ABSTRACT
We meet the first emigrant in Die Ausgewanderten [The Emigrants], Dr Henry Selwyn, living with his wife Hedi in exile in Norfolk. Selwyn is one of Sebald’s congenial melancholics, whose life has taken a wrong turn somewhere. Talking about his increasing estrangement from his wife Hedi, he tells the narrator:
Genau weiß ich es immer noch nicht, was uns auseinandergebracht hat, das Geld oder das schließlich doch entdeckte Geheimnis meiner Abstammung oder einfach das Wenigerwerden der Liebe.
[I still don’t know for sure what made us drift apart, the money or revealing the secret of my origins, or simply the decline of love.] (DA, 35; E, 21)]
Selwyn’s pitiful account of his marriage brings together two key concerns of Sebald’s literary project: memory and, as I will argue in this book, the no less crucial question of love, ‘a madness most discreet’, as Michael Hulse, echoing Romeo and Juliet, names it in his English translation of Schwindel. Gefühle. [Vertigo]. The first item in Selwyn’s attempt at explaining his alienation from his wife, money, serves as an allegory for the destructive powers of modern capitalism, which Sebald’s entire oeuvre explores and critiques. The glancing reference to ‘the secret of my origins’ obliquely names Selwyn’s Jewish origins, and thereby invokes the Holocaust, whose shadow hangs over the entire novel. In this, as in many other ways, the short narrative of Henry Selwyn is emblematic for Sebald’s literary methodology. Selwyn’s descent into isolation and eventual suicide is punctuated by a series of motifs that are classically Sebaldian: solitary withdrawal into a ruinous landscape, a lost or repressed Jewish childhood in Europe, a history of emigration, a feeling of closeness to plants and animals, the involuntary return of memory, chronic melancholy, and isolation. The brief history contains in it traces of the aesthetic and political themes that have also been identified as central to Sebald’s work: an overarching critique of modernity, the erasure of Jewish identities, the shadow of the Holocaust, and the narrator’s latent revulsion from German culture. In keeping with this revulsion, in the German version of the text, a startlingly ugly sideboard is said to be correctly described as altdeutsch, or ‘old German’ (DA, 15). The story of Henry Selwyn also enlists the celebrated Sebaldian techniques of intermediality, indirection, archive, dialectical style, intertextuality, and baroque allegory.