In his provocative essay Luftkrieg und Literatur (trans. On the Natural History of Destruction) the writer W.G.Sebald complained that there were very few literary depictions of the Allied firebombing of Germany. Sebald attributed this to some sort of willful amnesia on the part of German writers after the war. One of the few exceptions was Han Erich Nossack who witnessed the bombing of Hamburg in 1943 and captured his first-hand experience and impressions in a novel Der Untergang. The book is a surreal tour through a landscape of horror. Now the University of Chicago has released a new translation of Nossack’s book: The End: Hamburg 1943 with photographs by Erich Andres and a forrward by the translator, Joel Agee. You can read the first few pages here.
Nossack’s book is an important literary and historical document, but an even more gripping description of the Hamburg bombing can be found in Volker Hage’s Zeugen der Zerstörung: DIe Literaten und der Luftkrieg. Read Wolf Biermann’s story about how he – only six years old at the time – and his mother somehow survived. Unlike Nossack, who observed the firebomobing from afar, Biermann was right at ground zero.
But by far the best novel that deals with the Allied bombing of Germany was missed entirely by Sebald: Gerd Ledig’s Vergeltung, which deals with 59 minutes of terror during one bombing of Munich. More on Ledig in a future post.
