There’s an old story that I suspect W G Sebald knew, about two Jews in eastern Europe in the early 20th century wanting to flee persecution and wondering where to go. One says: “Maybe Australia.” The other says: “But it’s so far away!” And the first says: “Far away from where?”

Paul Bereyter was one of Sebald’s narrator’s schoolteachers. The story opens with the narrator recalling the moment in January 1984 when he learned of Bereyter’s suicide, and then read an obituary that left him feeling haunted. “Almost by way of an aside, the obituary added, with no further explanation, that during the Third Reich Paul Bereyter had been prevented from practicing his chosen profession. It was this curiously unconnected, inconsequential statement, as much as the violent manner of his death, which led me in the years that followed to think more and more about Paul Bereyter, until, in the end, I had to get beyond my own very fond memories of him and discover the story I did not know.”

The story is, as you would expect with Sebald, not so much a direct narrative as a compelling rumination that explores the condition of people in Bereyter’s situation. In my teaching I like to get students thinking about the relationship between our interior and exterior in the contexts of place-writing, examining how place can shape our identity, our mood, who we think we are and how we behave. We feel our connection to place both psychologically and physically, and this relationship works both ways: we project our psychological needs on to our surroundings as much as we are shaped by them. The stories in The Emigrants examine the darkness implicit in this scenario: that if our attachment to place is undone, this displacement can dislocate us both physically and psychologically.

This is something I’ve thought about a good deal while writing my Joseph Roth biography, but also in general over the years with regard to my maternal grandparents’ experiences as refugees from Nazi-occupied Vienna. When the place you thought was home – the place you grew up in, formed your sense of self in, and considered yourself a part of and safe within – reveals itself suddenly and violently not to be home, you lose your original, foundational reference point and are physically and existentially cut adrift. You are disabused of the ideas you had about who you were, and that you were a valued participant in that society. You become severed from the place that helped to form you, and the aspects of yourself that were propped up by the social role you performed there are suddenly unsupported and fall away. You are rudely ejected from a shared history that gave you identity, so you are not only disengaged from place but from time – you lose sense of a greater narrative that your life’s chronology plays out within. Your life makes less sense. And this is not even to mention the trauma that you feel on losing friends and family to genocide, and the guilt you feel for surviving.

Then there’s the matter of assimilation in the new country – the psychologically exhausting business of attempting to pass, of suggesting to your new fellow countrymen that you share their identity, an identity you are hastily learning as an autodidact… So, the violent destruction of one identity, the exhausting performance of another during which you second-guess yourself at every instant because you feel, as Joan Didion put it in The White Album, that everyone else has a script and you are improvising – and you feel that soon you’re bound to get caught out. Role-playing, acting, while attempting to recover from the ground having opened up beneath your feet, and that you will never again quite trust attachment to place as a secure source of identity.

At the same time, you lose any illusions of future physical safety: you are anxious that the new place that has accepted you as a refugee may one day turn on you too. Metaphorically, psychologically, you keep your suitcases packed. You never know when you might need to move on. You don’t put down roots that couldn’t be dug up again at haste if necessary. No place seems to guarantee psychological or physical security. There is no longer a ‘there’ by which to orient yourself – it’s gone.

So ‘Far away from where?’, you say wistfully – because you still look back in the direction of home but you know it no longer exists, or not for you… you no longer have a viable ‘there’ as a reference point, and while you may still orient yourself by reference to a lost home, you know you can’t go back there. You feel peripheral, both to your new country and the old country. You exist in a hinterland. So you’re not only doubly marginalised, you’re alienated, and the idea of home suddenly seems illusory and sad. You become like Sebald’s narrator’s Uncle Kasimir looking at the ocean in another of the stories in The Emigrants: “‘I often come out here,’ said Uncle Kasimir, ‘it makes me feel that I am a long way away, though I never quite know from where.’”

Or as Sebald writes with regard to Paul Bereyter, “one was, as the crow flies, about 2000km away – but from where? – and day by day, hour by hour, with every beat of the pulse, one lost more and more of one’s qualities, became less comprehensible to oneself, increasingly abstract.”

The Emigrants is an extraordinary book, one that I read shortly after Sebald’s death in 2001 but appreciated and understood better when I reread it last year. These stories are a profound act of empathy that display Sebald’s lifelong project to understand his native country’s descent into barbarism, and in particular the condition of the people Germany failed to murder and forced into exile.

First published in Die Ausgewanderten, Eichborn Verlag, 1992; first published in English in The Emigrants, Harvill Press, 1996