Author digs through rubble of war for answers

Tyler D. Johnson, Rocky Mountain News

Friday, February 7, 2003

Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris once said: "We shall take out one German city after another, like pulling teeth."

During the closing years of WWII, Harris, an Air Marshal with the RAF, was one of the chief proponents of Allied "area" bombings. The method was intentionally imprecise - towns, cities and citizens were targeted and approximately 600,000 German civilians were killed.

The Dresden conflagration is best known, but there were also 40,000 killed in Hamburg. In Cologne, there were 31.1 cubic meters of rubble per person, and 7.5 million people were left homeless throughout Germany.

W.G. Sebald, born in 1944 and killed in a car accident in 2001, was a German writer revered for four novels and a book of prose that all center on the eloquence of loss and the unending call of memory. In On the Natural History of Destruction, a collection of essays, Sebald offers a haunting meditation on the silence following the firestorms:

"There was a tacit agreement, equally binding on everyone, that the true state of material and moral ruin in which the country found itself was not to be described. The darkest aspects of the final act of destruction, as experienced by the great majority of the German population, remained under a kind of taboo like a shameful family secret, a secret that perhaps could not even be privately acknowledged."

The magnitude of the destruction was enough to drive any human insane - and often did. One story tells of a mother carrying her dead, burned child in a suitcase. But Sebald pursues the more difficult questions about the morality of the bombings and the torment German citizens felt at finding family, home and city destroyed and then having to realize, to varying degrees, some culpability. Hitler's nihilism is undeniable. But he was not the only one in uniform.

It should be obvious that nothing mentioned above is worse than what Jews endured - unprovoked - and here Sebald's essay becomes a matter of degrees: Even though the German citizenry's suffering was largely brought on by their country's pursuit of mass destruction, isn't their suffering valid on a human level? Aren't they victims as well? How valid is their suffering relative to that of the Jews and other citizens?

Rarely in history has there been such moral high ground as in the war against Nazi Germany. There is no defensible argument against using whatever means necessary to oppose outright genocide and brutal domination.

Sebald certainly understands this, but his questions are poignant. Perhaps the only response - definitive answers are impossible - is that morality is one of the first principles suspended during war because war, by its very nature, denies a cornerstone of civilization: that human life is valuable. In war, people are mere obstacles to victory and morality seems to show up in hindsight.

Sebald acts as a kind of social psychologist in seeking an answer for the cultural silence after the bombings. In the fascinating title essay, he examines the void in the national psyche and in German literature. The last three essays probably will interest only readers already familiar with the writings of Alfred Andersch, Jean Amery and Peter Weiss.

Sebald's style is not that of a burdensome academic or dry historian. His death was a loss for literature. His prose is graceful and clear, even when detailing destruction:

"The fire, now rising two thousand meters into the sky, snatched oxygen to itself so violently that the air currents reached hurricane force, resonating like mighty organs with all their 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 billboards through the air, tore trees from the ground, and drove human beings before it like living torches."

Not surprisingly, Sebald concludes that the reality of the bombings was simply more than the human mind could process. Think of how many New Yorkers who, in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, said the destruction was "like a movie." The psychological disconnection prevented German writers from capturing the magnitude while the citizens, damaged in every conceivable way, were eager to rebuild and silence the past. The former was done vigorously; the latter is impossible.

In 1992, Harris was honored with a monument in London. The ceremony prompted protests, and the one from Cologne's mayor encompassed the many contradictions arising from so much destruction: "In my view, it makes no sense to commemorate war heroes like Arthur Harris, although he fought on the right side and for the right cause."

Tyler D. Johnson is a multimedia producer at the Rocky Mountain News.