26 Der Untergang, p. 254.
27 Ibid.
28 Pseudoautobiographische Glossen, p. 21.
29 Hans Erich Nossack, “Bericht eines fremden Wesens über die Menschen,” in Interview mit dem Tode, p. 8.
30 Der Untergang, p. 204.
31 Ibid., pp. 205, 208.
32 Ibid., p. 211f.
33 Ibid., p. 226f.
34 Victor Gollancz, In Darkest Germany, London, 1947. The book is a compilation of newspaper articles, letters, and observations by Gollancz himself, and in its very lack of literary pretention it conveys a precise impression of the situation of the German population directly after the war. It includes a chapter entitled “This Misery of Boots,” which is devoted to the footwear of the postwar Germans, as well as photographs documenting about twenty pairs of these boots and shoes. The extremely battered items of footwear shown do indeed suggest a phenomenon of natural history, reminding the viewer of all the connotations of the term “stout shoes” (festes Schuhwerk) for the Germans even later. It is almost a model of the documentary linking of past and present as practiced by Kluge. Gollancz was also one of the few individuals to speak up for the German people immediately after the war, just as he had previously been one of the few to point, at the earliest possible moment, to the murder of the Jews in the concentration camps and suggest practical countermeasures, without getting much response. (See Let My People Go — Some Practical Proposals for Dealing with Hitler’s Massacre of the Jews and an Appeal to the British Public, London, 1943. An impressive historical study of this subject has been published: T. Bower, A Blind Eye to Murder, London, 1981.)
35 Cf. Frankfurter Vorlesungen, p. 82.
36 Der Untergang, p. 216.
37 Frankfurter Vorlesungen, p. 83.
38 Der Untergang, p. 243.
39 Alexander Kluge, Neue Geschichten. Hefte 1–18, Unheimlichkeit der Zeit, Frankfurt, 1977, p. 102.
40 Theodor W. Adorno, Prismen, Munich, 1963, p. 267; Eng., Prisms, tr. S. and S. Weber, London, 1967, p. 260.
41 Kasack, Die Stadt, p. 82.
42 Ibid., p. 22.
43 Der Untergang, p. 217.
44 Elias Canetti, Die gespaltene Zukunft, Munich, 1972, p. 58.
45 Der Untergang, p. 219.
46 Ibid., p. 248f.
47 Ibid., pp. 248–49.
48 Theodor Adorno, Kierkegaard — Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, Frankfurt, 1966, p. 253.
49 Der Untergang, p. 245.
50 The Odyssey, XXII, 471–73, Eng. tr. Robert Fagles, New York, 1996.
51 Der Untergang, p. 245.
52 Neue Geschichten, p. 9.
53 Ibid., p. 83f. The conclusions that the reader can draw from these “statements” converge with the ideas published by Solly Zuckerman in his autobiography, From Apes to Warlords (London: 1978). Lord Zuckerman was scientific adviser on air warfare strategy to the British government during the war, and with great personal commitment tried to dissuade High Command of the bomber forces under Air Marshal Arthur “Bomber” Harris from continuing with the strategy of wholesale destruction that went by the name Operation Overlord. He backed, instead, a selective strategy aimed against the enemy’s system of communications, which he was convinced would have brought the war to an end sooner and with far fewer victims, an opinion that, incidentally, coincides with the conjectures on this subject put forward by Speer in his memoirs. Lord Zuckerman writes: “As we now know, bombing at about a hundred times the intensity of anything ever suffered by European cities during the Second World War at no moment broke the spirit of the people of Vietnam against whom the American forces were fighting between 1964 and 1973. In those nine years, seven million tons of bombs were dropped on South Vietnam (which received about half of the total), North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia — three times the total tonnage of British, American and German bombs dropped on European soil in the Second World War” (Apes to Warlords, p. 148). These observations bear out his thesis of the objective pointlessness of “area bombing.” As Lord Zuckerman says in his book, once he had seen for himself after the war the effects of the air raids on German cities, he agreed to write an account entitled “The Natural History of Destruction” for the journal Horizon, edited by Cyril Connolly, but unfortunately this project was never carried out.
54 Neue Geschichten, p. 35.
55 Ibid., p. 37.
56 Ibid., p. 39.
57 Ibid., p. 49.
58 This and the following quotation: ibid., p. 53.
59 Cf. Wuppertal 1945, by Robert Wolfgang Schnel, in Vaterland, Muttersprache — Deutsche Schriftsteller und ihr Staat seit 1945, ed. K. Wagenbach, W. Stephan, and M. Krüger (Berlin: 1979), p. 29f., which quotes this comment by Brecht in a context that is relevant here. Stanislaw Lem, Imaginäre Grösse (Frankfurt: 1981), p. 74; Eng., Imaginary Magnitude, tr. Marc E. Heine (London: 1985).
60 Neue Geschichten, p. 59.
61 Ibid., pp. 63, 69.
62 Ibid., p. 79.
63 Interview mit dem Tode, p. 121.
64 Andrew Bowie, Problems of Historical Understanding in the Modern Novel, typewritten diss., Norwich, Eng., 1979, an outstanding work that studies Kluge in its closing chapter.
65 Neue Geschichten, pp. 38, 54.
66 Problems of Historical Understanding, p. 295f.
67 Neue Geschichten, p. 106f.
CONSTRUCTS OF MOURNING
1 Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern, Munich, 1967, p. 9.
2 An almost entirely dismantled and deindustrialized Germany such as the Morgenthau Plan envisaged would hardly have been in any state to rehabilitate itself, and Robert Burton’s description of melancholy states where the land lies uncultivated, desolate, full of swamps, marshes, wildernesses, and the like, where cities fall into decay, towns are depressed and poor, villages are deserted, and the population is dirty, ugly, and uncivilized, would probably have been very relevant to Germany.
3 This and the following three quotations are from Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern, p. 35.
4 Hans Erich Nossack, Pseudoautobiographische Glossen (Frankfurt: 1971).
5 Hans Erich Nossack, Der Untergang. In Interview mit dem Tode, Frankfurt, 1972, p. 249.
6 Act I, scene 2.
7 Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern, p. 47.
8 Ibid., p. 48.
9 Ibid., p. 56.
10 Ibid., p. 57.
11 Ibid., p. 28.
12 Heinrich Böll, Frankfurter Vorlesungen, Munich, 1968, p. 8.
13 Ibid., p. 9.
14 Die Unföhigkeit zu trauern, pp. 19, 18.
15 Günter Grass, Tagebuch einer Schnecke, Reinbek, 1974, p. 80; Eng., From the Diary of a Snail, tr. Ralph Manheim, London, 1974, p. 112.