ABSTRACT
Manchester has taken possession of me for good. I cannot leave.
I do not want to leave. I must not.1
These puzzling words are spoken by the reclusive artist Max Ferber, the fourth
and last of the enigmatic figures portrayed in Winfried Georg Sebald’s The Emigrants. It is the autumn of 1966 and the narrator, ‘Sebald’, has recently arrived in Manchester to take up a teaching post at the University. He seeks
to escape the tawdriness of his hotel room and the tedium of the British
Sunday by undertaking long, aimless walks across the bleak post-industrial
Mancunian cityscape. ‘Sebald’ wanders past empty soot-blackened buildings,
abandoned mills, deserted factories and warehouses, dreary streets on the
point of demolition, and desolate expanses awaiting redevelopment (Figure
1.1). Mid-1960s Manchester is half-ruin, half-building site. On one of these
perambulations, he chances upon Ferber’s ramshackle studio, occupying a
derelict building somewhere amid the disused docklands near Trafford Park.
