Review: On the Natural History of Destruction by WG Sebald | Books | The Guardian
The book consists of a long essay on postwar German reaction, or lack of it, to the Allied
bombing campaign in the final years of the war, based on lectures delivered by Sebald in
Zurich in 1997, and three shorter pieces on the German-language authors Alfred
Andersch, Jean Améry and Peter Weiss. The book originally published in Germany
consisted only of two essays, the one on the bombing and the one on Andersch; a
translator's note to the English edition does not make clear who decided to add the
Améry and Weiss essays, but they are perfectly appropriate addenda to the main essay.
The bombing campaign, directed by Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris and approved, though
somewhat uneasily, by Churchill, involved the dropping of a million tonnes of bombs on
131 cities and towns in Germany, with the resulting deaths of 600,000 civilians. The
statistics with which Sebald presents us - 31.1 cubic metres of rubble for every inhabitant
of Cologne, 6,865 corpses burned on pyres by the SS in Dresden in February 1945, flames
leaping 2,000 metres into the sky over Hamburg after a combined British and US air raid
with the grisly codename "Operation Gomorrah" - inevitably numb the reader's mind, as
it seems to have numbed the minds of the survivors.
And this is precisely Sebald's
theme, the eerie 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 it
on to the next generation".
This act of willed national amnesia both fascinates and appals Sebald. At times his
bafflement concentrates into tight-lipped rage at the determination by so many of his
fellow countrymen to pretend that what happened to Germany in the last years of the
war "was not the horrifying end of a collective aberration, but something more like the
first stage of a brave new world".
The book is lightly peppered with Sebald's trademark
grainy photographs, and he reproduces postcards juxtaposing views of Frankfurt-amMain
following the bombings and as it is today, as if the devastation wrought on the city
had been no more than a lucky opportunity to build a bigger, better city out of the rubble.
He acknowledges that the "miracle" of postwar German reconstruction was "in some
respects" admirable, but suggests it was also "tantamount to a second liquidation in
successive phases of the nation's own past history".
The place of kitsch in the German recovery is a constantly recurring theme. Examining
the many letters sent to him by Germans who had survived the war after reports of his
Zurich lectures had appeared in the newspapers, he is struck by the cosy, Kaffee und
Kuchen tone of so many of their reminiscences.
He finds it difficult to define the kind of
distortion contained in these testimonies, but surmises that it is connected with German
petit-bourgeois mores. The case histories he finds in a book called The Inability to Mourn
"make one at least suspect some connection between the German catastrophe ushered in
under Hitler's regime and the regulation of intimate feelings within the German family".
It is easy to see why On the Natural History of Destruction caused such a furore when it
was published in Germany in 1999.
If Sebald is baffled by the evasions and pretences of the populace at large, he is
profoundly disturbed by the "self-imposed silence" of German writers, who, with notable
exceptions such as Heinrich Böll - and Günter Grass, one might add, although Sebald,
interestingly, does not - have been unable, or unwilling, to tackle the subject of the Allied
strategy of destruction. Even when a historian such as Jörg Friedrich addresses the topic,
scant interest is aroused. "This scandalous deficiency," Sebald writes, "...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 information about
the monstrous events in the background of my own life."
One of those deficient writers is the novelist and general man of letters, Alfred Andersch,
the sub ject of Sebald's second essay. Andersch, who elected to stay in Germany after
1939 and had a decidedly dodgy war, is hardly a household name, even in his native
land, but from the 40s through to the 70s he was a highly respected and bestselling
author. Even before beginning his essay on him, Sebald delivers a devastating judgment
by quoting a jacket blurb written by Andersch himself, declaring that "[i]n Alfred
Andersch, German literature has discovered one of its soundest and most individual
talents". There follows a detailed critique of Andersch's fiction, in which Sebald finds
corruption beneath the writer's self-aggrandising stance of the aesthete: "When a morally
compromised author claims the field of aesthetics as a value-free area it should make his
readers stop and think."
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The final two essays celebrate the work of Améry and Weiss. In his essays, Améry, who
was tortured by the Gestapo and survived Auschwitz, left one of the greatest and most
terrible testaments of the European tragedy, and was the only one in postwar German
literature, Sebald declares, "who denounced the obscenity of a psychologically and
socially deformed society, and the outrage of supposing that history could proceed on its
way afterwards almost undisturbed, as if nothing had happened".Weiss, painter, novelist
and playwright, best known here for the play Marat/Sade, is in Sebald's presentation one
of the more savage witnesses to the postwar era, whose work pronounces a "verdict on a
period that has left any hope of salvation far behind".
On the Natural History of Destruction is a quietly spoken but fierce protest at the
mendacity and moral evasiveness of our time. In the tragic absence of more Sebald
fiction, it will have to do. One can do no better than to say of Sebald's work what he
himself quotes Elias Canetti saying of the diary, "notable for precision and
responsibility", of a survivor of Hiroshima: "If there were any point in wondering what
form of literature is essential to a thinking, seeing human being today, then it is this."
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