Customer Reviews

The End: Hamburg 1943

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Hans Erich Nossack was a German novelist in his 40s, married but apparently childless, living in Hamburg, during World War II. He was neither a Nazi nor a heroic anti-Nazi. By sheer coincidence he and his wife had managed to get a little vacation cabin outside the city on the sultry July night the Allied bombers came in wave after wave and rained down fire on Hamburg. The Nossacks were far enough out to be beyond reach of the flames, but close enough to see and even hear it all.

He wrote this within three months after that night. Joel Agee, the translator, notes in his introduction that he actually did this translation in the 1960s, with the Vietnam war in mind. But no publisher wanted it then. The reason this book has been published in English now is W.G. Sebald's praise of it in "On the Natural History of Destruction."

A short and straightforward book like this is the most devilish to translate, and the nearness of German and English makes the task more, not less, challenging.

There is a German equivalent of "the end," but it isn't the word Nossack took as his title. He called his book "Der Untergang." Literally, in English, "the undergoing." There is such a word in English, of course, but it means something different. You undergo an ordeal; you pass through some experience, like a dark night in a terror-filled forest, and you emerge, changed but alive, on the other side.

The German word is final in a way the English cannot be. It's like a torpedoed ship swallowed by the sea. Like the Latin equivalent, obitus, a going toward, a euphemism for "death," even in Roman times, and the source of our word obituary.

Even if undergoing had not the sense of "passage" in English, it has the wrong sound. The sonically unfortunate evolution of English gerundive endings into -ing, a weak and tinselly sound, renders that whole class of words mostly useless for poets or writers who aspire to a poetic quality. German -gang has the toll of a funeral bell.

The "Publishers Weekly" review, quoted above, seems to miss some important points.

"What's missing from Nossack's account is any political or historical dimension: a reader coming to this book for primary knowledge would learn little about why the bombings took place, or why so many people accepted them with numb resignation instead of anger."

Well, that's not the job of someone writing while the ground is still too hot to touch in some parts of the city, and while the flies still buzz from awful stinking cellar holes that nobody has the courage to peer into.

There is a yardstick for a book like this, in the modern American literary reaction to Sept. 11, 2001. What was written three months after that fact and dwelled on "why the bombings took place" and why people reacted as they did would be polemics or psychology. It would be impossible for a witness to write like that, so soon.

Oddly, the "PW" reviewer write, "The narrative is indeed clear-eyed and dispassionate, possessed of the emotional distance necessary to regard the terrible events in their totality."

It seems to me the book has not that quality at all. Yes, line by line it is a clear-eyed and dispassionate account. But there is a strange, almost insane, dislocation in it. As though you looked at a picture of an intact building, till you realized the picture had been turned and the building lay on its side.

After his wife, included throughout in a narrator's "we," every other person is a voiceless shadow. Even Nossack's neighbors and co-workers are a faceless group. The most dispassionate descriptions in the book are of human deaths: the group that huddled in a cellar and fried there is told in the kind of cold matter-of-factness you might use to describe the destruction of an anthill.

What breathes with soul and pain in this book is the lament for the lost things.

First, the buildings. Nossack and his wife, when they make their way back to the city, they go to his office to see if his papers have survived there, and they meet up with another worker who survived the night of the attack:

"Suddenly we hesitated; our gaze had fallen through the back window onto Saint Catherine's Church. Shocked, we looked at each other. 'Yes, I cried when it caved in,' said the engineer, who was standing next to us. He told us the precise hour when it had happened. It didn't help when we tried to persuade ourselves: It's just a church, what about those hundreds of thousands of homes and the people, that's so much worse. I suppose it was a symbol. All of us who had worked there loved that steeple exceedingly, each in his own way, perhaps without knowing it."

But then, as they go deeper into the ruined city in search of whatever is left of their belongings, the pangs of loss rise to a crescendo. They return to the building that had held their apartment, and found "just a small, much too small, heap of stones."

"But nothing was left, not a single trinket of all the things that we loved and that belonged with us. If there had been such a little something, how we would have caressed it; it would have been imbued with the essence of all the other things. And when we walked on, we left a vacuum behind. And the apartment? Our belongings? It's just not possible. And suddenly it's all there again. You are visiting someone, they have a bookcase. Oh yes! We had so many books. Or they'll put on a record. Do you know this concerto? Yes, that's Handel, we have it ourselves, all we have to do is take it out of the closet. But you know, the Hallelujah Chorus, we play it only on Christmas Eve after setting up the crèche. It's a family tradition."

It's Wordsworth's "Surprised by Joy," but with pulverized furniture in place of a dead child. How can the level of passion be the same in each case? What's wrong with this man? Nossack asks the same question:

"But these are just things! Imagine if you had lost your children or your wife. Yes, that is true, we say -- but it doesn't change anything. Was our way of living with things wrong, or just different? Who can say?"

Again, I think of all the literature to have come out of 9-11. We know so much about the people, the lost lives, that have been spun out for us from the obituaries that began to appear within days and ran day after day in the New York Times. People sometimes talk about the things lost in the attacks, the rupture of the New York skyline, for instance, but nobody makes that a central focus of the tragedy.

If some survivor -- someone who had worked in the WTC but stayed home sick that day -- wrote a poetic account of the things he had left in his desk and lost forever, hardly mentioning his co-workers and the others, we'd be rightly repulsed.

Yet however close we get to those lost lives, and we try and try, they have crossed over -- gone under. There is nothing now here, above ground, where they were but the wind and the night. We can never get into them in their final moments. No traveller returns to tell what they felt, falling, burning, crashing down.

Surely Nossack knew someone, some many, among the 30,000 people incinerated by the firestorm or crushed by falling brick walls.

Surely. And Wordsworth's poem is almost unbearable, if you pierce through the language and feel the emotion. It's contained in the formula of the sonnet's rules. The hard box that keeps the hot gush of tears from spilling out everywhere.

Nossack does not have the rigors of poetry. But he has his relation with objects, and into it he pours, and disguises, the unbearable sense of loss of so much life. His obsession with things is not a fetish, I think, it is a displacement that preserves sanity.

"These things have their life from us, because at some time we bestowed our affection on them; they absorbed our warmth and harbored it gratefully in order to enrich us with it again in meager hours. We were responsible for them; they could only die with us. And now they stood on the other side of the abyss in the fire and cried after us, begging: Don't leave us! We knew it, we heard it, and dared not pronounce their names, because pity would have destroyed us."

This little book takes about 40 minutes to read. It is not what you might expect. It is not a minute by minute account of what happened during the bombing. It does not give statistics or even mention many things about the appearance of the city or many of the horrifying things that happened. It is a revelation of what it felt like to lose everything. And it is truly beautifully written. Few people can write poetically much less translate poetically.

Hans Erich Nossack, the author of the "The End", was a German writer of some renown, as well as a poet. He lived in Hamburg, Germany during World War II (and thereafter, dying there in 1978). He happened to be vacationing with his wife, Misi, just outside the city in July 1943 when the Allies firebombed the town as part of "Operation Gomorrah", an attempt, in part, to demoralize the German people by purposefully bombing civilians, including women and children. In one night alone (July 23, 1943) it is estimated that over 40,000 people in the city died, primarily from a giant firestorm created from meteorological conditions partially caused by the effects of previous bombing 2 nights before and the tremendous bombing that night, which included anti-personnel incendiary bombs with phosphorus. The firestorm destroyed over 8 square miles of the city. The flames were over 2,000 feet high and could be seen from 200 miles away. The fire was so intense that it literally sucked oxygen out of any bomb shelters in the vicinity that were not airtight, causing people to die from carbon monoxide poisoning even if they were fortunate enough not to be incinerated outright from the heat. The force of the fire was the equivalent of a hurricane, with 150 mph winds. Before the bombing Hamburg was the second largest city in Germany. In addition to the outright deaths and destruction, the bombing resulted in over 1,000,000 refugees who had to evacuate and/or flee Hamburg.

Shortly after the bombing, the author and his wife returned to Hamburg, only to discover that their apartment had been destroyed. Three months later he (and presumably his wife) ends up in London (neither the translator nor the author explains how this came about). While in London, the author sets down his reminiscences and reflections on the bombing and its aftermath. His book was originally published in Germany in 1948 (under the title, "Der Untergang", meaning roughly one's demise, downfall, ruin, or destruction, e.g., Oswald Spengler's "Der Untergang des Abendlandes" is translated into English as "The Decline of the West" and Edgar Allen Poe's "The Decline and Fall of the House of Usher" is translated into German as "Der Untergang des Hauses Usher") but, for various reasons, was not translated and published in English until 2004.

The book is a sparse examination of the effects of on the remaining inhabitants of a town when it is bombed out (i.e., basically obliterated). It provides many interesting, and even fascinating, vignettes of life under such circumstances, especially in how people reacted to the horror and treated each other. Unfortunately, these sketches somehow seem incomplete. We never really learn much that is truly insightful about the author or about his wife. Indeed, his wife is often no more than a silent cipher: She is mysteriously detached from events (as well as from her husband) and she seems to serve only as a prop when necessary to serve the author's purpose. The author once described himself as the "best camouflaged writer in Germany". Nowhere is that camouflage more in evidence than in this book.

Nevertheless, the book is a valuable reference as a rare contemporaneous account of this event. The book must have taken courage to write and to address this event so soon after the fact. The problem is that there are far too many philosophical musings and meditations for it to really qualify as an historical account of the event and it seems that the author never really comes to grips with whatever it is he is trying to get across to the reader. The overall effect is more of a journal than an historical record.

Since this book was written within three months of the siege of Hamburg, the reader can walk through the noise, the terror, the human cost, and experience all the carnage through Nossack's eyes. We Americans have never, thank God, lived through a protracted and relentless bombing campaign. Nossack writes from the immediacy of the horror and his ability to write through the shock gives the book an eyewitness account of losing and not even recognizing his beloved city. I think we can also see how far removed the average citizen was from Nazi fanatacism and how little, at this point, they believed or cared about anything Hitler's government had to say. This is a five star book.

Pat O'Hagen

The original title of THE END is DER UNTERGANG, which means "the destruction," "the downfall," "the collapse." Translator Joel Agee, bearing in mind the "total collective ruin" narrated in the book, chose the title he did. Other possibilities might have been "The World Gone Under," "Fallen Away," or even "Everything in Ruins," but perhaps these alternatives are too descriptive, and the translator is right. In context, the original title signifies the end of the world that is known.

Author Hans Nossack wrote down his account three months after the Allied incendiary bombing of Hamburg in July 1943. Operation Gomorrah burned up fifty thousand lives. Nossack and his wife escaped by pure chance. In the first lines he explains that he could not delay writing for fear that his mind would return to the usual ways of thinking, with their conventional verities, and lose its ability to relate the other reality of his experience. The resulting short work--63 pages of inexplicably small type--must be called a memoir, yet is something quite different: the record of a mental state, the way a person thought after being stunned into a new or previously unrecognized reality. Agee, in his short foreword, calls it a report, a testimony, yet notes that it is unbalanced as reportage and not always factual as recollection. Reality has changed, so its description falls outside of any genre. The author is still in shock but emerging from his altered state, recovering his literary powers, but as yet unable to pull himself out of the void.

One can read the book as a historical document, but there is little attention to the dead, to the horrors that everyone would expect, and close attention to little details and missing objects. The Nazis and the Allies fighting the war do not seem to exist. The survivors of the bombing who need to bind together understand their special category without words and resent direct expressions of the obvious. They are like zombies. There is an occasional blurring between real and imagined or semi-hallucinatory events. It is bleak, streetless and chilling. Reading this book is like bending over a person lying in the road who softly tells you what he feels and what is numb, what is important and what no longer matters, what is real and what is not.

Why stop and listen? Why dip into another's misery, now so old? Well, for one thing, we always need to consider the most horrible possibilities. For another, we are still jumpy after the attacks of 9/11, and perhaps can profit from an account of ultimate disaster and survival. For a third, it is good for the soul to look back to Hamburg 1943 and hear from the victims, since it is always better to identify with victims, whether they be Jews in Nazi concentration camps or German citizens in Allied firestorms. But one advisory: don't read this book for its literary quality. It's too real for that.

In 1943 Hans Erich Nossack wrote a short narrative of his life as Hamburg was fire bombed by the Allies. Nossack was not in the city for the fire bombing, but his words tell a painful and mesmerizing tale of life immediately after the bombing. His poignant story is difficult to read due to the pain that comes from the pages through his words. They hit hard and without mercy. There are not any vengeful thoughts or anything negative, just the feelings that have transcended from that dark time in 1943 to today.

I highly recommend it.

This slim volume provides an eye-witness account of the Hamburg bombings of 1943. The devastation to the city is horrible, but the author's feelings toward the bombers would be unusual in today's society. Thought provoking.

Unlike the sentimental works describing the aftermath after 9/11, "The End", is an honest, unsentimental, and horrifying description about the allied bombing of Hamburg in 1943.

In less than 70 pages, the writer Hans Erich Nossack, tells his story, where "the most dangerous thing was the words "could have." It required a painful vigilance not to say "could have." I once walked past two women sitting by the ditch on the side of the road with their backs turned toward me. It was a grandmother with her grown daughter; some children may have been playing nearby. I only heard the old woman's words: Didn't I always tell you, you could have - and at that point the daughter howled like a mortally wounded animal. And nowadays, when someone in conversation is on the verge of straying into the realm of "could have," someone else will quickly admonish or beg him to stop; or the speaker will notice it himself and abruptly break off, saying: Oh well, it doesn't matter."

I can't say I enjoyed reading "The End," but like the instant re-play of the twin towers falling, I couldn't keep my eyes off them or the pages of this compelling book.

Reading in between the lines of this poetic eulogy to his native city Nossack has missed two points. Why was the city bombed? Was this revenge for what the Nazis had done to so many other cities?

Hamburg has been a major shipping port for central Germany since before there was a single German state. With it's natural harbor and rail lines it was one of the first targets that the Allies 'carpet' bombed. So much of the city was industrial that it was easier to 'level' it then to try and strategic bomb. One of the fallacies of WW2 is that the norden bomb sight was able to allow the Allies to 'pinpoint' bomb. It did not adjust for the speed and direction of the plane nor for the speed and direction of the wind.

Secondly, the Nazis had saturation bombed both Rotterdam and Warsaw, not to mention many of the major cities of the Soviet Union. By 1943, most if not all Germans had seen pictures of the destruction that the Luftwaffe had perpetrated (including Guernica in Spain) so they shouldn't have been surprised to see the Allies do the same thing.

This is just a part of the "Total War" that the Nazis had created, coming back to bite the German people in the arse. Nossack laments the losses to his home city but doesn't seem to take into account the same destruction visited on other cities. The German people were kept up to date by the Propaganda Ministry and saw daily what was being visited on other people by the Luftwaffe and Wehrmacht.

Look carefully at the pictures that are appended to the book and you will notice that the people seem to be well dressed and going about their everyday lives. The woman are even carrying handbags. After the bombing many of the refugees were set-up in new housing and given household goods that had been stolen from Jewish deportees or 'requisitioned' from the occupied countries (see "Hitler's Beneficiaries" by Gotz Aly).