W.G. Sebald: On The Natural History Of Destruction

Reviewed by PAT BASKETT

Sebald, who mesmerised readers with his novel Austerlitz, was born in Germany in 1944 where he grew up with the feeling that something was being kept from him. Monstrous events, about which he could learn nothing, haunted his background. This slender book, the first of his non-fiction works to appear in English, is the outcome of his exploration of that silence.

Its major essay arose from a series of lectures Sebald gave in Zurich in 1997, their subject the extraordinary fact that the humiliation and disaster felt by millions in the last years of World War 11 has found almost no expression in German literature. Neither have accounts of those experiences generally been passed on within families. After the lectures Sebald received dozens of letters confirming his belief.

This work is a profound consideration of the way in which memory (individual, collective and cultural) deals with experiences exceeding what is tolerable and, by implication, of the continued engagement of people in such destructive acts.

The statistics of the carpet bombing by the Allies of German cities during the Second World War are appalling and probably little known: a million tons of bombs dropped on 131 towns and cities, 600,000 civilians killed.

The campaign has an aspect of controversy similar to that which attaches to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: critics claim there were other means of achieving the same ends, namely the ending of the war. And there is a chilling parallel to our contemporary situation. Sebald writes that so much intelligence, capital and labour went into the planning by the Allies that the bombing had to happen.

Of course, a few diaries, letters and some more or less literary accounts do exist, the most compelling of which is Heinrich Boll's The Angel was Silent - enough to verify the gruesome pictures of women carrying children's bodies in their suitcases, and the putrefaction and the rats in the cellars that had served as bomb shelters. In Dresden, 6865 corpses were burned on pyres in February 1945 by an SS detachment which had gained its experience in Treblinka.

To this day, writes Sebald, any concern with the real scenes of horror during the catastrophe still has an aura of the forbidden about it, even of voyeurism, something that these notes of mine have not entirely been able to avoid.

Sebald's writing gains much of its power from such honesty and from his ability to speak with humanity of what is perhaps the ultimate in inhumanity. Included are shorter essays on three literary figures better known in the German-speaking world: Alfred Andersch, Jean Amery and Peter Weiss who wrote the Marat-Sade play. The text is peppered with Sebald's trademark grainy black and white photographs.

He died after a car crash in 2001, after living and working since 1970 in England as Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia.

By W.G. Sebald (trans. Anthea Bell)

Hamish Hamilton, $39.95