The Emigrants
By Winfried Georg Sebald

Photo: © Goethe-Institut London/Nicolas Gäckle Melancholic stories of sorrow and remembrance, of rootlessness, despair and death – in his acclaimed masterpiece, Sebald hovers around the edges of darkness. With great sensitivity he portrays the life stories and sufferings of four Jewish men expelled from their European homeland, who in old age are broken by their inconsolability. Reconstructing the past of a former landlord, a village teacher, a great-uncle and a painter friend, Sebald, both indirectly and with reference to himself, tells the story of his own pain at the fate of those people and of his sorrow regarding the German past. As a result The Emigrants is a unique, poetic and mysteriously interwoven story that, notwithstanding the various references and strategies to deliberately create deliberate uncertainty, remains depressingly vivid.