Deconstructing the Past in W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants: Historiography and Memory in Postmodern Writing (original) (raw)

Invasive Memory and W G Sebald’s The Emigrants

Transcript, 2022

The purpose of this research paper is to critically investigate the invasive nature of memory in W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants. Sebald chooses four Jews who experienced the terror of time characterized by the sinister anti-Semitism under Hitler. Dr Henry Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, Ambrose Adelwarth and Max Ferber escaped the Nazi terror but fell, unfortunately, prey to the reconstructive power of memory. Memory recreates the past. By recreating the past, it represences it. The represencing of the past for the aforementioned characters was to remind them of the events which disfigured their sense of self, belongingness, family, etc. It was difficult for them to live in the post-holocaust period in a different country as emigrants under the unending reconfiguring power of memory. The growing sense of fear and isolation as Jewish emigrants was further exacerbated by the tormenting reincarnation of the vicious past in the domain of memory. This recurrent reconfiguration of the most terrible historical reality, which embodied complete obliteration of Jewish existence, invited derangement to the sensitive survivors. This repetitive resurrection of the events of the past in the territory of memory is called invasive because it precipitated acute restlessness among the survivors and engaged them painfully with the past. Much of their growing isolation and their suicidal tendencies emanated from the unending experience of pain occasioned by the restorative re-emergence of the past occurring in the field of memory.

Not Knowing What I Should Think:" The Landscape of Postmemory in W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants

Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 2007

Die Ausgewanderten, published in Germany in 1992, was W. G. Sebald's first book to be translated into English. Its enthusiastic reception in numerous reviews and probing interviews, following the translation by Michael Hulse and English publication in 1996, led to Sebald's acknowledgment throughout the English-speaking world as a major writer. In its evocation of the personal and individual experience at times elided in historical narratives of the Holocaust, and its inquiry into the absence of engagement with the ways in which the Holocaust is implicated in the contemporary German and European landscape, Sebald's novel emerged as a central document in contemporary postmemory. Postmemory, as James Young notes, generates "a narrative hybrid that interweaves both events of the Holocaust and the ways they are passed down to us" (Young 15). Following Marianne Hirsch, Young suggests not "that postmemory takes us beyond memory, or displaces it in any way," but that it is "distinguished from memory by generational distance and from history by deep personal connection.. .. Post-memory is anything but absent or evacuated: It is as full and as empty as memory itself" (Young 15). Sebald's novel articulates the questions raised by postmemory: it signals the impact of the catastrophic experience of the Holocaust in breaking conventional historical and literary narration. Like Thomas Carlyle's French Revolution-also an account two generations later of a catastrophic event that ruptured but also transformed western culture-Sebald's novel is "multivocal." No "single, overarching meaning emerges unchallenged; instead, narrative and counter-narrative generate a frisson of meaning in their exchange, in the working through process they now mutually reinforce" (Young 15). Sebald's fiction-because of its narrative structure and semiotic dynamic-instructs us in the difficulties and complexities of reading our traumatic past. His narrator must deal with events preceding his birth by engaging the object and source of memory, which is mediated not through his own recollection but "through an imaginative investment and creation" (Barzilai 206, quoting Hirsch 22).

The reconfiguration of the European Archive in contemporary German-Jewish migrant-literature

Nordisk Judaistik/Scandinavian Jewish Studies

A considerable number of Eastern European migrant authors of Jewish origin are currently lifting Holocaust memory to a new level. Writing in German about events taking place in remote areas of the world, they expand the German framework of memory from a national to a transnational one. By partaking in reconsidering what is ‘vital for a shared remembering’ of Europe, this branch of writing reflects the European Union’s political concern for integrating the memories of the socialistic regimes in European history writing without relativising the Holocaust. In Vielleicht Esther, Katja Petrowskaja consults various national and private archives in order to recount the history of the mass shooting of over 30,000 Ukrainian Jews at Babij Jar – a canyon near Kiev. Thus, she ‘carries’ a marginalised event of the Holocaust into the German framework of memory and uncovers the layers of amnesia that have not only concealed the event amongst the Soviet public but also distorted and for ever made i...

Germans in Amerika: Written Possibility, Uninhabitable Reality

The Cambridge History of the American Essay, 2024

28. The American Essay and (Social) Science 477 ted anton 29. Philosophy as a Kind of Writing 490 paul jenner 30. The Essay and Literary Postmodernism: Seriousness and Exhaustion 509 stefano ercolino Contents vii