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The road to exile of four men. One is a teacher, fired by the Nazis from his job for having a Jewish ancestor, then inducted into the German army. Of the others, all Jews, one is a surgeon who commits suicide as he is unable to assimilate into British society, a second is an artist, a third becomes a butler in New York.

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thorold Two accounts of exile bridging fiction and non-fiction

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59 reviews
It has been many years since I read Sebald and I had forgotten how melancholy his writing is. That he is talented is without question. This recounting of the (fictional) lives of four German emigrants is almost unrelentingly depressing. The four stories that Sebald constructs are, for the most part, quite believable…even to the point of making me wonder on occasion if he isn’t simply telling non-fiction stories. But each one also has a few twists that struck me as not quite believable and reiterated that this is, in fact, fiction. Each story, in its way, addresses concerns of trauma and isolation, memory and belonging. I am not quite certain what it is about Sebald’s voice (in addition to his settings) that makes the overall show more effect so cheerless but I find it both consistent and compelling, in its way. One point that I think is essential to make is that the translation (into British, as opposed to U.S., English) is superb. I can’t read German and so have no way to compare but I find that Michael Hulse’s rendering is really quite extraordinary. show less
Published in 1992, this book tells the separate stories of four people known by the unnamed narrator (possibly a stand-in for the author). Taken together, they reflect the impact of historical forces in the aftermath of WWII. The first story focuses on the narrator’s friend, Dr. Selwyn, an emigrant to London from Lithuania. The second tells of the narrator’s primary schoolteacher, Paul Bereyter, who fights in the German Army despite being a quarter Jewish. The third relates the story of the narrator’s Great Uncle Ambros Adelwarth, who emigrated to America. The fourth deals with the narrator’s friend, Max Ferber, an artist, whose work has grown in popularity when the two meet after two and a half decades apart.

Though the show more Holocaust is never specifically mentioned, it looms in the background of these characters’ lives. The stories are interspersed with photographs and journal entries. The tone is melancholic. Common themes include memory, cultural displacement, loneliness, the lingering impact of traumatic events on a person’s mental health. The writing is almost mesmerizing in its somber beauty. It is a book that kept me looking for subtle connections among the four stories. It is a memorable work. show less
I admit to being somewhat puzzled as I was reading by how this came to be considered such a masterpiece by many authors I admire and respect. Not a book for me to read on a sleepy evening, I appreciated the prose, long paragraphs, and seeming digressions much more with the clear eyes of morning. And even now--though I gave it 3 stars--I am beginning to feel the ways in which this may stay with me for a long time, with its beautifully realistic investigation into how much (or little) we can know about another's life.
I have had copies of both Rings of Saturn and The Emigrants by W.G. Sebald hanging around for so long, and weighing more heavily each day as my procrastination continued, that Damocles must have given up by now and made an appointment with his bladesmith to make him a replacement sword. I don’t know why I have been so reticent to make the leap but I finally cracked open The Emigrants (Vintage Classics) to experience for myself the genius of Sebald. It was jolly good - very well written but not a lot happened. There. I guess if Susan Sontag described it as ‘a book of excruciating sobriety…’ I should have known what to expect. For some it’s an exquisite masterpiece, for me, it jars my brain a bit.
Reading The Emigrants is to allow oneself to be ushered into a diffuse world centered around a definite, yet rarely named emotional core. I found it hard to think of this work in isolation from others of Sebald's oeuvre, and missed some of the explicit transhistorical themes. Yet, I am left with an acute feeling of longing for the lives of the characters and the underlying sorrow of the narrator's project to capture and sustain their life experiences.
4.5 Sebald’s books always take me a while to warm up to, and this was no exception, but as usual I got there. This work has the stories of four individuals, each of whom emigrated at some point. Each individual is the sum of their history, so Sebald delves into not only the individual’s past, but often that of their families- in one case his own, in another one of his old schoolteachers, in others chance associates. As he interviews the people, or their acquaintances and families, and snaps his odd little photos, he convinces them to not only share their own and the character's pasts, often their journals, pictures and more. Long passages from diaries are included and are simply extraordinary. He cuts and pastes his own thoughts and show more experiences and feelings with those of his cast and the output is set of amazing lives, from rich polo playboys touring the middle east to a skyscraper roofing metal worker, to a victim of the US mental health viciousness of the 1960’s, to the ghetto of Nazi Germany and rural England. The depth of Sebald’s research and the manner in which he melds all these tales is quite incredible. show less
Is it fiction? Is it documentary literature? It’s a little bit of both and the impression of something hybrid is even strengthened by the many black-and-white photos that are inserted into the text without explanation or description. W.G. Sebald’s book “The Emigrants” (“Die Ausgewanderten”) is maybe the masterpiece of this author who came to England in 1966 and who spend the rest of his life as a lecturer and professor teaching at universities in England. His career as a prose writer (in his native German language) started when he was already in his mid-fourties.

“The Emigrants” is a collection of four long stories. Dr. Henry Selwyn, born as Hersch Seweryn in a shtetl near Grodno in Lithuania has come as a child to show more England and has against all odds made a career as a surgeon. The narrator, whose living conditions, opinions and favorite books coincide with W.G. Sebald gets to know Dr. Selwyn as a retired doctor leading a secluded life mainly in his garden when he is renting a flat in Dr. Selwyn’s house. A distanced friendship between the author and Dr. S. is developing and finally the doctor is telling the author the story of his life. The marriage of S. with a girl from Switzerland where he studied is not happy, maybe because S. kept his Jewish origin too long hidden from her, maybe because they just lost the love that was between them in the beginning. The happiest period of his life was according to S. his study times in Switzerland, when he used to go hiking with an old Swiss alpinist (who disappeared in the mountains one day). S. seems to be strangely detached from life, melancholic and living for his memories. After a return from a visit in France, the narrator receives the message of the suicide of S. Years later, during a sojourn in Switzerland, a local newspaper reports that the body of an alpinist was found that was missing since more than 70 years. It turns out to be the missing hiking partner of Dr. S. “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 story “Unexpected Reunion” (Unverhofftes Wiedersehen) by Johann Peter Hebel comes to mind, an author with which Sebald was familiar since early childhood because his maternal grandfather introduced him to this Alemannic writer.

Hebel plays also a role in the second story that was inspired by one of Sebald’s school teachers. In the story his name is Paul Bereyter, a born teacher who was able to turn every school lesson into something interesting and who was known for his unconventional but very inspiring way to teach. The narrator mentions for example that he introduced Hebel’s “Calendar Stories” to the pupils instead of the book lessons that he seemed not to consider as worthwhile for the children. Bereyter knew already in his youth that he wanted to become a teacher and nothing else and he succeeded to achieve his aim in the 1930s. But as a “quarter-Jew” (one grandfather was Jewish) he lost his position during the Nazi era. After the war (which he survived as a soldier) he was reinstalled as a schoolteacher, but something had changed within Paul, like everyone called him. “The seasons and the years came and went...and always...one was, as the crow flies, about 2,000 km away - but from where? - and day by day hour by hour, with every beat of the pulse, one lost more and more of one's qualities, became less comprehensible to oneself, increasingly abstract.” In his later years, Paul is haunted by memories. After his early retirement he is spending more and more time in France (where he lived for a few years as private teacher in the 1930s). There he makes friends with a Mme Landau which shares his interest in literature (Paul is approaching her after he sees her reading a Nabokov biography). From Mme Landau the narrator receives more information about the later years of Paul – also he was an emigrant, haunted by the ghosts of his past and by the fact that nobody in his small home town pretended that something had happened to the “disappeared” Jews even decades after the war was over.

Also the last two stories seem to be based on the lives of real persons. One is the story of a granduncle of Sebald who emigrated to America and who became a butler in a rich Jewish family. With the son of the family he traveled around the world short before WWI and they have obviously had a homosexual relationship. After the outbreak of a mental illness and early death of his friend, the authors granduncle devotes his life to the family of his friend until in his last years he is retiring to a mental hospital (without actually being ill in the classical sense – Robert Walser comes to mind), even wishing to be completely annihilated by an extreme form of electro shock therapy that was en vogue in the 1950s.

The last story, about the German-British painter Max Ferber (inspired by Frank Auerbach, whom Sebald met when he was a young student in Manchester – in the first German edition the name of the character was Max Aurach) doesn’t end with the death of the protagonist but since Ferber who came to England without his parents (who were killed in the Concentration Camps in the East) gives the narrator a diary of Ferber’s mother which she kept until her marriage, the narrator decides to undertake a study tour to Bad Kissingen, the home town of Ferber’s mother, which is not really a homecoming but a very disturbing experience. In the meantime, Max Ferber has made a name of himself in the art world, but he almost never leaves his studio in a dilapidated area of Manchester. Only once he goes on a visit to Colmar to see the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Gruenewald. The work of this strange man proves to be the intuition of the extreme power of pain in Ferber’s oeuvre.

Beside the already mentioned literary influences, the reader has also to think of Thomas Bernhard (especially when Sebald is describing his visit in Bad Kissingen in the last story), but also of Georges Perec and of Vladimir Nabokov. The passionate butterfly collector Nabokov is turning up in all four stories (in the last one even twice), and here Sebald is in my opinion doing a little bit too much. This “running gag” is not necessary for the dramaturgy of the stories and a bit of a cheap effect. But this is a minor flaw in this extraordinary collection of stories that has great qualities. Sebald is an excellent prose writer that is clearly inspired by Stifter or Gottfried Keller. The hybrid mixture of documentation, diary, photo novel and story seems to be the appropriate form to speak about the fate of these “emigrants” (Goethe’s “Unterhaltungen deutscher Ausgewanderten” echoes also in the title of the book). And indirectly the book is also a book about the friendship of Sebald with his maternal grandfather because in all four stories friendship between a young and a much older man plays an important role (Sebald’s relation to his father seems to have been strained in the contrary).

The book received very high praise by literary critics and was also a big success on the German and international (especially English-speaking) bookmarket. Susan Sontag, Antonia Byatt, Michael Ondaatje or Salman Rushdie considered Sebald as one of the most important authors of our times. Very few critics, like the German novelist Georg Klein have voiced their reservations about Sebald’s books. Klein was speaking about Sebald’s "sweet melancholic masochism towards the past", which claims a "false intimacy with the dead". Sebald also seems not to have noticed the changes in Germany following 1968 (he visited the country very rarely after 1966) which made some of his statements regarding his home country a bit out of time and place and for my taste sometimes a bit too self-righteous. But be this as it may, Sebald was a very important and excellent writer and “The Emigrants” is definitely one of the great books about the historical and personal disasters of the 20th century and therefore I recommend it very strongly.

A very interesting essay about Sebald's biographical sources of his work by the American germanist Mark M. Anderson sheds additional light on "The Emigrants" and other works of Sebald: http://www.wgsebald.de/vaeter.html

See also my blog: www.mytwostotinki.com
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ThingScore 88
His book is tragic, stunningly beautiful, strange, and haunting. What makes it beautiful is the fastidious prose with its sad resigned rhythm—as appealing and hypnotic in Michael Hulse's English translation as in the German original; and also Sebald's wonderfully desolate landscapes and townscapes, where depression rises like mist from quite factual, unemphatic descriptions of people and things.
Gabriele Annan, New York Review of Books (pay site)
Nov 25, 1997
added by jburlinson
Yet ''The Emigrants'' is not exactly a fictional memoir. Rather, it is the record of its narrator's investigations into the mysterious memories of others, preserved in stories that dramatize the sometimes treacherous enchantment of memory itself. In the shaping of these stories, Mr. Sebald's book reflects the irresistible retrospective circlings of our contemporary culture, even as he pursues show more a post-modern fictional inspection of the delicate relationship between memory and history. show less
Larry Wolff, New York Times
Mar 30, 1997
added by DieFledermaus

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Author Information

Picture of author.
32+ Works 16,911 Members
He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester. He has taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England since 1970. He became a professor of European literature in 1987. From 1989 to 1994 was the first director of the British Centre for Literary Translation. He was born in Wertach in Allgau, Germany in show more 1944. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

W. G. Sebald has a Legacy Library. Legacy libraries are the personal libraries of famous readers, entered by LibraryThing members from the Legacy Libraries group.

Some Editions

Hengel, Ria van (Translator)
Hulse, Michael (Translator)
Mendelsund, Peter (Cover designer)
Roloff, Michael (Translator)
Vigliani, Ada (Translator)

Awards and Honors

Series

Belongs to Publisher Series

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Common Knowledge

Canonical title*
De émigrés
Original title
Die Ausgewanderten; Die Ausgewanderten : Vier lange Erzählungen
Alternate titles*
De emigrés : vier geïllustreerde verhalen
Original publication date
1992 (Duits) (Duits); 1993 (Nederlands) (Nederlands)
People/Characters
Narrator; Clara; Dr. Henry Selwyn; Elli Selwyn; Johannes Naegli; Paul Bereyter (show all 13); Lucy Landau; Helen Hollaender; Great-Uncle Ambros Adelwarth; Uncle Kasimir; Aunt Lina; Cosmo Solomon; Max Ferber
Important places
Manchester, England, UK; Hingham, Norfolk, England, UK; Bad Kissingen, Bavaria, Germany; Jerusalem; Deauville, Calvados, Normandy, France; Ithaca, New York, USA (show all 8); Lancashire, England, UK; Norfolk, England, UK
Important events
World War II
Epigraph
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 come when night falls to search for life
First words
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.
Quotations
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.
Such endeavours to imagine his life and death did not, as I had to admit, bring me any closer to Paul except at best for brief emotional moments of the kind that seemed presumptuous to me. It is in order to avoid this sort of... (show all) wrongful trespass that I have written down what I know of Paul Bereyter.
Always before our religion lessons, Paul would always top up to the brim the holy water stoup, embellished with a flaming Sacred Heart that was fixed by the door, using (I often saw him do it) the watering can with which he n... (show all)ormally watered the geraniums. Because of this, the Beneficiary never managed to put the holy water bottle he always carried in his shiny black pigskin briefcase to use. He did not dare simply to tip out the water from the brimful stoup, and so, in his endeavour to account for the seemingly inexhaustible Sacred Heart, he was torn between his suspicion that systematic malice was involved and the intermittent hope that this was a sign from a Higher Place, perhaps indeed a miracle.
He was an amazingly good whistler; the sound he produced was marvellously rich, exactly like a flute's. And even when he was climbing a mountain, he would with apparent ease whistle whole runs and ties in connected sequence, ... (show all)not just anything, but fine, thoroughly composed passages and melodies that none of us had ever heard before, and which infallibly gave a wrench to my heart whenever, years later, I rediscovered them in a Bellini opera or a Brahms sonata.
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, ... (show all)who was always in good spirits and seemed so cheerful, was in fact desolation itself.
what he referred to as his condition had been deteriorating in recent years to the point where his claustrophobia made him unable to teach and he saw his pupils, although he had always felt affection for them (he stressed thi... (show all)s), as contemptible and repulsive creatures, the very sigh of whom prompted an utterly groundless violence in him on more than one occasion.
Three weeks after she arrived, on every visit, she would still be weeping with the joy of reunion, and three weeks before she left she would again be weeping with the pain of separation. If her stay with us was longer than si... (show all)x weeks, there would be a becalmed period in the middle that she would mostly fill with needlework; but if her stay was shorter there were times when one really did not know whether she was in tears because she was at home at long last or because she was already dreading having to leave again.
Even the least of his reminiscences, which he fetched up very slowly from depths that were evidently unfathomable, was of astounding precision, so that, listening to him, I gradually became convinced that Uncle Adelwarth had ... (show all)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.
They were silent, as the dead usually are when they appear in our dreams, and seemed somewhat downcast and dejected. Generally, in fact, they behaved as if their altered condition, so to speak, were a terrible family secret n... (show all)ot to be revealed under any circumstances.
He felt closer to dust, he said, than to light, air or water. There was nothing he found so unbearable as a well-dusted house, and he never felt more at home than in places where things remained undisturbed, muted under the g... (show all)rey, velvety sinter left when matter dissolved, little by little, into nothingness.
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, no so much because he was convinced that it was finished as... (show all) 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.
Looking at those gashed bodies, and at the witnesses of the execution, doubled up by grief like snapped reeds, I gradually understood that, beyond a certain point, pain blots out the one thing that is essential to its being e... (show all)xperienced - consciousness - and so perhaps extinguishes itself; we know very little about this. What is certain, though, is that mental suffering is effectively without end. One may think one has reached the very limit, but there are always more torments to come.
I began to fear that I would be condemned to spend the rest of my life amongst the patrons of Kissingen who were in all likelihood preoccupied first and foremost with the state of their bowels.
Last words
(Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)I wonder what the three women's names were - Roza, Luisa and Lea, or Nona, Decuma and Morta, the daughters of night, with spindle, scissors and thread.
Blurbers
Eder, Richard; Ozick, Cynthia; Dirda, Michael; McGonigle, Thomas; Sontag, Susan
Original language
German
*Some information comes from Common Knowledge in other languages. Click "Edit" for more information.

Classifications

Genres
Fiction and Literature, General Fiction
DDC/MDS
833.914Literature & rhetoricGerman & related literaturesGerman fiction1900-1900-19901945-1990
LCC
PT2681 .E18 .A9413Language and LiteratureGerman, Dutch and Scandinavian literaturesGerman literatureIndividual authors or works1961-2000
BISAC

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ISBNs
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ASINs
12