Reading this new edition of W.G. Sebald’s discursive meditation upon the blanket bombing of German civilians during the second world war took me back to Berlin in the early 1960s when German writers from the Gruppe 47 were in the ascendant, and no self-respecting avant-garde author wrote novels with stories or plots. They did not even write essays but rather ‘texts’; and I see that Notting Hill Editions, whose elegant slim editions resemble those published by Suhrkamp or the Carl Hansa Verlag at the time, also use the word ‘texts’ for literary writing.
W.G. Sebald was a German academic and later a writer who lived most of his life in Britain, teaching for 30 years, between 1970 and his premature death in an accident in 2001, at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. He wrote books which defy categorisation — a mix of travel writing, reminiscence, discursive philosophising, literary criticism and historical anecdote. These were much admired, leading to many awards, a reputation as a new James Joyce and his being tipped for the Nobel Prize.
Readers of his The Rings of Saturn — a ramble through East Anglia from Lowestoft to Bungay — will remember Sebald’s thoughts, following a conversation with the gardener at Somerleton Hall, on the 67 airfields built in East Anglia after 1940 from which bombers took off with their explosive and incendiary loads destined for Hamburg, Frankfurt and Dresden. ‘I pictured in my mind’s eye the German cities going up in flames, the firestorms setting the heavens alight, and the survivors rooting about in the ruins.’
In 1997 Sebald delivered a series of lectures in Zurich on the baffling absence in postwar German writing of any reference to this national trauma. On the Natural History of Destruction follows on from these lectures.
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