"In the last of the slides we saw the expanse of the Lasithi plateau spreading out before us, taken from the heights of one of the northern passes. . . .The fields . . . were awash in green upon green, studded with hundreds of white sails of wind pumps.We sat looking at this picture for a long time in silence . . . , so long that the glass in the slide shattered and a dark crack appeared on the screen. That view of the Lasithi plateau, held so long that it shattered, made a deep impression on me at the time, yet it vanished from my mind almost completely. It was not until a few years afterwards that it returned to me, in a London cinema, as I followed a conversation between Kaspar Hauser and his teacher, Daumer. . . .Kaspar, to the delight of his mentor, was distinguishing for the first time between dream and reality, beginning his account with the words: I was in a dream, and in my dream I saw the Caucasus . . ."

W. G. Sebald reveals in his books an impressionistic, enigmatic world as if through the lens of a silent film camera. He provides no answers about destinations, but prolific clues to the interrelatedness of existence. The Kaspar Hauser reference itself alludes to yet another episode from the same film by Werner Herzog, "The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser" (1974), in which the title character, a foundling of mysterious origins, tells a strange story on his deathbed. It is the story of a caravan.

Another haunting film sequence is alluded to in the second part of "The Emigrants." It is an episode from Fritz Lang's "Dr. Mabuse: The Gambler" (1922):

"Cosmo was particularly disturbed by an episode towards the end of the film, in which a one-armed showman and hypnotist by the name of Sandor Weltmann induced a sort of collective hallucination. . . .A caravan emerged onto the stage from a grove of palms, crossed the stage, went down into the auditorium, passed among the spectators, . . . and vanished as mysteriously as it had appeared. The terrible thing was, Cosmo inisted, that he himself had somehow gone from the hall together with the caravan, and now he could no longer tell where he was."

Sebald began publishing novels in his native German during the early 1990s. Translations appeared soon thereafter. They include "The Emigrants" (1996), "The Rings of Saturn" (1997), "Vertigo" (1999), and "Austerlitz" (2001). My book on Sebald's work will appear in the series "Understanding Contemporary European and Latin American Writers" (University of South Carolina Press) some time after April, 2002.