| The Emigrants | |
|---|---|
American paperback edition, New Directions Publishing (1997) |
|
| Author(s) | W. G. Sebald |
| Original title | Die Ausgewanderten |
| Country | Germany |
| Language | German |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Vito von Eichborn GmbH & Co |
| Publication date | 1992 |
| Published in English |
1996 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 354 |
| ISBN | 3821842938 |
The Emigrants (German: Die Ausgewanderten) is a 1992 novel by the German writer W. G. Sebald. It won the Berlin Literature Prize, the Literatur Nord Prize, and the Johannes Bobrowski Medal.
Contents |
The Emigrants is a novel in which Sebald discusses research into the lives of four different characters, each of whom had some sort of interaction with the narrator, presumed to be Sebald. 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. It is divided into four sections, each focusing on a different person
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.
Paul Bereyter was Sebald'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 Sebald obtains most of his information about Bereyter.
The author'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. 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.
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.
The character Max Aurach's last name, which is close to the name of his real-world inspiration, Frank Auerbach, was changed to Ferber in English translations.a
|
|||||