The emigrants

The emigrants. Four long stories is the title of a collection of four stories by the author WG Sebald , which was first published in 1992. In these stories, Sebald traces the fictional lives of four Jewish men who, as a result of their becoming strangers to the world, annihilate themselves in one way or another in old age.

Overview

The lives of the main characters are determined by pogroms , the Holocaust , emigration and the silent continuation of these traumas or even a hidden homosexuality. With these four, finally, internally and socially emigrants, the first-person narrator always enters into a personal relationship as if by chance, in which the insight into the inevitability of personal dramas develops. All four stories, which are increasing in scope, have a motto, in the fourth of which (“They come in the evening and look for life”) the long, self-destructive silence of the main characters also appears.

The narrator reconstructs the four biographies on the basis of his own encounters, from conversations with relatives and friends of the main characters, from diaries and photo albums, as well as from subsequent visits to the locations. Despite the addition to the title “Four Long Stories”, several references to data from the author's biography and the photos published with the texts undermine the limits of a narrative in the direction of a documentation . Some of the “stories” could also be the author's “experience reports”, so the narrator is not necessarily fictitious here. Sebald also uses this floating assignment to a genre in The Rings of Saturn and in Austerlitz .

In addition to the narrator, there are interlocutors and diary writers who appear to be left in their own style and give the text a touch of biographical research and multiple perspectives . The result is a Sebaldian “sound” that demonstrates to the reader how the right conclusions can be drawn from the traces visible on the surface when thinking about it. The narration in the gesture of exploring biographical lines of suffering shows the possibility of access to mostly concealed and buried stories - the horror of the victims and their exploration could already begin behind the door of a neighbor.

Dr. Henry Selwyn

Hersch Seweryn emigrated with his family from Lithuania to London in 1899 at the age of seven , won several scholarships as a very good student and changed his name to Henry Selwyn. After studying medicine, he became enthusiastic about mountaineering in Switzerland and about a much older mountain guide, to whom “he was very fond from the start” and whose fatal accident caused him a deep depression. Nevertheless, he married a wealthy Swiss factory owner's daughter, from whom he kept the secret of his origins for "a long time".

The narrator meets Selwyn looking for a place to stay on his wife's estate. Selwyn has lived for a long time, both internally and in summer also externally, in a small hermitage, more and more burdened by the loss of his identity, which he addresses to the narrator as "homesickness" and as a feeling of having sold his soul. After the end of his practice, he found his almost only address, as he reveals to the narrator, in the plants of the overgrown garden and with the three horses, to whom he grants a bread of grace. A few weeks after a last conversation, Selwyn shoots himself and after some time the glacier releases the human remains of Selwyn's lost lover after 72 years - as I am increasingly noticing, certain things have a way of returning, unexpectedly and unexpectedly ”, comments the narrator, who tells against the suppression. Like an explanation for Selwyn's bitter life and as a compass for the living, the motto on the cover of the story warns in lyrical setting:

                                                                        Destroy the last

                                                                       The memory doesn't

The narrator embeds the main character in a texture of powerlessness, decay and neglected life: the tall Selwyn appears because of his "supplicating attitude" because of "a very small person", leaving the tennis court and greenhouses that he used to use dilapidated because he thinks he can feel how the garden and park defend themselves against the imposed order, there are a multitude of stairs behind the walls in the manor house, from which the stately rooms were accessible for a large servants, there is his contrast his business-minded wife still maintains her ties to Switzerland. Despite the untamed, exemplary growth in the garden and the quality of its fruits, Selwyn does not succeed in breaking out of his comfortable order earlier and z. B. to connect to the inspiring experiences of a Crete trip and their perspectives. All these allegorical upheavals cannot save the heartbroken life of Selwyn.

Paul Bereyter

The narrator learns of the suicide of his primary school teacher who taught him in the early 1950s, becomes curious and reconstructs the life of the title character. After an initial approach through his student memories of the lesson, the narrator begins to include several conversations with a friend of Bereyters and the photo album that has been left to him in his investigation and to allow the life picture of increasing isolation to emerge. This principle of digging from the surface into the depths, which he reproduces as a narrative movement, the narrator experienced as a child with his elementary school teacher in a curiosity-arousing lesson of persistent search outside of school.

The fact that the quarter-Jewish teacher was ostracized from local society becomes clear in a number of correlating facets: in his removal from school service in 1935, in the murder of his Jewish lover, in his favorite location during class in a window niche, between inside and outside, in the constant absence from his place of residence, in his sadness suddenly evoked by music, in his "increasingly conspicuously strange behavior".

As a child, Bereyter had got to know the diversity and openness of a bourgeois Jewish world in his father's department store, which was wiped out by the Holocaust and post-war German society . The “insurmountable feeling of defeat” through this victorious concept of order of the war and post-war society finally drove him to lie down in front of a train, this symbol of an apparently brazen order, which his Jewish lover had also fallen victim to.

I was only able to fathom to some extent what this inconsolability was all about when I was able to classify my own, fragmentary memories into what I was told by Lucy Landau, who, as my research in S. turned out, arranged the funeral of Paul in the local cemetery. Often it is sentences like this that report through insertions and interruptions, in the gesture of self-correction and completion and move the narrative further out of everyday language through archaisms , dialect peculiarities or foreign words. In this second story the style is extremely resolved compared to the others, in the others perhaps more fluid than in this one due to the longer passages with the voices of other narrators.

Ambros Adelwarth

During a visit to America, the narrator is told about his relatives from the life of the polyglot and widely traveled great-uncle Ambros Adelwarth, who was employed as a valet and butler for the richest Jewish banking families in New York. Despite his intelligence and his Jewish background, he was not allowed to "let anything upset him throughout his life" and had to hide his long-standing homoerotic relationship with a son of the family.

His aunt reports to the narrator: "The older the Adelwarth uncle has become, the more hollow he seemed to me" and one can say, "that he didn't exist as a private person, that he only consisted of correctness"; he remembered his adventurous life in minute detail, but could no longer connect it to his feelings. Finally, because of his depression, he went to psychiatry and had his memory of his life erased by electric shocks .

In contrast to the two previous stories, the narrator relies almost exclusively on the reports of his relatives, who also leave him photos from Adelwarth's life and his travel diary. As in the other narratives and their locations, he takes a close look at the now closed and dilapidated clinic and permeates the narrative with the motifs used in the other narratives of the too long ignored self-loss or the growing inner emptiness, the ultimately destructive insertion into the social order, the positive allegories of the regenerating plants and gardens, as well as the dream figure of the butterfly hunter looking for his luck, who personifies the life problem of all main characters and which he illustrates with a photo of Vladimir Nabokov on butterfly stalk.

Max Aurach

The narrator came to Manchester in 1966 as a student , a decaying city that had once set the pace of industrialization , and while exploring the city he happened upon the studio of the elderly draftsman and painter Aurach, who was on a plane to England from his parents in 1939 while his parents, who had considered leaving too late, were soon transported to the east and murdered. Aurach has developed a way of painting in which he erases his drawings from paper up to 40 times until the erased, but not lost, engravings of his pen show a picture of the disappeared. Due to the “constant blurring of what was drawn”, almost the only result of his work was, as Aurach believes, “dust production that only comes to a standstill in the hours of the night.” Aurach also tells the narrator of the “enormity that grips him during a visit to Colmar of suffering ”on the picture panels of the Isenheim Altarpiece by Grünewald and his related inability to complete his picture Man with a Butterfly Net .

Twenty years later, in the Tate Gallery, the narrator comes across a picture of his former landlady painted by Aurach, sets off again for Manchester and the long conversations that follow in Aurach's studio explore the previously circumscribed subject of Aurach's origins. As a farewell, he hands the narrator his mother's 100-page diary, which she was able to write between his departure from Germany and her deportation. The narrator then quotes extensively from these text and image documents of a Jewish bourgeois family and falls so under her spell that two years later he visits the places described by Aurach's mother and also the graves of the family in Kissingen , but his stay because of him surrounding "mental impoverishment and memorylessness of the Germans" abbreviates.

reception

Gregor Dotzauer dealt primarily with the language of Sebald in Tagesspiegel on March 9, 2003 and judged that “the awkwardness was a question of striving for accuracy - even if this accuracy slipped away from him quickly.” And sometimes not much seems too are missing “and he would have been buried under his own highly cultivated box set growths.” But “WG Sebald is more famous than ever. And whether you are attracted or repelled by the agonizing slowness of his prose: his world literary stature is beyond question. "

Ijoma Mangold sees the life stories as “the self-portrait of an author who cannot get away from the dead. Because the dead have fought and suffered and because the only justice in this unjust fight is the poetry of memory. "

"Aside from the peculiar charm of their dark melancholy, Sebald's stories about emigrants fleeing hardship and persecution are all too topical," writes nma in Spiegel .

For Roland Wiegenstein , Sebald's book is a classic and the stories are “nothing more than detailed reasons for his own emigration” to England in 1966. "He couldn't stand the Germans and yet not only taught German literature in Norwich, but also perhaps wrote the most beautiful German that can be found in his generation."

Web links

Mangold, Ijoma, The Emigrants. WG Sebald maintains a noble attitude in the face of the catastrophic in life , in: Zeit Online on August 16, 2012, [1]

nma, WG Sebald: The emigrants , in: FAZ on March 17, 2002,   [2]

Der Spiegel, A Heap of Bones , January 4, 1993,   [3]

Waller, Dorian, the homeless hobbyist. The melancholy of the emigrant and its meaning for the text of WG Sebald's ´Max Aurach´, diploma thesis 2008,  [4]

Wiegenstein, Roland H., new edition. The morally strict Mr. Sebald and the emigrants , in: Deutschlandfunk on January 16, 2014,   [5]

reading

Max Ferber , read by WG Sebald. Production: Hessischer Rundfunk . Eichborn, Frankfurt am Main, 2000. ISBN 978-3-821-85137-2 .

Individual evidence

1. ^ WG Sebald: The emigrants. Four long stories . 9th edition. Eichborn, Frankfurt a. M. 2002, ISBN 3-596-12056-X .
2. ↑ In Sebald's The Rings of Saturn , the homosexuality of two protagonists tends to strengthen their personality. (Compare ibid., Pp. 165, 168, 252.)
3. ↑ Sebald, Die Migranderten, pp. 7, 29, 45, 219, 263.
4. ↑ The texts are illustrated with a total of 80 photos or facsimiles, which underline the claim that what is being told is factual. A large part could be "real", but z. For example, the view of a short-sighted suicide from a frog's eye view of the rail under his head is reproduced or fabricated and one of the figures points to the falsification of a historical photograph. (Sebald, Die Erwanderten, p. 41, 275) Sebald's strategy of using photos is examined by Waller, p. 43 ff.
5. ↑ “The generic name (... stories ...) doesn't really help”, you are dealing with “this genre indeterminacy.” Compare Mangold.
6. ↑ Sebald, Die Migranderten, pp. 63ff, 111ff, 246 ff.
7. ↑ Sebald, Die Migranderten, pp. 186 ff., 289 ff.
8. ↑ Sebald was only able to describe the horrors of the 20th century by resorting to an early language. "This is how we get that dizzying, almost schizophrenic Sebald key, which is both advanced and old-fashioned, precious and horrific at the same time." Compare Mangold.
9. ↑ Sebald, The Emigrated, pp. 23, 25.
10. ↑ Sebald, Die Migranderten, p. 34 f.
11. ↑ Sebald, Die Migranderten, pp. 20, 31.
12. ↑ Sebald, The Emigrated, pp. 30, 34.
13. ↑ Sebald, The Emigrated, p. 36.
14. ↑ Sebald, The Emigrated, p. 10.
15. ↑ “This scene is also part of a great parable about living on on the ruins of one's own life.” Compare nma in the mirror.
16. ↑ Sebald, The Emigrated, p. 17.
17. ↑ Sebald, Die Migranderten, pp. 18, 20.
18. ↑ Sebald, Die Migranderten, p. 13 f.
19. ↑ Sebald, The Emigrated, p. 26 ff.
20. ↑ Sebald, The Emigrated, pp. 45 ff.
21. ↑ Sebald, The Emigrated, pp. 63 ff.
22. ↑ Sebald, The Emigrated, p. 52.
23. ↑ Sebald, Die Migranderten, pp. 43, 55.
24. ↑ Sebald, The Emigrated, p. 62.
25. ↑ Sebald, The Emigrated, p. 43.
26. ↑ Sebald, Die Migranderten, pp. 75 ff.
27. ↑ Sebald, The Emigrated, p. 72.
28. ↑ Sebald, Die Migranderten, pp. 71 ff., 90, 92.
29. ↑ Sebald, The Emigrated, p. 63.
30. ↑ Sebald, Die Erwanderten, pp. 48, 53, 56, 74, 75; 176, 179, 344 f. For Mangold, Sebald's language is a "highly mannered artificial language (...) as if it had arisen in conversation with Adalbert Stifter and Johann Peter Hebel."
31. ↑ Sebald, Die Migranderten, pp. 128, 131.
32. ↑ Sebald, The Emigrated, p. 129.
33. ↑ Adelwarth's travel diary conveys the vanished life in a good while. As a symbol of temporary happiness, it mentions the only living and even particularly beautiful "butterfly with gold-speckled wings" in the four stories. (Sebald, Die Erwanderten, pp. 186 ff., 213.)
34. ↑ Sebald, Die Migranderten, pp. 129, 144, 146, 215.
35. ↑ Compare Wiegenstein: "The Ambros history is a kind of chain narrative in which the narrator changes several times."
36. ↑ The narrator first learned to use the genius loci as a helper from his elementary school teacher Bereyter. (Sebald, Die Erwanderten, p. 57 f.)
37. ↑ Sebald, Die Migranderten, pp. 34, 146, 259, 284.
38. ↑ Subordination to social constraints is a recurring theme. (Sebald, Die Erwanderten, pp. 13, 67, 148, 169.) The silent heroes of the stories typically have an unusual repertoire of the most polite manners. (Sebald, Die Migranderten, pp. 11, 65 ff., 144) Underlining this ambivalent motif with an ornament, the narrator reports on a later excursus into the decadence of Deauville on the French coast to visit the place where Adelwarth met his master and has accompanied lover to several casinos. (Sebald, Die Erwanderten, pp. 133 ff., 171 ff.)
39. ↑ Sebald, Die Migranderten, pp. 85, 145, 159, 213.
40. ↑ Sebald, Die Erwanderten, pp. 20, 26 f., 151, 170, 259 f., 319 f.
41. ↑ In his diploma thesis, p. 61 ff., Waller examines Manchester as a “palimpsest turned city”.
42. ↑ The fourth story is based on the example of the biography and working method of the painter Frank Auerbach . For the 1996 English book edition, The Emigrants , Auerbach insisted that two images directly related to him be removed and that the name of the protagonist, in which he saw too close to his own name, be changed. - See: Maya Jaggi: The Guardian Profile: WG Sebald . In: The Guardian . September 22, 2001, ISSN 0261-3077 (theguardian.com [accessed July 16, 2020]).
43. ↑ Sebald, The Emigrated, p. 238 f.
44. ↑ Waller works on p. 74 ff. A number of similarities between the figure Aurach and the author behind the narrator.
45. ↑ Sebald, Die Erwanderten, p. 259 ff. On the butterfly hunter as a positive motive, compare the individual references 33 and 40.
46. ↑ Sebald, Die Migranderten, p. 252 ff.
47. ↑ Sebald, The Emigrated, p. 338.