A rchive Date
[ 22-07-2022 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ Britain ]
|
[https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/11/04/a-natural-history-of-destruction
A Natural History of Destruction
By W. G. Sebald October 27, 2002
REFLECTIONS about the aerial bombing campaign by the Allies in Germany during the Second World War...
I spent my childhood and youth on the northern outskirts of the Bavarian Alps, in a region that was largely spared the direct effects of the so-called hostilities. At the end of the war, I was just a year old, so I can hardly have any impressions of that period of destruction based on personal experience.
Yet, to this day, when I see photographs or documentary films dating from the war I feel as if I were its child, so to speak, as if those horrors I did not...
Today, it is hard to form an even partly adequate idea of the extent of the devastation suffered by the cities of Germany in the last years of the Second World War, harder still to think about the horrors involved in that devastation.
Writer points out that 600,000 civilians were killed in the raids and gives rubble statistics... Apart from Heinrich Böll, only a few other writers-among them Hans Erich Nossack, the author of "Der Untergang" ("The End")-ventured to break the taboo on any mention of the inward and outward destruction, and generally did so rather equivocally...
The images of this horrifying chapter of our history have never really crossed the threshold of the national consciousness...
Writer tells about the underpinnings of the campaign in England...
[This] program of destruction directed primarily against the civilian population was vigorously debated from the first in Great Britain. Writer notes that the campaign was sustained even when selective attacks could be made from the air, with far greater precision, on targets like ball-bearing factories, oil and fuel installations, railway junctions, and the main transport arteries-operations that, as Albert Speer commented in his memoirs, would very soon have paralyzed the entire system of production...
In the end the bombing campaign did not shorten the war... A conclusive factor in deciding to continue the offensive was probably the propaganda value, essential for bolstering British morale... Solly Zuckerman, an adviser to Sir Arthur (Bomber) Harris, commander-in-chief of Bomber Command, suggested that Harris liked destruction for its own sake...
Writer describes the 1943 firestorm over Hamburg... Tells how the local population studiously ignored the destruction after the war... Writer tells about novels on the subject, including "The City Beyond the River" by Hermann Kasack; and "The Cathedral" by Peter de Mendelssohn... Writer mentions that a bomber raid on Stalingrad alone also caused the death of 40,000 civilians, causing elation among the invading German troops...
© 2022 Condé Nast. All rights reserved]
|