In The Emigrants, Sebald's narrator recounts his involvement with and the life stories of four different characters, all of whom are emigrants (to England and the United States). As with most of Sebald's work, the text includes many black and white, unlabeled photographs and strays sharply from general formats of plot and narrative.
Dr. Henry Selwyn is the estranged husband of Sebald's landlady. Selwyn fought in the First World War and has an interest in gardening and tending to animals. He confides in Sebald about his Lithuanian Jewish family's immigration to England from Lithuania, and suspects that it is this secretive, alien past that contributed to the dissolution of his relationship with his wife. He commits suicide by inserting a gun in his mouth. Selwyn, and the other members of his household, were loosely based upon the family and staff who resided in the house in Wymondham (Norfolk, UK) in which Sebald rented a room when he first took up his post as a lecturer in European literature at the University of East Anglia, in 1970.[3]
Paul Bereyter was the narrator's childhood teacher in a town referenced in the text only as "S". A quarter Jewish, he found employment difficult in the period leading up to the Second World War, although he eventually served in the Wehrmacht. Teaching in the small school after the war, Bereyter found a passion for his students while living a lonely, quiet life. In later years, his eyesight began to fail and he moved to France, where he met and spent much time with Mme Landau, from whom the narrator obtains most of his information about Bereyter. Like Selwyn, Bereyter commits suicide, by lying down on railway tracks.
The narrator's great uncle, Ambros Adelwarth, was the travelling companion of Cosmo Solomon, an affluent American aviator, gifted with much luck at gambling and a wayward attitude towards life. In his youth, he accompanied this man across Europe, and into Turkey and Asia Minor, before Cosmo fell ill and was sent to a mental institution. It is implied that there may have been some homosexual feelings between the two men. After Cosmo's death, Adelwarth was the butler of the young man's family, living on Long Island until first Cosmo's father, then second wife, died. In his later years, Ambros falls victim to an extreme depression which causes him to commit himself to the same institution that once held Cosmo. He allows and, in his own way, even encourages increasingly frequent and brutal electro-convulsive therapy to be performed on him by the institution's fanatical director.
As a young man in Manchester the narrator befriends an expatriate German-Jewish painter, Max Ferber. Years later the artist gives the narrator his mother's history of her idyllic life as a girl in a Bavarian village. It was written as she and her husband awaited deportation to the East and death. This section is written as a gradual discovery on the narrator's part of the effects of the Holocaust on Ferber and his family.[4]
