February 15, 2003
War
I do not usually offer directly political opinions in this space, which is normally reserved for musings on art, literature, and the events of my own life. However, I am against both the idea of a US-led war with Iraq and even more the urgency with which it is being pursued by our government. I am at work today, unable to attend today's anti-war rally in New York City, and therefore wish to express solidarity with the protesters in every forum possible.
To that end, allow me to mention On the Natural History of Destruction, a newly-published book by the late W.G. Sebald. It collects several lectures originally presented in Switzerland in 1997, with additional essays on Alfred Andersch, Jean Amery (link to his books), and Peter Weiss. Its central essay, which provoked controversy when published in German during 1999, is titled "Air War and Literature." Excerpts from this essay were recently published in The New Yorker and, thanks to The Guardian, can be found online at this site.
The essay attempts to understand the cultural elision in postwar German literature surrounding the Allied bombing of German cities such as Hamburg and Dresden. Sebald sees this is a willed endeavor, and extols the virtues of writers like Heinrich Boll and Hans Erich Nossack, who managed to report on the terrible events and their horrible, extended aftermath. When one reads passages like this--
In a raid early in the morning of July 28, beginning at 1am, thousands of tonnes of high-explosive and incendiary bombs were dropped on the densely populated residential area north of the Elbe. A now familiar sequence of events occurred: first, all the doors and windows were torn from their frames and smashed by high-explosive bombs weighing 4,000lbs, then the attic floors of the buildings were ignited by lightweight incendiary mixtures, and, at the same time, fire bombs weighing as much as 30lbs fell into the lower stories. Within a few minutes, huge fires were burning across the bombed area, which covered about eight square miles, and they merged so rapidly that, only a quarter of an hour after the first bombs had dropped, the whole airspace was a sea of flames as far as the eye could see. Five minutes later, at 1.20am, a firestorm arose of an intensity that no one would ever before have thought possible. Reaching more than a mile into the sky, it snatched oxygen to itself so violently that the air currents reached hurricane force, resonating like mighty organs with all the stops pulled out at once.The fire burned like this for three hours. At its height, the storm lifted gables and roofs from buildings, flung rafters and entire advertising kiosks through the air, tore trees from the ground, and drove human beings before it like living torches. Behind collapsing facades, the flames shot up as high as houses, rolled like a tidal wave through the streets at a speed of more than 90 miles an hour, spun across open squares in strange rhythms, like spinning cylinders of fire. The water in some of the canals was ablaze. The glass in the tramcar windows melted; stocks of sugar boiled in the bakery cellars. Those who had fled from their air-raid shelters sank, in grotesque contortions, in the thick bubbles thrown up by melting asphalt. No one knows for certain how many lost their lives that night, or how many went mad before they died. When day broke, the summer dawn could not penetrate the leaden gloom above the city. The smoke had risen to a height of five miles, where it spread like a vast, anvil-shaped cumulonimbus cloud. A wavering heat, which the bomber pilots said they had felt through the sides of their planes, continued to rise from the smoking, glowing mounds of stone. Residential districts whose street lengths totalled 120 miles were utterly destroyed.
--one cannot help but urge caution to our leaders who are currently planning similar attacks. It is even more disconcerting when one considers that the destruction outlined above was created by neither biological, chemical, nor nuclear weapons--all potentially more destructive than the type used over Germany--and presents only one side of the multi-faceted World War. All of this happened only sixty years ago: many of our grandparents fought in and were directly affected by these events. It is my sincere hope that, two generations later, we do not forget what happened and blunder into similarly tragic scenarios.