Reading the 20th Century discussion

Welcome to our June 2025 group read of....


The Emigrants (1992)

by

W.G. Sebald


Everyone is welcome

Come and get involved


At first The Emigrants appears simply to document the lives of four Jewish émigrés 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 and fiction and photographs.

I've got a copy of this now. Also came across some interesting related articles - but beware spoilers:

https://brickmag.com/an-interview-wit...

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-...

https://lithub.com/on-the-paradox-of-...

Thanks for these, Alwynne. I'm looking forward to reading this book in June. I loved Austerlitz.

I'm also looking forward to this. My favourite Sebald so far is The Rings of Saturn - maybe because it was my first introduction to the unique, slippery and dense writing style that Sebald made his own.

I started this yesterday, and am already intrigued by the connections I see between the first section and the opening pages of the second. I wonder if they will continue into the third and fourth sections.

So far, the style doesn't seem particularly dense to me, for which I'm glad, since I've got a couple of books in progress that require complete concentration.

Maybe dense is not quite the right word - the books of his I've read can seem straightforward on the surface but then another story shimmers into being almost out of the corner of the eye.

Roman Clodia wrote: "Maybe dense is not quite the right word - the books of his I've read can seem straightforward on the surface but then another story shimmers into being almost out of the corner of the eye."

That's a good way to put what I am sensing in this. My sense is that one of the mechanisms for that other story is in the little details that recur between the sections, but as I'm only on page 45, it's too early for me to be sure.

Is this your first Sebald, G?

Yes. He’s been on my TBR for a few years, though.

I’ve started this and am loving it. My impression so far is that it will be a quick easy read, but also profoundly moving. I’ll say more when I’m back at a computer and not on my phone

I am sorry to say my library does not offer The Emigrants. I enjoyed Austerlitz.

That's a shame Rachel

I've read the profiles of Dr Henry Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, and am now immersed in Ambros Adelwarth


They have been progressively more powerful which is saying something as the opening profile was truly beguiling though with slightly less haunting tragedy despite landing powerfully.

All the stories focus on displacement, loss, and memory but those which explicitly rub up against World War 2 hit me hardest.

Paul Bereyter, who sounded such a fabulous individual, deserved so much better and I was very moved by his story

Ambros Adelwarth has made his way into my dreams. What a tale. Absolutely extraordinary.

As with other Sebald books we get occasional photographs, often of people and places, which add another layer of complexity to the narrative, and evoke a sense of the past by creating a visual connection to the characters' lives. 

I am also left wondering how much is fact and how much is fiction.

Either way, it all reminds me of how those of us who live in a safe and predictable environment are truly blessed. To become disconnected from your roots is a hell of a wrench and finding that sense of belonging and identity in a new alien environment must be so challenging.

I'm now well into the final emigrant - Max Ferber - a painter the narrator befriends in Manchester


The narrators descriptions of his early impressions of Manchester are superb

Another Sebald masterclass

I'm hoping to finish my current read today then will make a start on this Sebald.

Hurrah - you'll probably still finish it before me

I'm maybe a quarter of the way into the Max Ferber section, and the paragraphs about Manchester early in the section that evoked Kristalnacht and the bombings of German cities brought me to tears.

Yes, me too


Paul Bereyter's story was also very moving

I realize that I have history brain, but I find anachronisms very distracting.
I can live—with some difficulty— with the improbability of a teenaged Max Ferber flying to Britain, but using an airline that didn’t exist in 1939 is painful.

Well done for noticing


As always with WGS, it’s hard to know how much is fiction

I think we must assume it is mainly fiction despite appearances to the contrary

Nigeyb wrote: "Well done for noticing


As always with WGS, it’s hard to know how much is fiction

I think we must assume it is mainly fiction despite appearances to the contrary"

For me it doesn't matter whether it's fiction or memoir: it's still painful anachronism.

Sometimes it's Sebald 's technique to create a deliberate mistake or anachronism to jarr the reader - it's unlikely, knowing him, to be simple error.

I'm about to start so am commenting with no knowledge of this book, just from what I know of Sebald's work.

Not about the book, but has anybody been to the Tenement Museum in New York? I haven't, but love specialized, small museums like this.

G wrote: "For me it doesn't matter whether it's fiction or memoir: it's still painful anachronism."

That's a shame. No fun being jarred from being immersed in a book.

It dosen't bother me especially when, as in this case, it's not purporting to be an accurate factual account"


Roman Clodia wrote: "Sometimes it's Sebald 's technique to create a deliberate mistake or anachronism to jarr the reader - it's unlikely, knowing him, to be simple error"

I think you're probably right


Scott wrote: "Not about the book, but has anybody been to the Tenement Museum in New York?"

Not me


I should finish this the next time I pick it


Overall I have really enjoyed it. A four star read. What about you G? You haven't said much about your feelings and response to what you have read

Nigeyb wrote: "As always with WGS, it’s hard to know how much is fiction

I think we must assume it is mainly fiction despite appearances to the contrary"

Yes, definitely - Sebald saw himself as a fiction writer, not a historian.

Some nods to the slipperiness of his narrative that I've come across so far:

- the chateau that looks as if it's a duplicate of Versailles from a distance but which is 'an utterly pointless counterfeit' when looked at up close.

- the photos that Dr Selwyn shows the narrator and his wife: 'one of the shots resembled, even in detail, a photograph of Nabokov in the mountains above Gstaad that I had clipped from a Swiss magazine a few days before. Strangely enough, both Edwin and Dr Selwyn made a distinctly youthful impression on the pictures they showed us, though at the time they made the trip, exactly ten years earlier, they were already in their late sixties'. And a bit later, 'neither Edwin nor Dr Selwyn was willing or able to make any remark concerning these pictures.'

- later in this section, someone is 'distinguishing for the first time between dream and reality'.

- And the narrator: 'at that point, as I recall, or perhaps merely imagine'...

- on recalling Paul Bereyer: 'this, as I have come to realize, was merely a fabrication of our minds'.

The mention of Nabokov feels especially significant given his own playfulness in fictional narrative and the unreliability of memory.

You know those odd coincidences? I've just come across Sebald's use of the phrase 'wrongful trespass' which Zadie Smith used in an essay I read over the weekend about the issue of 'own voices' and only writing from what you know vs. the imaginative and empathetic ability to walk in someone different's shoes. Both writers try to distinguish between 'cultural appropriation' and this 'wrongful trespass' vs. creating silos of narrow identity that are there to exclude people rather than create communality. Zadie puts it far more eloquently and in more thoughtful detail than my brief summary here! But it's interesting timing to come across this originary phrase in Sebald.

I love reading your musings RC


You notice so much and can contextualise it thereby adding more powerful insights

👏🏼


Cultural appropriation &. Wrongful trespass - brilliant, and not come across WT before

On the issue of verisimilitude, with one of the photos in the Paul Bereyer section the narrator says it almost could be the class he taught - but it clearly isn't the actual class.

Also, I've noticed how many stories are told at one remove from the narrator, as someone else recounts the life of the subject. So there's lots of space to ask questions about what is fact, what is fiction.

But I think Sebald doesn't see those as a hierarchy - he doesn't see literary narrative as subservient or inferior to historical facts. One of his concerns seems to be with what is not spoken - and so fiction can offer to fill a space that facts do not, an emotional truth regardless of whether the photos or stories are authentic or not.

An emotional truth is spot on. I had a powerful sense of that throughout the book

Roman Clodia wrote: "Nigeyb wrote: "As always with WGS, it’s hard to know how much is fiction

I think we must assume it is mainly fiction despite appearances to the contrary"

Yes, definitely - Sebald saw himself as a..."

Exactly, memory and its uncertainties are key themes in his work, which also raises questions about what is/isn't significant, relations between memory, history and identity etc And Nabokov is central to this novel particularly his interest in butterflies and the image of the hunter chasing an elusive butterfly - which can also stand in for the past, memory and so on...

Thanks Alwynne. It’s an education with you and RC

Yes, Nabokov has appeared in the three sections I've read so far - another famous emigrant, but perhaps as important for his literary aesthetics.

There are also gardens and flowers in each section - are they the consolation and balance against so much melancholy and despair? They can't seem to be an effective counterbalance given the suicides.

I found the Ithaka scenes in the third section hard to read. I need some Jeeves now to lift me up!

I'm only two sections in but following up on the story being told in a remove from the narrator, but the reader another remove from that which has us as readers reacting not only to the story but the narrator's reaction to the story. Sebald has an interesting approach and I am curious if his narrator develops more emotional response this subject as Sebald expands the elements of story that are increasing our own emotional response.

Sam wrote: "...and I am curious if his narrator develops more emotional response this subject "

I'm not sure he does but interested in what others think.

Did anyone else find a quiet understated humour at the dinner served in the first part? Asparagus with spinach, and rhubarb, clearly from the garden.

Roman Clodia wrote: "Yes, Nabokov has appeared in the three sections I've read so far - another famous emigrant, but perhaps as important for his literary aesthetics.

There are also gardens and flowers in each sectio..."

I noticed how many of the gardens and flowers (as well as buildings) were damaged, neglected, falling down, or barely inhabited/habitable. I took that as saying something about the experience of being in exile--or possibly more about being the one who survived because of the exile--which all these figures are.

The butterfly man is in the 4th section also. I've not read Nabokov, so thank you all for the observations about him.

G wrote: "I noticed how many of the gardens and flowers (as well as buildings) were damaged, neglected, falling down, or barely inhabited/habitable."

This, from my reading of two other Sebalds, is a common theme - or perhaps vision is a better term - of his, where he sees corruption and decay as an inevitable process and everywhere. If I recall correctly, the eponymous rings of Saturn are the shattered remains of other stars and, for him, what happened in Germany (he was born in 1944) overshadows (or undershadows?) his whole understanding of humanity, its dark and corrupt heart, if you will.

The other thing worth noting is the shifting 'I' - because, as we've noticed, there are layers of inset narratives without quotation marks, the 'I' of the narrative can be different people at different times. So as well as Sebald-the-author and Sebald-the-narrator, we have a series of other narrators stepping forward to tell their stories or those of the character the text is pursuing at any moment, before fading out again. This also helps confuse the boundaries between 'history' and 'fiction', and also foregrounds memory and the collapsing of time.

I find Sebald an author who goes out of his way to produce texts which seem quite straightforward on the surface but which use literary and formal qualities and techniques with masterly thoughtfulness and care.

Roman Clodia wrote:


"Did anyone else find a quiet understated humour at the dinner served in the first part? Asparagus with spinach, and rhubarb, clearly from the garden"

Yes indeed

And lest we forget the glimpse of all those dolls!

This is interesting from the Max Ferber section, Ferber himself speaking:

'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. All of them are dressed in the style of the Thirties'.

G wrote: "I can live—with some difficulty— with the improbability of a teenaged Max Ferber flying to Britain, but using an airline that didn’t exist in 1939 is painful"

Ah, I've just got to this part. I'm not sure I understand why you think this is improbable - Max's family had the money to bribe an official for a visa for the boy and hoped to follow him.

Also, Luft Hansa did exist from about the 1920s. When war broke out after Max left it became part of the Luftwaffe and then was broken up under the Allies' denazification after the war. It was reconstituted as the national carrier in the 1950s.

Oh, did you mean the BEA flight from Frankfurt to London?

This may be a controversial opinion but after reading two Sebalds before this, it seems to me that he's essentially writing the same book each time.

This one is perhaps the least sophisticated in terms of form with its four sequential mini fictional biographies. The later books are more innovative in their approach to their subject matter but the enigmatic photos, the shifting layered 'I' voice, the inability to move past the Holocaust (and I'm not dismissing that - it's at the heart of European postmodernism) which haunts the present out of the past, the sense of people damaged and essentially isolated or hollowed out, is similar in each book, as is the quiet, profoundly elegiac and melancholic tone.

Here's my review which explains more why this was 3-stars in comparison to the two later Sebald books I've read:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Roman Clodia wrote: "Oh, did you mean the BEA flight from Frankfurt to London?"

Yes. And my reservations about the flight are more that flying was pretty uncommon in the 30's, as well as very expensive. Usually even wealthy people took the train--at least, that's always been my understanding. I don't see a reason why Ferber would have flown. Since he's getting away in an extra-legal manner it seems to me that flying would attract attention in a way that taking the train would not.
Your observation that Sebald sometimes includes deliberate mistakes or anachronisms is helpful.

I love it when you're controversial RC


Your review makes a coherent and compelling case

Still, a powerful and moving novel that contains much to ponder

G wrote: "Your observation that Sebald sometimes includes deliberate mistakes or anachronisms is helpful"

He does but I was less sure, when I got to it, that the BEA flight was one. There's so much specificity about the various planes, the carrier, the plane type, even the name. So I wasn't sure if the implication was that this was such a significant moment for 15 year old Max that every detail was seared on his memory - or, because it was so significant, he's been building up a narrative around it all his life.

Either way, the scene where he says goodbye to his parents at the airport not knowing that he would never see them again is a haunting one.

On your misgivings, his family were wealthy business owners (until forced to pass assets over to an 'Aryan' owner) and it was before the war so his visa was the result of bribery, probably to jump the queue, but was legal as I understood it.

But memory is unreliable and this was a 70-something man reconstructing an event from over fifty years before, albeit one at the centre of who he thought he was.

Nigeyb wrote: "Still, a powerful and moving novel that contains much to ponder"

Absolutely, and I don't want to take anything away from this. Sebald is clearly thinking about how to to write his material, and that becomes more elliptical but also more sophisticated in the later books.

I loved the eccentricities and oddness of the characters in Rings of Saturn and the glimpses of the Holocaust were so fleeting that I almost wondered if I'd imagined them to begin with.

Still, no regrets at all on reading this - I found the third story of Ambros Adelwarth particularly impactful, the way he puts himself into Ithaka in order to wipe out his own memories...

Going back to the issue of 'wrongful trespass', I've seen a few reviews that mention Sebald was not Jewish and was a German who was born in 1944 so didn't experience the war personally. I have the sense that this weighs on him, and he questions to what extent this is his story to tell. Even his 'exile' from Germany was completely voluntary - he came to the UK to do postgraduate work and then settled at UEA.

Perhaps this is why Sebald wants to tell the experiences of the Holocaust at arm's length from his narrator?

It's a sensitive topic of whose story and whose is it to tell, that's why I was so interested so see it picked up by Zadie Smith. I'm sure we can all think of examples of badly done cultural appropriation or just lack of understanding (male authors writing female characters or vice versa, for example). I don't feel misgivings with Sebald but as I'm neither Jewish nor have any Holocaust family connections, what do I know?

Great points RC


Writing is, in part, an act of imagination and a tool for empathy

I have no issue with a writer tackling topics of which they have no personal connection, especially - as in the case of WGS - it's done so well

I hadn't realised he wasn't Jewish. I assumed he was. The news that he isn't makes no difference to my feelings about his work which I often find particularly powerful

I tend to come down on the same side as you but there are plenty of examples of failures of imagination or imagination constrained by politics and ideology that we could cite.

A prime example is Mammy, the Black maid in Gone With the Wind, who is shown to essentially think that chattel slavery is no bad thing.

It is a complicated issue and one with all kinds of ethical and aesthetic implications. I like that Sebald questions himself - as does Zadie Smith - so it's a thoughtful and self-conscious imagining.

That function of literature to allow us to experience lives beyond our own with empathy is especially under attack at the moment: the latest export from the US far right is the idea that compassion is not just over-rated but suicidal. No wonder they're banning books.

You are all far ahead of me in the book so I’m reading the comments lightly until I get further.

I find the style absorbing although it takes some thought to burrow through the syntax and digest the imagery. But one thing that strikes me about the writing is the frequent use of contradictory terms within a single statement, like Henry Selwyn being tall and broad-shouldered but seeming quite stocky, even short. Or his movements seemed at once awkward and yet perfectly poised.

The same style is repeated in the next portrait, Paul Beretyet, which I’m reading now.

Trying to find the truth in the contradiction or the reason for the opposing terms intrigues me. Any thoughts?