On the History of Man-made Destruction: Loss, Death, Memory, and Germany in the Bombing War

For the last five years, remarkably, Germans have been fighting the war all over again–in illustrated magazines, television documentaries, the feature sections of their newspapers, big-box-office films, fat books with many, many footnotes and still others with many, many pictures. In Germany, the Second World War is 'in'. This essay examines one key aspect of what historian Norbert Frei has called the 'battle for memory'–the renewed interest among many Germans in the consequences of the Allied bombing campaign in the Second World War. It focuses in particular on an immensely popular account of the bombing war, Jörg Friedrich's Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940-1945, Munich, 2002 ('The Conflagration: Germany in the Bombing War 1940-1945', English translation forthcoming). The essay locates the current discussion about the bombing war in the 'memory landscape' of contemporary Germany and it offers suggestions of how it might be possible to write a history of the bombing war that moves beyond the binary of victims and perpetrators framing Friedrich's account.