Sebald swansong lays WWII bomb blame with Germans : ThePost.ie


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Sebald swansong lays WWII bomb blame with Germans
Sunday, February 23, 2003
Reviewed by David O'Donoghue
On the Natural History of Destruction
By W G Sebald
Hamish Hamilton, e26
Best to wait until after Sunday breakfast to open this book. Come to think of it, maybe it'd be better just to keep away from the dining table altogether, such is the strength of the war imagery.

Sebald, who's better known for his fictional work which includes The Emigrants and Austerlitz seems to have been somewhat obsessed with the effect of World War II on his native country.

Born in Bavaria in 1944, in the dying months of the Third Reich, Sebald spent most of his adult life reflecting on the war.

Hisfatherhad joined the German army in 1929 and fought on for Hitler until the end, eventually returning home from a prisoner of war camp in 1947, a virtual stranger to his three-year-old son, Max (Sebald chose never to use his given names of Winfried Georg).

The book's title is borrowed from an idea for the title of an article for Cyril Connolly's journal Horizon, that was to have been written by Solly Zuckerman after visiting Cologne in 1947. But Zuckerman never wrote the pie c e, and when Sebald tracked him down 40 years later ``all that remained in his mind was the image of the blackened cathedral rising from the stony desert around it, and the memory of a severed finger that he had found on a heap of rubble''.

This book has the capacity to shock, and it is unashamedly anti-war.Take, for example, this description of the Hamburg firestorm resulting from a joint RAF/USAF bomber raid on July 27, 1943: ``Those who had fled from their air-raid shelters sank, with grotesque contortions, in the thick bubbles thrown up by the melting asphalt ... horribly disfigured corpses lay everywhere. Bluish little phosphorus flames still flickered around many of them; others had been roasted brown or purple and reduced to a third of their normal size.

``They lay doubled up in pools of their own melted fat ... elsewhere, clumps of flesh and bone or whole heaps of bodies had cooked in the water gushing from bursting boilers ... the remains of families consisting of several people could be carried away in a single laundry basket.''

The problem with such descriptions - apart from the fact that they hover sickeningly close to James Joyce's Jesuit hell ^ is that they also seem to negate Sebald's main thesis: that German writers were incapable of realistically describing the effects of the Allied bombing campaign.

Sebald has the good grace to accept that Hans Erich Nossack (the author of the earlier description) is the ``sole exception'' to his theory about Germany's wartime and post-war literary blind spot.The author baldly states that: ``no German writer ... was ready or able to put any concrete facts down on paper about the progress and repercussions of the gigantic, longterm campaign of destruction. Itwas thesamewhen the war was over. The quasinatural reflex, engendered by feelings of shame and a wish to defy the victors, was to keep quiet and look the other way''.

And Sebald doesn't limit his criticism to German writers, broadening his attack to embrace the nation itself, ``we Germans today are a nation strikingly blind to history''.

Whether modern day Germans would agree with him on this point is open to question but it is interesting to note Sebald's argument that the wartime writings of many German authors, including Heinrich Boll, lay deliberately unpublished for half a century.

He puts this down to the fact ``that the sense of unparalleled national humiliation felt by millions (of Germans) in the last years of the war had never really found verbal expression, and those directly affected by the experience neither shared it with each other nor passed in on to the next generation''.

There is something ironic in Sebald's choice to live in England for 35 years, where he walked his dog along the very disused airfields of East Anglia from where the Allied planes un leashed their bombs over Dresden, Hamburg, Munich and Berlin 60 years ago.

But Sebald knew there were two sides to every story and he kept his powder dry for the end.

After listing the myriad urban targets of the Luftwaffe, from Guernica to Coventry and Warsaw to Rotterdam, he states: ``The majority of Germans today know, or so at least it is to be hoped, that we actually provoked the annihilation of the cities in which we once lived.''

The letters Sebald received from those who responded to newspaper reports of his 1997 series of lectures (from which this book is drawn) make for fascinating reading, as do the author's thoughts on two Jewish writers and a Nazi writer. It is sad to reflect on the fact that since Sebald died in a car crash in December 2001,this will be his last book. More's the pity.