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appalling year for all of Europe, and for European Jews a death’s-head year; and 1970, when, at the age of twenty-six, Sebald left his native Germany and moved permanently to England.
    It cannot be inappropriate to speculate why. One can imagine that in 1966, during the high period of Germany’s “economic miracle,” when Sebald was (as that meagerly informative paragraph tells us) a very young assistant lecturer at the Universityof Manchester—a city then mostly impoverished and in decline—he may have encountered a romantic attachment that finally lured him back to Britain; or else he came to the explicit determination, with or without any romantic attachment (yet he may, in fact, have fallen in love with the pathos of soot-blackened Manchester), that he would anyhow avoid the life of a contemporary German. “The life of a contemporary German”: I observe, though from a non-visitor’s distance, and at so great a remove now from those twelve years of intoxicated popular zeal for Nazism, that such a life is somehow still touched with a smudge, or taint, of the old shameful history; and that the smudge, or taint—or call it, rather, the little tic of self-consciousness—is there all the same, whether it is regretted or repudiated, examined or ignored, forgotten or relegated to a principled indifference. Even the youngest Germans traveling abroad—especially in New York—know what it is to be made to face, willy-nilly, a history of national crime, however long receded and repented.
    For a German citizen to live with 1944 as a birth date is reminder enough. Mengele stood that year on the ramp at Auschwitz, lifting the omnipotent gloved hand that dissolved Jewish families: mothers, babies, and the old to the chimneys, the rest to the slave labor that temporarily forestalled death. —Ah, and it is sentences like this last one that present-day Germans, thriving in a democratic Western polity, resent and decry. A German professor of comparative literature accused me not long ago—because of a sentence like that—of owning a fossilized mind, of being unable to recognize that a nation “develops and moves on.” Max Ferber, the painter-protagonist of the final tale in Sebald’s quartet, might also earn that professor’s fury. “To me, you see,” Sebald quotes Ferber, “Germany is a country frozen in the past, destroyed, a curiously extraterritorial place.” It is just this extraterritorialism—this ineradicable, inescapable,ever-recurring, hideously retrievable 1944—that Sebald investigates, though veiled and at a slant, in
The Emigrants
. And it was, I suspect, not the democratic Germany of the economic miracle from which Sebald emigrated in 1970; it may have been, after all, the horribly frozen year of his birth that he meant to leave behind.
    That he did not relinquish his native language or its literature goes without saying; and we are indebted to Michael Hulse, Sebald’s translator (himself a poet), for allowing us to see, through the stained glass of his consummate Englishing, what must surely be the most delicately powerful German prose since Thomas Mann. Or, on second thought, perhaps not Mann really, despite a common attraction to the history-soaked. Mann on occasion can be as heavily ornate as those carved mahogany sideboards and wardrobes—vestiges of proper German domesticity abandoned by the fleeing Jews—which are currently reported to add a certain glamorous middle-thirties tone to today’s fashionable Berlin apartments. Sebald is more translucent than Mann; he writes as Turner paints: “To the south, lofty Mount Spathi, two thousand meters high, towered above the plateau, like a mirage above the flood of light. The fields of potatoes and vegetables across the broad valley floor, the orchards and clumps of other trees, and the untilled land, were awash with green upon green, studded with the hundreds of white sails of wind pumps.” Notably, this is not a landscape viewed by a fresh and