The Emigrants (Sebald novel)

The Emigrants
American paperback edition, New Directions Publishing (1997)
Author(s)	W. G. Sebald
Original title	Die Ausgewanderten
Country	Germany
Language	German
Genre(s)	Semi-autobiographical narratives
Publisher	Vito von Eichborn
Publication date	1992
Published in English	1996
Media type	Print
Pages	354
ISBN	3821842938

The Emigrants (German: Die Ausgewanderten) is a 1992 collection of narratives by the German writer W. G. Sebald. It won the Berlin Literature Prize, the Literatur Nord Prize, and the Johannes Bobrowski Medal.

Summary

In The Emigrants Sebald's narrator recounts his involvement with and the life stories of four different characters, all of whom are German emigrants (to England and the United States). As with most of Sebald's work, the text includes many black and white, unlabeled photographs and strays sharply from general formats of plot and narrative.

Dr. Henry Selwyn is the estranged husband of Sebald's landlady, who fought in the First World War and has a propensity for gardening and tending to animals. He confides in Sebald about his family's immigration to England from Lithuania, and suspects that it is this secretive, alien past that helped dissolve his relationship with his wife. He commits suicide.

Paul Bereyter was the narrator's childhood teacher in a town referenced in the text only as "S". A quarter Jewish, he found employment difficult in the period leading up to the Second World War, although he eventually served in the Wehrmacht. Teaching in the small school after the war, Bereyter found a passion for his students while living a lonely, quiet life. In later years, his eyesight began to fail and he moved to France, where he met and spent much time with Mme Landau, from whom the narrator obtains most of his information about Bereyter.

The narrator's great uncle, Ambros Adelwarth, was the travelling companion of an affluent young aviator gifted with much luck at gambling and a wayward attitude towards life. In his youth, he accompanied this man across Europe, and into Turkey and Asia Minor, before his companion fell ill and was sent to a mental institution. Afterwards, Adelwarth was the butler of the young man's family, living on Long Island until their death.

As a young man in Manchester the narrator befriends an expatriate German-Jewish painter, Max Aurach (supposedly based on Sebald's real-world inspiration, Frank Auerbach, and renamed Ferber in the English translation). Years later the artist gives the narrator his mother's history of her idyllic life as a girl in a Bavarian village. It was written as she and her husband awaited deportation to the East and death. This section is written as a gradual discovery on the narrator's part of the effects of the Holocaust on Aurach and his family.

Themes

The work is concerned very much with memory and feelings of foreignness. In two awkward scenes, Dr. Selwyn, whom the narrator does not know very well, confesses memories about his earlier life. He tells the story of a man he met in Switzerland in the time immediately prior to World War I, and how he felt a deeper companionship with this man than he ever did his wife. He also divulges how his family emigrated from Lithuania as a young boy, and tries to get the narrator to reveal how he feels being an emigrant from Germany living in England.

Bereyter is also portrayed as an outsider, even whilst living in his native Germany. As a Jew, he is a second-class citizen, and after the war, he is an intellectual living in a small provincial town.

Each of the section-title characters is an emigrant who left Germany (or a Germanised community). Sebald discusses how each left their native country and what they have become in their new lands. How much of Germany and emigration remains with them as they slide towards death under foreign skies? The narrator, whose biography appears similar to that of the author, is also an emigrant but his story is less explicit.

References

• Horskotte, Silke. "Pictorial and Verbal Discourse in W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants". http://www.uiowa.edu/~ijcs/mediation/medhorstkotte.htm
• Curtin, Adrian and Maxim D. Shrayer. "Netting the Butterfly Man: The Significance of Vladimir Nabokov in W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants." http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/brill/raa/2005/00000009/F0020003/art00004