On the Natural History of Destruction

by George M. Chatzistergiou

In the winter of 1943-44 the Nazi occupation forces razed to the ground a large number of villages as part of ‘mopping-up’ operations on the Greek mountain range of Pindos. Although the method of burning down was technologically primitive, a whole era of architectural ‘civilisation of the mountains’ was wiped out, and this gives an idea of the immense destructive power of the other, high-tech weapons used in World War II. An examination of the mass destruction of buildings can be one way to rationally approach the brutality of war, to “look at Medusa without turning to stone”. Yet the destructiveness of modern wars or of the incidents of “blind mass violence” is such that the fate of buildings comes second, if it is not actually taken for granted; it is people who are exterminated en masse or scarred for life.

The terrible destruction of people and their homes in a war is the subject of the book On the Natural History of Destruction by the German writer W. G. Sebald. The book is about the experience of the destruction of German cities by the Allies’ air raids during the 2^nd World War. Interestingly, Sebald’s book came out in Britain almost at the same time as Akira Yoshimura’s One Man’s Justice, a book about a Japanese soldier who went to prison at the end of the War for killing an American pilot who had bombed Japanese cities. This is literature from the hitherto silent ‘other side’, and the common point of reference is the horrible experiences of mass violence.

Sebald’s “natural history of destruction” starts off with number: 131 German cities were hit by Allied bombs of a total weight of one million tons. The raids left behind 600,000 dead, 3.5 million houses destroyed and 7.5 million homeless people. According to some ‘disaster statistic’, after the bombings of 1945 there were 31.3 cubic meters of rubble per inhabitant in Cologne, and 42.8 in Dresden. Sebald cites the numbers but does not stop there. After all, the author has nothing to do with the revisionist German historiography as represented today by Klaus Rainer Röhl, who attempts to equate the Axis and the Allies, comparing the number of raids and casualties of each side and getting to the point of likening the destruction of German cities with the tragedy of the World Trade Center. Sebald is fully conscious that the terrible events he describes were the result of an unprecedented cycle of violence initiated by the Nazi regime. “A country that "had murdered and worked to death millions of people in its camps could hardly call on the victorious powers to explain the military and political logic that dictated the destruction of German cities”, he explains at some point. In any case, the author does not claim to be a historian; indeed, his book is closer to literature than to traditional historiography. Since he is interested in the way the raids were experienced by those who suffered them, he gives detailed accounts of the destructions. The description of the horror is truly shocking. In a characteristic account of the air raid with the codename “Operation Gomorrah”, which flattened Hamburg on the 27^th of July, 1943, he writes: “Twenty minutes after the bombing commenced…a firestorm reaching more than a mile into the sky rolled like a tidal wave through the streets at a speed of more than 90 miles an hour… lifted gables and roofs from buildings…tore trees from the ground, and drove human beings before it like living torches... Air-raid shelters turned into ovens, and the asphalt in the streets melted…”. “When day broke…the smoke had risen to a height of five miles… mounds of stone…disfigured corpses lay everywhere...”. A tragic irony is that in Dresden thousands of the air-raid victims were incinerated by special SS units with the technique used in concentration camps...

Aside from describing the horror, the author relates situations which demonstrate the people’s determination “to carry on regardless”. A characteristic example is the bizarre spectacle of a house which was the only one to remain intact in an otherwise devastated area, with the housewife painstakingly cleaning the dust off the windows the day after the disaster. On another level, the author cites the German people’s collective resolution to ‘look ahead’, wiping out time and completely annihilating memory... This ‘annihilation’ of memory is exactly what bothers Sebald. During his relatively brief literary career of about a decade, until his death in a road accident in 2001, he was preoccupied with the issues of repressed memory, displacement and alienation, always in relation to Germany, where he was born in 1944. Since 1970 he lived in England when he pursued an academic career and became a university professor. His few works –mainly the books The Emigrants and Austerlitz– were well received by major literary critics internationally. They are certainly no ‘easy-reading’ material; the climate in Sebald’s books brings to mind the atmosphere of the German expressionist painters of the inter-war years, such as Max Beckmann, Otto Dix or even Ernst Kirchner. His is a moody style; he holds on to this ‘glum sensibility’ just as a blind man holds on to his stick – only ‘to cross over to the opposite pavement’ and not because he believes in the ‘miracle’, that is, that he will ever get back his eyesight…

These properties of his writing, which might be problematic in another context, are highly effective in getting across the horror of destruction in modern warfare. The author –who is in any case overawed by the gigantism of the modern era: the scale of the buildings, the pace of developments, the overabundance of choices– is thus able to talk to us about the immense destructiveness of today’s wars. Sebald brings the horror to the surface without embellishments, and gets to the bottom of things. And he gets results, too; upon finishing the book, the reader realises that the ‘opposite pavement’ which the ‘blind man with the stick’ is trying to reach represents the values of humanism, not in any vague or theoretical sense but in tangible form.

The book On the National History of Destruction makes clear the difference between actual war and it simulation on television. This is no small feat: it is the first step towards demonstrating the need for humanism. Of course, it may not be enough. The German expressionists revealed the atrocities of the First World War, but they still did not prevent the rise of Hitler to power or the next Great War. For humanism to act as the critical counterweight to destructiveness and sinister machinations, it seems necessary that we believe in the ‘miracle’, i.e. that humanity ‘can get its eyesight back’, and that we try as far as possible to contribute to its realisation …

W. G. Sebald

On the Natural History of Destruction

Hamish Hamilton, Penguin, 2003, pp. 204