The Emigrants - W.G. Sebald

‘they are ever returning to us, the dead’

‘I often come out here, said Uncle Kasimir, it makes me feel that I am a long way away, though I never quite know from where’

W. G. Sebald’s late twentieth-century masterpieces exist at the borderline of the novel form.  The combination of memoir, historical account, travelogue and fiction pushes the very boundaries of genre.  But Sebald’s use of a narrator with some biographical correspondence to the author, who takes part in the narrative, enables an even greater crossing of borders: those between past and present, memory and history, and current and previous generations.

This study will explore Sebald’s achievement through a close reading of his 1995 novel The Emigrants (first published in German as Die Ausgewanderten in 1993). The second of his great prose narratives, this haunting, melancholic work, on its simplest level, narrates the lives of four displaced victims of modern European history.

But on closer reading the text is much more complicated. Sebald created what he called a ‘periscopic’ narrative style in order to memorialise the lives of the lost and forgotten, the traumatised and the victims of persecution. His ambiguous but always tender narrator listens and bears witness, but also draws attention to many problems of memory, such as the authenticity of documentary evidence or testimony; the affliction of amnesia and what happens when memories return; and the ethical risks of imagining the lives of others.

At the same time his persona can be a drily amusing figure, reminiscent of A.A. Milne’s ‘Eeyore’ in his unrelentingly melancholic view of events which, as we will see, are not always what ‘really’ happened to Sebald the author during his wanderings and researches.

Over the eight weeks of this study we will begin to answer the following questions (among others):

• What deep or uncomfortable truths of the human condition does this book reveal, which might also apply to the non-emigrants among us?
• Who is the narrator, and what is his relation to Sebald himself?
• Who are the people described in the book? Where does fact and biography end and fiction and speculation begin?
• What is the role of the enigmatic, caption-less photographs dotted throughout the text?

Read Lewis Ward’s blog post Why read Sebald? for more background.

JOINING DETAILS:

• Eight week study of W.G. Sebald’s The Emigrants led by Lewis Ward (on Zoom)
• Wednesdays, 7.00 – 9.00 pm (UK), 16 September – 4 November 2026
• Recommended edition: Vintage Classics, ISBN: 9780099448884
• £280 for eight two-hour meetings

REDUCED COSTS: we are committed to making our studies as affordable as possible. We have a fund in place to support anyone who would like to register for a study but finds the cost difficult to afford. We can’t promise to help, but please email us at litsalon@gmail.com in confidence if you would like to request a reduction in the cost of a study.