History: The publication of W.G. Sebald's On The Natural History of Destruction, his first book of non-fiction to be translated into English from the German, underscores the extent of the literary catastrophe that was his death, in a car accident, in December 2001, writes Joseph O'Neill.
At the age of 57, the author of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, and Austerlitz was producing a stream of work as inspiring as anything being written anywhere in the world; and it is difficult to accept, as one reads this luminous book of essays, that all that we have left to look forward to from him is whatever emerges from the unsatisfactory and horribly finite business of excavating his unknown, or at least untranslated, writings.
The irony of this state of affairs will be apparent to anyone familiar with Sebald's work. His novels obsessively inquire into figures or epochs consigned to the dark backward and abysm of time, inquiries that invariably lead the reader into the dreamlike, disaster-stricken version of the past that Sebald made his territory. As he puts it, with characteristically magnificent gloominess, in this new work: "the endemic perversion of cruelty in the history of mankind is always described in the hope that the last chapter in that horror story will be written. \ purpose has never been fulfilled and probably never can be, since our species is unable to learn from its mistakes".
An example of this, Sebald suggests in the book's principal essay, was the Allied strategic bombing of 131 German cities during the second World War, which resulted in the destruction of about 3.5 million homes and the death of 600,000 civilians. By the spring of 1944, Sebald writes, "it was emerging that despite incessant air raids the morale of the German population was obviously unbroken, while industrial production was impaired only marginally at best, and the end of the war had not come a day closer". None the less, the offensive continued "in the face of all reason", and even though 60 out of a 100 of the bomber crews died in the process, "many of them boys who had only just left school". "The victims of war," Sebald concludes, "are not sacrifices made as the means to an end of any kind, but in the most precise sense are both the means and the end in themselves."
Critical scrutiny of the bombing campaign is not new - as Sebald points out, the British themselves have long questioned the strategic and moral basis of the attacks, and the statue of Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris, the commander-in-chief of Bomber Command, in the Aldwych, London, has for years been protested against. What's striking is that Sebald is the first German writer to examine in any depth the aerial destruction, which for more than 50 years was obscured by a current of "self-imposed silence" that ran not only through historical and literary discourse in Germany, but also family conversations. This taboo, and the linguistic and historical conventions that upheld it, are the principal focus of Sebald's animus - not least because, in his view, "this extraordinary faculty for self-anaesthesia" feeds the national "stream of psychic energy" that brought about Nazism and that continues, Sebald darkly infers, to influence the modern project of "creating a greater Europe".
And so, by scrupulously assembling (and sometimes discarding) shards of written testimony and historical data, by dwelling on specifics, by adopting a "synoptic and artificial view" and, ultimately, by the inestimable force of his style, Sebald, operating "on the borders of what language can convey", portrays something of the consequences of the bombings: the mothers who carried corpses of their babies in suitcases (incredible as it sounds, there were numerous instances of this), the "repulsive fauna of the rubble", the necropolitan remains of great cities, the dazed nausea of the refugees, the bizarre statistics of destruction (e.g. 31 cubic metres of rubble for each inhabitant of Cologne). In this way, Sebald succeeds in shattering the "tacit agreement, equally binding on everyone, that the true state of the material and moral ruin in which the country found itself was not to be described".
Although there is no doubting the moral and aesthetic persuasiveness of Sebald's case, it is possible that he overstates the unnaturalness of German self-censorship. Every state - the Republic of Ireland, certainly - has moral and historical blind spots; and extreme calamities such as urban firestorms are not readily amenable to literary narration, particularly if the victimhood of the injured is complicated by their complicity in far worse mass killings. So silence is natural, at least for a while. It's worth noting that, shortly after On the Natural History of Destruction was published in Germany in 1999, Günter Grass published his novella Crabwalk about the Soviet sinking of the refugee ship Gustloff, in which 9,000 non-combatants perished. Further counter-narratives have followed, notably a film documentary dealing with the murderous ethnic cleansing of millions of the Germans from the eastern territories in Czechoslovakia and Poland, and The Fire, the historian Jörg Friedrich's bestselling and controversial account of the strategic bombing of German cities. This wave of revisionism suggests that the "psychical" condition of Germany is perhaps healthier than Sebald feared.
There is, moreover, a danger in accepting without qualification Sebald's broader despair about the "ever-recurrent and ever-intensifying errors of history". The last, extraordinarily pacific half-century in Western Europe demonstrates beyond argument that human societies, when exposed to progressive influences, are capable of reducing the incidence of catastrophe. The mystical view of humanity's incorrigible propensity to evil obscures this crucial fact, and bolsters those who exercise power in accordance with superstitious notions of virtue and evil. Sebald was alive to this danger, and noted that a "combination of fantastic delusions on the one hand and an upright way of life on the other is typical of the particular fault line that ran through the German mind during the first half of the twentieth century".
This is the kind of insight that equips us to see more distinctly the world around us. At a time when the frailty of individual conscience in the face of great events has become painfully clear, we miss W.G. Sebald more than ever.
Joseph O'Neill is a novelist and the author of Blood-Dark Track, a non-fictional inquiry into the lives of his Irish and Turkish grandfathers, both of whom were imprisoned during the second World War
On The Natural History of Destruction. By W.G. Sebald, translated by Anthea Bell. Hamish Hamilton, 205 pp. £16.99