Reading this new edition of W.G. Sebald’s discursive meditation upon the blanket bombing of German civilians during the second world war took me back to Berlin in the early 1960s when German writers from the Gruppe 47 were in the ascendant, and no self-respecting avant-garde author wrote novels with stories or plots. They did not even write essays but rather ‘texts’; and I see that Notting Hill Editions, whose elegant slim editions resemble those published by Suhrkamp or the Carl Hansa Verlag at the time, also use the word ‘texts’ for literary writing.
W.G. Sebald was a German academic and later a writer who lived most of his life in Britain, teaching for 30 years, between 1970 and his premature death in an accident in 2001, at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. He wrote books which defy categorisation — a mix of travel writing, reminiscence, discursive philosophising, literary criticism and historical anecdote. These were much admired, leading to many awards, a reputation as a new James Joyce and his being tipped for the Nobel Prize.
Readers of his The Rings of Saturn — a ramble through East Anglia from Lowestoft to Bungay — will remember Sebald’s thoughts, following a conversation with the gardener at Somerleton Hall, on the 67 airfields built in East Anglia after 1940 from which bombers took off with their explosive and incendiary loads destined for Hamburg, Frankfurt and Dresden. ‘I pictured in my mind’s eye the German cities going up in flames, the firestorms setting the heavens alight, and the survivors rooting about in the ruins.’
In 1997 Sebald delivered a series of lectures in Zurich on the baffling absence in postwar German writing of any reference to this national trauma. On the Natural History of Destruction follows on from these lectures. Germans, writes Sebald,
“are a nation strikingly blind to history and lacking in tradition…. And when we turn to take a backward view, particularly of the years 1930 to 1950, we are always looking and looking away at the same time.
Sebald gives us glimpses of horror mostly taken from Hans Erich Nossack’s Interview mit dem Tode (Interview with the Dead) — the dead being the traumatised survivors. A woman arrives as a refugee in a German village with the charred body of her baby in her suitcase; vermin are glutted on the corpses — fat rats, finger-length maggots and swarms of flies, ‘huge and iridescent green’.
But Nossack’s book was documentary. Why have German novelists and essayists failed to address such a critical event in their nation’s recent history? The answer seems to be that it is difficult for those traumatised to know what to think, and so what to say, when a people have brought such a tragedy on themselves. Chateaubriand, as Sebald points out, wrote about the horrors suffered by Napoleon’s Grand Armée during its retreat from Moscow, but he was not there. Stendhal, who was, wrote nothing.
Sebald illustrates his essay as he did The Rings of Saturn with box camera black-and-white snaps: Alain de Botton does the same in some of his books. Included in On the Natural History of Destruction is an essay on Alfred Andersch, a German author ‘plagued with egotism, resentment and rancour’ whose work, like that of many other writers Sebald refers to, may be unfamiliar to English readers.