On the Natural History of Destruction. W G Sebald. Penguin. UK £16.99 HB

Review by Pat Boran

W.G. Sebald's posthumous On the Natural History of Destruction might equally have been titled on the Destruction of History, so much does it concern itself with the absence of a record of the virtual pulverisation of so many German towns and cities in the last years of the Second World War. But such a revision of the title would result in the omission of that troubling word "natural".

Originally delivered in a lecture in Zurich in 1997, Sebald's thesis in the essay that takes up the first and major half of the book, is that German writers of all kinds failed to record the devastation of their cities in the war. Unsurprisingly, such a claim drew both considerable media attention and controversy, as well as refutations from a wide variety of correspondents. But despite returning to a number of publications now out of print, as well as to private letters and diary entries, Sebald still failed to find any real evidence that showed Germany had taken account of these terrible years.

"When we take a backward view," he writes in the opening pages, "particularly of the years 1930 to 1950, we are always looking and looking away at the same time."

Appreciating the necessary drive towards re-imagining and rebuilding, Sebald is however greatly concerned about post-war efforts aimed at "pointing the population exclusively towards the future".

During those final years of the war, the RAF alone dropped some 1 million tons of bombs on German cities, killing 600,000 people and leaving some 7.5 million homeless. Yet post-war writers seemed less interested in the unprecedented destruction of so much of their homeland and its people than in "the redefinition of their idea of themselves".

Sebald identifies here "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 new Federal German society developed, he says, "an almost perfectly functioning mechanism of repression, one which allowed it to recognize the fact of its own rise from total degradation while disengaging entirely from its stock of emotions."

The disconnectedness of many of the eyewitness accounts examined by Sebald, together with reports of concerts among the ruins and other baffling denials of the realities of the period, suggests that such suppression had its origins in a kind of survival mechanism without which many physical survivors might not have survived psychically.

With the shadow of the threatened bombing of Iraq now hanging over his words, Sebald notes that, while in Britain even those in control of the military machine argued over the justification of such excessive force, in Germany there was little or no publicly-voiced opposition to the raids, the citizens looking on with "silent fascination" and the sense that what was about to befall them was "a just punishment".

The troubling appearance of the word "just" here, as of the word "natural" in the book's title, introduces notions of fate and destiny and serves to remove responsibility both from those who perpetuated the attacks as well as those who might afterwards have recorded, examined and learned from them. The fact that the onslaught, headed by Sir Arthur 'Bomber' Harris, failed to bring the war's conclusion "a day closer" is a grim reminder that a massive military machine, once it has reached a certain point in its growth, is almost impossible to stop. Economic arguments about the cost of preparations, and the waste involved in reversing them, have a simplistic logic against which all counter arguments seem hopelessly complicated.

The accounts of the bombing by those on the receiving end are equally suspect and distorted, eyewitnesses finding refuge from the unspeakable horror in stock phrases and expressions -- "all hell was let loose," "we were staring into the inferno" -- and in so doing manage to distance themselves from the experience.

During the bombing of Hamburg, for instance, the water in the canals was ablaze, glass melted in streetcar windows, and the fireball, sucking oxygen into itself, reached 2,000 metres into the sky. But it is the human details which communicate the horror far more intensely: one rare first-hand account tells of a refugee, fleeing the city, whose suitcase falls open to reveal "the roasted corpse of a child, shrunk like a mummy... the relic of a past that was still intact a few days ago". But such recognitions of the horror are confined to a mere handful of reports. Far more typical are such accounts as that of a cinema employee in Halberstadt trying to "clear away the rubble before the two o'clock matinée." This is not just wartime 'stiff upper lip' resilience, but an almost complete negation of the truth.

Even among those writers who did concern themselves with the devastation of the period, the vast majority, like Hermann Kasack, avoided the appalling realities "by invoking pseudo-humanist and Far Eastern philosophical notions" of cleansing and rebirth, notions which Sebald hears as uncomfortably echoing Fascist fantasies of only a few years before.

This combined denial and repression is, perhaps, seen clearest in an extract from a book on the history of the small market town of Sonthofen, published in 1963: "The war took much from us, but our beautiful native landscape was left untouched, as flourishing as ever." For Sebald, born in the penultimate year of the war, and then entering his twenties, it is the literary forms in which the past is preserved that are themselves not to be trusted.

As Sebald's first non-fiction work to appear in English, On the Natural History of Destruction is in part inspired by an article of the same title, due for publication in Cyril Connolly's Horizon but which the intending author, Solly Zuckerman, could not bring himself to write.

Among the things Zuckerman could not bring himself to describe following his visit to post-war Cologne was the plague of rats and flies that consumed all before them. And it is in this image that Sebald sees one of the greatest horrors simultaneously suffered and denied by the German people, that they who had "proposed to cleanse and sanitize all Europe now had to contend with a rising fear that they themselves were the rat people".

On so many levels, the always brilliant Sebald has reclaimed the past with this shocking, provocative and, in the light of the present military build-up, all-too timely book that shows, among other things, how deep and enduring are the scars of war.

© copyright Pat Boran