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On the Natural History of Destruction

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This posthumous volume of Sebald's non-fiction writing is a major contribution to German literary criticism and politico-cultural analysis. Accompanying his reflections on the traumatic impact of the air war against German cities are essays studying the very diverse reactions of three `witnesses' of that time as reflected in their post-war literary works. In AIR WAR AND LITERATURE, originally presented as the Zurich Lectures, Sebald delves deeply into some very uncomfortable questions. The air war on 131 German cities killed some six hundred thousand civilians and destroyed more than the homes of seven and a half million people. Why have these events resulted mostly in public silence for decades? Why have so few literary works attempted to speak to the traumatic impact on the population? Most Germans seem to have tried to come to terms with the realities of the war years by suppressing their immediate pain and the longer-term suffering. Sebald has thoroughly researched a multitude of authors, both in fiction and non-fiction. Yet, he deems their explanations unsatisfactory. Heinrich Boell is cited as one of the early exceptions, yet publication of his book, The Silent Angel, was delayed by forty years.

Sebald contemplates the different causes for this persistent silence. For example, basing himself on a range of contemporary sources, he confronts the reader with a detailed description of the Hamburg firestorm. As disturbing as his account is, Sebald's reflective style makes it readable. His objective reporting neither criticises the Allies' campaign nor does he apologise for German actions leading to the war. He wonders, though, whether the depth of the traumatic experiences of this and other air attacks may have left many people numb and dazed, unable to express their reactions for a long time. The account of a young mother wandering through the station confused and stunned is one of several examples. Her suitcase suddenly opens onto the platform revealing the charcoaled remains of her baby.

Sebald's intent is not to shock but to explain the deep sense of loss that must have been felt by people like her. He further contends that at that time in the war, the growing acceptance of guilt for the Nazi's atrocities led in many civilians to an acknowledgment of justified punishment by the Allied forces. Last, not least, after the war many Germans experienced a `lifting of a heavy burden' that they felt they had lived under during the Nazi regime. Concentrating on building the new Germany focused their minds on a better future. The publication (in German) of his Lectures in 1997 resulted in a range of reactions from readers. He reflects their varied views and comments in a postscript, thereby adding a fascinating 1990's dimension to his "rough-and-ready collection of various observations, materials, and theses".

The three authors who are the subject of the essays in this volume may be better known to students of German literature and culture. They represent a fine example of Sebald's skill as a contemplative and sensitive literary critic. At the same time, these essays complement Sebald's Lectures in a more fundamental way. In terms of coming to terms with the Nazi period and its atrocities, each one represents a specific type of German with his own means and ways of dealing with the recent past. Alfred Andersch is presented as having reinterpreted his personal history to fit his vision of self-importance in post-war Germany. Jean Amery, of half Jewish parentage, suffered through SS torture and survived various concentration camps. For the rest of his life, which he ended himself, he did not lose the nightmares of his torment. It was not until the mid-sixties, that he found his voice to impart his experiences in the form of essays on exile, genocide and resistance. Peter Weiss, who had lived in exile most of his life, found his self-expression mainly through painting and theatre productions until he published late in life his major fiction work, Aesthetics of Resistance.

This collection of "mediations on natural guilt, national victimhood, and the universal consequences of denying the past" is a significant socio-political document. Its importance for today's reader goes beyond the concrete German situation. As it addresses more fundamental issues of dealing with a society's traumatic past experiences, Sebald also confronts the need to develop the capacity to heal while learning and sharing the lessons from that past. [Friederike Knabe, Ottawa Ontario]

I found Sebald's descriptions of the Allied firebombing to be moving. One reviewer faults Sebald for his inclusion of several pages on the destruction of the zoo, because the reviewer thinks the original description that Sebald uses gives comfort to neo-Nazis. Perhaps it does, but that doesn't make it invalid. And if you look at the totality of this work, it certainly does not in any way condone Germany's Nazi past.

What Sebald is discussing is human memories of the bombings, and the repression of those memories. He isn't discussing the rights or wrongs of the bombings, which he mentions only briefly in what he calls a postscript. I don't think this should be used, as another reviewer has, to argue that he is minimizing German guilt. You could take the other point of view equally well: that he is minimizing Allied guilt by not discussing criticisms of the Allied bombing campaign. These issues are not germane to his narrowly-defined topic. In other words, the book is not a history of bombing, nor is it a discussion of the ethics of bombing civilians; rather, it is a description of what people remember about these events in later years.

I found the second part of the book, a discussion of Alfred Andersch, to be equally interesting. Here is a man who, according to Sebald, used his novels to rewrite the story of his life, and he wrote it as he probably should have lived it, rather than as he did live it. And he did this without ever apologizing for (or even admitting) his less than heroic behavior in real life.

The last two essays were less interesting to me than the rest of the work. They might be more useful to specialists in modern German literature. This brings me to what I consider a defect in this book. Surely the people about whom Sebald is writing are not household names in the U.S. I think that the translator or publisher should have included brief biographies of these individuals.

And while we are on this subject, I think the translator could have added to Sebald's footnotes too. In the section on Andersch, we are told that he divorces his wife in 1943 because she is Jewish, thus leaving her and their daughter at the mercy of the Nazi regime. But, although we are told of the fate of Andersch's mother-in-law, we are never told what happens to his ex-wife & daughter.

All in all, however, I think this work is well worth reading. It's not one that you will forget once you have finished reading it.

This is one of the most remarkable books written around World War 2.

Whilst Sebald's primary subject is the lacunae and evasions in German texts around the experience of the Allied bombing campaigns of World War 2, the main essay of this collection also raises profound questions for any reader asssociated with the Allied nations of the war. The response in popular histories written from an Allied perspective is revealed in the wake of the Natural History of Destruction to be less than adequate. Am I alone in feeling a degree of shame and repulsion as a citizen of nations who also violated human rights in such cases as Dresden and Hamburg?
More honesty on our part is called for ... this book offers much food for thought especially around the human feelings at ground zero

Questions about whether this book assists the neo-Nazi cause and also the extraordinary tone (with strong overtones of Nazism)of the many angry letters received by Sebald further indicates how inadequate is later generations' response to the profound moral challenge of World War 2 - espcially now we are in the midst of another war where the goodies and baddies are not quite so easy to tell apart as they are in late night movies

3 other essays examine esteemed 20th century German literary figures in the wake of the war - these figures are less known outside of a German speaking context (with the exception of Weiss' theatre piece Marat/Sade) and serve to introduce them to a new audience

The prose is vivid and evocative - it is a tragedy that this writer was killed in a traffic accident at the height of his powers.

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.

WG Sebald died far too soon. In the past few years this penultimately creative German writer graced us with four novels, or memoirs ("The Emigrants", "The Rings of Saturn", "Vertigo", and "Austerlitz") that created a hunger for more great writing from this gifted man. Shortly after his untimely death "After Nature" was published and proved to us that the novelist so many of us regarded as a 'poet' was indeed a gifted Poet. Now, with the relase of this collection of essays yet another aspect of WG Sebald is revealed - a critical philosopher unafraid to shed light on aspects of his German descent like few other writers have.

In "Air War and Literature" Sebald describes what the Allied Forces invasion and devastation of a country so reviled for its Nazi activities was like to the many Germans who remained after Hitler's time was over. It is not easy reading, this, understanding that the goal of the non-German world was to annhilate the land which had bred such atrocities. Yet Sebald does not plead the case for the German cities and people who were burned to the ground by Allied bombings. He instead turns inward to scold the Germans for not writing about their own 'victimization', the lack of writers to speak out about accepting guilt yet leading a path out of the heinous past to a future of repair and hope. He examines the effect of destruction on the great minds of the day, trying to find an answer why creative people were so intimidated by the terror of silence. To read about WW II from the German vantage is an experience few other authors have encouraged so tersly.

In the remaining three essays, Sebald the critic in turn lambasts the shallow glory-seeking work of Alfred Andersch (who considered himself a greater writer the Thomas Mann!) and the sensitive, soul-searching works of Jean Amery, both writers who have addressed the post-War Gaerman psyche. And finally he critiques both the paintings and the late writings of Peter Weiss in one of the most tender homages imaginable.

Sebald was a brilliant writer and a sharp, demanding critic, and time will place him in a position too early to visualize, so recent is the sadness of his passing. This is book that should be read by all those who love his novels, but also by those who want to further explore the incredible madness that once upon a time grew in Germany.

In a series of essays, the longest of which on "Air War and Literature," Sebald probes the veil Germans placed over the massive allied bombing campaign that devastated German cities. He also looks at the Holocaust through the eyes of survivors like Jean Amery and Peter Weiss.

The book gets its title from a report by Solly Zuckerman, who had visited Cologne in the immediate aftermath of the war, and was overwhelmed by the devastation he saw. Sebald, many years later, tries to sift through the various writings on the subject and sort out the most trenchant observations of the war. But, he found this exceedingly difficult since most Germans tended to avoid the subject or treat it in overtly melodramatic tones. But, it was in such novels as Heinrich Boll's "The Silent Angel" and Hermann Kasack's "The City across the River," that Sebald found what he was looking for -- honest depictions of the massive bombing campaign and the impact it had on the German psyche.

In three additional essays, Sebald looks at writers who approached the subject. The first being Alfred Andersch, who he takes to task for his melodramatic depictions of WWII that seemed more an effort to compensate for his own shortcomings than in exploring the depths of the war. Andersch enjoyed wide spread popularity in Germany as a writer. Criticism tended to be muted. Not so with Sebald, who illustrates how Andersch reinvented himself, which served as a parable of sorts for the typical German after the war.

Sebald then looks at the writings of Amery and Weiss, who were survivors, and struggled throughout their lives to reconcile their feelings regarding the Holocaust. Sebald looks most closely at Amery whose writings were stripped of any heroic pretensions and gave readers an unvarnished look at the concentration camps. Weiss tried to explore the Holocaust through painting, but then turned to writing in an effort to give his experiences the full weight that bore down on his tortured soul. It is in these two essays that one sees the nexis for Sebald's more extensive book on the subject, "The Emigrants."

The essays are loosely written. The first was a series of lectures he presented in Zurich, and the others serve more as book reviews. But, in them one finds much food for thought as Sebald was one of the more probing writers of our time.

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.

In both his fiction and non-fiction, this writer can take
seemingly banal experiences and transform them into interesting even mysterious encounters--and he does it all without seeming pretentious and overly learned.

"On the Natural History of Destruction" is however not about
banal experiences. It's about the trauma of total warfare as
endured by Germans citizens in the Allied bomb attacks waged mercilessly againt them in the Second World War, how that trauma was dealt with or suppressed, and the unreality of never having
come to terms with that trauma.

Sebald describes the German tendency to suppress feelings of
trauma as a product of a proud, even defiant, compulsion to rebuild Germany as well as the discomfort of collective guilt which Germans ultimately shared for having brought the war on
themselves.

When a society like Germany chooses to drown out feelings of
loss in post-war materialism, the memory of all the innocents who suffered is forgotten: the Jews, the children of German cities, even the zoo animals killed and displaced in the Allied bombings.
Sebald writes graphically and sympathetically about them all.

In the desire to move past their wartime tragedy, Germans brushed aside the memory of the innocent.

Memories of past moral shortcomings and complicities were also
brushed away. Sebald writes a chapter on the post-war writer
Andersch who reinvents himself after the war as a writer of conscience when in reality he had only been an ambitious,
morally weak, opportunist--more comfortable with Nazi ideology
than he would ever admit.

Sebald sees one of his roles as a writer as uncovering and
preserving the collective memories of a society even if
it's as painful as Germany's was in 1945.

This non-fiction work is comparable in quality to Sebald's
best fiction and is no less intriguing.

This must be one of the briefest yet most poignant, clever and clear-minded meditations on the madness and horror of war. Sebald's anatomy of the allied firebombings at the end of WWII brings us to the core of what really lies behind the murderous euphemisms of war coverage and political rethorics. It is not only a great piece of writing, but a wake-up call for a world with the worst case of self-delusion and moral intoxication about the implications of war and warmongering in centuries.

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.