The Allied Air War and Urban Memory: The Legacy of Strategic Bombing in Germany by Jörg Arnold (review)

A little over a decade has passed since the beginning of a renewed wave of interest in the history of air war in Germany. This time the starting point was neither the practical question of whether aerial bombing had achieved its objectives and helped end the war more quickly. Nor, except indirectly, did it concern the moral issue of whether or not Allied area bombing had been justified. Instead, scholars and the public focused on concepts of German victimhood, Vergangenheitsbewältigung, and the discourse about air war since 1945.

In one of the key texts in the debate, Luftkrieg und Literatur (1999, 17–18), W.G. Sebald drew attention to what he saw as a strange absence of German literature about the experience of air war. Most scholars have since concluded that Sebald was wrong, and Jörg Arnold’s work belongs to a subsequent wave of scholarship that focused not on the debate itself, but rather on exploring the various forms that air war memory took in the postwar years. Arnold examines how the experiences of air war were transformed into cultural memory in the cities of Kassel and Magdeburg, one on each side of the former inner-German border. Drawing from a range of administrative documents, literary and visual materials, as well as individual accounts, Arnold analyses bombing experiences at the local level, how these experiences became memories, and how memories and their meanings changed in the postwar period. Three interlinked “vectors” (19) of memory shape the body of the work, with segments on death, destruction, and survival.

Arnold argues throughout that memories of air war were both linked to the past and shaped by the present. Indeed, the work’s great strength lies in its close attention to the interplay of experience, mourning, memory, and attempts to instrumentalize it. Initially a reflection of individual experiences, memories came together to form a public discourse of remembering that drew on longer traditions of “classical, Christian and romantic motifs and images that dealt with urban catastrophe” (18). At the same time, urban memories of air war were coloured by “the nationalist discourse of World War I … and, more importantly … the racialist discourse of National Socialism” (18). Especially from the early 1950’s onward, urbanites developed commemorative practices and identified lieux de mémoire, which served a public purpose while they also became places for private mourning and consolation (99). Contemporary contexts continued to influence memory, whether that meant the tensions of the Cold War, German attempts to come to terms with the past, generational changes, or the evolving forms of writing local history.

Arnold justifies his decision to focus on cities because “it was here, on the level of individual cities, that the air war had the most immediate and profound impact” (10). Of course, bombing had a tremendous impact on individuals and families as well; but if one seeks to understand the cultural impact of air raids, cities are a logical place to begin. The focus on just two cities, which might seem limiting, enables both deep and long analysis. Magdeburg gets somewhat less attention than Kassel, but the comparison allows Arnold to highlight how, for example, the authorities in Kassel preferred to depoliticize and re-Christianize bombing, while those in Magdeburg repoliticized and de-Christianized it for an East German context. “Whereas in Kassel,” Arnold notes, “the casualties of the air war were remembered as victims of a (natural) disaster, in Magdeburg they were commemorated as victims of a crime” (102).

At the book’s conclusion, Arnold asks the pertinent question of whether, or to what extent, his results are generalizable. On the one hand, he argues that, with local variations, this story about Kassel and Magdeburg might have been told about “West German cities such as Hamburg, Pforzheim, Wurzburg, Heilbronn, Freiburg and many others.” In Dresden, and also in cities...