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The War in the Empty Air 102 4 The War in the Empty Air A Moral History of Destruction The publication in the New Yorker of W. G. Sebald’s “A Natural History of Destruction” in November 2002 provoked several letters to the editor declaring as immoral any sympathy for German wartime experiences .1 One reader was “shocked and offended” by the text “with its implicit suggestion that the Allied bombing of German cities was distinguished by ruthless aggression. It was only toward the end that Sebald fully brought home the point that the Germans were themselves responsible for this suffering.” Another found suggestions of “Nazi rhetoric ” in Sebald’s description of air raids, quoting as evidence the phrase “wholesale annihilation” and asserting that “Hamburg, Dresden and Berlin will be forever trumped by Auschwitz, Sobibor and Buchenwald, a fact that may explain why Germans have continued to show penitence in public for the horrors that they visited on others but have chosen to regret in more secluded ways the sufferings that others brought on them.” The advice, then, is to refrain “forever” from speaking in public about memories of a war that for millions of Germans had literally meant “wholesale annihilation.” Publishing articles and books dealing with this topic will be forever offensive and therefore taboo. These letters reflect the opinion of a majority of American Jews and also a large number of educated non-Jewish Americans: the German experience of this extraordinarily destructive, brutal war should remain forever erased from German individual and collective memory, long since replaced by the greatness of American victory in the “good war,” the “clean war,” the most successful war in American history. Relatively few Americans have looked at WWII with some degree of skepticism as the “war we The War in the Empty Air 103 won, as if there was no death, for goodness’ sake, with the help of the losers we left out there in the air, in the empty air.”2 In the same vein—he “paused immediately” when he read Sebald’s phrase “wholesale annihilation”—Christopher Hitchens reflected on German reactions to the near-total destruction of their cities at the endstage of WWII in a review essay for the Atlantic Monthly entitled “The Wartime Toll on Germany. W. G. Sebald wrote of the pain of belonging to a nation that, in Thomas Mann’s words, ‘cannot show its face.’”3 Hitchens’s meandering argumentation, both censorial and inconclusive, comes back again and again to that “pain,” which is for him the most fascinating aspect of Sebald’s argument. Sebald’s essay is not quite that self-centered, but equally inconclusive, touching on some of the most difficult moral-political questions in German postwar culture but never really attempting to clarify, much less connect, them. This lack of conceptual coherence is in part due to the fact that the published text is the English translation of a series of lectures on poetics, Luftkrieg und Literatur, that Sebald gave at Zürich University in December 1997 and then allowed to be published in 1999 under the same title and with very few alterations.4 They had aroused a good deal of interest because of their taboo-protected topic, the scale and manner of Allied air raids on Germany’s cities, especially firebombing—an apocalyptic destruction that Life had documented for (approving) American audiences in a powerful photo-essay, “The Battered Face of Germany” (June 4, 1945). Pointing out that there had always been silence about the true degree of the material and moral destruction and that it had become something like “a shameful family secret,” Sebald lamented the fact that almost nothing had been written about these huge and crucially important events.5 The reactions to his statements were mixed. Some critics applauded his breaking the silence: even if there had been more published accounts than Sebald seemed to know or wish to acknowledge, their number was remarkably low in view of the cultural and political importance of the events.6 There were also the familiar arguments warning of apologeticism: Sebald’s own relatively few but effective, sharply naturalistic descriptions of the horrors of large-scale air raids interspersed with many quotes from a variety of eyewitness statements might be misunderstood as keeping a record of comparative suffering. One critic claimed, rather extravagantly, that “the silence was hiding a shame more precious than all literature.”7 Significantly, critics on both sides of the argument agreed that the...

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