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The War in the Empty Air: Victims, Perpetrators, and Postwar Germans

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Given the central role of World War II in American culture, most Americans know surprisingly little about its impact on German civilians at the end stage of the war. More, the Germans themselves, copying the American view of W.W.II as the absolutely "good, clean, just war we won" over the absolutely bad and collectively guilty Germans, have shown little interest in remembering their own war experiences. Since the Allies' goal to get rid of a criminal regime had been good, very few if any questions were asked about their means, such as the American and British fire-bombing, especially late in the war and using new and devastating technology. It is still controversial in the U.S. and in Germany to discuss the wholesale destruction of German cities and the mass killing of civilians in terms other than the richly deserved punishment of the defeated. But the extent and manner of this destruction was an important part of that arguably worst war in Western historical memory and it needs to be analyzed and remembered as such. Based on a wealth of new historical and contemporary documents, Barnouw's new book The War in the Empty Air discusses the political uses of the memory of W.W.II in their impact on the history of the German and American experience of that war. Anticipating accusations that German interest in their own memories meant disrespect for the uniqueness and centrality of the Holocaust, the German intellectual and political elites have over many decades censored them so that they only recently began to be discussed more openly. Barnouw welcomes this beginning of a more inclusive, more questioning, more historical narrative of W.W.II, not only in Germany, because it might enable more people to learn more about and from that huge human disaster that was W.W.II. Instructively, one of her topics is the invocation in the post-war era of the Good, Just W.W.II to justify America's unjust wars and war-like interventions, a prime example being the invasion of Iraq. To quote from one of the reviews at Amazon.co.uk: "Barnouw's book covers the ground thoroughly. It is a book for the thoughtful reader." Given the catastrophic situation in Iraq and the current critical interest in the politics of the Israel Lobby, it is also a very timely book.

This book is an examination of thinking about World War II from the German side. Right after the war a series of photographic essays were published by the Allies showing the concentration camps and the inhumanity shown by the Nazi's on conquered people. These images seem to have created a skeleton in the closet that in turn became difficult to discuss.

Now that sixty years have passed since the end of the war, and the integration of what were two Germanies into one, there appears to be an awakening of discussion about the war. Perhaps there will be a merging of the horror of Auschwitz with the horror of Dresden.

I notice though there is very little such discussion coming from Japan. Nothing appears to have been Japan's fault. They were going peacefully along when all of a sudden we started dropping atomic bombs on them.