Collection: The Emigrants

Overview
W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants (1992) is a quartet of interlinked narratives about displacement, memory, and the afterlife of historical trauma. A Sebald-like narrator traces the fragmented lives of four emigrants whose paths cross his own, assembling their stories from conversations, letters, diaries, and journeys to places they once inhabited. The book’s distinctive blend of reportage and fiction, and its quiet incorporation of grainy photographs, makes each life feel both documentary and spectral, as if pieced together from a fading archive.

Dr. Henry Selwyn
The opening story follows the narrator’s landlord in rural Norfolk, an elderly country doctor with a cultivated English persona. Selwyn gradually reveals that he was born Hersch Seweryn in Lithuania and arrived in Britain as a child refugee. His carefully tended garden and his tales of mountaineering hint at a yearning for vanished worlds. A chance newspaper item about a long-missing Alpine companion triggers a collapse in composure; soon after, Selwyn takes his own life. The narrative sets the book’s method: the present is a thin crust over buried histories, and landscapes retain the echoes of what has been lost.

Paul Bereyter
Returning to his Swabian hometown, the narrator reconstructs the fate of his beloved primary school teacher, Paul Bereyter. Classified as one-quarter Jewish, Bereyter was barred from teaching under the Nazis, served in the army, and after the war resumed his vocation with precision and gentleness. His meticulous habits and solitary walks suggest a survivor’s vigilance. Haunted by exclusions he could never fully articulate, he eventually lies down on a railway line. The train that kills him becomes a grim emblem of modernity’s orderly mechanisms pushing inexorably over human lives.

Ambros Adelwarth
The third narrative turns inward to family history. Ambros Adelwarth, the narrator’s great-uncle, emigrated to America before the First World War and became a butler in a prominent Jewish household. Impeccable, restrained, and driven by an ethic of duty, he formed a deep, possibly romantic bond with Cosmo, the family’s heir. Their travels to the Middle East and Europe shimmer with glamour and melancholy, ending in Cosmo’s mental decline and early death. Ambros eventually commits himself to a sanatorium and undergoes electroshock therapy, as if trying to erase unbearable recollections. A recovered diary renders his restraint on the page as an exquisite form of mourning.

Max Ferber
In Manchester’s sooty postindustrial quarters, the narrator befriends Max Ferber, a German-Jewish painter who came to Britain as a teenager. Ferber’s canvases are layered and abraded, accretions of strokes and erasures that leave ghostly presences. Years later, the narrator receives a memoir written by Ferber’s mother, recounting their cultured life in a German city, the incremental humiliations of the 1930s, and their fatal delay in leaving. The document retrofits Ferber’s laconic manner with a submerged narrative of loss, and his studio becomes an arena where obliteration and remembrance struggle across the surface of paint.

Form and Themes
Across the four lives recur certain refrains: suicide or self-erasure, the ethics of precision and duty, cultivated surfaces that conceal wounds, and landscapes that act as repositories of grief. Sebald’s narrator moves between towns and archives with a calm, almost forensic tone, yet the prose is saturated with elegy. Photographs are embedded without full explanation, sharpening the book’s sense of unstable evidence. Emigration is not simply relocation but a condition of being unmoored in time, with identity dispersed among names, languages, and rooms left behind. The Emigrants becomes a meditation on how personal memory and public catastrophe braid together, and how the act of telling, partial, belated, fragile, keeps the dead within the circumference of the living.