What is needed to counteract this tendency, Sebald argues, is a “natural history of the destruction.” He is generous with statistics: 1 million tons of bombs dropped, 131 cities hit, 600,000 civilians dead, 3.5 million homes destroyed, 7.5 million Germans left homeless. He cites Hans Erich Nossack on the streams of refugees that “noiselessly and incessantly flooded everything,” bringing the chaos of the urban bombing into the quiet villages of the countryside. He devotes pages to the sudden flourishing of the parasites that feed off corpses: the rats, “bold and fat,” that “cavorted in the streets”; the flies, “huge, iridescent green, as had never been seen before.” And he remarks mordantly that “the striking paucity of observations and commentary on this matter can be explained by an unspoken taboo that is more understandable when one considers that the Germans, who had taken upon themselves the cleansing and hygienization of all of Europe, must have had to shield themselves from the mounting fear that they themselves were in fact the ‘rat nation’ [Rattenvolk].”
Though he is generally sympathetic to the German civilians who suffered so greatly, Sebald has harsh words for the way they closed their eyes to the destruction around them. Alfred Döblin remarked that people “walk around as if nothing had happened and. . the city had always looked like this.” The Swedish journalist Stig Dagerman, reporting from Hamburg, recalled traveling on a train that passed through the “moonscape” of that city; though the train was full, not a single person looked out the window. “And because he looked out the window,” Sebald writes, “people recognized him as a foreigner.” Nossack reported seeing a woman cleaning the windows of a house that “stands alone, undamaged, in the middle of the wasteland of ruins.” Sebald finds something ghastly in this: we are unsurprised when the inhabitants of an insect colony do not weep over the destruction of a construction nearby, but “from humankind one expects a certain amount of empathy.”
This is really beside the point, though, because the question concerns the responsibility of writers to respond to incidents in their culture, not the responsibility of the average citizen to open his eyes when confronted with the ugliness of humanity. (The German “amnesia” about the Allied bombing would hardly have been the Germans’ first cognitive failure in those terrible years.) Sebald is correct about the profound absence of the bombing campaign in postwar German literature, but it is not as if German writers had chosen to ignore the war. They overwhelmingly concerned themselves with the war — I am thinking of Günter Grass, Heinrich Böll, Wolfgang Koeppen, Thomas Mann, Ingeborg Bachmann, Max Frisch, Siegfried Lenz, Gert Hofmann — but not with the Luftkrieg aspect of it. Indeed, in postwar German writing one finds almost an obsession with Nazism: its beginnings, its rise to power, its lingerings in German society long after the war, and not least its crimes. Based on the literary evidence, National Socialism may have been as earth-shaking for German society as the million tons of bombs that fell on German soil. If German writers did not begin to write about the destruction of their cities until the 1990s, this may be because it was simply not as important to them; and that is to their credit, a sign of historical conscience. It is hardly a moral delinquence to worry more about what you have done to others than about what others have done to you.
One could also ask, as many German critics did, whether it actually is the responsibility of literature to register the impact of contemporary events. And there were other criticisms of Sebald’s argument as well. Kurt Oesterle, writing in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, pointed out that Sebald may have overestimated the eyewitness reports that make up so much of the basis for his arguments, reports that “shock before they explain.” And Dieter Forte published a long and very personal article in Der Spiegel in which he argued that “there exists horror that is beyond language” and cited the Polish writer Andrzej Szczypiorski’s comment that after he was released from a concentration camp he needed to “switch off his head” so that his body would survive. “Sebald prefers the indirect method, the clear reports, the clarity of calm observation; he remains distant from the actual horror, as if he were on the trail of one of his collages,” Forte wrote. “He overlooks my generation, the generation of the children in the big cities, who can remember, when they are able, when they can find words for it — and for that one must wait an entire lifetime.”
But these criticisms all overlook the aspect of Sebald’s book that, for a non-German reader, is the most obvious, and the most shocking: the utterly ahistorical way in which Sebald discusses the bombing campaign, without giving even a hint of moral or political context. One could argue that everyone knew the context already and so it does not need to be reiterated. But in fact Sebald was misinterpreted by some as implicitly arguing that the sufferings of the Germans could be seen as compensatory for the crimes of the Nazis, as the letters from readers that he discusses in the third chapter of the book reveal. He tries to correct this, quoting from such letters and giving his responses, and ending with the comment that “the majority of Germans today know — at least so one hopes — that we directly provoked the destruction of the cities in which we lived.” But in the first two chapters of his book — that is, the portion delivered as lectures — Sebald mentions the Holocaust only obliquely, and no other form of German aggression during World War II at all.
I do not mean in any way to suggest that Sebald was insensitive to the victims of the Holocaust. His literary work, especially The Emigrants and Austerlitz, shows him to be unique among German writers in his understanding of the catastrophe that befell the European Jews. Indeed, only a writer with Sebald’s moral standing with regard to the Holocaust could have dared write such a book as this one. And yet parts of Luftkrieg und Literatur are weirdly lacking in this sensitivity. One hesitates to accuse Sebald of something so crass as “moral equivalency,” but the suspicion of such a confusion cannot be avoided. On the very first page of the book Sebald calls the Allied bombings of Germany during the war “an act of extermination [Vernichtungsaktion] unique in history up to that point.” Later he refers to the “incineration” [Einascherung] of the city of Hamburg. He knows as well as anyone what those words imply.
In Sebald’s defense, one could argue that the Holocaust is simply not his subject here, that he is writing about an entirely different aspect of the war, and that to do justice to the Holocaust as well would have required an entirely different book. But the book makes it hard to sustain such a defense. For Luftkrieg und Literatur goes even further. Most remarkable is the passage in which Sebald discusses the important role of music in Germany, even at the time of the bombings. He quotes an English journalist who said that “in the midst of such shambles only the Germans could produce a magnificent full orchestra and a crowded house of music lovers,” and he rightly takes umbrage with this “double-edged” remark. And then he continues:
Who would deny the audiences, who were listening then with glistening eyes to the music rising throughout the nation once again, the right to be moved by feelings of gratitude for their rescue? And the question must also be permitted as to whether their breasts did not swell with the perverse pride that no one in the history of mankind on earth had been so played upon and had withstood so much as the Germans.