{"product_id":"on-the-natural-history-of-destruction-isbn-9780375756573","title":"On the Natural History of Destruction","description":"During World War Two, 131 German cities and towns were targeted by Allied bombs, a good number almost entirely flattened. Six hundred thousand German civilians died—a figure twice that of all American war casualties. Seven and a half million Germans were left homeless. Given the astonishing scope of the devastation, W. G. Sebald asks, why does the subject occupy so little space in Germany’s cultural memory? \u003cb\u003eOn the Natural History of Destruction\u003c\/b\u003e  probes deeply into this ominous silence.“Most writers, even good ones, write of what can be written. . . . The very greatest write of what cannot be written. . . . I think of Akhmatova and Primo Levi, for example, and of W. G. Sebald.”                          \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e —The New York Times \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“[Sebald] is writing about what he regards as a disquieting refusal to face facts—not only about what was done to the nation, but by implication, by the nation. . . . No better future for humankind is possible if we do less than look upon the crimes of our past, and their catastrophic results, with ‘a steadfast gaze.’”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Boston Sunday Globe \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“This may well be the last of Sebald’s writing we’ll ever have, so how amazing—and fitting—it is that it seems, in a fashion as uncanny as his prose and perceptions could often be, to close the circle of the ruminations that preoccupied his writing life.”       \u003cbr\u003e—\u003ci\u003eThe Washington Post \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“Sebald approaches his subject with sensitivity, yet avoids neither descriptions of horrible carnage nor criticism of writers too preoccupied with absolving themselves of blame to faithfully portray a destroyed Germany. The result is a balanced explication of devastation and denial, and a beautiful coda for Sebald.”   \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—Booklist \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e“The secret of Sebald’s appeal is that he saw himself in what now seems almost an old-fashioned way as a voice of conscience, someone who remembers injustice, who speaks for those who can no longer speak.” \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e—The New York Review of Books\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003eW.G. Sebald\u003c\/b\u003e taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, for thirty years, becoming Professor of European Literature in 1987. His books won several international awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the Berlin Literature Prize. He died at age 57 in 2001.\u003cb\u003eChapter 1\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAir War and Literature  \u003cbr\u003eZürich Lectures\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003ethe trick of elimination is\u003cbr\u003eevery expert's defensive reflex.\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e-Stanislaw Lem, Imaginary Magnitude\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eI\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eToday it is hard to form an even partly adequate idea of the extent  of the devastation suffered by the cities of Germany in the last  years of the Second World War, still harder to think about the  horrors involved in that devastation. It is true that the strategic  bombing surveys published by the Allies, together with the records of  the Federal German Statistics Office and other official sources, show  that the Royal Air Force alone dropped a million tons of bombs on  enemy territory; it is true that of the 131 towns and cities  attacked, some only once and some repeatedly, many were almost  entirely flattened, that about 600,000 German civilians fell victim  to the air raids, and that three and a half million homes were  destroyed, while at the end of the war seven and a half million  people were left homeless, and there were 31.1 cubic meters of rubble  for every person in Cologne and 42.8 cubic meters for every  inhabitant of Dresden-but we do not grasp what it all actually  meant. The destruction, on a scale without historical precedent,  entered the annals of the nation, as it set about rebuilding itself,  only in the form of vague generalizations. It seems to have left  scarcely a trace of pain behind in the collective consciousness, it  has been largely obliterated from the retrospective understanding of  those affected, and it never played any appreciable part in the  discussion of the internal constitution of our country. As Alexander  Kluge later confirmed, it never became an experience capable of  public decipherment. This is highly paradoxical in view of the large  numbers of people exposed to the campaign day after day, month after  month, year after year, and the length of time-well into the postwar  period-during which they still faced its real consequences, which  might have been expected to stifle any positive attitude to life.  Despite the enormous efforts whereby some kind of practicable modus  vivendi was restored after every attack, even after 1950 wooden  crosses still stood on the piles of rubble in towns like Pforzheim,  which lost almost one-third of its 60,000 inhabitants in a single  raid on the night of February 22, 1945, and no doubt the appalling  smells which, as Janet Flanner wrote in March 1947, were released  from the yawning cellars of Warsaw by the first warm spring weather  pervaded the German cities, too, in the immediate postwar period. But these things obviously did not register on the sensory experience  of the survivors still living on the scene of the catastrophe. People  walked \"down the street and past the dreadful ruins,\" wrote Alfred  Döblin in 1945, after returning from his American exile to southwest  Germany, \"as if nothing had happened, and . . . the town had always  looked like that.\" The reverse side of such apathy was the  declaration of a new beginning, the unquestioning heroism with which  people immediately set about the task of clearance and  reorganization. A booklet devoted to the city of Worms in 1945-1955  says that \"the hour called for upright men of impeccable conduct and  aims, almost all of whom would be in the front line of reconstruction  for years to come.\" This booklet, written by one Willi Ruppert for  the municipal authorities, included many photographs, including the  two pictures of the Kämmererstrasse printed here. They make it look  as if the image of total destruction was not the horrifying end of a  collective aberration, but something more like the first stage of a  brave new world. Writing of a conversation with the directors of I.  G. Farben in Frankfurt in April 1945, Robert Thomas Pell records the  amazement with which he heard Germans stating their intention of  rebuilding their country to be \"greater and stronger than ever  before\"-in a tone in which self-pity, groveling self-justification, a  sense of injured innocence, and defiance were curiously intermingled. Nor did  they subsequently fail to carry out that intention, as witness the  postcards that travelers in Germany can buy today at the newsstands  of Frankfurt am Main. From the outset, the now legendary and in some  respects genuinely admirable reconstruction of the country after the  devastation wrought by Germany's wartime enemies, a reconstruction  tantamount to a second liquidation in successive phases of the  nation's own past history, prohibited any look backward. It did so  through the sheer amount of labor required and the creation of a new,  faceless reality, pointing the population exclusively towards the  future and enjoining on it silence about the past. German accounts of  the time, which is scarcely a generation ago, are so few and far  between that Hans Magnus Enzensberger's collection Europa in Trümmern  (\"Europe in Ruins\"), published in 1990, consists predominantly of  pieces by foreign journalists and writers making observations that  until then had been almost completely ignored in Germany. The few  accounts originally written in German are by former exiles or other  outsiders, such as Max Frisch. Those who had stayed in Germany and,  like Walter von Molo and Frank Thiess in the deplorable controversy  over Thomas Mann, were fond of saying that while others were  comfortably ensconced in America they themselves had not left their  homeland in its hour of need, refrained entirely from commenting on  the process and outcome of destruction, probably not least for fear  that accurate descriptions might get them into trouble with the  occupying forces. Contrary to popular opinion, this shortage of  contemporary accounts was not compensated for in postwar German  literature which, as it followed a deliberate program of renewal  after 1947, might have been expected to cast some light on the real  state of affairs. Whilst the old guard of so-called internal  emigrants claimed to have been engaged in passive resistance,  invoking, as Enzensberger notes, vague notions of freedom and the  humanist inheritance of the West in endless and prolix abstractions, the younger generation of writers who had just returned home were so  intent on their own wartime experiences, described in a style  constantly lapsing into maudlin sentimentality, that they hardly  seemed to notice the horrors which, at that time, surrounded them on  all sides. Even the frequently cited \"literature of the ruins,\" of  its nature presupposing an unerring sense of reality and chiefly  concerned, as Heinrich Böll acknowledged, with \"what we found when we  came home,\" proves on closer inspection to be an instrument already  tuned to individual and collective amnesia, and probably influenced  by preconscious self-censorship-a means of obscuring a world that  could no longer be presented in comprehensible terms. 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 not even be privately acknowledged. Of all the literary  works written at the end of the 1940s, probably only Heinrich Böll's  Der Engel schwieg (\"The Angel Was Silent\") gives some idea of the  depths of horror then threatening to overwhelm any who really looked  at the ruins around them.9 Reading it, one is immediately aware that  this of all novels, a tale which seems marked by irremediable gloom,  was more than readers of the time could be expected to take, as  Böll's publishers and probably Böll himself thought. As a result it  was not published until 1992, almost fifty years later. Indeed, the  seventeenth chapter, relating the death throes of Frau Gompertz, is  so unremittingly somber that even today it makes painful reading. The  dark, stickily clotting blood described in these pages as it pours  from the dying woman's mouth in floods and spasms, spreading over her  chest, staining the sheets, dripping over the edge of the bed to the  floor and forming a glutinous puddle-inky and, as Böll is at pains to emphasize, intensely black-hued blood- symbolizes the despair that militates against the will to survive,  the bleak depression that refuses to lift and to which the Germans  might have been expected to succumb in view of such a horrific end.  Apart from Heinrich Böll, only a few authors-Hermann Kasack, Hans  Erich Nossack, Arno Schmidt, and Peter de Mendelssohn-ventured to  break the taboo on any mention of the inward and outward destruction,  and as we shall see, they generally did so rather equivocally. Even  in later years, when local and amateur war historians began  documenting the fall of the German cities, their studies did not  alter the fact that the images of this horrifying chapter of our  history have never really crossed the threshold of the national  consciousness. Those compilations, as a rule published by more or  less obscure firms-Hans Brunswig's Feuersturm über Hamburg  (\"Firestorm over Hamburg\"), for instance, was issued in 1978 by  Motorbuch-Verlag of Stuttgart-often seemed curiously untouched by the  subject of their research, and served primarily to sanitize or  eliminate a kind of knowledge incompatible with any sense of  normality. They did not try to provide a clearer understanding of the  extraordinary faculty for self-anesthesia shown by a community that  seemed to have emerged from a war of annihilation without any signs  of psychological impairment. The almost entire absence of profound  disturbance to the inner life of the nation suggests that the new  Federal German society relegated the experiences of its own  prehistory to the back of its mind and developed an almost perfectly  functioning mechanism of repression, one which allowed it to  recognize the fact of its own rise from total degradation while  disengaging entirely from its stock of emotions, if not actually  chalking up as another item to its credit its success in overcoming  all tribulations without showing any sign of weakness. Enzensberger  points out that it is impossible to understand \"the mysterious energy  of the Germans . . . if we refuse to realize that they have made a  virtue of their deficiencies. Insensibility,\" he adds, \"was the  condition of their success.\" The prerequisites of the German  economic miracle were not only the enormous sums invested in the  country under the Marshall Plan, the outbreak of the Cold War, and  the scrapping of outdated industrial complexes-an operation performed  with brutal efficiency by the bomber squadrons-but also something  less often acknowledged: the unquestioning work ethic learned in a  totalitarian society, the logistical capacity for improvisation shown  by an economy under constant threat, experience in the use of  \"foreign labor forces,\" and the lifting of the heavy burden of  history that went up in flames between 1942 and 1945 along with the  centuries-old buildings accommodating homes and businesses in  Nuremberg and Cologne, in Frankfurt, Aachen, Brunswick, and Würzburg,  a historical burden ultimately regretted by only a few. And in  addition to these more or less identifiable factors in the genesis of  the 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  together in the postwar years, and indeed still binds them, more  closely than any positive goal such as the realization of democracy  ever could. Perhaps we ought to remind ourselves of that context now,  when the project of creating a greater Europe, a project that has already failed twice, is entering a new phase, and  the sphere of influence of the Deutschmark-history has a way of  repeating itself-seems to extend almost precisely to the confines of  the area occupied by the Wehrmacht in the year 1941.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe plan for an all-out bombing campaign, which had been supported by  groups within the Royal Air Force since 1940, came into effect in  February 1942, with the deployment of huge quantities of personnel  and war matériel. As far as I know, the question of whether and how  it could be strategically or morally justified was never the subject  of open debate in Germany after 1945, no doubt mainly because a  nation which had murdered and worked to death millions of people in  its camps could hardly call on the victorious powers to explain the  military and political logic that dictated the destruction of the  German cities. It is also possible, as sources like Hans Erich  Nossack's account of the destruction of Hamburg indicate, that quite  a number of those affected by the air raids, despite their grim but  impotent fury in the face of such obvious madness, regarded the great  firestorms as a just punishment, even an act of retribution on the  part of a higher power with which there could be no dispute. Apart  from the reports of the Nazi press and the Reich broadcasting  service, which always spoke in the same tone of sadistic terrorist  attacks and barbaric gangsters of the air, protests against the long  campaign of destruction conducted by the Allies seem to have been few  and far between. According to several accounts, the Germans faced the  catastrophe that was taking place with silent fascination. \"This was  not the time,\" wrote Nossack, \"to draw such petty distinctions as the  difference between friend and foe.\" But in contrast to the mainly  passive reaction of the Germans to the loss of their cities, which  they perceived as an inescapable calamity, the program of destruction  was vigorously debated from the first in Great Britain. Not only did  Lord Salisbury and George Bell, Bishop of Chichester, repeatedly and  very forcefully express the opinion, both in the House of Lords and  to the general public, that an attacking strategy directed primarily  against the civilian population could not be defended morally or by  the laws of war, but the military establishment responsible for  conducting the campaign was itself split over this new kind of  warfare. The continuing ambivalence in the appraisal of the battle of  annihilation was even more pronounced after Germany's unconditional  surrender. As accounts and pictures of the effects of area bombing  began appearing in England, there was a growing sense of revulsion  against damage that had been, so to speak, indiscriminately  inflicted. \"In the safety of peace,\" writes Max Hastings, \"the  bombers' part in the war was one that many politicians and civilians  would prefer to forget.\" Retrospective historical accounts did not  clear up the ethical dilemma either. Feuds between various factions  were continued in memoirs, and the verdict of historians trying to  maintain an objective balance swings between admiration for the  organization of such a mighty enterprise, and criticism of the  futility and atrocity of an operation mercilessly carried through to  the end against the dictates of good sense.[quote]--The New York Review of Books","brand":"Modern Library","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46299892285669,"sku":"NP9780375756573","price":21.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780375756573.jpg?v=1767734118","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/on-the-natural-history-of-destruction-isbn-9780375756573","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}