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The Emigrants is a 1992 fictional work by German writer W.G. Sebald. It consists of four semi-autobiographical narratives, each with its own photos in black and white, which are framed within the narrator’s encounters with the characters during his travels. The stories revolve around emigration, history, loss and identity; they also follow similar experiential threads that connect people separated from their nation of birth and construct a modern form of subjectivity that grapples with the problem of rationalizing the loss of personal and national identity—an issue not always dealt with successfully.

The first section of the story is about a Lithuanian doctor who moved to England. While looking for a house to rent, he found one that was overgrown with vegetation and disorganized. The disorder reflected how the doctor felt: disengaged from his place in time and alienated from his surroundings due to homesickness. He had left Lithuania when he was seven years old, but recently began experiencing repressed memories of home as if they were happening right then. Although these memories were difficult for him, it ultimately made him realize that he could manage them by integrating into this new way of life despite those feelings of nostalgia.

In the second section, the narrator hears news of his favorite teacher’s suicide. The obituary mentions that he was Jewish and had been drafted into military service during World War II. He was forced to participate in Hitler’s war crimes because he wasn’t persecuted enough by the Nazis to be considered a Jew. After being exiled from Germany for his heritage, Bereyter became an educator of children whose families had also exiled him for his heritage. His teaching stifled memories of German history until they destroyed him completely.

The author goes to New Jersey and visits his aunt in order to find out more about a relative. This relative, Ambros Adelwarth, was multilingual and had an adventurous spirit. He moved to America in the early 20th century and worked as a butler for a wealthy Jewish family. Later on, he became involved with Cosmo Solomon, an aviator who was very wealthy at the time. The two of them traveled all over Europe together before they fell into depression after losing each other. Adelwarth ended up going back home where he went into therapy because of his depression; however, this treatment failed miserably because it didn’t address any of the underlying causes of his problems—identity issues and loss related issues that came from being separated from someone you love very much (Solomon). After years passed by without him really doing anything productive or useful with himself (other than getting married), he wound up working at some mental facility which subjected him to electroconvulsive shock therapy treatments (shock treatments) that ultimately did nothing except make him feel worse than when he started receiving them. The narrator then tracks down this same building where Adelwarth received these horrible shock treatments only to realize that there is no way anyone could have gone through something like what happened to him without having been permanently damaged emotionally by it all.

The final section of the book describes an encounter with a painter who is also a German Jew. He fled Nazi persecution and his family died at the hands of Nazis. Now he paints in Manchester, England, attempting to reconstruct parts of his lost childhood through painting. But he goes too far into it—he starts seeing things that aren’t there and becomes depressed as a result. It’s not easy for everyone to be exposed to their trauma; sometimes it can open up very difficult emotions.