On the Natural History of Destruction (ISBN 0375504842)

Flies of the Lord:
Why was there so little German writing about the destruction of the war? And why was the little that did get done so steeped in mystic rambling instead of acute description and analysis? Sebald's theory: this was so for the same reason that enabled the Germans to go for their amazing reconstruction: they were so numbed by the experience, that they had turned off any perception and just put one foot in front of the other. And for the same reason the alleged war aim of demoralizing the German population failed. They did not stop to think about it. Sebald also does a good lot of destructive criticism on writers of the first hours: Kassack, Nossack, Mendelsohn, also Arno Schmidt get demolished badly (which hurts me in the case of AS, the hermit of Bargfeld, but admittedly the text that Sebald demolishes is utter crap). Boell gets off lightly, his contemporary novel was not published until decades later, because publishers did not think the public was 'ready'. Good stuff was only produced and published in the 70s: especially Kluge and Fichte. A special attention is paid to the previously thought respectable Andersch. Devastating. In principle the message stands: the firestorms, the reign of rats and flies was not written about from the inside. The area bombing concept was developed when Britain had no other choice: in no other way could they get back into the fight. Why was it continued when it was not needed any more and did more damage than good to the war effort? Plausible answer: two reasons: first, the material was produced and needed to be used, simple economic consideration; second, the propaganda effect on the domestic front was overwhelming. Never mind it was useless.

Memory Will Speak:
I'm a great fan of W.G. Sebald. I think he's possibly the most powerful writer of my lifetime in any language. But I wonder if this 100-page essay, based on a couple of lectures, hasn't received undue attention in the body of Sebald's work. It's far from his most creative writing, it's uncharacteristically ambiguous, and it has been received with oddly obtuse misunderstanding. Still, the problems I and other Sebald fans have with it are important and need to be confronted. After a couple of readings in English and in German, I've come to think that Sebald was a deeper psychologist than a historian, and that he was confused and dissatisfied with his own relationship to Germany and to German history. The "Destruction" in question here is the devastation of 131 German cities caused by British and American bombing, during which the RAF dropped a least a million tons of explosives and set off fire-storms of a new level of horror. There are issues of debate about the moral and strategic justifications of such bombing of civilian targets; the British themselves debated at the time, not least because the casualty rate of bomber personnel was 60% and the bombing consumed more than a third of Britain's resources of war materiel. There have been similar heated debates about the American decision to us atomic bombs in Japan. But the strategic efficacy and the moral justification of the bombings are NOT Sebald's main concern. He is not offering a plea for pity or self-pity, or a claim that one wrong counters another. Here's what he says on page 103: "The majority of Germans today know, or at least so it is to be hoped, that we actually provoked the annihilation of the cities in which we once lived. Scarcely anyone can now doubt that Air Marshal Goring would have wiped out London if his technical resources had allowed him to do so." Sebald offers this remark in reaction to an absurdity, the appalling notion that "International Jews" were behind the strategy of destroying German cities, a notion that Sebald finds rooted in the xenophobia and paranoia of pre-war Germany. Sebald's preoccupation is not, therefore, with the tactics of destruction, but rather with the post-war response of the German people to their catastrophe and its meaning. He is concerned with `historical amnesia.' Here are his own words: "The destruction of all the larger German cities and many of the smaller one, which one must assume could hardly be overlooked at the time and which marks the face of the country to this day, is reflected in works written after 1945 by a self-imposed silence, an absence also typical of other areas of discourse, from family conversations to historical writings.... This scandalous deficiency, which has become ever clearer to me over the years, reminded me that I had grown up with the feeling that something was being kept from me; at home, at school, and by the German writers whose books I read hoping to glean more in formation about the monstrous events in the background of my own life." It's important to recall that this essay, and the lectures it was based on, are primarily critiques of German post-war literature, most of which is unknown to English readers. For example, Sebald spends four pages analyzing Die Kathedrale by Peter de Mendelssohn, a minor bit of kitsch that wasn't even published until years after the war. Here, I fear, Sebald is open to serious reservations. Rather than showing that no one recorded the destruction, or responses to the destruction, Sebald seems to be judging the records and responses as inauthentic and inadequate. Yet among those records is an account by Peter Reck which Sebald treats extensively, an account so horrific and vivid that it calls Sebald's judgement of it into doubt. Sebald's own writing style is so carefully dissociative, so nuanced and distanced and yet so resonant with emotions, that hardly any mere journalist or popular author could possibly satisfy him. Is the question perhaps not whether German writers addressed memories of the war, but whether they did so profoundly and honestly enough? How many aftermaths of wars have been chronicled by writers of Sebald's caliber? It's also important to recall that Sebald himself was only one year old when the war ended. He was a small child in a remote rural corner of Germany during the most painful years of reconstruction. Whose memories have been deselected then? Certainly not his own! And Sebald was not an exile from Germany; he was an emigrant. Unlike that brilliant exile, Vladimir Nabokov, Sebald had no memory of or nostalgia for a pre-war Germany, a better or at least more gracious lost world. Sebald's nagging dissatisfaction with post-war Germany is the rancor of one who has tried to leave more behind than he has been able to. Sebald has declared that he'd rather not be German but can't help it. For all his years as an emigrant to England, when he began writing late in life, he wrote in German, about Germany. I have to wonder why Sebald felt such furious dislike for the Germany of his own lifetime; I suppose he felt a self-contempt and disappointment with his Folk roughly like my own outrage at the historical failings of my own birth country, and at the unreadiness of my people to acknowledge our true history. Sebald's theme, like Nabokov's, is always memory. For them, what cannot be remembered does not exist. Life itself is memory and the fullest memory amounts to the fullest life. But only a substantiated memory is real rather than merely literary pretense. Why else does he include his characteristic random photos? On page 73, for instance, he shows a simple bedroom, his parents' bedroom in Germany when he was a child, with a picture on the wall of the Nazarene in prayer in the moonlit garden of Gethsemane. He had just noticed a memorial in a Corsican village to victims of Auschwitz, and now he sees the same picture of Christ, the exact same!, on the wall of a Corsican church. Meaningful? For Sebald, yes; he writes: "Such is the dark backward and abysm of time. Everything lies all jumbled up in it, and when you look down you feel dizzy and afraid." Oddly enough, the same picture, the exact same!, hung on the wall of my own grandparents' bedroom when I was a child, and I FEEL, however irrationally, what Sebald meant. Memory is not what you remember but what you feel when you remember.

w. g. sebald:
subtle, interesting and disturbing book from a viewpoint seldom encountered in America; author deserves to be better known

ON THE NATURAL HISTORY OF DESTRUCTION:
This book is about the aftermath of the bombing in Germany in WWII. It's about what really happens to people in war. It's about what really happens in war. Everyone in the United States should read this book. If they did, war would always be the last choice, and we wouldn't be in Iraq today.

Not much of a book:
This very slight volume consists of about 100 pages of an interesting set of lectures on the subject of why there hadn't been much written in contemporary German literature on the subject of the destruction of German cities by aerial bombing in World War II. It's a very interesting topic but the lectures pre-date the publication of "Der Brand" ("The Fire") by Joerg Friedrich which I imagine makes Sebald's earlier lectures somewhat obsolete. The lectures are somewhat interesting read in conjunction with Gunther Grass' very disappointing and confusing "Peeling the Onion" although Sebald doesn't refer to Grass' work anywhere in this book. The rest of the book is padded out with three short essays on two German writers and one German artist who are mostly unknown outside of the German-speaking world. I majored in German literature as an undergraduate in the 70's but don't think I had ever heard of Alfred Andersch, or if I had, I had completely forgotten about him. The essay on Peter Weiss, an artist of some kind, is particularly obtuse without any illustrations accompanying the text.