The Emigrants

by W. G. Sebald

  back to those days, I see shades of blue everywhere - a single empty space, stretching out into the twilight of late afternoon, crisscrossed by the tracks of ice-skaters long vanished.

  The memoirs of Luisa Lanzberg have been very much on my mind since Ferber handed them over to me, so much so that in late June 19911 felt I should make the journey to Kissingen and Steinach. I travelled via Amsterdam, Cologne and Frankfurt, and had to change a number of times, and sit out lengthy waits in the Aschaffenburg and Gemünden station buffets, before I reached my destination. With every change the trains were slower and shorter, till at last, on the stretch from Gemünden to Kissingen, I found myself in a train (if that is the right word) that consisted only of an engine and a single carriage - something I had not thought possible. Directly across from me, even though there were plenty of seats free, a fat, square-headed man of perhaps fifty had plumped himself down. His face was flushed and blotched with red, and his eyes were very close-set and slightly squint. Puffing noisily, he dug his unshapely tongue, still caked with bits of food, around his half-open mouth. There he sat, legs apart, his stomach and gut stuffed horribly into summer shorts. I could not say whether the physical and mental deformity of my fellow-passenger was the result of long psychiatric confinement, some innate debility, or simply beer-drinking and eating between meals. To my considerable relief the monster got out at the first stop after Gemtinden, leaving me quite alone in the carriage but for an old woman on the other side of the aisle who was eating an apple so big that the full hour it took till we reached Kissingen was barely enough for her to finish it. The train followed the bends of the river, through the grassy valley. Hills and woods passed slowly, the shadows of evening settled upon the countryside, and the old woman went on dividing up the apple, slice by slice, with the penknife she held open in her hand, nibbling the pieces, and spitting out the peel onto a paper napkin in her lap. At Kissingen there was only one single taxi in the deserted street outside the station. In answer to my question, the driver told me that at that hour the spa clientèle were already tucked up in bed. The hotel he drove me to had just been completely renovated in the neo-imperial style which is now inexorably taking hold throughout Germany and which discreetly covers up with light shades of green and gold leaf the lapses of taste committed in the postwar years. The lobby was as deserted as the station forecourt. The woman at reception, who had something of the mother superior about her, sized me up as if she were expecting me to disturb the peace, and when I got into the lift I found myself facing a weird old couple who stared at me with undisguised hostility, if not horror. The woman was holding a small plate in her claw-like hands, with a few slices of wurst on it. I naturally assumed that they had a dog in their room, but the next morning, when I saw them take up two tubs of raspberry yoghurt and something from the breakfast bar that they had wrapped in a napkin, I realized that their supplies were intended not for some putative dog but for themselves.

  I began my first day in Kissingen with a stroll in the grounds of the spa. The ducks were still asleep on the lawn, the white down of the poplars was drifting in the air, and a few early bathers were wandering along the sandy paths like lost souls. Without exception, these people out taking their painfully slow morning constitutionals were of pensioner age, and I began to fear that I would be condemned to spend the rest of my life amongst the patrons of Kissingen, who were in all likelihood preoccupied first and foremost with the state of their bowels. Later I sat in a cafe, again surrounded by elderly people, reading the Kissingen newspaper, the Saale-Zeitung. The quote of the day, in the so-called Calendar column, was from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and read: Our world is a cracked bell that no longer sounds. It was the 25th of June. According to the paper, there was a crescent moon and the anniversary of the birth of Ingeborg Bachmann, the Austrian poet, and of the English writer George Orwell. Other dead birthday boys whom the newspaper remembered were the aircraft builder Willy Messerschmidt (1898-1978), the rocket pioneer Hermann Oberath (1894-1990), and the East German author Hans Marchwitza (1890-1965). The death announcements, headed Totentafel, included that of retired master butcher Michael Schultheis of Steinach (80). He was extremely popular. He was a staunch member of the Blue Cloud Smokers' Club and the Reservists' Association. He spent most of his leisure time with his loyal alsatian, Prinz. -

  Pondering the peculiar sense of history apparent in such notices, I went to the town hall. There, after being referred elsewhere several times and getting an insight into the perpetual peace that pervades the corridors of small-town council chambers, I finally ended up with a panic-stricken bureaucrat in a particularly remote office, who listened with incredulity to what I had to say and then explained where the synagogue had been and where I would find the Jewish cemetery. The earlier temple had been replaced by what was known as the new synagogue, a ponderous turn-of-the-century building in a curiously orientalized, neo-romanesque style, which was vandalized during the Kristallnacht and then completely demolished over the following weeks. In its place in Maxstrasse, directly opposite the back entrance of the town hall, is now the labour exchange. As for the Jewish cemetery, the official, after some rummaging in a key deposit on the wall, handed me two keys with orderly labels, and offered me

  the following somewhat idiosyncratic directions: you will find the Israelite cemetery if you proceed southwards in a straight line from the town hall for a thousand paces till you get to the end of Bergmannstrasse. When I reached the gate it turned out that neither of the keys fitted the lock, so I climbed the

  wall- What I saw had little to do with cemeteries as one thinks of them; instead, before me lay a wilderness of graves, neglected for years, crumbling and gradually sinking into the ground amidst tall grass and wild flowers under the shade of trees, which trembled in the slight movement of the air. Here

  and there a stone placed on the top of a grave witnessed that someone must have visited one of the dead - who could say how long ago. It was not possible to decipher all of the chiselled inscriptions, but the names I could still read -Hamburger, Kissinger, Wertheimer, Friedlànder, Arnsberg, Auerbach, Grunwald, Leuthhold, Seeligmann, Frank, Hertz, Goldstaub, Baumblatt and Blumenthal — made me think that perhaps there was nothing the Germans begrudged the Jews so much as their beautiful names, so intimately bound up with the country they lived in and with its language. A shock of recognition shot through me at the grave of Maier Sterm,

  who died on the 18th of May, my own birthday; and I was touched, in a way I knew I could never quite fathom, by the symbol of the writer's quill on the stone of Friederike Halbleib, who departed this life on the 28th of March 1912-I imagined her pen in hand, all by herself, bent with bated breath over her work; and now, as I write these lines, it feels as if / had lost her, and as if / could not get over the los.1 despite the many years that have passed since her departure. I stayed in the Jewish cemetery till the afternoon, walking up and down the rows of graves, reading the names of the dead, but it was only when I was about to leave that I discovered a more recent gravestone, not far from the locked gate, on which were the names of Lily and Lazarus Lanzberg, and of Fritz and Luisa Ferber. I assume Ferber's Uncle Leo had had it erected there. The inscription says that Lazarus Lanzberg died in Theresienstadt in 1942, and that Fritz and Luisa were deported, their fate unknown, in November 1941. Only Lily, who took her own life, lies in that grave. I stood before it for some time, not knowing what I should think; but before I left I placed a stone on the grave, according to custom.

  Although I was amply occupied, during my several days in Kissingen and in Steinach (which retained not the slightest trace of its former character), with my research and with __the writing itself, which,

  as always, was going laboriously, I felt increasingly that the mental impoverishment and lack of memory that marked the Germans, and the efficiency with which they had cleaned everything up, were beginning to affect my head and my nerves. I therefore decided to leave sooner than I had planned, a decision which was the easie
r to take since

  my enquiries, though they had produced much on the general history of Kissingen's Jewry, had brought very little to light concerning the Lanzberg family. But I must still say something about the trip I took up to the salt-frames in a motor launch that was moored at the edge of the spa grounds. It was about one o'clock on the day before I left, at an hour when the spa visitors were eating their diet-controlled lunches, or indulging in unsupervised gluttony in gloomy restaurants, that I went down to the riverbank and boarded the launch. The woman who piloted the launch had been waiting in vain, till that moment, for even a single passenger. This lady, who generously allowed me to take her picture, was from Turkey, and had already been working for the Kissingen river authority for a number of years. In addition to the captain's cap that sat jauntily on her head, she was wearing a blue and white jersey dress which was reminiscent (at least from a distance) of a sailor's uniform, by way of a further concession to her office. It soon turned out that the mistress of the launch was not only expert at manoeuvring her craft on the narrow river but also had views on the way of the world that were worth considering. As we headed up the Saale she gave me a few highly impressive samples of her critical philosophy, in her somewhat Turkish but nonetheless very flexible German, all of which culminated in her oft-repeated point that there was no end to stupidity, and nothing as dangerous. And people in Germany, she said, were just as stupid as the Turks, perhaps even stupider. She was visibly pleased to find a sympathetic ear for her views, which she shouted above the pounding of the diesel engine and underlined with an imaginative repertoire of gestures and facial expressions; she rarely had the opportunity to talk to a passenger, she said, let alone one with a bit of sense. The boat ride lasted some twenty minutes. When it was over, we parted with a shake of hands and, I believe, a certain mutual respect. The salt-frames, which I had only seen in an old photograph before, were a short distance upriver, a little way off in the fields. Even at first glance, the timber building was an overwhelming construction, about two hundred metres long and surely twenty metres high, and yet, as I learnt from information displayed in a glass-fronted case, it was merely part of a complex that had once been far more extensive. There was currently no access - notices by the steps explained that the previous year's hurricane had made structural examinations necessary - but, since there was no one around who might have denied me permission, I climbed up to the gallery that ran along the entire complex at a height of about five metres.

  From there one could take a close look at the blackthorn twigs that were bunched in layers as high as the roof. Mineral water raised by a cast-iron pumping station was running down them, and collecting in a trough under the frame.

  Completely taken aback both by the scale of the complex and by the steady mineral transformation wrought upon the twigs by the ceaseless flow of the water, I walked up and down the gallery for a long time, inhaling the salty air, which the

  slightest breath of air loaded with myriad tiny droplets. At length I sat down on a bench in one of the balcony-like landings off the gallery, and all that afternoon immersed myself in the sight and sound of that theatre of water, and in ruminations about the long-term and (I believe) impenetrable process which, as the concentration of salts increases in the water, produces the very strangest of petrified or crystallized forms, imitating the growth patterns of Nature even as it is being dissolved.

  During the winter of 1990/91, in the little free time I had (in other words, mostly at the so-called weekend and at night), I was working on the account of Max Ferber given above. It was an arduous task. Often I could not get on for hours or days at a time, and not infrequently I unravelled what I had done, continuously tormented by scruples that were taking tighter hold and steadily paralysing me. These scruples concerned not only the subject of my narrative, which I felt I could not do justice to, no matter what approach I tried, but also the entire questionable business of writing. I had covered hundreds of pages with my scribble, in pencil and ballpoint. By far the greater part had been crossed out, discarded, or obliterated by additions. Even what I ultimately salvaged as a "final" version seemed to me a thing of shreds and patches, utterly botched. So I hesitated t0 send Ferber my cut-down rendering of his life; and, as I hesitated, I heard from Manchester that Ferber had been taken to Withington Hospital with pulmonary emphysema. Withington Hospital was a one-time Victorian workhouse, where the homeless and unemployed had been subjected to a strict regime. Ferber was in a men's ward with well over twenty beds, where much muttering and groaning went on, and doubtless a good deal of dying. He clearly found it next to impossible to use his voice, and so responded to what I said only at lengthy intervals, in an attempt at speech that sounded like the rustle of dry leaves in the wind. Still, it was plain enough that he felt his condition was something to be ashamed of and had resolved to put it behind him as soon as possible, one way or another. He was ashen, and the weariness kept getting the better of him. I stayed with him for perhaps three quarters of an hour before taking my leave and walking the long way back through the south of the city, along the endless streets - Burton Road, Yew Tree Road, Claremont Road, Upper Lloyd Street, Lloyd Street North - and through the deserted Hulme estates, which had been rebuilt in the early Seventies and had now been left to fall down again. In Higher Cambridge Street I passed warehouses where the ventilators were still revolving in the broken windows.

  I had to cross beneath urban motorways, over canal bridges and wasteland, till at last, in the already fading daylight, the facade of the Midland Hotel appeared before me, looking like some fantastic fortress. In recent years, ever since his income had permitted, Ferber had rented a suite there, and I too had taken a room for this one night. The Midland was built in the late nineteenth century, of chestnut-coloured bricks and chocolate-coloured glazed ceramic tiles which neither soot nor acid rain have been able to touch. The building runs to three basement levels, six floors above ground, and a total of no fewer than six hundred rooms, and was once famous throughout the land for its luxurious plumbing. Taking a shower there was like standing out in a monsoon. The brass and copper pipes, which were always highly polished, were so capacious that one of the bathtubs (three metres long and one metre wide) could be filled in just twelve seconds. Moreover, the Midland was renowned for its palm courtyard and, as various sources tell, for its hothouse atmosphere, which brought out both the guests and the staff in a sweat and generally conveyed the impression that here, in the heart of this northern city with its perpetual cold wet gusts, one was in fact on some tropical isle of the blessed, reserved for mill owners, where even the clouds in the sky were made of cotton, as it were. Today the Midland is on the brink of ruin. In the glass-roofed lobby, the reception rooms, the stairwells, the lifts and the corridors one rarely encounters either a hotel guest or one of the chambermaids or waiters who prowl about like sleepwalkers. The legendary steam heating, if it works at all, is erratic; fur flakes from out of the taps; the window panes are coated in thick grime marbled by rain; whole tracts of the building are closed off; and it is presumably only a matter of time before the Midland closes its doors and is sold off and transformed into a Holiday Inn.