Winfried Sebald - The Emigrants

In early 1942 (Ferber concluded, the evening before I left Manchester), Uncle Leo embarked at Southampton for New York. Before he left he visited Margate one last time, and we agreed that I would follow him in the summer, when I had completed my last year at school. But when the time came I did not want to be reminded of my origins by anything or anyone, so instead of going to New York, into the care of my uncle, I decided to move to Manchester on my own. Inexperienced as I was, I imagined I could begin a new life in Manchester, from scratch; but instead, Manchester reminded me of everything I was trying to forget. Manchester is an immigrant city, and for a hundred and fifty years, leaving aside the poor Irish, the immigrants were chiefly Germans and Jews, manual workers, tradesmen, freelancers, retailers and wholesalers, watchmakers, hatters, cabinet-makers, umbrella makers, tailors, bookbinders, typesetters, silversmiths, photographers, furriers and glovers, scrap merchants, hawkers, pawnbrokers, auctioneers, jewellers, estate agents, stockbrokers, chemists and doctors. The Sephardic Jews, who had been settled in Manchester for a long time and had names like Besso, Raphael, Cattun, Calderon, Farache, Negriu, Messulam or di Moro, made little distinction between the Germans and other Jews with names like Leibrand, Wohlgemuth, Herzmann, Gottschalk, Adler, Engels, Landeshut, Frank, Zirndorf, Wallerstein, Aronsberg, Haarbleicher, Crailsheimer, Danziger, Lipmann or Lazarus. Throughout the nineteenth century, the German and Jewish influence was stronger in Manchester than in any other European city; and so, although I had intended to move in the opposite direction, when I arrived in Manchester I had come home, in a sense, and with every year I have spent since then in this birthplace of industrialization, amidst the black facades, I have realized more clearly than ever that I am here, as they used to say, to serve under the chimney. Ferber said nothing more. For a long time he stared into space, before sending me on my way with a barely perceptible wave of his left hand. When I returned to the studio the following morning to take my leave of him he handed me a brown paper package tied with string, containing a number of photographs and almost a hundred pages of handwritten memoirs penned by his mother in the Sternwartstrasse house between 1939 and 1941, which showed (said Ferber) that obtaining a visa had become increasingly difficult and that the plans his father had made for their emigration had necessarily grown more complex with every week that passed — and, as his mother had clearly understood, impossible to carry out. Mother wrote not a word about the events of the moment, said Ferber, apart from the odd oblique glance at the hopeless situation she and Father were in; instead, with a passion that was beyond his understanding, she wrote of her childhood in the village of Steinach, in lower Franconia, and her youth in Bad Kissingen. In the time that had passed since they were written, said Ferber, he had read the memories his mother had committed to paper, presumably not least with himself in mind, only twice. The first time, after he received the package, he had skimmed over them. The second time he had read them meticulously, many years later. On that second occasion, the memoirs, which at points were truly wonderful, had seemed to him like one of those evil German fairy tales in which, once you are under the spell, you have to carry on to the finish, till your heart breaks, with whatever work you have begun — in this case, the remembering, writing and reading. That is why I would rather you took this package, Ferber said, and saw me out to the yard, where he walked with me as far as the almond tree.

The manuscript which Ferber gave me on that morning in Manchester is before me now. I shall try to convey in excerpts what the author, whose maiden name was Luisa Lanzberg, recounts of her early life. At the very beginning she writes that not only she and her brother Leo were born at Steinach, near Bad Kissingen, but also her father Lazarus, and her grandfather Löb before him. The family was recorded as living in the village, which had formerly been under the jurisdiction of the prince-bishops of Wiirzburg and a third of whose inhabitants were Jews long resident there, at least as far back as the late seventeenth century. It almost goes without saying that there are no Jews in Steinach now, and that those who live there have difficulty remembering those who were once their neighbours and whose homes and property they appropriated, if indeed they remember them at all. From Bad Kissingen the road to Steinach goes by way of Grossenbrach, Kleinbrach, and Aschach with its castle and Graf Luxburg's brewery. From there it climbs the steep Aschacher Leite, where Lazarus (Luisa writes) always got down from his calèche so that the horses would not have so hard a job of it. From the top, the road runs down, along the edge of the wood, to Höhn, where the fields open out and the hills of the Rhön can be seen in the distance. The Saale meadows spread before you, the Windheim woods nestle in a gentle curve, and there are the tip of the church tower and the old castle — Steinach! Now the road crosses the stream and enters the village, up to the square by the inn, then down to the right to the lower part of the village, which Luisa calls her real home. That is where the Lions live, she writes, where we get oil for the lamps. There lives Meier Frei, the merchant, whose return from the annual Leipzig trade fair is always a big event. There lives Gessner the baker, to whom we took our Sabbath meal on Friday evenings, Liebmann the slaughterer, and Salomon Stern, the flour merchant. The poorhouse, which usually had no occupants, and the fire station with the slatted shutters on the tower, were in the lower part of the village, and so was the old castle with its cobbled forecourt and the Luxburg arms over the gateway. By way of Federgasse, which (Luisa writes) was always full of geese and which she was afraid to walk down as a child, past Simon Feldhahn's haberdashery and Fròhlich the plumber's house with its green tin shingle cladding, you come to a square shaded by a gigantic chestnut tree. In the house on the other side — before which the square divides into two roads like waves at the bow of a ship, and behind which the Windheim woods rise — I was born and grew up (so the memoir in front of me reads), and there I lived until my sixteenth year, when, in January 1905, we moved to Kissingen.

Now I am standing in the living room once again, writes Luisa. I have walked through the gloomy, stone-flagged hall, have placed my hand cautiously on the handle, as I do almost every morning at that time, I have pushed it down and opened the door, and inside, standing barefoot on the white scrubbed floorboards, I look around in amazement at all the nice things in the room. There are two green velvet armchairs with knotted fringes all round, and between the windows that face onto the square is a sofa in the same style. The table is of light-coloured cherrywood. On it are a fan-like frame with five photographs of our relatives in Mainstockheim and Leutershausen and, in a frame of its own, a picture of Papa's sister, who people say was the most beautiful girl for miles around, a real Germania. Also on the table is a china swan with its wings spread, and in it, in a white lace frill, our dear Mama's evergreen bridal bouquet, beside the silver menora which is required on Friday evenings and for which Papa cuts paper cuffs especially every time, to prevent the wax dripping from the candles. On the tallboy by the wall, opened at a page, lies a folio-sized volume ornately bound in red with golden tendrils of vine. This, says Mama, is the works of her favourite poet, Heine, who is also the favourite poet of Empress Elisabeth. Next to it is the little basket where the newspaper, the Miinchner Neueste Nachrichten, is kept, which Mama is immersed in every evening despite the fact that Papa, who goes to bed far earlier, always tells her that it is not healthy to read so late at night. The hoya plant is on the cane table in the bay of the east window. Its leaves are firm and dark, and it has a lot of pink-hearted umbels consisting of white, furry stars. When I come down early in the mornings, the sun is already shining into the room and gleaming on the drops of honey that cling to every little star. I can see through the leaves and flowers into the grassy garden where the hens are out pecking. Franz, our stable boy, a very taciturn albino, will have hitched the horses to the calèche by the time Papa is ready to leave, and over there, across the fence, is a tiny house under an elder, where you can usually see Kathinka Strauss at this time. Kathinka is a spinster of perhaps forty, and people say she is not quite right in the head. When the weather permits, she spends her day walking around the chestnut tree in the Square, clockwise or anti-clockwise according to whim, knitting something that she plainly never finishes. Though there is little else that she can call her own, she always wears the most outrageous bonnets on these walks; one, which featured a seagull's wing, I remember particularly well because Herr Bein the teacher referred to it in school, telling us we should never kill any creature merely in order to adorn ourselves with its feathers.