On the Natural History of Destruction
by W.G. Sebald
Random House

Americans often overlook the destruction that the Allied bombing campaign wrought on Germany. Between Feb. 13-15, 1945, Approximately 100,000 people died as the British and Americans reduced Dresden, one of the shining examples of high German classicism, to rubble. Scores of other German cities experienced similar attacks: 200,000 dead in Hamburg. 20,000 — or a third of the population — in Pforzheim. The Royal Air Force dropped 15,000 tons of bombs on Cologne in 90 minutes, flattening a 2.4-square-mile area. The Allied air campaign went on for almost three years and annihilated entire cities; it wrote the destructive power of war, unleashed by Germany, on the soul of its civilian population.

Why then, the late W.G. Sebald asks in his newly translated "On the Natural History of Destruction," has so little been written about it? For all the vast greatness of 20th century German literature, hardly a single writer touched on the destruction wrought by the bombing campaign. (Ironically, though he doesn't mention it, the most memorable novel about the period comes from an American: Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five.") It appears that for a tragedy of its magnitude, those three years left barely an impression on Germany's literary consciousness. "Yes, there are a few relevant texts," Sebald writes, "but what little has been recorded in literature, in terms of both quantity and quality, stands in no relation to the extreme collective experience of the time."

Sebald's essay, ably translated by Anthea Bell and accompanied by three shorter works, touched off a virtual cottage industry of retrospection across Germany soon after he first delivered it as a speech in Zurich in 1998. And while not all the critics have been in agreement with Sebald's thesis, most have praised its precision and acuity — a final reminder of the genius lost when he was killed in a car accident in 2001.

True to his reputation as a thoughtful, patient writer, Sebald is being extremely precise in his study — he is aware of the bevy of books and films detailing life in immediate postwar Germany, the so-called Trummer Literatur (or "literature of the ruins"); he is also aware of writers like Heinrich Böll who, as Böll, writes, examined "what we found when we came home." But they weren't there, they didn't see the horrors. And the few accounts Sebald does find are riddled with equivocation and kitsch, using the devastation merely as a background. What he is looking for, and comes up wanting, is a literature of the air campaign that in its language is indelibly marked by magnificent loss. Without saying it, he is asking why Germany never developed a literature equivalent to that which emerged from the Holocaust. "Where is our Primo Levi?" should be the book's subtitle.

That the two events — the air campaign and the Holocaust — are at least indirectly linked does not, on one level, escape Sebald. He theorizes that Germans internalized their pain in the same way that they internalized so much else about the Third Reich: Deeply ashamed of what had happened, they declared a "Zero Hour" and put as much as they could behind them. "The destruction ... is reflected in works written after 1945 by a self-imposed silence, an absence also typical of other areas of discourse, from family conversations to historical writings," he writes. Sebald relates how as a child born toward the end of the war, he grew up with almost no sense of what his country had been through.

"How ought such a natural history of destruction begin?" he asks. And though he proceeds to outline some of the more gruesome aspects of the air raids and their aftermath, his question itself raises the question as to what the term "natural history of destruction" might mean in the first place. Sebald never tells us, but we can get some idea by noting what he sees absent: first-hand accounts; documentary evidence such as photographs or letters; above all a literature that plumbs the abyss created by the bombing campaign.

One gathers that a "natural history of destruction" would also eschew overly political or overly personal motives, focus on the people involved, refuse to fetishize gore and death, and have at its core a strong empathy, if not compassion, for the victims. Most of all, it would seek to draw links between the individual events and the big moral and existential questions such a tragedy inevitably conjures.

Again, such a literature would mirror very much the wealth of writing that has emerged from the Holocaust. And while we will never know if Sebald would agree, it is hard to imagine there is not also a link between the immensity of Holocaust literature and the dearth of accounts from the air campaign. This is not to say that the Holocaust as a topic has unfairly crowded out the latter; rather, it is to say that the Holocaust as a bellwether of moral failure blots out all other instances, and in particular those to which it is linked by temporal and geographic proximity. Which is why there is also no literature of the German decimation of Polish and Russian civilian populations; why no libraries exist recounting the hundreds of thousands of Serbs killed by Nazi-supported Croats; why few books recount the countless German civilians raped, tortured and killed by Soviet troops as they pushed westward at the end of the war.

All of these are as morally reprehensible as the Holocaust, and yet because of its singular intent, the vast technological and bureaucratic apparatus it brought to bear and the thoroughness with which it was carried out, the Holocaust trumps all others as the nadir of human existence. All other catastrophes, and those who survived them, are silenced by its enormity.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)