On the Natural History of Destruction 
by 

W.G. Sebald

 

Helping the Angel of History

Although Sebald has some clearly stated moral criticisms of the Allied carpet-bombing of German civilians during WWII, these are not the main subject of his Zurich lectures nor of the personal responses he includes in this volume. Rather, it is the widespread impact of such trauma and the subsequent effects of what amounts to a massive cultural as well as psychological repression that he analyses. I think such an effort is worthwhile mainly because it suggests parallel phenomena in many other areas of large-scale human tragedy.

There are events simply too terrible to recall, to discuss, or even to admit to consciousness. Sebald’s case in point is the intentional mass killing of non-combatants in dozens of German cities from 1943 through 1945. The death toll in Hamburg alone was probably that of the atomic blasts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. And the physical destruction was virtually complete in many German cities over even greater areas than in Japan. 

The remarkable thing for Sebald is that these losses were not seriously considered in either official analyses or in literature for almost half a century. According to Sebald “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.” He goes on to portray a sort of continuing conspiracy to avoid “the well-kept secret of the corpses built into the foundations of our state, a secret that bound all Germans together in the postwar years, and indeed still binds them, more closely than any positive goal such as the realization of democracy ever could.”

Sebald identifies several possible reasons for this communal “self-anaesthesia.” The first and most obvious is the repressed guilt for the war itself. But there is also the humiliation risked if such events were to recognised in the presence of the forces of the occupying victors. And given the immense task of rebuilding from nothing in the affected cities, morale could only have been compromised by contemplating the causes of the devastation. These seem obvious, or at least plausible, enough.

But these are rationalisations rather than explanations. The basic fact that these rationalisations revolve around is the experience itself, an experience of survival within inexpressibly horrible conditions of death, destruction, decay, filth, and disease. The survivors witnessed extinction not just of their friends and families but of an entire civilisation. They starved, lived in caves, acted more like an insect colony than a society - in some cases, for years.

Collective catastrophe forms an historical break, a before and after. The before becomes largely mythological in light of the catastrophe while the catastrophic events themselves are incomprehensible, almost divinely transcendent in their sheer excessiveness. Melodrama is always a literary temptation in these circumstances; but this is a distraction rather than an exploration of the horror involved.

Sebald puts his intellectual finger on the central problem which is not with officials or authors but with the nature of the experience: Those who undergo such trauma cannot express their experience. He refers to the Japanese author Kenzaburo Oe’s notes on his conversations with survivors of the Hiroshima bomb who were unable to speak about the day of the blast 20 years later. Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man describes his hopelessness in the Nazi death camp knowing that he will be unable to communicate the depth of the suffering he is experiencing. The survivors of apartheid in South Africa similarly report a failure of expression during the Truth and Reconciliation process. Some things simply can’t be said.

It does not seem unreasonable to extrapolate this sort of mute testimony to other events - to slavery and the extermination of the natives in America; to those who served in the trenches in the first European war; to the survivors of genocide in Rwanda and Yugoslavia. The list of such occasions in which language of their existential reality is entirely absent is of course endless. Recognition that perhaps the most important things about such events are inherently beyond language is significant in everything from literature to government policy-making. Minimally it might make us all a bit more humble in our opinions.

When Zhou Enlai, the Chinese premier was asked in 1972 about the long term effects of the French Revolution, his famous response was “It’s too early to say.” Experiences get passed on subtly from generation to generation. Mass trauma seems most likely to get transmitted entirely outside of language. This makes their effects more rather than less pronounced. Just recognising this possibility might be a major intellectual breakthrough.

Sebald mentions Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History, painted so evocatively by Paul Klee. The Angel, with horrified fixity, looks back on the past while it is swept forward by the storm of events. It is completely oblivious to either its present state or its future. It, therefore, has no real experience except of what has already been recorded. It is helplessly mute because records are inadequate to cope with the circumstances in which it finds itself.

Sebald’s book is a rambling series of notes, memories, and anecdotes which are highly personal and intensely engaged in German literary politics. It’s merit, I think, lies in these two apparently restrictive characteristics. Sebald doesn’t present a thesis; he provokes thought. The book is a sort of meditation which demands thinking about tragedies other than the destruction of almost every German city. It is a book that tries to at least get Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History to look over its shoulder.



Postscript 12Aug19: An interesting article on the transmission of trauma among generations: https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts...