Fragment 1
Hamburg. The hour of Gomorrah.
The operation of destruction strove to prove itself worthy of this title of devastation. In the warmth of a summer’s night it staged a monstrous opera in so rapid a sequence of acts they were indistinguishable one from the other.
‘Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.’
Among the inhabitants is a little boy of five and a half. He is asleep, curled up round his teddy bear, in a cellar crowded with people. But the cellars are derisory shelters, rat traps when everything caves in on top of them, and the survivors rush to escape from the hideout strewn with shattered bodies. They flee into streets lined now with nothing but stumps of smoking walls. Distraught and shrieking, they go running to add to the uproar of Gomorrah, where screams keep rising from here and there, suddenly falling silent to resume elsewhere — other screams yet always alike.
The little boy, wrenched from sleep, runs without comprehending anything, and mingles his crying with the great ambient din. His crying turns to sobs when the hand that was holding his suddenly lets go. He is alone in the crowd, all alone in his nightmare. For he is still asleep, asleep on his feet, running and crying. But his crying suddenly ceases when he sees the woman who was holding his hand start to waltz in the mud and ruins with a great bird of fire fastened on her back. The predator spreads its radiant wings and envelops the woman in them from head to foot. Before this abduction of amazing speed, of fierce beauty, the little boy swallows his saliva like a stone, in the same gulp losing all the words, all the names he ever knew.
Hamburg, the moment of obliteration.
‘And Abraham … looked toward Sodom and Gomorrah, and toward all the land of the plain, and beheld, and, lo, the smoke of the country went up as the smoke of a furnace.’
The child is not Abraham, just a little boy clutching his teddy bear very tightly to his chest, and his gaze splinters. Death takes him alive there, before the furnace, leaving him dead to his memory, to the language he spoke, to his name. His soul is petrified, his heart condenses into a block of salt. In counterpoint to the celestial conflagrations and outcry of the shattered city, he hears the thud of his salty heart beating inside the fabric body of the bear whose muzzle is crushed against his throat, whose buttercup eyes are pressed to his neck. The heat all around is suffocating, the air thick with sooty dust and gas. Only the teddy bear’s eyes seem to have preserved a miraculous clarity and gentleness.
Hamburg, zero hour.
‘But [Lot’s] wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.’
In this temporal gap a little boy who has only just died is brutally delivered back into the world, cast completely naked into one of the world’s craters. He knows nothing about himself any more. He cannot distinguish between his own body and that of the teddy bear with rununculus eyes. He now knows nothing about humanity, he confuses the human voice with the tumultuous din — of explosions, of avalanches of stones, beams and metal, of the forest of flames sweeping across the demolished town, of the wails of the dying and the screams of deranged survivors. He knows nothing any more of his language. Words are but sounds chaotically crowded into the furnace-press of war, producing a slimy run-off stinking of blood and carbonized flesh, of sulphur, gas and smoke. A greasy black run-off streaked with glittering gashes of yellow and scarlet.
Hamburg, daybreak following Gomorrah.
Brought into the world by war, all alone among the ruins, the newly reborn child confuses beauty with horror, madness with life, melodramatic horror with death. He sets off, like a bundle blown before the wind, carried by the tide as droves of survivors flee the fine city steeped in waters of chastisement for crimes committed by the Reich.
When people finally show some concern for this evidently lost or orphaned child walking along in a trance, he cannot answer any question put to him. He is thought to be deaf or simple-minded. Someone has the idea of untying the scorched handkerchief round his teddy bear’s neck. There is a name embroidered on it in multi-coloured threads: Magnus. Is this the name of the teddy bear, the child’s father, or the child himself? For want of a better alternative, the young deaf-mute is given this name. And under this borrowed name he is placed in a centre with other unclaimed children waiting for adoption or foster families.
After Gomorrah, on the verge of the moor, on the steps of hell.
A woman turns up at the centre. She inspects all the children. A woman still young, elegant, but her face hardened by a recent bereavement. The story of this little boy, not a deafmute but with no memory whatsoever, interests her. She observes him for a long time, finds him cute, placid, and suspects he is intelligent. He is a curly-haired little boy, with hazel eyes, a skull that perfectly conforms to Aryan standards, and uncircumcised. Sound in body and sound in race. As for his mind, it has been denuded, a rubbed-out page ready to be rewritten. The woman will undertake to make it totally blank before writing on it to suit herself. She has a substitute text for it. A text of revenge against death.
Notes
At the height of summer 1943, during an extended heatwave, the RAF, supported by the US Eighth Air Force, flew a series of raids on Hamburg. The aim of this offensive code-named Operation Gomorrah was the maximum possible destruction and incineration of the city. In the course of the night raid that began at one o’clock in the morning of the 28th July 10,000 tons of high explosive and incendiary bombs were dropped on the densely populated residential area east of the Elbe…
W.G. Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur
For anyone who likes records, who wants to become an expert in ruins, and wants to see not a town in ruins but a landscape in ruins, more of a wilderness than a desert, more desolate than a mountain, and as phantasmagorical as a nightmare, there is perhaps after all only one German city that answers: Hamburg…
Every geometrical form is represented in this variant of Guernica and Coventry…
Stig Dagerman, German Autumn
Fragment 12
A victim of sunstroke, the young man found unconscious on the edge of a cotton field is taken to a hospital in Veracruz. For two days his body and mind are in a sweltering fever. He sweats, he tosses, he raves. But beneath his sun-burnt eyelids, his gaze is fixed, arrested on an image, that of the black mass the woman turned into after twirling round, her back winged with flames. He wishes he could see her face as it was when she was still alive, the face she had in the cellar, in the street in ruins, just before the waltz. He wishes he could rewind the sequence of images, but his memory refuses to. Brought up short by this carbonized body, his memory disintegrates, excoriated and exasperated.
When at last, by force of tension, his memory restarts it moves the other way, running forward. Out of the dark mass lying in the mud and ashes he sees another woman rise, a stranger dressed in a black suit, her mouth painted red, her ears sparkling. She comes towards him, with her red smile, shining eyes, and crystal flowers glinting in her ears. She bends over him. She smells good. She strokes his head, murmurs words he does not understand but they rustle like foliage, then she takes him gently by the hand and leads him away. He follows her, like a meek little robot, but when the woman tries to make him part with the teddy bear he is clutching under his arm, he escapes from her with piercing screams. She has to submit to letting him keep this ugly relic of his past which she intends to get rid of as soon as she has won the child over.