From the Archives . . . The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald
“Again and again, from front to back and from back to front, I leafed through the album that afternoon, and since then I have returned to it time and again, because, looking at the pictures in it, it truly seemed to me, and still does, as if the dead were coming back, or as if we were on the point of joining them” (The Emigrants, pp. 45-46).
A much-praised book, The Emigrants by W. G. Sebald was first published in German in 1992 and appeared in an English translation in 1996. It is a story of exile and its mediations: the ways in which exile is both experienced and narrated. As the book’s back cover states, “the narrator retraces routes of exile which lead from Lithuania to London, from Munich to Manchester, from the South German provinces to Switzerland, France, New York, Constantinople, and Jerusalem.” While the protagonists in this account are mostly Jews displaced and dispersed during the first half of the twentieth century, arguably the book has far wider resonance and relevance in our own time. As the subject of exile, deportation, and forced returns regains tragic potency for many in 2025 and beyond, Sebald’s haunting portrait of emigrants is history repeating itself. Against the human ability to forget even the most outrageous acts against fellow human beings, Sebald’s book is about remembrance and the desire to get to the heart of the exile and emigrant experience.
The black-and-white photographs interspersed throughout Sebald’s account stand as sentinels to ward off forgetting. They add a concreteness to the personalities described, whose sensibilities would otherwise seem wispy and fragile. Many of the images are of building exteriors and interiors of homes, but empty of human presence, as though to signify the disappearance that is part of the DNA of exile and deportation. Sebald makes use of a range of media – letters and family albums, newspaper accounts or obituaries, as well as modes of transport such as railways and railway tracks, boats, ships, and airplanes to convey the mobilities that mark his emigrants.
Through first-person narration, the author both underscores and tantalizes the question of identity – his own (the narrator remains nameless) and those of the four emigrants he sets out to learn about. The book recounts a journey of (partial) revelation of four figures who are the eponymous “emigrants”: Dr Henry Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, Ambrose Adelwarth, and Max Ferber. All are shadowy, even ghostly figures, for beyond a point, they are reluctant, or unable, to communicate their inner lives and thoughts. Their stories are told to the narrator either in bits and pieces by themselves, or by someone who knew them. Weaving description and reminiscence, Sebald mimics the work of memory, with its gaps and elisions, and our need to shut the door on the most painful incidents of our lives.
The first story, the shortest of the four, is set in Norwich, England, where the narrator meets Dr Henry Selwyn whose house he rents briefly. Selwyn, now in his 80s, has taken to spending most of his time in his garden that he does not tend, but allows to be overgrown and untamed. Through their conversations, his past is revealed, although not in great detail. We do learn, however, that he was born a Lithuanian Jew, had been driven from his homeland at age seven, and did not regain contact with his family afterwards. This memory now haunts him and another close connection with a mountain guide on a trip to the Alps. He is the first of the four emigrants who, overcome with loneliness and grief, takes his own life.
The narrator’s old school teacher, Paul Bereyter, in the second story is described more vividly. For instance, “He [Paul] read and read – Altenberg, Trakl, Wittgenstein, Friedell, Hasenclever, Toller, Tucholsky, Klaus Mann, Ossietzky, Benjamin, Koestler and Zweig; almost all of them writers who had taken their own lives or had been close to doing so” (p. 58). Mme. Landau, Bereyter’s landlady, has kept his notebooks, “black oilcloth books, as if Paul had been gathering evidence, the mounting weight of which, as his investigations proceeded, finally convinced him that he belonged to the exiles and not to the people of S” (pp 58-9). We get the impression of a brilliant man tormented by people who did not see past his ethnicity and ignored his predicament.
The last two stories are about the narrator’s great-uncle Ambrose Adelwarth, and a painter named Max Ferber. Adelwarth’s life is described in much detail, and revealed through photos in family albums. Having emigrated to the U.S. at age fourteen, he holds a number of jobs and eventually becomes a sort of caretaker in a rich household. Through relatives’ accounts and photographs, a portrait emerges of a highly talented, kind and resourceful young man. But Ambrose too succumbs to unarticulated pain in later life, as in “the more Uncle Adelwarth told his stories, the more desolate he became. After Christmas ‘52 he fell into such a deep depression that, although he plainly felt a great need to talk about his life, he could no longer shape a single sentence nor utter a single word, or any sound at all” (pp. 102-3). Checking into a mental institution, he becomes a willing victim of the injuries caused by early electrotherapy shocks administered at the hospital.
Max Ferber, whose parents sent him away to England at an early age and were themselves deported to a death camp in Germany, is haunted by memories that he cannot quite explain. Here is how the narrator finds him in his studio:
Time and again, at the end of a working day, I marvelled to see that Ferber, with the few lines and shadows that had escaped annihilation, had created a portrait of great vividness. And all the more did I marvel when, the following morning, . . . he would erase the portrait yet again, and once more set about excavating the features of his model, who by now was distinctly wearied by this manner of working, from a surface already badly damaged by the continual destruction. The facial features and eyes, said Ferber, remained ultimately unknowable for him. He might reject as many as forty variants, or smudge them back into the paper and overdraw new attempts upon them; and if he then decided that the portrait was done, not so much because he was convinced that it was finished as through sheer exhaustion, an onlooker might well feel that it had evolved from a long lineage of grey, ancestral faces, rendered unto ash but still there, as ghostly presences, on the harried paper (p. 162).
The Emigrants is a sad book about sad and damaged people. But like all great works, it invites a reinterpretation. Reading the book now makes me see these portraits quite differently – of humans who, against all odds, were incredibly courageous in wrestling with memories of loss, trauma, and displacement. When the narrator encounters them, they are all in their later years, having led meaningful lives in their places of settlement. There is none of the romanticization of the typical exile story in these portraits, nor is this a sentimental journey into Sebald’s own family history. Rather, Sebald reminds us that human beings are complicated, that the past is never the past, and that we have an obligation to tell each other’s stories.
Washington DC Feb 2025