One dark night during the Second World War, an English police officer waved down a speeding car. ‘The way you’re travelling, sir, you’ll kill someone,’ he scolded the driver. ‘Young man’, came the reply, ‘I kill thousands of people every night!’ The driver was Sir Arthur Harris, the leader of RAF Bomber Command. It was, of course, no idle boast. During the war, Bomber Command dropped about 1 million tons of bombs on enemy territory, attacked over 130 towns and cities, killed more than 600,000 civilians, destroyed 3.5 million homes and left about 7.5 million Germans homeless. The way that this astonishing experience has been dealt with in German thinking and literature is at the heart of W.G. Sebald’s last book to be published in English.
Sebald was born in Germany in 1944. He taught German literature in English universities from 1966 and was Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia when he was tragically killed in a motor accident in 2001. Despite speaking English well he wrote exclusively in German. His acclaimed novels, especially The Rings of Saturn and Austerlitz, are well known to Anglophone readers.
On the Natural History of Destruction is his first book of non-fiction to be published in English. It first appeared in Germany in 1999 and provoked considerable debate. The German edition consisted of two lectures and an afterword entitled ‘Air War and Literature’ and an essay on the writer Alfred Andersch. For the English edition two further essays were added, on Jean Améry and Peter Weiss.
It is, as Sebald says in the opening lines of his first lecture on the air war, ‘hard to form an even partly adequate idea of the extent of the devastation suffered by the cities of Germany in the last years of the Second World War, still harder to think about the horrors involved in that devastation’. For Sebald, one of the cultural mysteries of the 20th century is the fact that, despite Germany suffering destruction on an unprecedented scale, the experience ‘seems to have left scarcely a trace of pain behind in the collective consciousness’. He observes that the experience of being bombed flat ‘has been largely obliterated from the retrospective understanding of those affected, and it never played any appreciable part in the discussion of the internal constitution of our country’.
On Sebald’s analysis it is not just Basil Fawlty who lived by the rubric ‘Don’t