The Emigrants

The Emigrants () 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. Summary In The Emigrants, Sebald's narrator recounts his involvement with and the life stories of four different characters, all of whom are 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 an interest in gardening and tending to animals. He confides in Sebald about his Lithuanian Jewish 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. Selwyn, and the other members of his household, were loosely based upon the family and staff who resided in the house in Wymondham (Norfolk, UK) in which Sebald rented a room when he first took up his post as a lecturer in European literature at the University of East Anglia, in 1970. 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.