On the Natural History of Destruction - Softcover

Sebald, Winfried Georg

 
9780375756573: On the Natural History of Destruction
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0375756574 ISBN 13: 9780375756573
Verlag: Modern Library Inc, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

During World War Two, 131 German cities and towns were targeted by Allied bombs, a good number almost entirely flattened. Six hundred thousand German civilians died—a figure twice that of all American war casualties. Seven and a half million Germans were left homeless. Given the astonishing scope of the devastation, W. G. Sebald asks, why does the subject occupy so little space in Germany’s cultural memory? On the Natural History of Destruction probes deeply into this ominous silence.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

W.G. Sebald taught at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, for thirty years, becoming Professor of European Literature in 1987. His books won several international awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the Berlin Literature Prize. He died at age 57 in 2001.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

During World War Two, 131 German cities and towns were targeted by Allied bombs, a good number almost entirely flattened. Six hundred thousand German civilians died--a figure twice that of all American war casualties. Seven and a half million Germans were left homeless. Given the astonishing scope of the devastation, W. G. Sebald asks, why does the subject occupy so little space in Germany's cultural memory? On the Natural History of Destruction probes deeply into this ominous silence.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1
Air War and Literature
Zürich Lectures

the trick of elimination is
every expert's defensive reflex.
-Stanislaw Lem, Imaginary Magnitude

I

Today it is hard to form an even partly adequate idea of the extent of the devastation suffered by the cities of Germany in the last years of the Second World War, still harder to think about the horrors involved in that devastation. It is true that the strategic bombing surveys published by the Allies, together with the records of the Federal German Statistics Office and other official sources, show that the Royal Air Force alone dropped a million tons of bombs on enemy territory; it is true that of the 131 towns and cities attacked, some only once and some repeatedly, many were almost entirely flattened, that about 600,000 German civilians fell victim to the air raids, and that three and a half million homes were destroyed, while at the end of the war seven and a half million people were left homeless, and there were 31.1 cubic meters of rubble for every person in Cologne and 42.8 cubic meters for every inhabitant of Dresden-but we do not grasp what it all actually meant. The destruction, on a scale without historical precedent, entered the annals of the nation, as it set about rebuilding itself, only in the form of vague generalizations. It seems to have left scarcely a trace of pain behind in the collective consciousness, it has been largely obliterated from the retrospective understanding of those affected, and it never played any appreciable part in the discussion of the internal constitution of our country. As Alexander Kluge later confirmed, it never became an experience capable of public decipherment. This is highly paradoxical in view of the large numbers of people exposed to the campaign day after day, month after month, year after year, and the length of time-well into the postwar period-during which they still faced its real consequences, which might have been expected to stifle any positive attitude to life. Despite the enormous efforts whereby some kind of practicable modus vivendi was restored after every attack, even after 1950 wooden crosses still stood on the piles of rubble in towns like Pforzheim, which lost almost one-third of its 60,000 inhabitants in a single raid on the night of February 22, 1945, and no doubt the appalling smells which, as Janet Flanner wrote in March 1947, were released from the yawning cellars of Warsaw by the first warm spring weather pervaded the German cities, too, in the immediate postwar period. But these things obviously did not register on the sensory experience of the survivors still living on the scene of the catastrophe. People walked "down the street and past the dreadful ruins," wrote Alfred Döblin in 1945, after returning from his American exile to southwest Germany, "as if nothing had happened, and . . . the town had always looked like that." The reverse side of such apathy was the declaration of a new beginning, the unquestioning heroism with which people immediately set about the task of clearance and reorganization. A booklet devoted to the city of Worms in 1945-1955 says that "the hour called for upright men of impeccable conduct and aims, almost all of whom would be in the front line of reconstruction for years to come." This booklet, written by one Willi Ruppert for the municipal authorities, included many photographs, including the two pictures of the Kämmererstrasse printed here. They make it look as if the image of total destruction was not the horrifying end of a collective aberration, but something more like the first stage of a brave new world. Writing of a conversation with the directors of I. G. Farben in Frankfurt in April 1945, Robert Thomas Pell records the amazement with which he heard Germans stating their intention of rebuilding their country to be "greater and stronger than ever before"-in a tone in which self-pity, groveling self-justification, a sense of injured innocence, and defiance were curiously intermingled. Nor did they subsequently fail to carry out that intention, as witness the postcards that travelers in Germany can buy today at the newsstands of Frankfurt am Main. From the outset, the now legendary and in some respects genuinely admirable reconstruction of the country after the devastation wrought by Germany's wartime enemies, a reconstruction tantamount to a second liquidation in successive phases of the nation's own past history, prohibited any look backward. It did so through the sheer amount of labor required and the creation of a new, faceless reality, pointing the population exclusively towards the future and enjoining on it silence about the past. German accounts of the time, which is scarcely a generation ago, are so few and far between that Hans Magnus Enzensberger's collection Europa in Trümmern ("Europe in Ruins"), published in 1990, consists predominantly of pieces by foreign journalists and writers making observations that until then had been almost completely ignored in Germany. The few accounts originally written in German are by former exiles or other outsiders, such as Max Frisch. Those who had stayed in Germany and, like Walter von Molo and Frank Thiess in the deplorable controversy over Thomas Mann, were fond of saying that while others were comfortably ensconced in America they themselves had not left their homeland in its hour of need, refrained entirely from commenting on the process and outcome of destruction, probably not least for fear that accurate descriptions might get them into trouble with the occupying forces. Contrary to popular opinion, this shortage of contemporary accounts was not compensated for in postwar German literature which, as it followed a deliberate program of renewal after 1947, might have been expected to cast some light on the real state of affairs. Whilst the old guard of so-called internal emigrants claimed to have been engaged in passive resistance, invoking, as Enzensberger notes, vague notions of freedom and the humanist inheritance of the West in endless and prolix abstractions, the younger generation of writers who had just returned home were so intent on their own wartime experiences, described in a style constantly lapsing into maudlin sentimentality, that they hardly seemed to notice the horrors which, at that time, surrounded them on all sides. Even the frequently cited "literature of the ruins," of its nature presupposing an unerring sense of reality and chiefly concerned, as Heinrich Böll acknowledged, with "what we found when we came home," proves on closer inspection to be an instrument already tuned to individual and collective amnesia, and probably influenced by preconscious self-censorship-a means of obscuring a world that could no longer be presented in comprehensible terms. There was a tacit agreement, equally binding on everyone, that the true state of material and moral ruin in which the country found itself was not to be described. The darkest aspects of the final act of destruction, as experienced by the great majority of the German population, remained under a kind of taboo like a shameful family secret, a secret that perhaps could not even be privately acknowledged. Of all the literary works written at the end of the 1940s, probably only Heinrich Böll's Der Engel schwieg ("The Angel Was Silent") gives some idea of the depths of horror then threatening to overwhelm any who really looked at the ruins around them.9 Reading it, one is immediately aware that this of all novels, a tale which seems marked by irremediable gloom, was more than readers of the time could be expected to take, as Böll's publishers and probably Böll himself thought. As a result it was not published until 1992, almost fifty years later. Indeed, the seventeenth...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Modern Library Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375756574
ISBN 13 
9780375756573
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
202
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

Lengericher Landstr. 19
Osnabrück
49078
Deutschland

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780140298000: On The Natural History Of Destruction: by Winfried Georg Sebald

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0140298002 ISBN 13:  9780140298000
Verlag: Penguin, 2004
Softcover