[In the following review, Chalmers lauds Sebald's evocation of history and memory in The Emigrants.]

Perhaps the last moment at which our 20th century of murder and destruction might have taken a different course was 1913. Certainly the summer of that year recurs in W G Sebald's four linked stories of emigration and exclusion as a time of happiness that was never to be recaptured. The longest, “Max Ferber”, begins in 1966, in a startlingly evoked Manchester: a sooty mausoleum of industrialisation. The narrator, a young German student with a biography much like that of Sebald, explores the wastelands of the city. He stumbles on an artist's studio in some otherwise deserted buildings by the docks. The artist is a German-Jewish émigré, Max Gerber. They talk, walk in the Manchester murk, and the student watches the artist at work.

More than 20 years later, now an academic but still in England, the former student reads a magazine article about Ferber's belated success. He visits him, still in the same studio, and only now does the narrator learn the full extent of Ferber's tragedy. He was put on a plane to England in 1939, while his parents were sent to their deaths in November 1941.

Ferber presses on the narrator the hand-written memoirs his mother Luisa composed about her childhood and youth. This story within the story is a remarkable and touching account of Jewish life around the turn of the century in the small German village of Steinach and in the nearby spa of Bad Kissingen. The memoir climaxes in the summer of 1913 with Luisa's engagement to a Gentile—a French-horn player—who soon dies of a stroke. She never gets over the death.

A second story, “Ambros Adelwarth”, has as its subject the narrator's great uncle, who emigrated to America in the early 1900s after training as a servant in the great hotels of Switzerland. He is employed as a companion to Cosmo Solomon, son of one of the wealthiest New York Jewish bankers, and they travel across Europe and the Near East. The first world war, however, seems to pitch the unstable Cosmo into madness and he dies without recovering.

Ambrose (as he has become) loved Cosmo and the latter's death overshadowed his life, even though he continued as butler to the Solomons. On retirement he falls into deep depression, and commits himself to the same home in which Cosmo died. Again there is a story within a story. The narrator is given a diary kept by Ambrose. It records a journey the pair made in 1913 from Trieste to Constantinople and Palestine, with extraordinary descriptions of cities, not least of Jerusalem in abject decay. Ambrose's story ends by evoking memory as “a kind of dumbness. It makes one's head heavy and giddy, as if one were not looking back down the receding perspective of time, but rather down on the earth from a great height, from one of those towers whose tops are lost to view in the clouds.”

That is a giddy-making vantage point for sure. But it is also an angel's perspective. It recalls that angel who, in Walter Benjamin's “Ninth Thesis on the Philosophy of History”, sees progress as “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.” One can read Sebald's marvellous book, with its documents, photographs and reported speech, as a debate with the immigrant Benjamin's arguments on history, progress and memory. If we can no longer dare to share Benjamin's hopes, we can still believe with him that “nothing that has ever happened should be regarded as lost for history”. To ensure that, we need stories like those of The Emigrants.