Airborne Terror and

Review of W.G. Sebald, “Air War and Literature,” in W.G. Sebald, On the History of Natural Destruction, trans Andrea Bell. New York: Random House, 2003. ISBN 0375504842, 224 pages, $23.95.

W.G. Sebald’s Luftkrieg und Literatur (Air War and Literature) ([German] 1999; 3rd ed., 2002) caused a stir in the American press even before it appeared in English as part of On the Natural History of Destruction. In lectures that he delivered in 1997 in Zurich, Sebald proposed the thesis that the destruction of German cities during World War П had not been discussed sufficiently in historical accounts and written about in literature. The reactions of the time in the German press tell a great deal about why Germans had been reluctant about discussing the topic publicly. But the reaction in the U.S. is at least as fascinating to psychohistorians. Recent reactions appeared in the Boston Globe, The New York Times, and the New York Review of Books, among others.

Sebald was not the first to speak of the air war that devastated most of Germany in the last two years of the war. Every household in Germany spoke about what happened to its members during those horrible months. I have heard close to 100 different tales from older Germans. Some accounts come from my own family. For example, my grandfather’s house was almost completely demolished three times (though, thankfully, each time he was away at work). There are the rare conversations with my stepmother who lived in Numberg for part of the air attacks. One bomb came straight down the staircase of her parent’s house and demolished half of it, leaving furniture sitting precariously on a ledge of the living room. During the raid, the family was huddled in the basement and survived in a hail of debris and dust, and, unlike in one of Sebald’s descriptions, did not get buried or fried alive. Then are some poignant tales of others. The mother of a friend lost her home 13 times; another woman cooked in a burned out basement, first for German and then American soldiers; still another had a bomb fall into her featherbed—it remained there unexploded while the entire street burned to the ground. Even I recall running to a bunker in Brixen/Bressanone, Italy, during one of my visits with my mother.

Sebald was one of the first well-known authors to speak of and write about this common experience. Rather than retelling all the many details of the devastation, he was more interested in discovering why so few authors before him had written about this unique experience. He was especially interested in the reasons that no fiction literature had emerged from it. Several authors have argued before and since that those who silently or actively participated in the Holocaust should not complain about their sorrows and losses; they should simply have accepted their punishment. Others maintained that this near silence must be attributed to the Nazi regime’s having started the sort of bombing that later rained down on Germany; it was, after all, Stukas that devastated several parts of Europe before English and American bombers began their work on Germany. So why should Germans complain? Still others asserted that the silence must be attributed to the post-war period in which people were endeavoring to reestablish their lives and did not want to be reminded of those horrific times and the intense struggles that followed.

My own reasons for explaining the silence, especially on the literary level, are similar to those of Rainer Goetz, one of my colleagues. First, the bombings did not produce many heroes. It was and is easier to find heroes on vast battlefields (I am thinking of the literature and movies surrounding the Battle of Stalingrad) and in the struggles for love and attention that emerged as favorites after the war (like the romantic tales of another time). Second, the proper literary tone regarding the bombings would have been almost as difficult to develop as the proper tone for a novel about the Holocaust. What we have instead for the bombings are historical studies and, for the Holocaust, powerful autobiographies and historical studies. Third, the personal tales of horror rarely rose above the family level to a national chorus; as my first mother-in-law said almost every time she recounted one more tale of horror, “Ach, no one wants to know these stories anyway.” Like veterans of combat, most people who experienced the horror of bombing did not have the strength to deal with it except in intimate settings.

Sebald recounts few details, given the mass of information that is available from many individuals and sources. But the few details he does recount make the point about why one might not write a novel—they are difficult to integrate into one’s comprehension. Two are particularly gruesome. One tells of people having been melted in a

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firestorm and clean-up crews seeing clumps of fat next to their desiccated corpses. The other speaks of women carrying their dead infants in suitcases as they fled their destroyed homes.

Sebald’s tales are confirmed by an undiscovered jewel, Hans Joseph Domsta’s Duren 1940-1947: Krieg, Zerstorung, Neubeginn (Duren 1940-1947: War, Destruction, New Start) ([German] 1994). Domsta, the town’s senior archivist, details from contemporary dairies, records, letters, and reports in over 400 pages how the city was systematically demolished from 1941 to 1945 and how its citizens survived and died in a targeted city. As bombers came practically night after night, and destroyed one street after die other, most people fled Duren for the nearby countryside and beyond, leaving it a ghost town.

Why, one must ask, the interest in Sebald’s “Air War” in the U.S.? One stated reason is a near astonishment about Germans’ lamenting their WWU trauma. After all, who started the war and why complain about “getting their due”? Another reason is connected to an understanding among politicians and military leaders that modem war is fought with civilian casualties. Thus, many more Germans were killed in 1941-1945 than who were Nazis or even Nazi sympathizers. They were killed, as British Air Marshall A.T. Harris put it in a leaflet dropped on September 10, 1942, near Duren: “We bomb Germany, one city after the other, ever more intensively, to make it impossible for you [the Germans] to continue the war. That is our goal.”

As a reluctant American nation (and world) debates with a determined warrior president about the advisability of war in the Middle East, Sebald’s appeal is not surprising. But psychohistorians read his essay less for the usually offered reasons than more subtle ones. We are intrigued by the unspoken assumption that people who start wars may in turn be hurt, maimed, and killed, just like those whom they attack. On occasion, the question is raised, Why has it become acceptable in the last three generations to kill civilians by the hundreds of thousands? Less often the question is, Could I be one of those who may end up at the wrong place in an attack on civilians? Were it that we had a debate about the answers to these questions. One answer must be, at least as I read Sebald, that the hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of dead from bombings in many places around the globe should encourage us to prevent attacks on innocent—or maybe even not so innocent—civilians.

Sebald had no need to reiterate that war is hell, but he described hell. Having been in hell, survivors tend to close the door to it, never wanting to reopen it. I have heard some of them say, “Vergiss es” (Forget it), as if to say, “Let me not revisit that place.” Those who lived through hell, or heard about it in detail, know something many people have forgotten, namely that the life of every human being is just that, the life of a human being. Indeed, the life we have is the only life we have. It is useful and practical to remind ourselves often that one should not take it from anyone, even for so-called “good” reasons.

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