The Emigrants transformed Sebald's literary fortunes – although it certainly did not appear that way initially. When Sebald read an excerpt from the book at the televised competition for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 1990, he did not convince the highprofile judges. Scandalously, he failed to win any of the six prizes handed out by the jury to emerging writers. Things changed once the first enthusiastic reviews appeared in autumn 1992 and the book was featured on the popular TV programme Das Literarische Quartett in January 1993.

Like Vertigo, the beginnings of the four stories collected in this book hark back to the 1980s. The nucleus of The Emigrants is the story of the damaged life and tragic death of Paul Bereyter, the fictional name Sebald gave to his primary school teacher Armin Müller. When Sebald heard the news of Müller's suicide in early January 1984, it must have reminded him of Jean Améry, another Jewish survivor of Nazi persecution who had committed suicide five years earlier. Sebald explained how a kind

Researching and writing the story of his former teacher put Sebald on track of the phenomenon of the ‘survivor syndrome’; a tragic condition that first causes its victims to repress their traumatic burden of escaping persecution before eventually becoming overwhelmed and compelled to end their lives.

As before in Vertigo, Sebald collected four stories in one book, and, again, used the Leitmotif of a hunter to connect them – in this case the butterfly collector Vladimir Nabokov. One difference between the two, however, is that the coherence between the stories that make up The Emigrants is much stronger. Still, the title suggests a common denominator that does not really exist.