The Literature of Urbicide: Friedrich, Nossack, Sebald, and Vonnegut

The Literature of Urbicide: Friedrich, Nossack,Sebald, and Vonnegut

10:2 | © 2007 Eduardo Mendieta

But strategic bombing had not won the war.At most, it had eased somewhat the task ofthe ground troops who did. The aircraft,manpower and bombs used in the campaignhad cost the American economy far more inoutput than they had cost Germany...A finalparagraph or two written by Henry Alexandersomewhat overstated the contribution of airpower to the outcome without altering thebasic facts. The purpose of both history andfuture policy would have been served by amore dramatic finding of failure, for thiswould have better prepared us for the costlyineffectiveness of the bombers in Korea andVietnam, and we might have been spared thereproach of civilized opinion.

John Kenneth Galbraith1

It is impossible to fight any war whollyhumanely. In most respects, the Western alliesdisplayed commendable charity in theirconduct of total war against an enemy bereftof civilized sentiment. Aerial assault,however, provided the exception. It was apolicy quite at odds with the spirit in whichthe Americans and the British otherwiseconducted their war effort. The remoteness ofbombing rendered tolerable in the eyes ofWestern political leaders and militarycommanders, not to mention their aircrew,actions which would have seemed repugnantand probably unbearable had the Alliesconfronted the consequences at closequarters.

Eduardo Mendieta | The Literature of Urbicide: Friedrich, Noss... https://muse-jhu-edu.proxy.library.stonybrook.edu/journals/theo...

1 of 29 5/19/15, 5:57 AM

Max Hastings2

As the bomber crews quickly discovered,their front in the sky bore no moreresemblance to gladiatorial single combatthan did the trenches of Flanders. In its sheer,overwhelming scale, the strategic-bomberoffensive was eerily akin to the grinding,anonymous, assembly-line war of attritionthat had dehumanized, or at leastderomanticized, the ground soldier in the lastwar. A bomber crew was a mere cog in animmense machine that spanned half theglobe, a machine that scooped men up andhurtled them into the air with all the finesse ofa catapult smashing boulders against the stonewalls of an enemy castle.

Stephen Budiansky3

1.

Most historians, in the words of Erich Hobsbawn,consider the 20th century the 'age of extremes.'4 Somehistorians have gone as far as making more precise thenature of those extremes by calling the 20th century, thecentury of genocide5. While most of the killing in the 20thcentury took place in concentration camps, gulags, and thesteppes of Eurasia, a large number of deaths were due tothe emergence of area bombing, strategic bombing, andwhat later during Korea, and Vietnam would be called"carpet bombing." As sociologist Mary Kaldor noted inher important Old and New Wars, the 20th century alsomarked an important reversal in the ratio of military tocivilians death due to war. Whereas in most wars from the17th to late 20th century the ration of military to civiliandeaths was 8 to 1, in the 20th century it was 1 to 86. The20th century became the century of genocides preciselybecause civilian immunity in wars was crushed by thelogic of total war. Furthermore, the majority of civiliandeaths were inflicted as consequences of thetransformation of total war into urbicide. Thus, the 20thcentury was a century of genocide partly because it was acentury of urbicide. The logic of total war that makes thehome front the battle front, where there are no innocentbystanders, and where civilians are de facto implicated in


2 of 29 5/19/15, 5:57 AM

the war policies of tyrannical governments, convertedcities into military targets. The logic of total warculminates in urbicide. At the center of this logic is alsowhat military historian Michael Sherry has called"technological fanaticism." And driving this fanaticismwas, and remains, the idolatry of the airplane and itsbombs, whether dumb or smart. The killing of cities in the20th century by what was called "moral bombing," butwhich soon turned into carpet-bombing, and then thedeliberate "destruction" of the urban centers, was madepossible by the development of the heavy bomber, andthen the jet. Technological developments allowed for thecontrol of sea and land to be superseded by total control ofthe air. At the same time, the airplane became the focus ofa technological fascination that sought to re-romanticizethe war experience. The flying ace, for instance, becamethe knight of the air7. The combination of technologicalavailability with the romanticizing of a warrior eliteallowed the air war to turn into a war of annihilation, onethat in the process concealed its destruction. Thetransformation of cities into necropolises, from a distanceof 30,000 feet that shielded pilots and airplane crews tothe killing of 100,000 civilians in one aerial attack -- aswas the case in Germany and Japan during WWII -- hasbeen amply analyzed by sociologists and philosophers oftechnology. What has not been properly studied is thephenomenology of urbicide, that is to say the experienceof such massive urban destruction. A possibleapproximation to such a phenomenology would have tobegin with the event of the physical shock, which is thenaugmented by the trauma of urban devastation itself. Thisphenomenology of urbicide, in turn, would have to besupplemented with an analysis of historical responsibility,since most of the record of urbicide comes to us by way ofhistorical documents and investigation. Finally, sinceurbicide is at the crossroads of the individual, thecollective, and the historical, we can only have access to itthrough a prodigious exercise of fictional imagination.The scope of these, and as if cataclysmic, machinations ofannihilation and devastation can be approached properlyonly in a medium that is beyond historical fiction and thepersonal memoir. Here the question of an ethics of fictioncomes to the fore. The historical uniqueness of urbicide,thus, is most aptly circumscribed by way of aphenomenology that in turns both presupposes and entails


3 of 29 5/19/15, 5:57 AM

an ethics. For this reason in the following we willapproach the elements of one such phenomenology ofurbicide by way of an analysis of four writers of urbicide,or what we can call the literature of urbicide: Friedrich,Nossack, Sebald, Vonnegut. While the first three areGerman writers, the last one is a classic US writer. YetVonnegut's work belongs among those written by theGerman writers because it is about the experience of thefirebombing of Dresden by someone who lived it as both avictim and perpetrator. It is also one of the earliest, if notthe first, such narrative, to attempt to give words to anunprecedented human catastrophe.

2.

The literature of WWII urbicide is already vast8. Inaddition to the works I discuss here, I could also havediscussed John Hersey's Hiroshima, the novels ofHermann Kasak, Heinrich Boll, the diary of VictorKlemperer, the anonymous memoir of a woman whosurvived the mass rapings that took place after the Sovietsmarched into Germany9. To this literature we could alsoadd the more recent works of urbicide, such a NuhaAl-Radi, Baghdad Diaries: A Woman's Chronicle of Warand Exile, Jasmina Tesanovic's The Diary of a PoliticalIdiot, and more recently, Baghdad Burning: Girl Blogfrom Iraq, which is the compilation of the blog kept byRiverbend, the on-line name of a young Woman inBaghdad10. I focused, however, on four authors whodevoted their writing to the firebombing, area bombing,and carpet-bombing of German cities during WWII. I didso because by focusing on these writers I would beconcentrating on the emergence of strategic bombing, aspart of total war, and the kinds of moral and ethical issuesit raises for us today. If we are to properly deal with thefuture of cities in the 21st century, we have to come toterms with the fact that we inherited from the 20th centurya strategic imperative that has guided the conduct of warsince the end of WWII, namely the strategic imperative ofair supremacy, which as a corollary has made extensiveuse of the strategic bombing of urban centers. I quotedJohn Kenneth Galbraith's statements about his assessmentof the report issued by the United States StrategicBombing Survey as an epigraph for this essay preciselybecause he saw already in 1945 that air supremacy and theindiscriminate use of bombs would become a central tenet


4 of 29 5/19/15, 5:57 AM

of US military doctrine11. To this day, the US military isin pursuit of the supreme smart bomb, one what will makethe killing of citizens and cities an immaculate death:guiltless, sanitized, and unmourned. Mesmerized bytechnological fanaticism, we strive after the utopia of aguiltless and dispassionate war, for which we are alsoneither responsible nor guilty.

I. W. G. Sebald

3.

Winfried Georg Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgau,Germany, 1944, a region of Germany partly spared thehorrors of WWII. He studied German literature andlanguage in Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester.Eventually, he settled in England and taught at theUniversity of East Anglia in Norwich in England for thirtyyears. He was also the founding director of the BritishCentre for Literary Translation, a position he held from1989 to 1994. Late in life, he turned to fiction -- or moreproperly, historical fiction -- and published a series ofnovels that brought him international recognition12. In1997 Sebald delivered in Zurich his "Air war andLiterature" lectures. These lectures were revised,expanded and published two years later. Sebald died in2001 in a fatal car accident. From the 1999 book versionof his lectures a translation into English was published in2003 under the title of On the Natural History ofDestruction13 -- a title that it must be noted is misleadingand also not one Sebald would have chosen14. Ashortened, and highly edited, version of the main part ofthe book appeared in the November 4th 2002 issue of TheNew Yorker. The English edition of the book adds threeessays on Jean Amery, Alfred Andersch, and Peter Weiss,respectively. In 2005 there appeared a translation of aposthumous work entitled Campo Santo, which is madeup of 16 short essays, some of them dealing with thetheme of the air war.

4.

But it is the Zurich lectures that concern us here. Thecentral theme of these lectures is the role of writer asbearer of social memory, and in particular, Sebald'sindictment of German writers for their failure to havedealt even if only tangentially with the national trauma of


5 of 29 5/19/15, 5:57 AM

the air war against German cities and the German people.Sebald began these lectures thus: "Today it is hard to forman even partly adequate idea of the extent of thedevastation suffered by the cities in the last years of theSecond World War, still harder to think about the horrorsinvolved in that devastation...it is true that of the 131towns and cities attacked, some only once and somerepeatedly, many were almost entirely flattened, that about600,000 German civilians fell victim to the air raids, andthat three and a half million homes were destroyed, whileat the end of the war seven and half million people wereleft homeless, and there were 31.1 cubic meters of rubblefor every person in Cologne and 42.8 cubic meters forevery inhabitant in Dresden - but we do not grasp what itall actually meant."15

5.

Indeed it is difficult to begin to form an adequate ideabecause sheer numbers do not communicate the level ofconcentration. For instance, between September 1944 andApril 1945, the Allies dropped in excess of 800,000 tonsof bombs on Germany, which was about 60 percent of thetotal bombs dropped between 1939 and 1945. As MaxHastings writes in his book Armageddon: "In all, in thefirst four months of 1945 the British dropped 181, 740tons of bombs on Germany, and Eight Air Force 188, 573.In the whole of 1943, the British had dropped only157,367 tons. Such statistics emphasize how muchdestruction was done to Germany's cities at a phase of thewar when "de-housing" civilians had become meaninglessto everyone except the wretched Germans beneath."16

6.

According to military historian Stephen Budiansky, 11percent of the entire German population, and as much as50 percent of the urban dwellers, were left absolutelyhomeless, as about 50 percent of the total urban spaces inGermany were flattened17. Bomber Harris, explicitlycontradicting Air Ministry orders, failed to proceed withstrategic bombing, and obsessively pursued German cities.In a letter from November of 1944, Bomber Harris writes:"In the past 18th months, Bomber Command has virtuallydestroyed 45 out of the leading 60 German cities. In spiteof invasion diversions [The Normandy Invasion was adiversion!], we have so far managed to keep up and even


6 of 29 5/19/15, 5:57 AM

to exceed our average of 2 cities devastated a month !!There are not many industrial centres of population nowleft intact. Are we going to abandon this vast task, whichthe German themselves have long admitted to be theirworst headache, just as it nears completion?"18

7.

Now we know that the German were able to triple theirmilitary production, above their levels before the air wareven got under way, and that in fact only 1 % ofGermany's war production was affected by bomberHarris's bombs19. Already in 1945 the U.S. StrategicBombing Survey came to the conclusion that only 6.5 %of machine tools were damaged or destroyed by so-calledstrategic bombing20. Furthermore, the one strategic targetthat did matter in the end, namely the oil refinery andgasoline processing centers spread out through Germanyand the Balkans, received in all only 12 % of all thetonnage of bombs dropped on Europe21. Even if AlbertSpeer was able to produce three times more planes for theNazi war effort, without gasoline and without pilots, thepoint was moot. But this was not the aim of bomberHarris. Budiansky summarized starkly the obscene logicin the following way: "The decisive showdown against theLuftwaffe in the spring of 1944 had also demonstrated therelative unimportance of what it was the bombersmanaged to hit: what mattered was provoking the fightersto respond and get shot down. In retrospect, the 600,000German civilians killed in the process seemed almostincidental to what the air war had been about."22

8.

While the air war may have been no more glamorous andglorious than the war of attrition that Europeans hadexperienced during WWI, and while the civilian deaths onboth sides of the channel may have been "incidental," orwhat today we call "collateral damage," a society that wasshattered in the way that Sebald notes by approximation isperhaps beyond words, but precisely for that reasonshould have become the primary theme for post-WarGerman literature. In fact, Sebald's lectures advanced fourcentral theses23. First, that the experience of thedevastation of German cities had not found a place inpost-War German literature. Second, that those affected by


7 of 29 5/19/15, 5:57 AM

the air war, and this was surely a large number ofGermans since half of the urban dwellers were lefthomeless, and the major German cities were flattened,remained silent about of experiences. Third, that thissilence was directly related to a taboo about speakingabout those experiences. Fourth, that self-imposed silenceof the affected has contributed to what the Mitscherlichs'called an inability to mourn, one that left a deformingeffect on the emergent nation. As Sebald put it in an essayfrom 1983 dealing explicitly with the theme of mourning,"It is probably therefore fair to say that the authors of the1950s, predestined to be the conscience of the newsociety, were as deaf to the conscience as that new societyitself."24

9.

That German writers failed to be the conscience of thenew society is precisely what led Sebald to censure sostridently his fellow German authors, and this is in fact theheart of the lectures on "The Air War and Literature."Thus, it is important to underscore, notwithstanding thenegative and outraged responses to Sebald's lectures asthey were presented in The New Yorker25, that Sebald didnot espoused revisionist ideas that seek to exculpate thehorrors of the Nazi regime. Nor was his the aim to attemptto normalize the German situation by acknowledging thesuffering of the victimizers. In fact, quite the opposite canbe said to have been his aim. Sebald is quite adamant andexplicit that he is not seeking to offer arguments forGerman revisionists. He is reflecting on the role ofliterature as a vehicle for remembrance, for workingthrough a national trauma. Sebald argues that with fewexceptions, Heinrich Boll, and Hans Erich Nossack mostnotably, the majority of German writers failed to dwellupon or even broach the aftermath of the air war. Thisfailure may have contributed to the inability of theGerman people to mourn their own past, their ownsuffering, and by not acknowledging that sufferingconsequently not being able to come to terms with whatthey had participated in, whether voluntarily and passivelyor reluctantly and under duress. Mourning allows what islost to be let go of and to restitute to the lost a dignity thatotherwise would have gone unacknowledged. What waslost was a type of innocence, that at some level even in theacknowledgement of mutual suffering, there have been


8 of 29 5/19/15, 5:57 AM

victims on both sides. To acknowledge suffering is alsoaway to take distance from who and how it was inflicted.In turn, mourning as restitution acknowledged and partlyreconstituted the dignity of the Nazi regime's victims, foras someone mourned, they were no longer just theindifferently and undifferentiated exterminated of agenocidal regime, but the victims of a community thatmourned their death. Instead, according to Sebald, aself-imposed, castigating and self-loathing silence wasimposed. In this way the inability to mourn as wasenabled by the silence of generations, hindered theprocess of coming to terms with the anti-Semitism ofGerman society, but also the ways in which the Germansthemselves were victims of the same genocidal regime.By not mourning, they reconstituted their complicity witha regime that had victimized them once.

10.

Sebald's work in general is a meditation on ruins, ondisplacements, on memory and exile, but the Zurich seriesof lectures take us directly to the question of an ethics ofmemory26. Although Sebald does not directly write thefollowing, it is nonetheless intimated by his overallanalysis: who speaks for the perpetrator once he hasbecome a victim, or put differently, who is authorized towitness for the perpetrator and historically criminal? Thevictim has a legitimate claim to witnessing. The victimcan be and is his or her own witness, although sometimesthat witnessing is impossible, as Derrida has made explicitin his later work. The survivor, as Adorno noted, is guiltyfor having survived, and thus his witnessing is alreadytainted. But if this is the case, what witnessing can takeplace on the side of the victimizer, the criminal, thehistorically guilty, when they in turn have turned intovictims? Sebald's approximation to the question of theethics of memory, and the duties of literature to act as avehicle of social memory and a site for working throughsocial trauma, raises another question: with what authoritycan we deny the victimizer turned victim the right to theirmemory? In fact, and to be more precise, as survivors andpreserves of the memory of collective suffering, do wehave a superior duty to remember for the victimizer turnedvictim. If they cannot remember, or for moral reasons arenot allowed to remember, memorialize their ownsuffering, is it not our duty to remember for them and with


9 of 29 5/19/15, 5:57 AM

them? And insofar as we deny the victimizers turnedvictims their memory, are we also not hindering theireventual incorporation into a moral community of equals?This is a type of black mail, too frequently used in theofficial rhetoric of warring nations. We only have to turnto the recent war against Iraq to see its effects27, and it isone that these questions seek to unmask. It is not the casethat if we allow the perpetrator turned victim to mourn,we're either condoning or exculpating their historical sin.Nor should we succumb to the similar blackmail that tocall into question the calculus of destruction entails thatwe therefore accepted or were willing to tolerate adictator, and a greater evil.

II. Jorg Friedrich

11.

Jorg Friedrich is a historian by training and he hasestablished himself as a reliable analyst and critic of Nazicriminality and atrocities, one who can hardly be accusedof wanting too quickly and too eagerly to talk aboutGerman suffering inflicted by the Allies. In short, he ishardly suspect of harboring right-wing sympathies, orseeking to offer fodder for the revisionists that have beenmobilizing a right wing turn in German cultural politics.In 2002 Friedrich published a hefty volume entitled DerBrand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940-194528whichcuriously takes up some of Sebald's literary techniques.Each chapter begins with a longish, quasi-aphoristicparagraph that summarizes the contents of the chapter.Each subsection is less a recounting than a poeticevocation of the horrors and destruction. It marshals allthe statistics and numbers that the historian has at herfingertips, but they are presented along with the chilling,very graphic and vivid personal recollections of survivorsof the Luftkrieg. It is hardly a historian's book, although ituses amply the skills and tools of historians. Friedrich hasbeen chastised in the German press for having mingled thedispassionate and cold narrative of historians with theexistentially shocking details of personal suffering. Thebook, however, confronts directly the limits of bothpersonal and historical narrative. The Fire is a product thattransgresses genre and disciplinary boundaries. It is also,and not surprisingly, an attempt to put the entire spot lighton the war crimes committed by the Allies through 'moral


10 of 29 5/19/15, 5:57 AM

bombing,' and then so-called 'strategic bombing."

12.

Der Brand is a literary, philosophical, historical, and eventat times poetic, reflection on the experience of "The Fire."Fire stands here for a qualitatively new stage in war, onethat surpasses anything that had come before. This firewas the result, but also more than the mere summation ofthe bombs dropped over Germany. The synergy oftechnological means, technological romanticism, andtechnological blindness, gave way to a new experience ofspace. A space of annihilation was created. As Friedrichwrites: "In an industrialized war, all industries are warindustries. Whoever works and lives in those surroundingsis participating in the war effort...Between 1940 and 1943,ideas take shape to create, from the air, annihilation zonesVernichtungsraume on the ground to destroy both themeans and the morale to continue the war. Those ideasfail. Ultimately, Germany has to be conquered on theground, yard by yard, in a seven-month campaign. Astactical support for that bloody campaign, the heretoforegreatest volume of bombs by far is dropped on the largestarea, with the highest number of human casualties."29 Inthe end, we are left with a vision of an apocalyptic eventbrought on by technological means that surpassedanything humans had ever experienced.

13.

The book is not organized chronologically, but ratherthematically. So, for instance, we have chapters on:weapons, in which Friedrich discusses: the airplanes, theengineers of fire, the heavy bombers, and radar; anothersection discusses strategy, the regions of the air bombings,defense; and finally the "we" - the behavior of the peopleunder the air raids, and the response by the Nazi regime.A penultimate section, entitled "Ich" deals with thesensorial aspects of the air attacks, the emotions evoked,and finally, survival. The last section of the book isentitled "stones," which closes with a subsection entitled"the resilience of paper" and which is a reflection on thedestruction of libraries by the firestorms unleashed by theincendiary bombs dropped over almost all German cities,which resulted in the largest book burning ever in humanhistory.

14.


11 of 29 5/19/15, 5:57 AM

In 2003 Friedrich published a coffee-table size bookentitled Brandstatten: Der Anblick des Bombenkriegs30 atitle that could be translated as Sites of Conflagration: theLook of the War of Bombs. The book has ten chapters,each headed by a single word: earlier, attack, defense,refuge, rescue, provision, wreckage, living in ruins, theparty, and today. Each chapter chronicles in pictures thetransformation of German cities from before, during, afterand today, due to the air war. These pictures give face andshape to the otherwise numbing statistics that we havecome to know so well from the US strategic bombingsurvey: over half a million German civilians were killed,3,6 million dwelling destroyed, or 20% of all dwellings,meaning that 7.5 million people had been renderedhomeless. About 80 % of all urban centers in Germanywere flattened or severely damaged. In Friedrich's book ofpictures we get a glimpse of the massive devastation that131 cities and towns underwent under a firestorm ofexplosive, and incendiary bombs. All of this becomes themore horrifying as we came to realize that most of thisdevastation took place way after it had become clear thatthe war would be won by the allies, and that the Germansthemselves, as early as the Spring of 44, anticipated thatGermany would lose the war. It cannot be underscoreenough that the point is not to exculpate the Nazi regime,nor to attempt to gain some moral high ground bylowering the moral standing of the Allies and their warstrategies. Friedrich is interested in chronicling a humantragedy, which had both victims and perpetrators, on bothsides. In the end, Friedrich has provided us with anindispensable archive that is a veritable "encyclopedia ofpain,"31 pitched to levels of anguish and despair by thenew technologies and strategies of war.

III. Hans Erich Nossack

15.

Hans Erich Nossack came to the attention of Americanand British readers when Sebald singled him out, alongwith Boll and Kasack, as one of the few German writersthat had attempted to come to terms with the bombing ofGerman cities. Sebald focused on Nossack's memoirwritten shortly after the bombing of Hamburg in 1943,which was published in a collection of reports by himunder the title Interview mit dem Tode (Interview with


12 of 29 5/19/15, 5:57 AM

Death), and more specifically, Sebald focused particularlyon Nossack's report or autobiographical account of thebombing of Hamburg, which appeared under the title "DerUntergang: Hamburg 1943."32 Nossack's memoir isindeed an amazing piece of writing. It manages tocombine a lapidary, almost clinical, style with ametaphysical and surreal tone that keeps the touch ofmemory on the singularity of the destruction of Hamburg. The first sentence announces: "I experienced thedestruction of Hamburg as a spectator." But by the end ofthe first page, the spectator is a witness summoned to bearthe burden of memory, the burden of speaking theknowledge of what was seen: "For me the city went toruin as a whole, and my danger consisted in beingoverpowered by seeing and knowing the entirely of itsfate."33 The extent and finality of the destruction couldonly be encompassed in the experience and memory ofone who had been spared as spectator so that he wouldbecome an actor in the recalling of the tragedy. Memoryhere is an imperative, granted by the passivity of arbitraryand guilty survival.

16.

Nossack registers in his memoirs what is perhapssuggested in the phrase "on the natural history ofdestruction." The devastation was not only of humans, thecity, the gadgets and elements that give density to dailyexistence, and to which our sentimentality clings. ForNossack, the bombing was an event in nature, evenperhaps of nature. "All of this is senseless, and thinkingabout it fills one with infinite piety for all creatures, andone falls silent because words threaten to become sobs."34

The bombing descends, rains, and collapses the sky overHamburg, not unexpectedly, not unforeseeably. Nossacknotes with precision: "One didn't dare to inhale for fear ofbreathing it in. It was the sound of eighteen hundredairplanes approaching Hamburg from the south at anunimaginable height. We had already experienced twohundred or even more raids, among them some very heavyones, but this was something completely new. And yetthere was an immediate recognition: this was whateveryone had been waiting for, what had hung for monthslike a shadow over everything we did, making us weary. Itwas the end."35


13 of 29 5/19/15, 5:57 AM

17.

This end is, curiously, a supremely human event. Nossackrefuses to ontologize, to mythologize, and to neutralize thehistorical character of this end. Nature is not to be spared,even less so than humans, who may escape thedevastation. Enemy and friend, humans and nature arecaught in this storm of fire. "But now was no longer thetime for such petty distinction as that between friend andfoe. And suddenly everything was submerged in the milkylight of the netherworld. A searchlight behind me wassweeping the earth at ground level. Frightened, I turnedaround, and then I saw that even nature had risen up inhatred against herself. Two trunkless pines had brokenthrough the peaceful trance of their existence and turnedinto black wolves avidly leaping after the bloody sickle ofthe moon, which was rising before them. Their eyesgleamed white and foam dripped from their snarlingmouths."36 The image of the moon as a bloody sickle,hanging over humans, is paralleled by the rabid wolvesleaping murderously at her. Nature hates itself for havinggiven birth to this abominable creature: humans. Later, itis the entire earth that 'writhes in agony.'37 This pain ismade more acute when Nossack writes about the cats ofHamburg. "It is worthwhile to speak of the city's cats.They could not be lured from the ruins of their formerhomes. They slunk about among charred or stillsmoldering beams, screaming with hunger. When peoplebrought them something out of pity, they would attack thefood, screeching, prepared for a fight. But they wouldn'tlet you pick them up, you had to use force or a ruse. Mostof them died despite all the care they were given, either ofhomesickness or the consuming aftereffects of terror."38

18.

Surely one of the reasons why Sebald lionized Nossackwas because of the latter's complete refusal to allow hismemorializing to be used for apologetic purposes. Thereis no desire for either exculpation or recrimination inNossack's narrative. The opposite is perhaps truer.Nossack chronicles the failure of the "State" to deal withthe bombings. Curiously, Nossack notes the betrayal ofthe "State" not in order to bemoan the German people'sown situation of utter abandonment, but in order to mark apainful self-contempt for having ever held on to the ideathat they could have expected anything else from such a


14 of 29 5/19/15, 5:57 AM

state. Nossack writes: "...everyone knew that preciselythose whose position and whose promises should haveobliged them to stay at their posts and help until the endhad been the first to run away and had, on top of that,ruthlessly misused their influence to get hold of vehiclesin which they carted off their belongings; yes, and thatthey had left other refuges lying on the street with theirlast bundle. This is not an isolated case and notexaggerated; thousands saw it. But when people talkedabout it, their words, though bitter, were far form beingvengeful, but rather as if laughing at themselves for everhaving expected anything else. Woe to us if the powerfulshould take revenge some day for this contempt! But Ibelieve they didn't even understand it."39

19.

It is precisely against this self-contempt that Nossack putsdown, deliberately, a reflection on what accompanied thisself-mocking, and that is the absence of the cursing andrecrimination of the Allies for the bombings. Nossackwrites: "...I have not heard a single person curse theenemies or blame them for the destruction. When thenewspapers published epithets like "pirates of the air" and"criminal arsonists," we had no ears for that. A muchdeeper insight forbade us to think of an enemy who wassupposed to have caused all this; for us, he, too, was atmost an instrument of unknowable forces that sought toannihilate us. I have not met even a single person whocomforted himself with the thought of revenge. On thecontrary, what was commonly said or thought was: Whyshould the others be destroyed as well?... All of this mustbe said once and for all; for it redounds to the glory ofman that on the day of reckoning he experienced his fatewith such largeness of spirit. Even thought it was just for abrief period; for in the meantime the picture has becomeconfused again."40

20.

Nossack's memoir is a brilliantly lucid remembrance butalso a meditation on memory, witnessing, and temporality.It also points us toward an ethics of memory. Nossackasks reflectively, "Why go on? I mean, why record allthis? Wouldn't it be better to surrender it to oblivion for alltime? For those who were there certainly don't have toread it. And the others, and those who will come later?


15 of 29 5/19/15, 5:57 AM

What if they read it only to enjoy something strange anduncanny and to make themselves feel more alive? Does ittake an apocalypse to do that? Or a descent into theunderworld? And we who have been there do not evendare to utter a prophetic warning. Not yet!"41 Memoryhere has the gift of prophesy. In fact, memory is prophecy,but only when its time has come, when humanity, notindividuals, nor nations, has awakened to its terrors. Butwhat is time, when historical continuity has been sosundered and humans have been exiled from their civility,from their cities, from their worlds. "Now time sits downsadly in a corner and feels useless."42 How are we toarrive at a point of recognition, or mutuality, when we areunhinged, timeless, set adrift in the void of timelessness?Nossack captures precisely this time at a standstill. In theruins time has become useless, meaningless, as a way toorganize human experience. Everything happenssimultaneously, and events are thrown up in disarray-moments suspended in mid-air like droplets of water in afreeze-frame: before, now, then, are no longer coordinates.It is in this way that perception becomes super-sensitive,and a hyperrealism takes over. Every point, every shard ofcolor, sound, smell and taste, comes forward to form ahyper-sensory canvass. As Nossack remembers, even inthe midst of the infernal thundering of the bombs, therustling of leaves could be heard.

21.

What is also telling about Nossack's personal memoir isthat Joel Agee, his American translator, had been familiarwith the text since its first publication, back in 1948, andhad undertaken its translation at the height of the VietnamWar. Agee writes in the foreword to his translation: "Itranslated the essay on Hamburg when I was in my earlythirties. I was living in New York then. I'm not sure why Itook on this task. It was not with the intention ofpublishing the piece. Probably my motive was to share itwith friends and my wife, for no other reason than that Iliked it. But I can't help thinking that my returning toNossack's book at that time, and my choosing to translatepart of it, had something to do with the war in Vietnam, orrather with the language in which that war was discussed:militant language for war and against it, rational languageof numbers and quantities, analytical language, newspaperlanguage, speechwriter's language. In that Babel of


16 of 29 5/19/15, 5:57 AM

rhetorics, I must have remembered the windless calm inNossack's account and opened his book to see how hemanaged to speak of his ordeal without complaint andwithout accusation and yet with an authority that compelsa reciprocal calm in the reader." (x) Agee relates that hesent the manuscript of his translation to several publishers,but he received only rejections. He was told thatAmericans were not prepared to sympathize with Germansuffering during WWII (xi). Two questions are inevitableand must be put on the table. First, can we read Nossacktoday, in the world we inherited from the Allied victoryover the Axis powers, not as an attempt at self-exculpationor request for pity, but as a deeply humane account ofsuffering and devastation that continues to haunt usbecause of the self-concealing weapons that inflict it? Andsecond, to what extent are the refusal to mourn and therefusal to empathize marks of a similar moral andpsychological distortion and failure? We shall return tothese questions in the conclusions.

IV. Kurt Vonnegut

22.

Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the classics ofAmerican anti-war literature43. It was published in 1969,at the height of Vietnam War, after Vonnegut had spentseveral decades trying to write it. The book is neither anovel nor a memoir. It transgresses all genres. It is parttravelogue, memoir, science-fiction, black humor, andsardonic portrayal of the absurdity of the war44.Undoubtedly, the book is without doubt about theimpossibility of writing about the experience of thebombing of Dresden without betraying it to the linearityand simplicity of sentences45. The book is based onVonnegut's experiences in Dresden as a P.O.W., assomebody who survived the bombing after havingbombed and strafed by Germans, Americans, British, andRussian airplanes. The book is also about the process oftrying to write about Dresden, about his travels back to thecity where he survived in a slaughterhouse. In the bookwe are also introduced to the Tralfamadorians, extra-terrestrials from the planet Trafalmadore, whoseexperience of time is wholly different from humanperception (and here comparisons with Nossack areinevitable, for both note on the uselessness of time to


17 of 29 5/19/15, 5:57 AM

make sense of the experiences undergone under bombing).As Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut's voice in the book, relays theTrafalmadorian philosophy of time: "All moments, past,present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.The Trafalmadorians can look at all the different momentsjust the way we can look at a stretch of the RockyMountains, for instance...When a Trafalmadorian sees acorpse, all the thinks is that the dead person is in a badcondition in that particular moment, but that the sameperson is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, whenI myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug andsay what the Trafalmadorians say about dead people,which is 'So it goes.'"46 From such a sense of temporalityit is hard to derive a sense of moral justification. "There isno beginning, no causes, no effects."47 This is not unlikeWittgenstein's early views on ethics: 'if one were to writea book that could contain all the statements that could beenunciated about the world, this book would not containone ethical statement. The world is only all the totality ofstates of affairs, all that is the case. But moral statementsare not states of affairs. They are the way humans adoptcertain stances towards the world, and therefore theycannot be part of that book that says all that is the world.'

23.

There are two refrains throughout the book that arerepeated on almost every other page, alternatively, or evensometimes in the same page, as if they were magicalincantations. One is what the Trafalmadorians say: "So itgoes," The other is "Poo-tee-weet!" One could take themto be sardonic shrugs. In war, this is what happens! Whatdid you expect? This reading would require that weassume that Vonnegut is advocating that we adopt thisphilosophy of time. It is my contention that in fact he issuggesting the opposite. The book is far too irreverent toindulge the pieties of a theodicy that happens to havesaved some and not others. The Trafalmadorians are adevice that allows Vonnegut to talk about the omniscientand omnipotent "I" of the just war of the children'scrusade, as the subtitle of the book announces:"Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade. Aduty-Dance with Death. By Kurt Vonnegut, a fourth-generation German-American now living in easycircumstances on Cape Cod and smoking too much, who,as an American infantry scout hors de combat, as a


18 of 29 5/19/15, 5:57 AM

prisoner of war, witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden,Germany, "The Florence of the Elbe," a long time ago,and survived to tell the tale. This a novel somewhat in thetelegraphic schizophrenic manner of tales of the planetTralfamodre, where the flying saucers come from. Peace."

24.

In Slaughterhouse-Five there are no heroes, neitherphysical nor moral. What reigns is a profound sense ofresignation, of unmerited luck, of suffering the completerandomness of fate that sends humans down paths of lifearbitrarily. And yet, every moment is linked like a chain,in such a way that every moral act leaves its mark. TheTrafalmadorian philosophy of time is not a theodicy, nor isVonnegut advocating that we let go of Dresden, and theAir War, as part of a chain of events that has brought us tothis moment, the moment of victory. What is distinctive isthat while the memoir/fiction/commentary that isSlaughterhouse-Five is framed by the device of a differentphilosophy of time, it is also about Billy Pilgrim, whonotwithstanding his involvement in these events does theright thing. In Slaughterhouse-Five there is a very tellingpassage that suggests that even if history is written by thevictorious, this does not make it right. In the passage BillyPilgrim engages Rosewater, whom he meets in a hospitalafter an accident and who at the time is readingsomething. Billy asks Rosewater what he is reading: "SoRosewater told him. It was The Gospel from Outer Space,by Kilgore Trout. It was about a visitor from outer space,shaped very much like a Tralfamadorian, by the way. Thevisitor from outer space made a serious study ofChristianity, to learn, if he could, why Christians found itso easy to be cruel. He concluded that at least part of thetrouble was slipshod storytelling in the New Testament.He supposed that the intent of the Gospels was to teachpeople, among other things, to be merciful, even to thelowest of the low. But the Gospels actually taught this:Before you kill somebody, make absolutely sure he isn'twell connected. So it goes."48

25.

Still, like Nossack, there reigns in Vonnegut's book asense of tranquility, of magnanimous non-judgmentality.How else could one have reacted when by all possiblestandards and measures, one's survival was if not


19 of 29 5/19/15, 5:57 AM

miraculous at least illogical and insensible? In the prefaceto the 25th edition Vonnegut writes that "I have no regretsabout this book, which the owlish nitwit George Will saidtrivialized the Holocaust. It is a nonjudgmental expressionof astonishment at what I saw and did in Dresden after itwas firebombed so long ago, when, in the company ofother prisoners of war and slave laborers who hadsurvived the raid, I dug corpses from cellars and carriedthem, unidentified, their names recorded no where, tomonumental pyres." Vonnegut then tells us why he couldhave been so non-judgmental. The devastation had beendone by bombs, by honorable men, and requiring neitherfanatical hate nor blind allegiance. Dropping the bombsrequired "no more fury and angry vigor than would" anyjob on "an automobile assembly line." Technology makesit both necessary and easy to destroy without having toconfront the consequences of one's acts of destruction.Nonetheless, for Vonnegut there was a fundamentaldifference between Auschwitz and the firebombing ofGerman cities. While Auschwitz was about humanity'sinhumanity towards other humans, the firebombing ofGerman cities was about the inhumanity that ourtechnology allows us to inflict on fellow humans. Thisdistinction, which at first blush seems to be a qualitativedifference, turns in fact on a quantitative difference. As amatter of how many bombs, and how they were delivered,the distinction between firebombing and crematoria seemsto melt away -the difference being perhaps that in onecase, the effects were not immediately evident to the one'sdropping the bombs. This is not to indorse or suggest thatthere was no difference between the deliberate andplanned extermination of Jews in the crematoria of thesystem of concentration camps that spread like a cancerover Nazi occupied Europe. The difference betweenAuschwitz and Dresden, if we take them metonymically,cannot have been a matter of degrees on a technologicalcontinuum. For in that case, the singularity of Auschwitz,as well as Dresden, blends in the dark night oftechnological fanaticism. What must be retained for ourpurposes, namely an approximation at the phenomenologyof urbicide, by way of its literature, is the question thatevidently shaped the writing of Slaughterhouse-Five, andwhich Vonnegut answers in the negative: does writingempathetically about the suffering of the victims of thefirebombing of German cities entail trivializing the


20 of 29 5/19/15, 5:57 AM

holocaust?

V. Conclusion

26.

Gunther Grass writes in his 2002 novel, Im Krebsgang(Crabwalk), a book that has added fuel to the literature ofthe air war debate: "But I'm still not sure how to go aboutthis: should I do as I was taught and unpack one life at atime, in order, or do I have to sneak up on time in acrabwalk, seeming to go backward but actually scuttlingsideways, and thereby working my way forward fairlyrapidly?"49 In our case, we have scuttled sideways, as ifmoving back to WWII, when in fact we have been movingtowards today, when the US military continues to wagewar with the same doctrines and principles that led to thedevastation of most German cities, and the killing of overhalf a million civilians. These policies and doctrines are ineffect today. "Shock and Awe" is merely an extension ofoperation Gomorrah (the firebombing of Hamburg) andOverlord (the firebombing of Berlin and Dresden), as wellas the area bombing used in Korea, and carpet bombingsin Vietnam. It is no secret that air supremacy is a centraldoctrine of US military strategy50. What is notacknowledged, although it is an obvious consequence ofit, is that this air supremacy also entails a "forwardadvancing" Air Force that must neutralize its allegedenemy before it leaves the runway51.

27.

I want to suggest that the inevitability of urbicide as alogical outcome of air-supremacy, whose principles werealready enunciated in the early thirties by Giulio Douhetin his The Command of Air 52, is both concealed andtolerated by what I would like to call a moral blackmail,one that continues to extort us precisely because aself-imposed silence prevented us from even formulatingquestions about the justifiability of killing hundreds ofthousand civilians in one firebombing53. It is a blackmailthat says that the supreme immorality of our enemy offersa warrant and an alibi for our own acts of devastation,which furthermore should remain unchallenged andbeyond censure. If one dares to even raise the question ofthe morality of one's means, then, one is accused of either


21 of 29 5/19/15, 5:57 AM

condoning or tolerating the malevolence of one's enemy.The blackmail here is that the morality of one's actsremains beyond inspection, and any questioning of itmakes you either a collaborator or pacifier of the other'sterror. Historian Dagmar Barnouw has given expression tothis particular phenomenon when she asks in her powerfulrecent book, War in the Empty Air: " has not the moral-political authority on which a widespread Americanexpectation of collective German remorse has drawn overmany decades, and which was reenergized by the collapseof the East Block, contributed to superpower certaintiesthat might prove unhealthy for the body politic? How longcan any group, especially one that has great power,survive so much righteousness?"54 The fact is that theblackmail that I am talking about, and which Barnouwcalls "superpower certainties" is based on thejuxtaposition of a Moral Malus and a MoralBonus/Bonum, which Barnow discusses in her book.While the Germans inherited the former, the Americansand the Allies inherited the latter. What Barnow suggestsby this juxtaposition is that the moral calculuspresupposed by superpower certainties is a reductive andsimplistic Manichean moral cosmology in which some aresupremely evil, and de facto destroyable and punishable,and some are supremely good, and thus apriorilyblameless and justified in their every act of destruction.But surely no group, no nation can develop a proper andmeasured sense of moral responsibility and entitlementwhen all their actions emanate from an unquestioned andunquestionable Moral Bous/Bonum. If the incapacity tomourn may betray an inability to come to terms withcomplicity and loss, then the incapacity to empathizebetrays an inability to see oneself as a moral equal, bothaccountable and capable of moral repair and revision. Thisis precisely why, for example, the United States does notparticipate in the International Criminal Court, why it alsoflaunts the Geneva Conventions in Guantánamo, AbuGhraib, and other such places that are lawless by law (asthe lawyers for the White House had determined)55.

28.

What the literature of urbicide grants us is a language, alanguage that nonetheless bears the wounds of silenceimposed by a devastation beyond its own power ofexpressivity, that neither trivializes nor romanticizes,


22 of 29 5/19/15, 5:57 AM

exculpates or mythologizes, the suffering of all victims ofa form of war that only now we are beginning to be ableto question in its morality. The ethics of fiction in this casecommands that we take a stand on the side of the innocentvictim, whether they are on this side of the walls oftyranny or the other side of their tyranny. It is an ethicsthat demands that we abandon the hard shell of our ownmoral intransigence and insouciance, and in the words ofEmmanuel Levinas, assume charge for the morality of theother, by inspecting the morality of our own actions.Again, in Levinas's philosophy of ethics, we are moreresponsible than the other, and we are especiallyresponsible for the morality of the other. There is afundamental asymmetry in morality, but it is not theasymmetry of a completely good versus a completely evil,or malum. Rather, it is the asymmetry that one's acts mustbe submitted to a greater moral scrutiny than the moralityof the other. Our moral goodness, our moral standing, is aresponse to the other, but which nonetheless is neverjustified by the other, especially not when the other fails toact morally.

Eduardo Mendieta is Associate Professor ofPhilosophy and director of the the LatinAmerican and Caribbean Studies Center atStony Brook University. He is the author ofGlobal Fragments: Globalizations,Latinamericanisms, and Critical Theory. Thisessay is part of a larger project on philosophyand war. His e-mail is:[email protected]

NOTES

1 John Kenneth Galbraith, A Life in Our Times. Boston:Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981, 226-7.

2 Max Hastings, Armageddon: The Battle for Germany1944-1945. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004, 308.

3 Stephen Budiansky, Air Power: The Men, Machines, andIdeas that Revolutionized War, From Kitty Hawk to GulfWar II. New York: Viking, 2004, 309.


23 of 29 5/19/15, 5:57 AM

4 Eric Hobsbawn, The Age of Extremes: A History of theWorld, 1914-1991. New York: Pantheon Books, 1995.

5 Mark Levene, "Why is the Twentieth Century theCentury of Genocide" Journal of World History, Vol. 11,No. 2 (Fall 2000): 305-336.

6 Mary Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence ina Global Era. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001,8, 100.

7 Linda R. Robertson, The Dream of Civilized Warfare:World War I Flying Aces and the American Imagination.Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

8 See the bibliography compiled by Volker Hage, Zeugender Zerstorung, 287-292.

9 See Noah Isenberg, "Dresden Mon Amour: Realism orRevisionism? Germans Revisit the War" in Bookforum,Summer 2005, available on line at:www.bookforum.com/isenberg.html; see also Mark M.Anderson, "Crime and Punishment" The Nation, Vol. 281,No. 12 (October 17th, 2005): 31-38.

10Riverbend's writing is discussed in Rachel Woodward'spaper, this issue.

11 For an in-depth look at Galbraith's role in the USStrategic Bombing Survey, see Richard Parker, JohnKenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics.New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005, chapter 9:"Surveying the Consequences of War," 172-190.

12 See the entry on Sebald at the on-line LiteraryEncyclopedia, available at: www.litencyc.com.

13 W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction,Translated by Anthea Bell, New York: Random House,2003.

14 Sebald wrote an essay in 1982, entitled "BetweenHistory and Natural History: On the Literary Descriptionof Total Destruction" now in Campo Santo (New York:Random House, 2005), 65-95. We know from Sebald


24 of 29 5/19/15, 5:57 AM

himself that the expression a "natural history ofdestruction" came from Lord Solly Zuckerman, whointended to write a report with such title, but never carriedout his plan, due to his inability to give expression to thedevastation he had seen, particularly in Cologne. On theNatural History of Destruction assimilates a humaninduced and produced cataclysm into an event of nature: aflood, an earthquake, a draught, a tsunami, a hurricane. Inthis way, it ontologizes and neutralizes a human product, ahistorical event. Sebald was interested in getting to thehistorical, that is, the human dimensions of an event thattook on quasi-natural proportions and qualities, though itremained nonetheless a human act. At best, Sebald wantedto reflect on the encounter of human and natural history asthey happened in the firebombing of German cities. Butwe must be vigilant not be persuaded that Sebald soughtto level and homogenize the destruction of German citieswith a catastrophe or cataclysm of natural proportions andeffects.

15 Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, 3-4.

16 Max Hastings, Armageddon: the Battle for Germany1944-1945. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004, 306-7.

17 Stephen Budiansky, Air Power: The Men, Machines,and Ideas that Revolutionized War, From Kitty Hawk toGulf War II. New York: Viking, 2004, 318.

18 Bomber Harris, quoted in Hastings, Armageddon, 304.

19 Budiansky, Air Power, 318.




23 For an overview of the Sebald-Debatte see VolkerHage, Zeugen der Zerstorung: Die Literaten und derLuftkrieg. Essays und Gesprache. Frankfurt am Main: S.Fischer Verlag, 2003, 113-131. I don't entirely agree withHage's summary and characterization of what was centralin the debate, though I find his overview useful. Hage'sbook, otherwise, is extremely important in the Luftkrieg


25 of 29 5/19/15, 5:57 AM

Debatte.

24 W. G. Sebald, Campo Santo, Translated by AntheaBell, New York: Random House, 2005, 99.

25 The letters from readers were printed in The NewYorker, December 2nd, 2002.

26 While one would have to look to Walter Benjamin , T.W. Adorno, and J. Derrida to give a more appropriateaccount of the relationship between remembrance,commemoration and ethics, in the US., we are fortunate tohave Edith Wyschogrod, who has labor, toiled, harvestedthis question over the last two decades, see Spirit inAshes: Hegel, Heidegger and man-made death. NewHaven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985; and An Ethics ofRemembering: History, Heterology, and the NamelessOthers. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

27 See the Dagmar Barnouw's timely and striking book,The War in the Empty Air: Victims, Perpetrators, andPostwar Germans. Bloomington and Indianapolis: IndianaUniversity Press, 2005, especially the preface and chapterone.

28 Jorg Friedrich, Der Brand: Deutschland imBombenkrieg 1940-1945. Munchen: Propylaen, 2002. AnEnglish translation has appeared in the fall of 2006: TheFire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945, Translated byAllison Brown, New York: Columbia University Press,2006.See the review of this and Friedrich's next book byIan Buruma, "The Destruction of Germany" New YorkReview of Books, Vol. 51, No. 16, October 21, 2004.Friedrich's work has been reviewed in English mostly inconjunction with the work of Sebald. The translation ofDer Brandis too recent to access its impact. AC Graylingexplicitly puts Friedrich's book aside, see A. C. Grayling,Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy ofthe WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan,New York: Walker & Company, 2006). Michael Bess'srecent Choices under Fire: Moral Dimensions of WorldWar II, New York: Knopf, 2006., does not even listFriedrich in its bibliography. The same is the case withMarshall de Bruhl's Firestorm: Allied Airpower and theDestruction of Dresden, New York: Random House, 2006.


26 of 29 5/19/15, 5:57 AM

29 Friedrich, The Fire, 49.

30 Jorg Friedrich, Brandstatten: Der Anblick desBombenkriegs (Munchen: Propylaen, 2003. Indeed, herewe should pause to ponder what this means! All Border'sbookstore throughout the continental US carry what in thebusiness is called "reminders" books, books book at ¼ theusual prize of "War" picture books; generally of WWII. AtHeathrow, the bookshops have large WWII sections ofbooks, and there is always a best-seller on hand.

31 Friedrich, The Fire, 486.

32 Hans Erich Nossack, The End: Hamburg 1943.Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press,2005. Henceforth I will refer to this translation withnumbers in parentheses.

33 Nossack, The End, 1.



36 Nossack, The End, 11





41 Nossack, The End, 36-7.


43 Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five or the Children'sCrusade. New York: Dell Publishing, 1991 (1969).

44 For a discussion of Vonnegut in the context of otherwar literature in the US, see James Dawes, The Languageof War: Literature and Culture in the U.S. from the CivilWar through World War II. Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 2002.


27 of 29 5/19/15, 5:57 AM

45 See the interview between Volker Hage and KurtVonnegut in Zeugen der Zerstorung, 281-286.

46 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 26-7.

47 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 88.

48 Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five, 108. Italics in theoriginal.

49 Gunther Grass, Crabwalk: A Novel, Translated byKrisha Winston, New York: Harcourt Inc., 2003, 3.

50 I dealt with this history in my essay "Axel of Evil:SUVing through the Slums of Globalizing Neoliberalism"in City, Vol. 9, No. 2, 2005, 195-2004.

51 See Michael S. Sherry, The Rise of American AirPower: The Creation of Armageddon. New Haven andLondon: Yale University Press, 1987), Conrad C. Crane,Bombs, Cities, and Civilians: American Airpower Strategyin World War II. Lawrence, KS: University Press ofKansas, and Ronald Schaffer, Wings of Judgement:American Bombing in World War II, New York andOxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

52 Giulio Douhet, The Command of Air. Washington,D.C.: Office of the Air Force History, 1983 1942.

53 A question that Robert McNamara thinks we must ask.See the film-documentary The Fog of War.

54 Dagmar Barnouw, The War in the Empty Air: Victims,Perpetrators, and Postwar Germans. Bloomington andIndianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2005, 6. See alsothe recently released book by A. C. Grayling, Among theDead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of WWIIBombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan. New York:Walker & Company, 2006. This later came out toorecently to be considered in this essay. I hope to deal withthis book in a future text.

55 The best analyses of this phenomenon are David Cole,Enemy Alien: Double Standards and ConstitutionalFreedoms in the War on Terrorism,New York: New Press,


28 of 29 5/19/15, 5:57 AM

2003, Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Power ofMourning and Violence, London and New York: Verso,2004, Mark Danner, Torture and Truth: America, AbuGhraib, and the War on Terror, New York: New YorkReview Books, 2004. See also the important essay byElaine Scarry, "Rules of Engagement: Why MilitaryHonor Matters" Boston Review Vol. 31(November/December 2006), available on line at:http://bostonreview.net.proxy.library.stonybrook.edu/BR31.6/scarry.html

Copyright © 2007, Eduardo Mendieta and The Johns HopkinsUniversity Press


29 of 29 5/19/15, 5:57 AM

The Literature of Urbicide: Friedrich, Nossack, Sebald, and Vonnegut

Documents