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Biography & Autobiography. History. Military. Nonfiction. HTML: W.G. Sebald completed this extraordinary and important -- and already controversial -- book before his untimely death in December 2001. On the Natural History of Destruction is W.G. Sebald's harrowing and precise investigation of one of the least examined "silences" of our time. In it, the acclaimed novelist examines the devastation of German cities by Allied bombardment, and the reasons for the astonishing absence of this unprecedented trauma from German history and culture. This void in history is in part a repression of things -- such as the death by fire of the city of Hamburg at the hands of the RAF -- too terrible to bear. But rather than record the crises about them, writers sought to retrospectively justify their actions under the Nazis. For Sebald, this is an example of deliberate cultural amnesia; his analysis of its effects in and outside Germany has already provoked angry and painful debate. Sebald's incomparable novels are rooted in meticulous observation; his essays are novelistic. They include his childhood recollections of the war that spurred his horror at the collective amnesia around him. There are moments of black humour and, throughout, the unmatched sensitivity of Sebald's intelligence. This book is a vital study of suffering and forgetting, of the morality hidden in artistic decisions, and of both compromised and genuine heroics. From the Hardcover edition..… (more)
User reviews
Sebald is very interesting on the motivation behind the bombing campaign, despite its manifest failure to break the morale of the German people or even to significantly impair industrial production. One underlying force that he sees is simply that the enterprise of the material and organizational dimensions of the bombing offensive,
..had such momentum of its own that short-term corrections in course and restrictions were more or less ruled out, especially when, after the three years of the intensive expansion of factories and production plants, that enterprise had reached the peak of its development–in other words its maximum destructive capacity.
Given the massive resources poured into the development and execution of the bombing campaign, Sebald sees it as inevitable:
...so much intelligence, capital and labor went into the planning of destruction that, under the pressure of all the accumulated potential, it had to happen in the end. (empahsis in the original)
This image of industrial/political forces set in motion across a society that then follow through to their own "logical" conclusions irrespective of whether or not they are, in fact, rational in terms of cost and effectiveness, is an important one. It is something that we see replicated again and again in all sorts of situations.
The book also contains Sebald's notes and thoughts on three writers: Alfred Andersch, Jean Amery, and Peter Weiss. Sebald is particularly hard on Andersch whom he describes as "a mental existence plagued by ambition, egotism, resentment and rancor".
Amery was tortured and survived Auschwitz and he entered the debates of the 60s on exile, resistance, torture, and genocide from the perspective of a survivor and a victim. Sebald explores the limitations of language and expression to either describe some truths. He refers to, "The paradox of searching for a time which, to the author's own distress, cannot in the last resort be forgotten entails the quest for a form of language in which experiences paralyzing the power of articulation could be expressed". Thus language is simply inadequate to describe some things, and the author is working, "on the borders of what language can convey".
The piece on Peter Weiss is subtitled: The Remorse of the Heart: On Memory and Cruelty. Weiss was an artist and writer. Listen to Sebald on Weiss:
The process of writing...is the struggle against ‘the art of forgetting', a struggle that is as much part of life as melancholy is of death, a struggle consisting in the constant transfer of recollection into written signs. Despite our fits of ‘absence' and ‘weakness', writing is an attempt to ‘preserve our equilibrium among the living with all our dead within us, as we lament the dead and with our own death before our eyes', in order to set memory to work, since it alone justifies survival in the shadow of a mountain of guilt. ....the writings of Peter Weiss show that abstract memory of the dead is of little avail against the lure of waning memory if it does not also express sympathy–sympathy going beyond mere pity–in the study and reconciliation of an actual time of torment. The artistic self also engages personally in such a reconstruction, pledging itself, as Weiss sees it, to set up a memorial, and the painful nature of that process could be said to ensure the continuation of memory.
This is a wonderful book that deserves re-reading and deep contemplation. What a loss when Sebald was killed in a car accident in 2001.
I did decide to go back and read everything and I am glad I did. Just allowing oneself to go with the flow of his writing is a joy in itself. This is a book I am sure I will revisit again and because of my latest work this week in re-reading it I am changing my four star rating to a five. We all have to "get over" whatever it is that prevents us from hearing and reading what needs to be said about the Holocaust. Though Sebald rarely raises its name he is always talking about torture and destruction and crimes against humanity. The book is truly amazing.
The first, the title essay, is the
Sebald is highly critical of Alfred Andersch. This essay follows a more linear path as Sebald gives a quick overview of Andersch’s temperament and successes and failures then discusses his background and how it influenced his books. One could hardly argue with the portrait of Andersch as an almost delusionally self-aggrandizing man (Sebald quotes a colleague of Andersch’s describing how Andersch claimed he would be greater than Thomas Mann). He also had out-of-proportion rage at critics who negatively reviewed his books. Andersch’s conduct during WWII sounds more opportunistic and self-promoting than anti-Semitic but he tried to portray himself as someone who opposed the Nazi party after the war. He married a Jewish woman and later claimed that he did it to protect her but then divorced her when her status interfered with his ambitions. Sebald finds weakness in Andersch’s work also – criticizing him for exotic, stereotypical descriptions of a Jewish character, poorly written sex scenes and creating wish-fulfillment versions of himself.
He praises Jean Amery and Peter Weiss. The essay on Weiss was a bit opaque though Sebald gives evocative descriptions of the grotesque darkness in his works. He assumes the reader is familiar with Weiss – I had to Wiki him to realize that I’d at least heard of Marat/Sade. The piece on Amery was better – the analysis was more concrete and it had the appeal of Sebald’s fiction, where the author is able to capture the essence of his characters at a distance. In his writings, Amery grapples with the irreversible nature of memory and experience. He still feels resentment and survivor’s guilt as well as guilt that he didn’t resort to violence. Sebald praises Amery’s authenticity (as opposed to the posturing of Andersch), his detached, ironic prose and his firm stance on the importance of resistance, however useless.
The bulk of the book consists of an adapted lecture series on the bombing of German cities, the unprecedented nature of the destruction in cities such as Hamburg and the curious lack of references to it in most German post-war literature. This is
The remainder of the book is a series of essays on three German writers, none of whom I knew anything about, and although this was interesting in what it said about the culture of the time, it would not inspire me to read any of these writers. The first is Alfred Andersch - who seems comically vain and egotistical, the second is Jean Amery, a Jewish survivor of the camps and the third is Peter Weiss, who was also a painter.
Sebald was always an intriguing writer, but for the most part I don't think this ranks with his best work.
The main attraction of this volume is a pair of lectures Sebald gave on the German people's supposed failure to remember and therefore work through the horrific destruction of that country's cities at the end of the second world war--a destruction that will be familiar to anyone interested in now slightly out of favor novels like Slaughterhouse 5. Sebald argument flits back and forth between a number of similar but *not* identical claims:
i) Germans have repressed the destruction of, e.g., Hamburg, and do not remember it at all.
This has the virtues of appealing to what I am told are Sebald's main themes, memory and forgetting. I confess, these are not my favorite themes, but I am saved here because statement i) is blatantly untrue. Sebald modifies it, without *too* much silliness, to
ii) German writers have repressed the destruction of, e.g., Hamburg, and do not write about it at all.
This, too, is untrue, as Sebald admits, and once more alters his statement to
iii) German writers have not repressed the destruction of, e.g., Hamburg, but they have not written about it in a way that satisfies me, W. G. Sebald; that is, they have not written extremely plain descriptions of objects like burnt human limbs.
Please note that Sebald was an infant while the bombing was going on, so he certainly doesn't and can't 'remember' the destruction.
This is really where the argument comes to rest: nobody has written a book about the destruction of the German cities, to which Sebald could, in good conscience, have given five stars on goodreads. That is not much of an argument. The insights it gives into Sebald's aesthetic preferences do not endear him to me, either, since his suggestion is that any 'artistic' representation of this destruction is morally bankrupt, and what is needed is, more or less, the straight facts ma'am. Perhaps among German authors this could seem like a radical statement. To those of us used to Anglo-American 'plainness,' unfortunately, it sounds like a plea for yet more lower journalism.*
There are some nice things at the start and end of this volume. The two lectures are nicely written, and the essay on Peter Weiss (aforementioned) may, I hope, spur publication of Aesthetics of Resistance's second and third thirds. I hope this in part because the essay on Jean Amery was probably behind the recent translation of the work discussed here, on the air war. The first lit-crit essay is a polemic against Alfred Andersch, a writer I'd never heard of, and thanks to Sebald's entirely convincing essay, will probably never read. Of course, that would have been the case without Sebald's essay.
The dark core of the book is Sebald's addendum to his lectures (starting on page 69). I suspect that this is the most Sebaldian part of the book: it flits around the author's uninteresting personal experiences, and the fragments seem, to me at least, to add up to nothing. Unlike the lectures, it is not well written (and/or well translated); rather, it is filled with sentences like "The material in the passages above indicates that attitudes to the realities of a time when urban life in Germany was almost entirely destroyed have been extremely erratic," (91). That might well be very clear in German, but in English it is rebarbatively abstract.
Someone I trust almost entirely tells me that Rings of Saturn is the place to start, and I will give it a shot. But after the disaster of 'Austerlitz' and the feel-good pseudo-criticism of 'On NHD' (aren't you glad that *you* are not guilty of the great sins of not remembering things Sebald says are important, or of writing books Sebald doesn't like?), my patience with W. G. won't hold much longer.
*: There's an interesting, though academic, article to be written comparing Adorno's reaction to the war and the art that comes after it, and Sebald's reaction here. Adorno would argue that this just-the-facts is a mirror of the oppressive world that led to the war. Sebald would argue that modernist formalist is an immoral distortion of people's actual suffering. Note that for Adorno the problem is *social*, and focused on justice; for Sebald the problem is *individualistic* and focused on personal morality. This might explain my distaste for what I've read of WGS so far.