Had this been reviewed more fairly by my fellow Goodreaders, I probably would have gone up to 3 stars, but instead I find myself thrown into a position of aggression. Had this been written by, e.g., Peter Weiss, not only would it not have x hundred ratings; it wouldn't even have been published. Thankfully for lovers of mildly diverting amateur history and effective literary polemic (i.e., probably not you), it was written by Sebald, and so is not only published, but published in cheap paper-back by a major publishing house. Meanwhile, one third of Peter Weiss's Aesthetics of Resistance, which Sebald praises effusively in the last essay here, has been published by a small university press. So it goes.

The main attraction of this volume is a pair of lectures Sebald gave on the German people's supposed failure to remember and therefore work through the horrific destruction of that country's cities at the end of the second world war--a destruction that will be familiar to anyone interested in now slightly out of favor novels like Slaughterhouse 5. Sebald argument flits back and forth between a number of similar but *not* identical claims:

i) Germans have repressed the destruction of, e.g., Hamburg, and do not remember it at all.

This has the virtues of appealing to what I am told are Sebald's main themes, memory and forgetting. I confess, these are not my favorite themes, but I am saved here because statement i) is blatantly untrue. Sebald modifies it, without *too* much silliness, to

ii) German writers have repressed the destruction of, e.g., Hamburg, and do not write about it at all.

This, too, is untrue, as Sebald admits, and once more alters his statement to

iii) German writers have not repressed the destruction of, e.g., Hamburg, but they have not written about it in a way that satisfies me, W. G. Sebald; that is, they have not written extremely plain descriptions of objects like burnt human limbs.

Please note that Sebald was an infant while the bombing was going on, so he certainly doesn't and can't 'remember' the destruction.

This is really where the argument comes to rest: nobody has written a book about the destruction of the German cities, to which Sebald could, in good conscience, have given five stars on goodreads. That is not much of an argument. The insights it gives into Sebald's aesthetic preferences do not endear him to me, either, since his suggestion is that any 'artistic' representation of this destruction is morally bankrupt, and what is needed is, more or less, the straight facts ma'am. Perhaps among German authors this could seem like a radical statement. To those of us used to Anglo-American 'plainness,' unfortunately, it sounds like a plea for yet more lower journalism.*

There are some nice things at the start and end of this volume. The two lectures are nicely written, and the essay on Peter Weiss (aforementioned) may, I hope, spur publication of Aesthetics of Resistance's second and third thirds. I hope this in part because the essay on Jean Amery was probably behind the recent translation of the work discussed here, on the air war. The first lit-crit essay is a polemic against Alfred Andersch, a writer I'd never heard of, and thanks to Sebald's entirely convincing essay, will probably never read. Of course, that would have been the case without Sebald's essay.

The dark core of the book is Sebald's addendum to his lectures (starting on page 69). I suspect that this is the most Sebaldian part of the book: it flits around the author's uninteresting personal experiences, and the fragments seem, to me at least, to add up to nothing. Unlike the lectures, it is not well written (and/or well translated); rather, it is filled with sentences like "The material in the passages above indicates that attitudes to the realities of a time when urban life in Germany was almost entirely destroyed have been extremely erratic," (91). That might well be very clear in German, but in English it is rebarbatively abstract.

Someone I trust almost entirely tells me that Rings of Saturn is the place to start, and I will give it a shot. But after the disaster of 'Austerlitz' and the feel-good pseudo-criticism of 'On NHD' (aren't you glad that *you* are not guilty of the great sins of not remembering things Sebald says are important, or of writing books Sebald doesn't like?), my patience with W. G. won't hold much longer.


*: There's an interesting, though academic, article to be written comparing Adorno's reaction to the war and the art that comes after it, and Sebald's reaction here. Adorno would argue that this just-the-facts is a mirror of the oppressive world that led to the war. Sebald would argue that modernist formalist is an immoral distortion of people's actual suffering. Note that for Adorno the problem is *social*, and focused on justice; for Sebald the problem is *individualistic* and focused on personal morality. This might explain my distaste for what I've read of WGS so far. ( )

This posthumous collection is a curious mixture.

The bulk of the book consists of an adapted lecture series on the bombing of German cities, the unprecedented nature of the destruction in cities such as Hamburg and the curious lack of references to it in most German post-war literature. This is powerful, moving and thought provoking.

The remainder of the book is a series of essays on three German writers, none of whom I knew anything about, and although this was interesting in what it said about the culture of the time, it would not inspire me to read any of these writers. The first is Alfred Andersch - who seems comically vain and egotistical, the second is Jean Amery, a Jewish survivor of the camps and the third is Peter Weiss, who was also a painter.

Sebald was always an intriguing writer, but for the most part I don't think this ranks with his best work. ( )

L'argomento è oltremodo interessante e l'esposizione di Sebald lo rende anche affascinante. E' la storia di un buco nero in una coscienza collettiva - e verrebbe da dire che ben gli sta.
La letteratura si è dimenticata di certa Storia, ma fortunatamente il cinema no, e 'Germania anno zero' di Rossellini è li' per ricordare, a chi ne avesse voglia, la perversione di quei momenti. ( )

The first time through much of the book was wasted on me as I am not familiar with the writers Sebald was criticizing. But the first section was pretty amazing. I had no idea really how bad it all was during WWII. I am glad I read the book. Sebald was a very gifted writer whose sentences are quite accessible for all.

I did decide to go back and read everything and I am glad I did. Just allowing oneself to go with the flow of his writing is a joy in itself. This is a book I am sure I will revisit again and because of my latest work this week in re-reading it I am changing my four star rating to a five. We all have to "get over" whatever it is that prevents us from hearing and reading what needs to be said about the Holocaust. Though Sebald rarely raises its name he is always talking about torture and destruction and crimes against humanity. The book is truly amazing. ( )

This book consists of four essays by W.G. Sebald. The first describes the paucity of German history and literature relating to the firebombings of German cities during WWII. The others analyze different writers – Alfred Andersch, Jean Amery and Peter Weiss.

The first, the title essay, is the longest and is based on a series of talks that Sebald gave in 1997. His subject is the silence surrounding the bombings of German cities, many of which were almost completely decimated. Because this is a Sebald book, there are various tangents, wanderings around the subject, pictures and insertions of the author into the narrative. I enjoyed this as Sebald is a favorite author of mine, but this is not a rigorously organized look at the topic. There is some background given on the bombings – Sebald notes that it was almost the only way that the British could fight back but he is critical of the decision to target civilian populations. Some of the silence stems from German guilt over WWII, some from the need to rebuild and move on, some from the unreliability of the survivors. Sebald’s description of what happened in targeted cities is stomach-churning. After reading it - it’s easy to see how the dazed survivors wouldn’t be good witnesses and might fall back on clichéd phrases as Sebald notes. He analyzes some of the contemporaneous nonfiction and literary accounts of the bombing and finds them unsatisfactory. Empty aesthetics, the elevation of love/personal fulfillment over the significance of the destruction or philosophical handwaving are some of his criticisms. A coolly described nonfiction account gets his approval though. Sebald finds foreigners who came to Germany soon after and witnessed the destruction to be somewhat more reliable. I was a bit uncomfortable that some of Sebald’s comments came close to saying that there are only a few acceptable ways to come to terms with events that shattering. Sebald has a quick tangent describing how his hometown was spared bombardment but that the events and the silence surrounding them affected him anyway – a similar theme in his novels, where his characters who have avoided or survived the war are doomed nonetheless. He ends with descriptions of some of the letters that were sent to him after his lectures and some are pretty scary in a normal-people-believing-in-Protocols-of-Zion way.

Sebald is highly critical of Alfred Andersch. This essay follows a more linear path as Sebald gives a quick overview of Andersch’s temperament and successes and failures then discusses his background and how it influenced his books. One could hardly argue with the portrait of Andersch as an almost delusionally self-aggrandizing man (Sebald quotes a colleague of Andersch’s describing how Andersch claimed he would be greater than Thomas Mann). He also had out-of-proportion rage at critics who negatively reviewed his books. Andersch’s conduct during WWII sounds more opportunistic and self-promoting than anti-Semitic but he tried to portray himself as someone who opposed the Nazi party after the war. He married a Jewish woman and later claimed that he did it to protect her but then divorced her when her status interfered with his ambitions. Sebald finds weakness in Andersch’s work also – criticizing him for exotic, stereotypical descriptions of a Jewish character, poorly written sex scenes and creating wish-fulfillment versions of himself.

He praises Jean Amery and Peter Weiss. The essay on Weiss was a bit opaque though Sebald gives evocative descriptions of the grotesque darkness in his works. He assumes the reader is familiar with Weiss – I had to Wiki him to realize that I’d at least heard of Marat/Sade. The piece on Amery was better – the analysis was more concrete and it had the appeal of Sebald’s fiction, where the author is able to capture the essence of his characters at a distance. In his writings, Amery grapples with the irreversible nature of memory and experience. He still feels resentment and survivor’s guilt as well as guilt that he didn’t resort to violence. Sebald praises Amery’s authenticity (as opposed to the posturing of Andersch), his detached, ironic prose and his firm stance on the importance of resistance, however useless. ( )