They forgot to remember to forget
Carole Angier THE EMIGRANTS by W. G. Sebald, translated by Michael Hulse Harvill, £14.99, pp. 237 The Emigrants is not only about emigra- tion. It is about internal as well as external exile; it is about loss, and above all about memory. Finally, therefore, it is about art. Another great German writer, Gunther Grass, has said that writing is the naming of lost things; that without loss there would be no literature. The Emigrants bath explores and embodies this theme. It is quiet and understated, and it has taken us three years (and three German prizes) to translate it. But I think it may be a master- piece.
It begins — not on page one, but inter- nally — from the central fact of German life since the war: the need not to remember the Third Reich. The narrator, who like W. G. Sebald lives in his own exile in England, tells of the recovery of German memory by four exiles, after lifetimes of forgetting. And one of the things that makes The Emigrants an unconsoling masterpiece is that this recovery is not only the rebirth it is post-Freudianly meant to be, but also a re-death: a recognition that some pain is simply too bad to face.
Among them the four narratives cover various German exiles — Jewish and non- Jewish (or part-Jewish), wartime and pre- war. They move like memory itself — not logically or openly, but mysteriously, through images, echoes and accidents. The opening story, `Dr Henry Selwyn', sounds the notes which the others will pick up and develop. Its first hint that Dr Selwyn is not what he seems is the way his house reminds the narrator of the false front of a French château he'd once seen. He moves into the house himself; and discovers that behind Its hollow walls are servants' passageways, in
which 'the shadows of the servants were perpetually flitting past' — just as the shadowy memories flit behind the walls of Dr Selwyn's skull.
One night Selwyn tells him of the loss of a friend, an alpine guide called Johannes Naegeli, whose death in 1914 had plunged him into a deep depression, 'as if I was buried under snow and ice'. Only months later does he tell him his real loss and his real name. Many years after that the narra- tor reads in a newspaper that the Oberaar glacier has finally yielded up the remains of Johannes Naegeli. 'And so they are ever returning to us, the dead,' Sebald writes. from the snow and ice of forgetting.
The next is the saddest story, that of Paul Bereyter, who was one-quarter Jewish but 'German to the marrow; who could neither love nor leave Germany, and whose only way out was the same as Dr Selwyn's. The third is the most mysterious: the story of Ambros Adelwarth, Sebald's own great- uncle, who left Germany in 1900 at the age of 14 and became a gentleman's gentle- man, in every sense of the phrase. It is not clear what is behind Uncle Adelwarth's longing for extinction, but his story is full of clues, not only to his own pain but to all the others': his mad employer's visions of war, and their journey together to Jerusalem; and his nephew Kasimir's stand- ing on the American coast, saying, 'It makes me feel that I am a long way away, though I never quite know from where.'
The last is the story of Max Ferber, a Manchester artist who works by scratching the thick paint off his canvasses instead of spreading it on, and who says that his real product is the dust that this creates. Though he has not changed his name, he too hides his true story, which the narrator only begins to learn by accident 20 years later. This sends him on a journey into his own past and Ferber's, which pulls together all the notes and clues of the earlier narra- tives in a final resolving movement.
With its artist hero, this is a story about art. And its conclusion is as ambivalent as the one about memory: that literature, for Instance, is as much torment as liberation for the teller, as much reduction as celebra- tion of the told. It is what Ferber says about his mother's memoirs: heart-break- ing but necessary work, 'the remembering, writing and reading'. It is like the last extraordinary image of the salt-frames on the river at Bad Kissingen, in which the mineral water dissolves the hanging twigs, but reproduces them in crystallised form.
This vision of art is especially distilled in an image which links all four narratives: a man with a butterfly net, who is first Dr Selwyn, later a madman, and finally an unnamed Russian boy, but who is always also Vladimir Nabokov, the supreme artist of exile and memory. All the images of exile culminate in Max Ferber'; and here too the central loss is identified as the Jew- ish one. We know why Ferber feels at home in Manchester, with its echoes of
Lodz (`thepolski Manczester') and its smok- ing chimneys; and we remember Uncle Adelwarth's description of the destruction of Jerusalem, until nothing remained `but dry stone and a remote idea in the heads of its people'.
If I have made The Emigrants sound too abstract, I should add that we see its images, in photographs which are part of the artistry and originality of the text. If I have made it sound too gloomy, I should add that it is shot through with a subtle and Grimm humour. It is exquisitely written and exquisitely translated, and I think we should give both author and translator a few prizes ourselves. In a dream which unites the themes of memory, art and Jewish loss, Max Ferber sees an exact model of the Temple of Solomon by a ghetto craftsman, and recognises a true work of art. This is an image of what Sebald himself has achieved.
To order a copy of this book at the special discount price of f11.99, call The Spectator Bookshop on 0181 964 9640.
Previous page
