SOURCE: Chalmers, Martin. “Angels of History.” New Statesman 125, no. 4292 (12 July 1996): 44-5.

In the following review, Chalmers lauds Sebald's evocation of history and memory in The Emigrants.

Perhaps the last moment at which our 20th century of murder and destruction might have taken a different course was 1913. Certainly the summer of that year recurs in W G Sebald's four linked stories of emigration and exclusion as a time of happiness that was never to be recaptured. The longest, “Max Ferber”, begins in 1966, in a startlingly evoked Manchester: a sooty mausoleum of industrialisation. The narrator, a young German student with a biography much like that of Sebald, explores the wastelands of the city. He stumbles on an artist's studio in some otherwise deserted buildings by the docks. The artist is a German-Jewish émigré, Max Gerber. They talk, walk in the Manchester murk, and the student watches the artist at work...