On the Natural History of Destruction (Paperback)

The firestorms over Hamburg in the summer of 1943 were a previously unknown phenomenon. They supported towers of flame that rose two kilometers into the air, and unleashed rolling walls of fire that unfurled down city streets and across open spaces at speeds of up to 150 km/h. They were so hot that the aircrews dropping the bombs could feel the heat through the fuselage of their bombers. In his controversial collection of lectures and meditative essays, noted professor of literature and novelist W.G. Sebald (Austerlitz) asks why the devastating effects of Allied air raids on German civilian populations during the Second World War have been left largely undocumented in the German literary tradition, how the agonizing deaths of 600,000 of their countrymen have become confused with the guilt and accountability of a divided nation struggling with the post-war legacy of Hitler’s Final Solution.

Is the dearth of literature pertaining to the destruction of German cities, as Sebald would suggest, really the fault of writers (many of whom were compelled to collude with the Third Reich during wartime) trying to defend their own reputations by sweeping the ashes of Germany under the rug? Or was it the calculated gesture of a people in the throes of self-pity coming upon the realization that they had forfeited the right to complain? For his part, Sebald, who portrays his countrymen as being consumed with order, seems not so interested in a “history of destruction,” but rather the process of destruction, the breakdown of order, and how those who experienced it looked the other way. As a polemicist, Sebald is in up to his neck, and while he spends a tad too much time on tiptoes as a result, he is comfortable in the pose. Comfy or not, it’s easy to imagine his German contemporaries taking strong exception to the criticisms by one who was both too young to experience the war first hand, and who lived most of his professional career outside the country’s borders (he taught literature in England for 30 years).

The constrained quality of the larger lectures portion exposes his conceits as a writer, prone as so many academics are to tangential patrols through the underbrush of their subject matter, hoping perhaps to flush out a supporting argument. Much more enjoyable from a strictly stylistic standpoint are his meditations, such as his withering (and occasionally hilarious) attack on the pretensions of reconstruction-era author Alfred Andersch, and his compassionate analysis of the work of philosopher, essayist, and Auschwitz survivor Jean Améry.

Contentiousness aside, or not, the now-deceased Sebald has one final item he’d like us to stick in our strudel, a thought that underlines the collection’s function not just as an exploration of societal amnesia, but also as a sobering warning to the citizens of today: “Perhaps we ought to remind ourselves of [the secrets of WWII] …when the project of creating a greater Europe, a project that has already failed twice, is entering a new phase, and the sphere of influence of the Deutschmark--history has a way of repeating itself--seems to extend almost precisely to the confines of the area occupied by the Wehrmacht in the year 1941.” --Jamie O’Meara --Ce texte provient de la Hardcover édition.

Politically and militarily we are divided into doves and hawks, left wing and right, as if it were impossible to possess both wings for balance and flight. In these metaphoric matters there is barely any room for the nuances of "thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird"—to borrow a phrase from that insurance executive Wallace Stevens. Might is certainly right in flight, and the machine in the garden becomes even more pervasive in the devastating effects of a Daisy Cutter—a pastoral munitions to eradicate ethnic cleansing. Warthogs, drones, stealth fighters and bombers with laser-guided tomahawk and cruise missiles fill the air and amphitheatre of war, as once again the United States unleashes its increasing power, precision, inventiveness, and global responsibility.
W.G. Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction is a revisiting of his native land after fifty years to explore a taboo subject: the firebombing of Germany during World War II. Sebald is a British resident in search of his German childhood. Published posthumously, Sebald's book consists of a series of lectures he delivered in Zurich on "Air War and Literature." He begins with statistics: the Royal Air Force dropped a million tons of bombs on German cities in the last years of the Second World War. Three and a half million homes were destroyed, seven and a half million people were left homeless, and about 600,000 German civilians died. With the exception of Heinrich Böll and a few lesser-known authors, post-War German literature ignored these events. The silence surrounding these bombings is attributable to national trauma as well as to the guilt felt by victims who were at the same time perpetrators. While the Nazis burned millions of Jews at Auschwitz, the RAF's bombs burned Hamburg's "innocent" civilians. "Those who had fled from their air-raid shelters sank, with grotesque contortions, in the thick bubbles thrown up by the melting asphalt." Mothers fleeing the city carried the corpses of their babies in their suitcases.
Germans were on the move daily: their collective uprooting led to chronic restlessness after the War and a craving for travel, according to Böll's questionable speculations. Like their Jewish victims, the Aryans (in a faulty parallel) feared that they themselves were vermin, surrounded by rats and flies in their ravaged cities. Amidst this devastation, Germans turned to music, specifically opera, as an escape into fantasy and "ultra-German racial kitsch." Sebald ends his lecture by quoting from Walter Benjamin's apocalyptic "angel of history" whose face is turned toward the past. "Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress." Benjamin's parable owes much to Franz Kafka, but its fatalism points to the cyclical nature of attack and reprisal, the inevitability of retaliation that makes progress illusory, as the angel zigzags through history, one step backward for each step forward.
Michael Greenstein (Books in Canada)
--Ce texte provient de la Hardcover édition.