648
PARTISAN REVIEW
he felt they were headed for death." We are reminded of the trains that
carried so many other Jews to their deaths . These four emigrants are as
inextricably bound to those dead as they are to each other by the dis–
turbing state of freedom and regret their own journeys have brought
them. The message Sebald repeatedly impresses upon us is: go, but do
not expect to go with impunity.
The fourth story in
The Emigrants
is that of Max Ferber, for whom
even the shortest train ride is torture. After remaining in Manchester for
more than twenty years, he finally brings himself to take a trip to
Switzerland, during which he severely injures his back in the act of stand–
ing up. In the midst of the crippling pain-"related, in the most precise
manner conceivable, to the inner constitution I had acquired over the
years"-Ferber begins to remember his youth. One understands then
that to remain still-actually petrified-all those years had been a way of
staying the onslaught of memory. Sebald himself is susceptible to bouts
of paralysis, both physical and mental, often following the disorientation
that arises when memory is confronted by reality or when the past
becomes an interloper in the present, as when he thinks he recognizes
Dante in the streets of Vienna. At these times, he writes, "when obliged
to lean against a wall or seek refuge in the doorway of a building, I feared
that mental paralysis was beginning to take hold of me, I could think of
no way of resisting it but to walk until late into the night, till I was utterly
worn out." Traveling is both the cause and cure of the malady-nostal–
gia, melancholy, vertigo, and even madness-that threatens Sebald and
those he shadows. Motion confuses and upsets, but it also fixes things in
sharp relief: fleeing one Italian city, he writes, "Not until I am on the
train to Milan do I become visible again to my mind's eye."
For Sebald, whose scholarly mind is a log of the ruins of history, the past
is always forcing itself upon the present.
Vertigo,
divided like
The Emi–
grants
into four parts, recounts a journey to Vienna, Venice, Verona, Riva,
and finally to Sebald's childhood town in the mountains of southern Ger–
many. The journey progresses, doubles back, and repeats itself, while echo–
ing the travels of Stendhal and Kafka, pausing on the imprisonment of
Casanova in Venice, and crossing the paths of countless others. Not only
does Sebald spot Dante walking down the street, but also King Ludwig II
on a vaporetto; Elizabeth, daughter of James I, boarding a train at Heidel–
berg Station ("whom I recognized instantly, without a shadow of a
doubt"); and-in one of the many humorous moments in the book-twin
boys who are the spitting image of Kafka, whose picture he tries in vain to
take until he is suspected of pederasty. This indulgence in confusing the
identities of strangers with figures of history nods to another kind of mad-
