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the complete review - non-fiction / literary criticism

On the Natural History
of Destruction

by
W. G. Sebald

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B- : some interesting aspects, but poorly argued and the underlying view of what literature should be is a disturbing one

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  No consensus, varied opinions (many only focussing on the first essay)

  From the Reviews:

• "Sebald's sombre thoughts were motivated not by historical revisionism, but by a cultural deficit." - Zulfikar Abbany, The Age
  
  
• "Germany suffered both those disgraces to the fullest possible extent, and Sebald registers that contradiction to the limit of his ability. His opening bid deserves criticism, as I hope I have shown." - Christopher Hitchens, The Atlantic Monthly
  
  
• "Over and over, Sebald finds himself appalled by the inappropriate cheerfulness, busyness, et cetera, of the people he studies. (...) By no means do I want to dismiss this book, which I cannot shake from my mind. I disagree with much of what Sebald says, and with the harsh way that he says it. Nonetheless, he has begun something very important. To the extent that World War II remains relevant to our time, it can no longer be relevant through primary perception -- the battles are over -- but through memory." - William T. Vollmann, The Believer
  
  
• "W. G. Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction is dry ice. In prose as precise and astringent as a surgeon’s knife -- Sebald writes in clear revulsion against what he sees as the kitschy grandiosity of too much German literature -- he examines a great hole of cultural memory (.....) But the reasons for this German amnesia (...) are not difficult to fathom, and so Sebald’s puzzlement is puzzling." - Susie Linfield, Boston Review
  
  
• "Its primary subject is literature and the Allied air raids on Germany during the second world war, but it is just as much about the psychopathology of destructiveness, repression in the mass memory of succeeding generations, and the sequelae of torture and cruelty from the victims' point of view." - Fred Charatan, British Medical Journal
  
  
• "The most substantial of these four essays by W G Sebald is concerned with the way in which German writers responded to the air raids, and what place these man-made events have had or still have in the nation's collective memory. In other words, in common with all Sebald's work, this book is about memory and bearing witness and the failure to do so. And what he records is, with very few exceptions, a history of failure." - Alan Marshall, Daily Telegraph
  
  
• "This act of willed national amnesia both fascinates and appals Sebald. (...) If Sebald is baffled by the evasions and pretences of the populace at large, he is profoundly disturbed by the "self-imposed silence" of German writers, who, with notable exceptions (...) have been unable, or unwilling, to tackle the subject of the Allied strategy of destruction. (...) On the Natural History of Destruction is a quietly spoken but fierce protest at the mendacity and moral evasiveness of our time. In the tragic absence of more Sebald fiction, it will have to do." - John Banville, The Guardian
  
  
• "What preoccupies Sebald here, as in his eerie novels, is the career of guilt in history. Why do so few German writers face up to this "landscape of ruins," this psychic ground zero ? Because, he suggests, they were so compromised by their behavior during the Third Reich that they've been busy ever since rewriting their own story, coming up with an alibi." - John Leonard, Harper's
  
  
• "But his main subject is in the inability of German writers to bear truthful witness. Sebald condemns their bad faith and selective amnesia, casting himself in the roles of public conscience and seer. (...) Though the work of a laconically witty man, Sebald's writing has little humour. But his bleak pessimism, like Skegness air, is bracing. These four essays add to our picture of his achievement a fiercely didactic moralist, brave in his pursuit of truth." - Peter J. Conradi, The Independent
  
  
• "If the new book refers us back to the earlier ones in this way, it also looks ahead to narrative journeys that cannot now be undertaken." - Geoff Dyer, LA Weekly
  
  
• "Expressions such as 'national humiliation' or the 'rise from total degradation' reveal Sebald to have been a child of the postwar period and a writer significantly moulded by years spent in a country which never experienced a comparable historical rupture." - Christian Schütze, London Review of Books
  
  
• "On the Natural History of Destruction is a translation of one of the first and still one of the most profound expressions of this new interest (.....) Although Sebald gives us a vivid account of the bombing and a sensitive discussion of its literary representations, his book has little to say about the historical context. Sebald was in no sense an apologist for Nazism, nor does he suggest a moral equivalence between the air war and Nazism's crimes. But for all its rhetorical power, his book leaves the most important question unanswered: Can the air war be morally justified ?" - James J. Sheehan, The Los Angeles Times
  
  
• "En prenant appui sur ce continent noir de l'histoire, Sebald se penche avec une passion non dénuée de cruauté sur les liens épineux qui existent entre la littérature et la vérité." - Raphaëlle Rérolle, Le Monde
  
  
• "(E)ven after substantial revision, the published version retains a disjointed feel. Sebald presents less a linear argument than an accumulation of meanings filtered through lapidary descriptions, personal musings, historical notes and, above all, literary criticism. (...) The posthumous English edition of On the Natural History of Destruction further includes two other literary essays, so that the air war lectures now make up only the first half of the book. The overall effect of these changes is to present the lectures themselves as criticism -- a kind of discursive commentary on the writers who did attempt to address the devastation of German cities." - Hugh Eakin, The Nation
  
  
• "But these criticisms all overlook the aspect of Sebald's book that, for a non-German reader is the most obvious, and the most shocking: the utterly ahistorical way in which Sebald discusses the bombing campaign, without giving even a hint of moral or political context." - Ruth Franklin, The New Republic
  
  
• "It is fine literary criticism (sharp enough to prompt at least one angry letter from Germany claiming that the bombing was a typical Jewish plot). But for a British audience, this is quite arcane material. Nor does it seem so very surprising. Everything he says feels well-judged, but in finding the taboos erected against that unforgettable horror so mystifying he seems to overlook the obvious extent to which postwar German publishers were obliged to wave aside anything that smacked of self-pity." - Robert Winder, New Statesman
  
  
• "The issues he raises about the war against the civilians have no simple answers. They defy description (.....) What worries Sebald, as it should worry any thinking person, is our newfound capacity for total destruction." - Charles Simic, The New York Review of Books
  
  
• "(T)his slim volume is patently something of a publishing afterthought. (...) On the Natural History of Destruction is a complex apologia of a book, one that attempts to absolve a son of the sins of the father by establishing a larger and more generic ground for incrimination." - Daphne Merkin, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "On the Natural History of Destruction is such a timely and startling book because Sebald is not proud to be telling the truth about Germany after the war, he is just dismayed that it might always need to be told." - Adam Phillips, The Observer
  
  
• "On the Natural History of Destruction leaves an aftertaste of sadness that flows from both its own bleak reflections and the knowledge that Sebald's indispensable voice has been silenced." - Kenneth Baker, San Francisco Chronicle
  
  
• "This approach may sound dull, or too literary, but it is not. Sebald, with his aversion to anything bombastic, self-righteous or self-pitying, is a guide with the good manners not to harangue either us or his fellow Germans, and scarcely a page of this book fails to throw out valuable hints." - Andrew Gimson, The Spectator
  
  
• "Sebald draws no overt moral or historical lesson. He seeks simply to speak about the unspeakable, to bring into the open something most of his contemporaries chose for years to airbrush from their consciousness. Sebald's laconic prose is admirably suited to the subject. His book is chiefly interesting to a British reader because it is the work of a brilliant mind, rather than because it exposes new evidence." - Max Hastings, Sunday Telegraph
  
  
• "Sebald's thesis is clear and pursued with his customary rigour. After the war, he argues, collective amnesia became the dominant factor in the German psyche (.....) Its focus and emphasis might prove slightly too specialised for some readers. The German writers he discusses are practically unknown in this country." - Andrew Riemer, Sydney Morning Herald
  
  
• "This is a brilliant and disturbing book, but nothing is as bleak as his conclusion" - Antony Beevor, The Times
  
  
• "Andersch is representative of that self-deceiving generation. The severity with which Sebald judges his novels applies also to the West German society that mistook Andersch and other "internal emigrants" for examples of intellectual integrity, when in reality they had merely conformed. The attempt to rehabilitate German literature had foundered on account of the fraudulence and moral cowardice of its leading figures. Sebald was casting doubt, not only on the authenticity of a generation of writers, but on the entire post-war German project of "coming to terms with the past" (Vergangenheitsbewaltigung)." - Daniel Johnson, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "His challenge to postwar writers who ignored the holocaust that consumed Germany's cities is only rhetorical. (...) Sebald isn't really interested in taking others to task for what they didn't do. He just wants an excuse for doing it instead. And so he does. Meticulously, point by point, detail by detail, he reconstructs the destruction that was visited upon his land, sparing no horror." - Zofia Smardz, The Washington Post

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       Most discussion of this volume has centred on the longest piece in it, Air War and Literature. Based on lectures given by Sebald in Zürich in 1997 (and including Sebald's discussion of the initial reaction to those lectures), the piece takes up about half of the book; the remainder of the book consists of essays about three authors (Alfred Andersch, Jean Amery, and Peter Weiss) in which Sebald explores issues similar to those raised in Air War and Literature.
       Sebald believes that Germans have inadequately discussed (both publicly and in their literature) and hence also not come to terms with the incredible destruction ("on a scale without historical precedent") caused specifically by the large scale (and largely indiscriminate) aerial bombing of Germany by the Allied powers during World War II. Sebald offers some of the shocking statistics (huge numbers of dead, enormous amounts of bombs, rubble, etc.) and describes some of what happened -- some of the more horrific conflagrations and their consequences --, but what he focusses on is what he perceives to be an unwillingness to publicly discuss these events and the lingering aftermath, what he believes became a "taboo on any mention of the inward and outward destruction".
       Sebald certainly has a valid point insofar as these events have not been publicly discussed (or obsessed over) to the extent one might expect, given how many people were affected (and given the horror of many of their experiences). Certainly, the fire-bombings of Germany have not been publicly dissected in the same manner that other World War II horrors -- such as the Nazi concentration camps or the bombing of Hiroshima -- have, but Sebald does not probe very deeply into what the reasons for this may be. Comparisons that he might have considered (Hiroshima's iconic and much-discussed status, compared to the largely ignored fire-bombing of Tokyo that claimed more lives, for example) are ignored, and discussion remains relatively superficial. Differing reactions in West and East Germany, the role of the occupying forces in limiting and shaping public discussion, the constant reminders (bombed and burnt out buildings -- some of which remained standing as testament to events (certainly in East Germany) until fairly recently) all might explain part of how the public dialogue about these events was shaped, but Sebald does not consider them closely.
       More disturbingly, Sebald specifically focusses on the literary reaction to the destruction and horrors suffered in Germany -- or rather the lack thereof. Sebald is particularly disappointed that writers did not (and have not) adequately (as he considers it) addressed these events in their writing, particularly their fiction. Again, he is fundamentally correct in the observation that these events, and the aftermath, have not been extensively treated in post-War German fiction -- but Sebald condemns the writers for this failure, and this is what is objectionable. Sebald has a clear vision of what literature must be and what it must do: he demands that it be grounded in authenticity and deal with human experience in a specific way, including, specifically, confronting history. It is an extremely limited view of literature.
       Again and again, Sebald insists that what writers should have done is convey the magnitude and the horror of these events (and chides them for not doing so). Sebald has a very specific idea of what these horrors are, or at least how they should be perceived: they are incredible, nearly unimaginable. They are really, really bad. He easily dismisses eyewitness accounts (by those who actually experienced the events he's concerned with) as inadequate because they use clichés, language that is banal, with words and phrases whose:

function is to cover up and neutralize experiences beyond our ability to comprehend.

The apparently unimpaired ability -- shown in most of the eyewitness reports -- of everyday language to go on functioning as usual raises doubts of the authenticity of the experiences they record.

People's ability to forget what they do not want to know, to overlook what is before their eyes, was seldom put to the test better than in Germany at that time.

an essentially apologetic attitude dominates the urge Andersch sometimes feels for unreserved confession. Memory acts very selectively: decisive tracts of experience are entirely omitted, an editing technique which runs counter to the objectivity announced by the subtitle Ein Bericht ("An Account").

the essays written by Améry at this time about his personal past and present contain insights, based on the most direct experience, into the irreparable condition of those victims, and it is from such insights alone that the true nature of the terror visited on them can be extrapolated with some precision.

Apart from Niederland's professional case histories, which show the humiliation of the victim continued even in the compensation proceedings, only Améry's writings give an adequate idea of what it means to have been delivered up to death.

More clearly than the oeuvre of any other contemporary author, the writings of Peter Weiss show the abstract memory of the dead is of little avail against the lure of waning memory if it does not also express sympathy -- sympathy going beyond mere pity -- in the study and reconstruction of an actual time of torment.

It records an accumulated sense of fear and pain of death, and must have almost exhausted its author; that account is the place from which Weiss, as a writer, does not return. The rest of the text is only a postlude, the coda to a martyrs' chronicle.

Those who had fled from their air-raid shelters sank, with grotesque contortions, in the thick bubbles thrown up by the melting asphalt.

The words that Améry set down on paper, and which seem to us full of the comfort of lucidity, to him merely outlined his own incurable malady and drew a dividing line between "deux mondes incommunicables (.....)"

Unmeisterliche Wanderjahre (as the title of one of his works runs, alluding to Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre)

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Links:

• Random House publicity page
• Hanser publicity page

• The Believer
• Bookforum
• Boston Review
• Camden New Journal
• Carol Anne Costabile-Heming at H-Net
• Culture Machine
• Daily Telegraph
• Falter (German)
• Gerald A. Fetz at H-Net
• First Things
• Flak Magazine
• Freitag (German)
• The Guardian
• In Writing
• jungle World (German)
• Shriram Krishnamurthi
• LA Weekly
• Lire (French)
• literaturhaus.at (German)
• Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
• New Statesman
• The New York Times
• The New York Times Book Review
• The Observer
• The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
• Prague
• The Quarterly Conversation
• Rocky Mountain News
• satt.org (German)
• San Francisco Chronicle
• Sunday Business Post
• Sunday Telegraph
• The Sunday Tribune
• Sydney Morning Herald
• The Telegraph
• Wiener Zeitung (German) (scroll down for review)
• The Yale Review of Books

• Chronology
• Links

• Jean Améry: A Biographical Introduction

• See the complete review's Peter Weiss page

• Profile at The Guardian
• A Symposium on W.G. Sebald
• Obituary at The Guardian
• In memoriam at Flak Magazine
• Interview at The Guardian
• Caricature by David Levine

• Campo Santo
• Unrecounted

• The Emergence of Memory: Conversations with W.G.Sebald, edited by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

• Peter Weiss' Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (The Aesthetics of Resistance)
• See Index of Literary Essays under review
• See Index of German literature

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About the Author:

       German author Winfried Georg Sebald was born in 1944 and spent most of his life teaching at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. He died in 2001.

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© 2003-2009 the complete review

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