Kluge’s literary record of the air raid on Halberstadt is also a model of its kind from another objective viewpoint, where it studies the question of the “meaning” behind the methodical destruction of whole cities, which authors like Kasack and Nossack either omit for lack of information and out of a sense of personal guilt, or endow with mystical significance as divine justice and long overdue punishment. If the strategy of the area bombing of as many German cities as possible could not be justified by military objectives, which can hardly be denied today, then, as Kluge’s book shows, the special case of the horrible devastation of a medium-sized town, of no importance either strategically or to the war economy, must raise very serious questions about the factors determining the dynamic of technological warfare. Kluge’s account contains an interview with a high-ranking staff officer by a correspondent for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Both the officer and the journalist flew with the raid as observers. The section of the interview quoted by Kluge deals primarily with the question of “moral bombing,” which Brigadier General Williams explains by reference to the official doctrine on which the air raids were based. When asked, “Do you bomb for moral reasons or are you bombing the enemy’s morale?” he replies, “We are bombing the enemy’s morale. The population’s will to resist must be broken by the destruction of their city.” When pressed further, however, he admits that morale does not seem to be affected by the bombs. “Obviously morale is not located in the head or here [he points to his solar plexus] but somewhere among the individuals or populations of the cities concerned. We have investigated that, and it’s known to the staff.… Obviously it’s not in the head or the heart, and that makes sense anyway, since people who have been killed by the bombs aren’t thinking or feeling anything. And people who escape a raid like that in spite of our best efforts clearly don’t take their impressions of the disaster with them. They take all the luggage they can, but they seem to leave behind their instant impressions of the raid itself.”53 While Nossack offers us no conclusions about the motives and reasons for the act of destruction, Kluge, both here and in his book on Stalingrad, tries to account for the organizational structure of such a disaster, showing how even when the facts have become clearer the catastrophe continues on its old course because of administrative apathy, and there is no chance of raising the difficult question of ethical responsibility.
Kluge’s account begins by showing the total inadequacy of all those modes of behavior socially preprogrammed into us in the face of a catastrophe which is irrevocably unfolding. Frau Schrader, an employee of long standing at the Capitol cinema in Halberstadt, finds the usual course of the Sunday program — it has been maintained for years, and the movie showing today, April 8, is an Ucicky film starring Wessely, Petersen, and Hörbiger — disrupted by the prior claims of a program of destruction.[7] Her panic-stricken attempts to create some kind of order and perhaps clear up the rubble in time for the two o’clock matinée tellingly illustrate the extreme discrepancy between the active and passive fields of action involved in the catastrophe, leading the writer and his readers to the quasi-humorous observation that “the devastation of the right-hand side of the auditorium … [had] no meaningful or dramaturgical connection with the film being screened.”54 There is similar irrationality in the description of a troop of soldiers sent as an emergency force to dig up and sort out “100 corpses, some of them badly mutilated, partly from the ground, partly from visible depressions in it that had once been part of a shelter,” with no idea of the purpose of “this operation” in the present circumstances.55 The unknown photographer intercepted by a military patrol who claims that he wants “to record the burning city, his own home town, in its hour of misfortune,” resembles Frau Schrader in following his professional instincts.56 The only reason why his declared intention of recording the very end is not absurd is that the pictures he took, which Kluge added to his text and numbered 1 to 6, have survived, as he could hardly have expected at the time. The women on watch in the tower, Frau Arnold and Frau Zacke, equipped with folding chairs, torches, thermos flasks, packets of sandwiches, binoculars, and radio sets, are still dutifully reporting as the tower itself seems to move beneath them and its wooden cladding begins to burn. Frau Arnold dies under a mountain of rubble with a bell on top of it, while Frau Zacke lies for hours with a broken thigh until she is rescued by people fleeing from the buildings on the Martiniplan. Twelve minutes after the air raid warning, a wedding party in the inn Zum Ross is buried, together with all its social differences and animosities — the bridegroom was “from a prosperous family in Cologne,” his bride from Halberstadt, “from the lower town.”57 These and many of the other stories making up the text show how, even in the middle of the catastrophe, individuals and groups were still unable to assess the real degree of danger and deviate from their usual socially dictated roles. Since, as Kluge points out, normal time and “the sensory experience of time” were at odds with each other, those affected “could not have devised practicable emergency measures … except with tomorrow’s brains.”58 This divergence, for which “tomorrow’s brains” can never compensate, proves Brecht’s dictum that human beings learn as much from catastrophes as laboratory rabbits learn about biology, which in turn shows that the autonomy of mankind in the face of the real or potential destruction that it has caused is no greater in the history of the species than the autonomy of the animal in the scientist’s cage, a circumstance that enables us to see why the speaking and thinking machines described by Stanislaw Lem wonder if human beings can actually think or are merely simulating that activity, and drawing their own self-image from it.59
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A film by the director Gustav Ucicky, starring actors Paula Wessely, Peter Peterson, and Attila Hörbiger. The film was called Heimkehr (Homecoming).