Invasive Memory and W G Sebald’s The Emigrants

Abstract

The purpose of this research paper is to critically investigate the invasive nature of memory in W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants. Sebald chooses four Jews who experienced the terror of time characterized by the sinister anti-Semitism under Hitler. Dr Henry Selwyn, Paul Bereyter, Ambrose Adelwarth and Max Ferber escaped the Nazi terror but fell, unfortunately, prey to the reconstructive power of memory. Memory recreates the past. By recreating the past, it represences it. The represencing of the past for the aforementioned characters was to remind them of the events which disfigured their sense of self, belongingness, family, etc. It was difficult for them to live in the post-holocaust period in a different country as emigrants under the unending reconfiguring power of memory. The growing sense of fear and isolation as Jewish emigrants was further exacerbated by the tormenting reincarnation of the vicious past in the domain of memory. This recurrent reconfiguration of the most terrible historical reality, which embodied complete obliteration of Jewish existence, invited derangement to the sensitive survivors. This repetitive resurrection of the events of the past in the territory of memory is called invasive because it precipitated acute restlessness among the survivors and engaged them painfully with the past. Much of their growing isolation and their suicidal tendencies emanated from the unending experience of pain occasioned by the restorative re-emergence of the past occurring in the field of memory.