ask him about his origins, and it is only later in life that N returns when Ferber is taken ill and he tells N how he came from Bavaria just before WW2, leaving behind his parents who were murdered in a concentration camp. Ferber also gives N a diary that his mother kept that reveals the ever-collapsing world the German Jews experienced. Deeply affected by the diary, N makes a pilgrimage to the spa town they lived in, but finds nothing that commemorates or even acknowledges their existence, except for the overgrown Jewish cemetery. N observes bleakly,

“I stood before it [the grave] for some time, not knowing what I should think ... I felt increasingly that the mental impoverishment and lack of memory that marked the Germans and the efficiency with which they had cleaned everything up, were beginning to affect my head and nerves.”

But to take these stories at face value is like reading just the clues of a cryptic crossword without actually solving the puzzle, though I think you need significantly more literary knowledge than I have to decode them, and so I found that the clues and allusions did tend to get in the way of the narrative.
For example, Nabokov turns up in each story, either in person or as the “butterfly man”; there are lists - lists of people, occupations, buildings – lists that are much longer than needed to make a point; and then there are the dreams. They left me with more questions than answers, even after a second reading.

And it wasn’t until I almost reached the end (on my first reading), looking at the pictures of the spa in Kissingen, that I started to wonder about the significance of the photographs. The images were there to impart a reality to the narratives, but didn't they just highlight the murky boundary between fact and fiction? And who were the people in them? From Sebald’s own life? Did he search for photographs to illustrate something or did he weave his stories around found images? And the places, the buildings - were they actually where Sebald said they were?

So, despite my rating, this is a book that will stay with me for a long time, and if nothing else, made me aware of how little I actually understand. For that I should probably give it five stars.

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

They told me not to walk alone, day or night. But I had to see the cemetery. I’d been told earlier by a painter and a pharmacist that if I took a right onto the main road (dirty and stoned, of course) from the clinic, I would eventually come to the end of the road where I was sure to see the gates of El Cementerio. “But you aren’t going alone?” they asked.

As I set about, the blazing sun -- a hotness I was first introduced to and had only first known three days before, upon my arrival -- was beating on me with anger, but was a surprisingly pleasant contrast to the waves breaking to my right; the peaceful call of a Thursday afternoon. Children in their yards, old enough for school, but unlikely to attend. The grown men and women, happy to see my white face, smiling and waving; some yelling broken words of English, proud of what they knew; proud of their shacks and town of decay; knowing they were lucky to be surrounded such strange beauty. How did they know they were right? I knew they were right. And I took note of the sea again, its sound never stopping, hitting the sand in relentless, uneven waves.

I walked by the orphanage, where only the night before, amidst playing and watching the children perform, I’d been haunted by a tattered black and white image on the wall: an old man with a weathered face, deep wrinkles, no teeth, paternally gazing down at a child. Who was he? What did he know? If only through a dream, I knew the man; I did not know his information, but I knew him from a time long ago, a time flitting incoherently in my mind, but deep inside me just the same.

As the road continued there were no more houses; stray dogs now ran past me from my right side, coming from the trash heaps on the beach. To my left there were woods; the sun continued to blaze. Had I gone in the wrong direction? Should I have been afraid? I did not feel afraid.

The graveyard was a transcendent mess; graves scattered about and surrounded by weeds and unkempt grass; here and there a grave stood tall or was colored pink, or contained a message. The sea; it continued; it was still there, to my side, and I now saw it through trees, just over the hill; it was a part of the graveyard. All of it was. And an old photograph blew by feet, but I wouldn’t dare pick it up.

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

“What I saw had little to do with cemeteries as one thinks of them; instead, before me lay a wilderness of graves, neglected for years, crumbling and gradually sinking into the ground amidst tall grass and wild flowers under the shade of trees, which trembled in the slight movement of air.”

I am back to Sebald. It has now been over two years since I read Austerlitz, which I enjoyed as I had enjoyed Vertigo before it. There was, of course, the acknowledgment of Sebald’s talent with the pen. I think that, even if all of the erudite references go over your head while reading him (and many did, believe me), the writing itself is something you cannot begrudge Sebald. Two years have rolled on, and with them has come many top-tier works of fiction and non-fiction. There have been a couple of voyages, new friends made, and many, many mistakes committed. An appreciation has been built, and I am more patient with what I take in. Slower, more critical, and often more damning. The emotional bedrock of Sebald’s prose is more accessible now. I know what it is, and I know where I can access it. I am also in the realm where I can categorically point to his works and declare them works of genius. That emotion, however, is not as readily accessible as a dirty, quick, pleasurable McDonald’s meal (are we all okay with me making this a motif in future writing? I think if you have it in your profile picture, you get a pass?). It is emotion that needs to be recognized as complex, so it might be better thought of as caviar. When you read works that have that quality coupled with unbelievable prose, you know that you have found a good hub of “re-read material” that justifies being kept on the shelf for years to come.

This book, too, like the previous ones, played out in my mind much the same as its structure on the physical page. Maybe the doldrums of unearthing a long-sheathed memory, continuing on, on, on, until a local climax is achieved, and a burst of images comes flying into your mind’s eye. I was unable to strip myself away from the four narratives, which seemed to grow in intensity and verve, linear growth and ending in a bang. Dr. Henry Selwyn into Paul Bereyter into Ambros Adelwarth into Max Ferber. The final narrative was the most impactful for me.

I just mentioned the movement of my mind while reading this book – so what images flashed into my head? This I can do. I can talk about what came up. Just now, I am unable to attempt to put together any sort of personal narrative. It has been this way for a while, and I suspect this mood will persist for another several months. But let’s catalogue these emotions and images that I cannot hold all at once:

- The evocation of love in all narratives, which was constant. Parental love, romantic love, love of self, love of country, love of place. As the narratives moved on, I began to anticipate this love to be unrequited, or else dashed to pieces.

- Easy one due to the title, but the unhomed feeling of being an emigrant was apparent in every single piece. I loved how the successes that surrounded the trials and tribulations of the emigrants in their new homes did not diminish the feeling of coming loose, somehow.

- I found out about Korsakoff syndrome, which is horrifyingly fascinating. The individual begins to confabulate, inventing memories to fill in crucial missing chunks in his/her life story.

- The butterfly man was always there in the background. Somehow. Somewhere. Much as he is for me, when I turn around and see the grey spines on my shelf and staring out at me with a scolding touch.

- Cannot emphasize how much Max Ferber’s preference for dust, for settling, for not moving, for staying still, touched me to my core.

I suspect I will be reading some analytical secondary material in the near future to delve a bit deeper into these works. Let’s see what my experience is like upon successive readings. Here are a couple of quotes I wanted to share as I end this one:

“I gradually became convinced that Uncle Adelwarth had an infallible memory, but that, at the same time, he scarcely allowed himself access to it. For that reason, telling stories was as much a torment to him as an attempt at self-liberation. He was at once saving himself, in some way, and mercilessly destroying himself.”

“Memory, he added in a postscript, often strikes me as a kind of dumbness. It makes one’s head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspectives of time but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds.”

[Matthew Ted · Rating 5 out of 5]

96th book of 2020.

Simply, this novel is about the lives of four Jewish émigrés in the 20th century. It is written in that wonderful and haunting voice of Sebald’s, which I touched on in my recent Vertigo review. And, like in my Vertigo review, Sebald has once again taken me through the lives of the people in this book, but made me reflect on the people from my own life. I have decided that Sebald is so important to read because he makes us look into the past, into history, of western civilisation, but also into our own. Part of moving forwards is done by looking backwards.

In all four parts of this novel, Vladimir Nabokov is mentioned. Part way through the first part there is even a photograph of Nabokov, standing with a butterfly net (for he was an avid lover of butterflies, something I learnt in the south of France, from a man who loved them as much. I happened to be reading Lolita for the first time, and he told me that Nabokov frequented the south of France for its diversity of butterflies – there was some odd symmetry there). Other than the moments where Nabokov ‘haunts’ the narrative, it is almost entirely driven towards the unravelling of Sebald’s four subjects: Dr Henry Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, Ambros Adelwarth and Max Ferber. And before I move on, is Sebald our narrator? It is hard to tell, as ever. The first line of the novel is, At the end of September 1970, shortly before I took up my position in Norwich, I drove out to Hingham with Clara in search of somewhere to live. I immediately presumed it would be his wife with him, but fans of Sebald would know that he married the Austrian-born, Ute. It was with Ute that he lived in an old rectory outside of Norwich. It could have been the very same place as described here. In the final part the narrator notes his birthday being the same as someone’s death on a gravestone, May 18th, which matches Sebald’s birthday. There are some discrepancies, but I believe that the narrator is, mostly, Sebald himself.

Dr Henry Selwyn is the first interesting portrait Sebald draws for us. He says brilliant lines like this, More and more, he said, he sensed that Nature itself was groaning and collapsing beneath the burden we placed upon it. But, like a lot of Sebald’s subjects, he was also a lonely man (Since then, almost my only companions have been plants and animals. Somehow or other I seem to get on well with them, said Dr Selwyn with an inscrutable smile, and, rising, he made a gesture that was most unusual for him.). It is a short part, disproportioned to the rest of the novel at only twenty-odd pages, but regardless, interesting, and ends with the reporting of a tragedy.

Paul Bereyter is the narrator’s old school teacher. The study delves first into his own memories of the man, which were my favourite part of the entire novel, I think, and then into facts learnt later in life, after research. Paul Bereyter story begins with tragedy, rather than ends. In fact, Bereyter reminded me of one of my university lecturers, Dr S. Often, as he set us all scrawling away in our pads, he disappeared from the door behind his desk to stand outside. A girl next to me once asked if I knew whether he smoked, and I told her that I couldn’t imagine so. She said, Well what is he doing out there then? I shrugged, Probably just enjoying the fresh air. I believe I was right, it was so in tune with his character to stand outside whenever he possible. It was so similar to Bereyter who is described as standing, whenever he could, in one of the window bays towards the head of the room, half facing the class and half turned to look out, his face at a slightly upturned angle with the sunlight glinting on his glasses. I found the part most moving because of the affinity I felt towards Bereyter, the free-thinker, the unusual, eccentric teacher. I imagined him being melancholic at times, and at other times, enthusiastic and happy as Dr S. is. Once, I was having a tutorial with Dr S. in his office at the university when thunder rumbled, it rolled, like unravelling a giant carpet over the city, over our heads. We both fell quiet. On que, rain began hitting the window, coming down sideways, in such large droplets that it sounded like hail. Possibly it did hail. For a moment, we remained that way, silent, both inclining our heads to look out at the shaking grey clouds before finally Dr S. continued what he was saying and that moment was lost to our memories, never to be mentioned again.

Ambros Adelwarth is an exploration of the narrator’s great-uncle. It is the longest part in the novel. Again, his part is rife with outlandishness, eccentricity, insanity. He says something that is reminiscent of Bereyter, that Since mid May 1969 – I shall have soon been retired for fifteen years – I have spent my life out of doors here, in the boathouse or the apiary, depending on the weather, and I no longer concern myself with what goes on in the so-called real world. No doubt I am now, in some sense, mad. The narrator tracks his great-uncle and his companion, Cosmo, who has a number of mental breakdowns. Cosmo believed a German film that was screened in New York was a labyrinth devised to imprison him and drive him mad, with all its mirror reversals (such a sentence that is so Borges that one remembers that Sebald was greatly influenced by him). Adelwarth once lost Cosmo, only to find him on the top floor of the house, in a room that had been previously locked, standing on a stool, his arms hanging down motionless, staring out at the sea where every now and then, very slowly, steamers passed by; and Adelwarth asked Cosmo what he was doing, and he had responded he wanted to see how his brother was, but he never did have a brother, according to Uncle Adelwarth. More madness, more tragedy; the novel again becomes slightly dizzying or intoxicating to read, to think about, just as Vertigo was before it.

Finally- Max Ferber. The narrator describes meeting him in Manchester in his twenties and then the narrative shifts to the life of Ferber’s mother, as the narrator acquires her memoirs.

Jane Alison's book Meander, Spiral, Explode has a fantastic exploration of this book's structure and themes. Highly recommended.

[Brodolomi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kad bi depresija mogla da bude lepa i kad bi mogla da bude oblikovana rečeničnim nizom, prodavala bi se u supermarketima u vidu „Iseljenika”. Gotovo je nemoralno da ovakve muke budu oblikovane ovako estetski superiorno. Narator, dok skuplja trice i kučine po devastiranoj modernosti našeg sveta, rekonstruiše živote četvorice muškaraca koje je poznavao. Da bi se stekla predstava kakvi su to životi, dovoljno je istaći da se junaci pojedinačno opisuju kao „dekorativni pustinjaci”, osobe koje je „unutrašnja samoća pojela”, koji svakim gestom izražavaju „zahtev za život u odsutnosti” a sa svakim otkucajem srca postaju „neshvatljiviji, bezličniji i apstraktniji”.

Iako bi Nabokov i njegovi memoari „Speak, memory” negde trebalo da budu glavna međutekstualna veza u „Isiljenicima” (doduše kao kontrapunkt ne i po sličnosti), lično nisam mogao da se oslobodim asocjacije na „Vrt Finci Kontinijevih” Đorđa Basanija, verovatno zbog elegičnog tona i stila.

[Barbara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I requested this book from my library after reading a superb review here on Goodreads by Roger Brunyate. Sebald has written fictional biographies of four men, three German and one Russian. The Second World War and the Holocaust are at the center of all their stories. The volume is filled with photographs that give the impression these are true stories rather than creations of the author. They are immensely sad because above all they are about loss - loss of family, home, country and for some, language. Vivid descriptions of lost villages and towns, Jewish enclaves, and ways of life are extremely poignant. The landscapes of alpine Germany, were the most appealing to me, I lived in southern Germany from ages 10-12. My father, an American Army officer, was stationed in Augsburg. He made sure that we had opportunities to explore Bavaria, and although this was decades ago, I recall many of the places we saw.

Sebald's novel doesn't simply extol people and places that are gone. He reminds us that many people we interact with in our lives could have extraordinary pasts that we don't know about. The story of the author's great-uncle Ambrose appears to be simply that of an eccentric man who worked as a servant to wealthy families. But Ambrose's story reveals a man who was the companion, and lover of a wealthy young man whose family he worked for. In the early 20th century, the two men traveled throughout Europe and the Middle East in the guise of employer and servant. Another story of a young man who leaves Germany for Manchester, England, at first seems to be the simple story of a student going abroad for education. However, this happens during World War Two, so the reader soon wonders about the deeper story. What led this man in his early 20's to England and how did he manage to leave Germany? The descriptions of Manchester, a former capital of industry and shipping, were particularly engaging. I am fascinated with places that are ghosts of their former glory, and now decaying. Perhaps I continue to be engrossed by such places after living in New England, where there are scores of former factory towns with immense abandoned complexes. To me, they have always appeared to be haunted by the people and activity that once thrived there. In recent years, such complexes have been refurbished to house small businesses, expensive condos, and museums.

This compact volume is a short read, but one to savour. It is a gem of a book that captures a past, and reminds us to "never forget".

[Graychin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my third Sebald novel (if “novel” is the word). It probably ought to have been my first, and I’d recommend it as a good introduction to Sebald’s special concerns and peculiar style. Those concerns: Memory, first of all, its collection and preservation, and its failure; exile in all its forms; the case of the German people, especially the post-war generation’s attempt to grasp their historical burden; the Holocaust and everything lost in the flames. That style: Cool and meditative, with a professorial distance of perspective, almost Victorian (a la Eliot or James) in artistry and psychological precision. The stories that Sebald wants to tell are never his own. That is to say, they don’t often belong to the narrator. He is only the collector, the naturalist writing from his study, bent with a magnifying glass over a specimen box of human loss. He speaks from a sort of post-apocalyptic precinct, in the shocked silence that follows historical horror. But still the flowers grow: there is a subtle sort of humor, a joy in detail, a sense for the preciousness of fleeting things.

[Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was actually far better and more readable than Ring of Saturn, I thought. The last of the four stories did get a bit hung up on itself and I was expecting more of a tied finish, but there's no fault to find with the threads or the colors, and the piece on his elementary school teacher was truly touching and ranks up there with the best character profiles I've ever read. It's all poignant without being overwrought (again perhaps apart from the rather meandering final piece), it's striking imagery without trying hard for it. There's some pieces that seem Victorian in their grotesque sensibilities and sentimentality, but sheer modernity in their hard, unflinching grey reality. These were real, hand painted scenes you'd pay to be inside of. I'm glad I read another Sebald- it was like a whole different book, in the best way.

[Inderjit Sanghera · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two images flashed through my head when reading Sebald's 'The Emigrants'. The first one was a character's statement that reading his mother’s memoirs was like an evil German fairy tale that once you start reading, you have to carry on reading until your heart breaks; reading 'The Emigrants' is a lot like this, the second one was the constant reappearance of the author Vladimir Nabokov in each narrative; The Emigrants is the retelling of four seemingly disparate Jewish émigrés’ in the twentieth century, yet all of them are linked together via a single them; that of Nabokov. Nabokov's 'Speak, Memory' is mentioned in the book and the book itself is a beautiful, dazzling autobiography dealing with the miracles of life and consciousness, of love and death and of memory, and it's indelibility. Sebald's novel, however, although working on a similar thematic level, deals with four individuals looking to lose their memories, to get rid of them, for these people their memories are links to the past are painful and represent all the suffering and hurt they experienced during their lives, for these four individuals their memories are paradoxically not only the very things that define them, that keep them alive but also the things they most want to get rid of as they are the threads with which their lives hang on a balance, lives which they perhaps do not want to live any more as two of them commit suicide and one of the others who, like Nabokov, had an astonishingly accurate memory, instils himself in a mental institution and undergoes various tortures in order to forget and fade into nothingness, just before he dies he states he is waiting for the "butterfly man" (Nabokov) Yet, despite all this, all of these characters are obsessed with their memories, they relate their life stories or the most important events of their lives to the narrator or friends and although their memories are ones of pain and loss, they are also ones of love and the only link they have to a past which has long disregarded them.

Sebald may not have Nabokov’s lyrical power, his powers of expostulation on the miracle of consciousness, but he has his storytelling abilities. Sebald takes the live of four individuals who to the outside world may be considered cranks, individuals living isolated lifestyles in mental institutions or isolated gardens, individuals suffering from a fear of people and spaces, but he able to imbue them with an individual element, to show their essential humanity and to give the reasons for each individuals sense of loss, the people they have loved and lost during their lives, whether it be fiancés, parents, siblings, friends or lovers, he is able to give sense behind why these people are running away from their memories and yet, ironically, these memories are the only things that have kept these people and the ones they love alive. Yes a lot of their memories are full of hurt and pain, but like in the evil German fairy tales, once you start reading ‘The Emigrants’ you cannot stop till your heart breaks, not only with the suffering caused by memory but also by its joy and immortality.

[Gorkem · Rating 5 out of 5]

Edebiyat dünyasında oldukça önemli bir yere sahip Göçmenler, dört farklı hikaye anlatıcısını kendi yaşam yerlerini değiştirmeleri veya başkalarının anılarına ortak olmaları üstüne kurulu bir kitap. Bu seyir sürecini W.G.Sebald, 20.yy' boyunca içinde alarak, belki de yazılmış en acı, en üzüntülü ve bazen de en sinir bozucu öykülerini yaratırken okurun zihninde kendi zamanını ve geçmişini sorgulatıyor.

İlk olarak 1992 yılında basılan kitap, öncelikle bir anı kitabı değil. Fakat, okur ilk başta Sebald'ın müthiş diliyle böyle olabileceği hissine kapılıyor. Sebald'ın Göçmenleri oluştururken, insanların anılarını dramatik hale getirmek anlatıcılarının ve başkalarının gizemli anılarına ilişkin soruşturmalarının kaydıdır düşüncesiyle oluşturması ve aynı zamanda günümüz dünyasında kaybedilen belleklerimiz ve kendi kişisel tarihimizi kurgulayarak okura post-modern çağ eleştirisini yapıyor.

İçerik:
Kitap dört öyküden oluşuyor:

a.İlk öykü,Dr. Henry Selwin: Bu öyküde kendisini bahçıvanlık işlerine adamış çocuk yaşında kendi ülkesini terk etmek zorunda kalıp, o günün getirdiği koşullara alışamayan bir yaşlı adamı konu alıyor.

b.İkinci öykü, Paul Bereyter: Öyküyü anlatan kişinin öğretmenin intiharı üzerine öğretmeni ile ilgili olan anıları araştırmaya adayan bir öykü. Açıkcası beni en fazla etkileyen öykülerden biriydi.

c.Üçüncü öykü, Ambros Adelwarth: II.Dünya Savaşı arifesinden önce Almanya'dan New Jersey'e göç eden yahudi bir aileyi konu alıyor.Öyküye adını veren Ambros Adelwarth'ın bu süreci sonrasında yaşadığı psikolojik buhranları anlatıyor.

d.Dördüncü öykü, Max Ferber: Hikaye anlatıcısının Manchester'dan İngiltere'ye yolculuğu esnasında tanıştığı ressam olan Max Ferber'in hikayesi. Nazi Almanyası, yalnızlık, pişmanlık temalarının en ağır işlendiği kitabın en yürek burkan öykülerinden biri.

Sonuç:

Göçmenler, Sebald'ın okuduğum ilk kitabı. Ve açıkcası bu kadar karamsar ve üzücü öyküleri, bu kadar duru ve abartmadan sanki gerçekten hikayeyi anlatan kişiden dinliyormuşçasına okuyucuya sunmasına , diline ve en önemlisi okurun görsel algısını da fotoğraflarla desteklemesine hayran oldum. Anılar ve göç etme temalarını müthiş şekilde harmanlamış edebi bir eser.

İyi okumalar dilerim.

10/9

[Lito · Rating 4 out of 5]

Πρώτη επαφή με τον W.G.Sebald με τους "ξεριζωμένους".
Ένα ιδιαίτερο ανάγνωσμα που συνδυάζει αυτοβιογραφία, ιστορία, ταξιδιωτική αφήγηση, μυθοπλασία, εικονογραφημένο, με φωτογραφίες όμως ασχολίαστες.
Η μνήμη και η απώλεια οι πρωταγωνιστές.
4 ιστορίες, 4 Εβραίοι που αυτοεξορίζονται για να βρουν καλύτερη τύχη, αλλά παραμένουν "ξεριζωμένοι", μακριά απ'ό,τι αγάπησαν και ό,τι τους ήταν οικείο. Κάνουν ό,τι μπορούν για να πετύχουν, για να χτίσουν μια καινούργια ζωή, αλλά κάτι μέσα τους τους κατατρώει και σταδιακά τους απομακρύνει απο την πραγματικότητα. Εν τέλει αυτοεξορίζονται και από τον καινούργιο τους τόπο, απο την καινούργια τους ζωή.
Μια λογοτεχνία χαμηλών τόνων αλλά τόσο "δυνατή". Μια καινούργια ματιά στην αποτύπωση των βάρβαρων αυτών χρόνων που στοίχειωσαν την Ευρώπη.
Στην αρχή ομολογώ με κούρασε όλη αυτή η λεπτομερής περιγραφή...
κλείνοντας το βιβλίο, εντέλει, νοιώθω συγκλονισμένη!
Προσπαθώ να καταλάβω τι ακριβώς συνέβη...

[sigurd · Rating 5 out of 5]

ho letto e riletto in questi ultimi anni Gli emigrati di W.G.Sebald. non è un libro che apparentemente avrebbe potuto piacermi, e infatti la lettura di ogni capitolo è stata intervallata da altre letture, salvo poi ritornare ad essa e riassaporare quella gravitas, quella malinconia unita, come ha detto di lui Michael Silverblatt, a una giocosità, una certa generosità d'animo. Tutto questo rende questo libro, e i libri in generale di Sebald, di un altro tempo, in un altro tempo. Le sue immagini si allargano e creano un effetto allucinatorio, per quanto mite, nel cervello del lettore: gli occhi di alcuni uccelli notturni replicano quelli di oscuri filosofi; la stazione di Anversa sembra quella di una fortezza, descritta con precisione architettonica. Sebald si guarda indietro e dona al passato quella vivacità che soliamo promettere al futuro. C'è sempre un appuntamento delle cose, che presto accadrà, nel passato delle sue storie.
Gli emigrati è un libro con una struttura singolare, diversa da altri suoi libri precedenti. Sebald ha parlato di "narrativa documentaristica", forse perché è un libro formato da racconti per cui ha dovuto fare delle ricerche, ha dovuto chiacchierare con molte persone, ritornare sui suoi luoghi familiari. Quattro racconti che hanno lunghezze differenti, via via crescenti. L'ultimo, il più lungo, è ambientato a Manchester, la città nella quale Sebald andò a vivere appena arrivato in Inghilterra. E' molto bello questo racconto perché c'è una presa di consapevolezza sulla questione ebraica, che poi esploderà nell'ultimo libro "Austerlitz". per la prima volta Sebald si rende conto che gli ebrei esistono. Fino agli anni '60, in Germania non se ne parlava troppo dell'Olocausto, era un tabù. In Germania non c'erano più ebrei e imbattersi in uno di questi significava fare un'esperienza quasi aliena. "non sapevo chi fossero" dice Sebald in un'intervista "E così, quando sono andato a Manchester, all'improvviso eccoli tutti intorno a me, perché Manchester ha una comunità ebraica molto estesa, e concentrata in alcuni quartieri: il luogo dove vivevo era appunto uno di quei posti pieni di ebrei. anche il mio padrone di casa era ebreo. non parlavamo di quanto era accaduto, io non affrontavo l'argomento, e lui neppure. tutti evitavamo di parlarne. finché la moglie del mio padrone di casa, una vera, bravissima donna inglese, una volta mi ha detto «lo sa che Peter viene da Monaco?». E non sapevo che farmene di questa informazione. ma infine, vent'anni dopo, sono tornato e gli ho parlato. ed è così che è venuto fuori che da bambini andavamo a sciare nello stesso posto, il che mi ha fatto pensare. E' la realtà a colpire. Che quell'uomo avesse lasciato le tracce degli sci sulla stessa neve, sulle stesse colline. Sono lezioni di storia di tipo diverso. Non si trovano nei libri".
Mi commuovono la voce e gli occhi di Sebald; la sua attenzione capillare, infinitesima per le leggère, capitali lezioni della realtà, e altrettanto la sua disposizione nell'accoglierle. Ricordo che, a proposito dell'ultima pagina de Gli anelli di Saturno sui bachi da seta e i riti funebri, disse che gli era stata donata dalla lettura del Times la mattina in cui la scrisse, eppure è una pagina perfetta, sembra incastonata in maniera lucidissima e razionale in quel fiume di parole. C'è in lui un atteggiamento fideistico. i suoi libri sono costruiti con una misura eccezionale, prosastica, ma c'è sempre quel particolare, quell'incrocio di cose che sembra sia stato donato a lui solo. come accade con i poeti e con i mistici. Quell'intuizione che noi non avremmo avuto mai perché il nostro peccato è la superbia e la presunzione. E invece, come dice Cristo, solo i miti e gli umili erediteranno la terra.