Excavating Memories In The Immigrants

Excavating Memories in “Max Ferber”
In his book, “The Emigrants”, W.G Sebald talks about four different characters and their stories. In his last one, he talks about Max Ferber, a Jewish painter who moved to Manchester as a refugee from Nazi Germany when he was a kid. In the narrator’s visits throughout the years, Ferber tells the story about his past and stay in Manchester. The chapter explores the past that haunts and affects his daily life. Throughout his life, Ferber has experienced trauma and dealt with it by repressing his memories through art. Several symbols describe his way of dealing with them. Sebald uses Ferber’s painting process and Manchester’s cityscape to develop the theme of repressed memories. Sebald

This method of scraping and repainting serves as a metaphor for dealing with memories. He scratches and scrapes the paint as if he was erasing his memories and filtering them. Whereas by painting and reworking, he tries to edit these thick layers of memories that are stacked on the canvas. However, some memories escape “annihilation” (P162) right to his mind. He continues the destruction until everything he wants to get rid of will be wiped off. This process of scratching made the floor thickly covered with paint droppings and dust. Ferber had a weakness for the dust and “loved more than anything else in the world”(P161). It symbolized the physical residue of memories that was building up on the floor as it was constantly fought in the painting process. He never touched them, he left them undisturbed believing that they will dissolve into “nothingness”(P161) over time. In addition, the author emphasizes more than once Ferber collecting the dust: “his prime concern was to increase the dust.”(P161) He describes Ferber’s obsession with his past. Furthermore, there is a contrast in Ferber’s dealing with memories. He is holding onto them by

He first describes Manchester as a city that has endured ups and downs by pointing out: “Manchester’s shipping traffic peaked around 1930 and then went into an irreversible decline, till it became to a complete standstill in the late Fifties.” (P 166). As well as that, Ferber’s studio was located in the middle of an industrial area full of “deserted buildings” (P160). Everyone has fled off, the same way Ferber fled Germany. The location of the studio symbolizes a link between Ferber and his past. After its decline, Manchester was a city of “motionless and deathly silence”(P166). All of its histories have been buried. “One solid mass of utter blackness, bereft of any further distinguishing features” (P168) was all that was left. There is a similarity between Manchester and Ferber. They were haunted by the history that was repressed but present. In the novella, Manchester acts as a description of Ferber’s painting. Similarly, as his paintings, Manchester has witnessed a huge transformational change. It transitioned from a natural structure to an industrial city that endured an economic disaster later on. Manchester underwent the destruction of a “natural amphitheatre” (P168) the same way Ferber scrapes his painting. Moreover, Manchester was reconstructed into the industrial “Jerusalem”(P165) just like Ferber’s painting undergoes