The Emigrants

His light was always on till the small hours. He read and read - Altenberg, Trakl, Wittgenstein, Friedl, Hasenclever, Toller, Tucholsky, Klaus Mann, Ossietzky, Benjamin, Koestler, and Zweig: almost all of them writers who had taken their own lives or had been close to doing so. He copied out passages into notebooks which give a good idea of how much the lives of these particular authors interested him. Paul copied out hundreds of pages, mostly in Gabelsberg shorthand, because otherwise he would not have been able to write fast enough...


The Emigrants, W.G. Sebald
1992