Forced to be an accessory to the devastation of his homeland, and then an educator of children whose families had exiled him for his heritage, Bereyter never fully came to terms with Germany after the war. He was caught in a double bind during World War II because, though he was not Jewish enough to experience persecution directly, he was considered German enough by the Nazi regime to be drafted into military service for Hitler. Investigating further, he learns that Bereyter was one-quarter Jewish. While reading the obituary, the narrator is struck by a seemingly innocuous footnote that Bereyter had once been unable to follow his passion for teaching. In the second section, the narrator hears the news that his favorite teacher from his former German primary school, Paul Bereyter, has committed suicide by stepping into the path of a train. Yet, when Selwyn becomes cognizant of this cognitive dissonance, his narrative ultimately poses the possibility of managing and recovering from it. Despite their temporal remoteness, the images of his lost homeland have become clear and immediate in his mind, rendering him unable to integrate into a new way of life. Having left Lithuania in 1899 at the age of seven, he confides in the narrator his recent outgrowth of repressed memories from childhood. The disorder of the house mirrors Selwyn’s disengagement with his time and place and a disordered memory fraught with homesickness and alienation. While searching for a room to rent in England, the narrator discovers his house, a house overgrown with vegetation. The first section highlights Henry Selwyn, an elderly Lithuanian doctor. Despite its characters’ unique pasts, the book also follows the experiential threads that connect people separated from their nation of birth, constructing a modern form of subjectivity that grapples with the problem of rationalizing the loss of personal and national identity and not always succeeding. Framed in these personal encounters and interspersed with monochrome photos that enforce a realist narrative context, each successive tale reveals a different perspective on emigration, history, loss, and global identity.

Composed as a mosaic of semi-autobiographical narratives, Sebald’s work traces the stories of four immigrant men as an unnamed narrator encounters them during his travels. The Emigrants is a 1992 fictional work by German writer W.G.

The emigrants sebald novel