SOURCE: Brady, Philip. “Ghosts of the Present.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4867 (12 July 1996): 22.

In the following review, Brady praises Sebald's use of vivid imagination and haunting evocation of memory in The Emigrants.

In an essay first published in 1927 and entitled “Photography”, Siegfried Kracauer, one of a group of cultural critics—it included Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht—who were looking for meanings below the surface appearance of photographs, scrutinizes an old, faded photograph of his grandmother. He reflects on what he calls the “demonic ambiguity” of old photographs, the tension between an opaqueness “which scarcely a ray of light can penetrate” and a transparence that can increase “to the extent that insights thin out the vegetation of the soul”. And behind the ambiguity, he finds something unsettling: photographs fail in their “attempt to banish the recollection of death”. While Kracauer muses, letting a photograph generate ideas, the German writer...