W.G.Sebald died ten years ago last month in a tragic accident - a terrible loss for both German and English letters. To mark the anniversary of his death I picked up his last book: On the Natural History of Destruction (1999) (Anthea Bell's translation of Luftkrieg und Literatur). In this extended essay Sebald picks up the taboo topic of the Allied aerial bombing of Germany in World War II that reduced the great historic cities to rubble and killed more than 600,000 civilians.
Sebald's central thesis is that the terrible destruction and death from the bombings induced a kind of collective amnesia in the postwar population as evidenced by the near-complete absence of any treatment of the subject in German literature.
"There was a tacit agreement, equally binding on everyone, that the true state of material and moral ruin in which the country found itself was not to be described. The darkest aspects of the final act of destruction, as experienced by the great majority of the German population, remained under a kind of taboo like a shameful family secret, a secret that perhaps could nt even be privately acknowledged."
Sebald feels there is something inherently German in this willful amnesia - this mass Verdrängung in a Freudian sense- which, nevertheless was useful in the rapid rebuilding of the ruined cities. It was not only the economic support of the Marshall Plan that spurred the Wirtschaftswunder - Germany's postwar Economic Miracle:
"there was also a purely immaterial catalyst: the stream of psychic energy that has not dried up to this day, and which has its source in the well-kept secret of the corpses built into the foundations of our state, a secret that bound all Germans todgether in the pastwar years, and indeed still binds them, more closely than any positive goal such as the the realization of democracy ever could."
Sebald acknowledges the few literary works that deal directly with the firebombing - especially Hans Erich Nossack's Der Untergang, which is an eyewitness account of the carpet-bombing of Hamburg. He also mentions Heinrich Böll's early novel Der Engel schwieg ("The Silent Angel"), which wasn't published until 1992 due to the (taboo) graphic descriptions of the terrible deaths from the bombings.
Sebald makes only passing reference to the writer Gert Ledig (see my piece: Gert Ledig. Novelist of War) whose 1955 masterpiece Vergeltung ("Payback") is the shocking story of the firebombing of Munich. The critical reviews of Vergeltung at the time were so negative that Ledig never again found a publisher for his fiction - which only supports Sebald's central thesis of willful amnesia.
But Sebald never extends his thesis to the perpetrators of the firebombing, even though he presents the records of the British High Command who deliberately targeted noncombatant civilians in an effort to demoralize the German populace. It turns out the firebombings had the opposite effect. Where are the American or British works of fiction that deal with this moral catastrophe? The only one that comes to mind is Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, written from the perspective of a survivor (Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in Dresden when it was firebombed). For that matter, where are the American literary works that deal with Hiroshima (John Hershey's non-fiction book Hiroshima is a huge exception) or the carpet bombing of North Vietnam that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians? Willful amnesia apparently knows no national boundaries.
Some other resources for those interested in this topic:
- Volker Hage's Zeugen der Zerstörung: Die Literaten und der Luftkrieg is a response to Sebald's essay.
- Oliver Lubrich's Berichte aus der Abwurfzone is a collection of eyewitness reports by non-Germans who happened to be in Germany as the cities were bombed.
- Jörg Friedrich's Der Brand (English edition: The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940 - 1945) is unlikely to be surpassed as a history of the Allied aerial bombing campaign.
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