The Emigrants (Sebald novel)
American paperback edition, New Directions Publishing (1997)
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| Author | W. G. Sebald |
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| Original title | Die Ausgewanderten |
| Country | Germany |
| Language | German |
| Genre | Semi-autobiographical narratives |
| Publisher | Vito von Eichborn |
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Publication date
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1992 |
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Published in English
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1996 |
| Media type | |
| Pages | 354 |
| ISBN | |
The Emigrants (German: Die Ausgewanderten) is a 1992 collection of narratives by the German writer W. G. Sebald. It won the Berlin Literature Prize, the Literatur Nord Prize, and the Johannes Bobrowski Medal. The English translation by Michael Hulse was first published in 1996.
In The Emigrants Sebald's narrator recounts his involvement with and the life stories of four different characters, all of whom are German emigrants (to England and the United States). 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.
Dr. Henry Selwyn is the estranged husband of Sebald's landlady. Selwyn 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 contributed to the dissolution of his relationship with his wife. He commits suicide by inserting a gun in his mouth.
Paul Bereyter was the narrator'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 the narrator obtains most of his information about Bereyter. Like Selwyn, Bereyter commits suicide, by lying down on railway tracks.
The narrator's great uncle, Ambros Adelwarth, was the travelling companion of Cosmo Solomon, an affluent American 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 Cosmo fell ill and was sent to a mental institution. It is implied that there may have been some homosexual feelings between the two men. After Cosmo's death, Adelwarth was the butler of the young man's family, living on Long Island until first Cosmo's father, then second wife, died. In his later years, Ambros falls victim to an extreme depression which causes him to commit himself to the same institution that once held Cosmo. He allows and, in his own way, even encourages increasingly frequent and brutal electro-convulsive therapy to be performed on him by the institution's fanatical director.
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