by W. G. Sebald
The reason for the murder of memory lies in the fear that Orpheus’ love for Eurydice might, as Nossack puts it in another passage, turn to a passion for the goddess of death; it knows nothing of the positive potential of melancholy.47 But if it is true that “the step from mourning to being comforted is not the greatest step but the smallest,” then the proof is in that passage of Nossack’s account where he remembers the truly infernal death of a group of people who burned in a bombproof shelter because the doors had jammed and coal stored in the rooms next to it caught fire.48 “They had all fled from the hot walls to the middle of the cellar. They were found there crowded together, bloated with the heat.”49 The laconic comment reminds us of the Homeric lines about the fate of the hanged maids: “So the women’s heads were trapped in a line, / nooses yanking their necks up, one by one / so all might die a pitiful, ghastly death … / they kicked up heels for a little—not for long.”50 The comfort of language evoking pity takes the reader, in Nossack’s text, in very concrete terms straight from the horror of that coal cellar into the following passage about the convent garden. “We had heard the Brandenburg concertos there in April. And a blind woman singer performed; she sang: Die schwere Leidenszeit beginnt nun abermals—‘The Time of Suffering Now Begins Once More.’ Simple and self-assured, she leaned against the harpsichord, and her unseeing eyes looked past those trivialities for which we already feared, past them and perhaps to the place where we now stood, with nothing but a sea of stones around us.”51 Here again, of course, we have a construction—a metaphysical construction—placed on the meaning. But the way in which Nossack puts his hope in the will to tell the truth, and helps to overcome the tension between two poles by his unemotive style, may justify such a conjecture.
Comparison of Kasack’s novel with Nossack’s factual account also shows that an attempt to write a literary account of collective catastrophes inevitably, if it is to claim validity, breaks out of the novel form that owes its allegiance to bourgeois concepts. At the time when these works were produced the implications for the technique of writing could not yet be foreseen, but they became increasingly clear as West German literature absorbed the debacle of recent history. Consequently, Alexander Kluge’s highly complex and at first sight heterogeneous book Neue Geschichten. Hefte 1–18 (“New Stories. Nos. 1–18”), published in 1977, resists the temptation to integrate that is perpetuated in traditional literary forms by presenting the preliminary collection and organization of textual and pictorial material, both historical and fictional, straight from the author’s notebooks, less to make any claim for the work than as an example of his literary method. If this procedure undermines the traditional idea of a creative writer bringing order to the discrepancies in the wide field of reality by arranging them in his own version, that does not invalidate his subjective involvement and commitment, the point of departure of all imaginative effort. Indeed, the second of the “new stories,” describing the air raid of April 8, 1945, on Halberstadt, is a model in this respect, showing how personal involvement in collective experience, a crucial feature of Nossack’s writing too, can be made at least a heuristically meaningful concept through analytic historical investigations, relating it to immediately preceding events and later developments, to the present, and to possible future perspectives. Kluge, who grew up in Halberstadt, was thirteen years old at the time of the air raid. “When a high-explosive bomb drops you notice it,” he says in his introduction to the stories, adding, “On April 8, 1945, something of that kind fell ten metres away from me.”52 Nowhere else in the text does the author refer directly to himself. The tone of his account of the destruction of his native town is one of research into the past; the traumatically shocking experiences to which those affected reacted with complex processes of amnesiac suppression are brought into a present reality shaped by that buried history. In precisely the opposite way from Nossack’s, Kluge’s retrospective presentation of what happened follows not what the author saw with his own eyes, or what he may still remember of it, but events peripheral to his own existence past and present. For the aim of the text as a whole, as we shall see, depends on the fact that experience in any real sense was actually impossible in view of the overwhelming speed and totality of the destruction; it could be acquired only indirectly, by learning about it later.
Kluge’s literary record of the air raid on Halberstadt is also a model of its kind from another objective viewpoint, where it studies the question of the “meaning” behind the methodical destruction of whole cities, which authors like Kasack and Nossack either omit for lack of information and out of a sense of personal guilt, or endow with mystical significance as divine justice and long overdue punishment. If the strategy of the area bombing of as many German cities as possible could not be justified by military objectives, which can hardly be denied today, then, as Kluge’s book shows, the special case of the horrible devastation of a medium-sized town, of no importance either strategically or to the war economy, must raise very serious questions about the factors determining the dynamic of technological warfare. Kluge’s account contains an interview with a high-ranking staff officer by a correspondent for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Both the officer and the journalist flew with the raid as observers. The section of the interview quoted by Kluge deals primarily with the question of “moral bombing,” which Brigadier General Williams explains by reference to the official doctrine on which the air raids were based. When asked, “Do you bomb for moral reasons or are you bombing the enemy’s morale?” he replies, “We are bombing the enemy’s morale. The population’s will to resist must be broken by the destruction of their city.” When pressed further, however, he admits that morale does not seem to be affected by the bombs. “Obviously morale is not located in the head or here [he points to his solar plexus] but somewhere among the individuals or populations of the cities concerned. We have investigated that, and it’s known to the staff.… Obviously it’s not in the head or the heart, and that makes sense anyway, since people who have been killed by the bombs aren’t thinking or feeling anything. And people who escape a raid like that in spite of our best efforts clearly don’t take their impressions of the disaster with them. They take all the luggage they can, but they seem to leave behind their instant impressions of the raid itself.”53 While Nossack offers us no conclusions about the motives and reasons for the act of destruction, Kluge, both here and in his book on Stalingrad, tries to account for the organizational structure of such a disaster, showing how even when the facts have become clearer the catastrophe continues on its old course because of administrative apathy, and there is no chance of raising the difficult question of ethical responsibility.
Kluge’s account begins by showing the total inadequacy of all those modes of behavior socially preprogrammed into us in the face of a catastrophe which is irrevocably unfolding. Frau Schrader, an employee of long standing at the Capitol cinema in Halberstadt, finds the usual course of the Sunday program—it has been maintained for years, and the movie showing today, April 8, is an Ucicky film starring Wessely, Petersen, and Hörbiger—disrupted by the prior claims of a program of destruction.* Her panic-stricken attempts to create some kind of order and perhaps clear up the rubble in time for the two o’clock matinée tellingly illustrate the extreme discrepancy between the active and passive fields of action involved in the catastrophe, leading the writer and his readers to the quasi-humorous observation that “the devastation of the right-hand side of the auditorium … [had] no meaningful or dramaturgical connection with the film being screened.”54 There is similar irrationality in the description of a troop of soldiers sent as an emergency force to dig up and sort out “100 corpses, some of them badly mutilated, partly from the ground, partly from visible depressions in it that had once been part of a shelter,” with no idea of the purpose of “this operation” in the present circumstances.55 The unknown photographer intercepted by a military patrol who claims that he wants “to record the burning city, his own home town, in its hour of misfor
tune,” resembles Frau Schrader in following his professional instincts.56 The only reason why his declared intention of recording the very end is not absurd is that the pictures he took, which Kluge added to his text and numbered 1 to 6, have survived, as he could hardly have expected at the time. The women on watch in the tower, Frau Arnold and Frau Zacke, equipped with folding chairs, torches, thermos flasks, packets of sandwiches, binoculars, and radio sets, are still dutifully reporting as the tower itself seems to move beneath them and its wooden cladding begins to burn. Frau Arnold dies under a mountain of rubble with a bell on top of it, while Frau Zacke lies for hours with a broken thigh until she is rescued by people fleeing from the buildings on the Martiniplan. Twelve minutes after the air raid warning, a wedding party in the inn Zum Ross is buried, together with all its social differences and animosities—the bridegroom was “from a prosperous family in Cologne,” his bride from Halberstadt, “from the lower town.”57 These and many of the other stories making up the text show how, even in the middle of the catastrophe, individuals and groups were still unable to assess the real degree of danger and deviate from their usual socially dictated roles. Since, as Kluge points out, normal time and “the sensory experience of time” were at odds with each other, those affected “could not have devised practicable emergency measures … except with tomorrow’s brains.”58 This divergence, for which “tomorrow’s brains” can never compensate, proves Brecht’s dictum that human beings learn as much from catastrophes as laboratory rabbits learn about biology, which in turn shows that the autonomy of mankind in the face of the real or potential destruction that it has caused is no greater in the history of the species than the autonomy of the animal in the scientist’s cage, a circumstance that enables us to see why the speaking and thinking machines described by Stanislaw Lem wonder if human beings can actually think or are merely simulating that activity, and drawing their own self-image from it.59
Although it seems impossible, as a result of the socially and naturally determined human capacity to learn from experience, for the species to escape catastrophes generated by itself except purely by chance, studying the conditions in which destruction took place after the event is not pointless. Instead, the retrospective learning process—and this is the raison d’être of Kluge’s account, compiled thirty years after the incidents he describes—is the only way of deflecting human wishful thinking toward anticipation of a future not already governed by the fears arising from suppressed experience. The primary school teacher Gerda Baethe, a character in Kluge’s text, has similar ideas. It is true, the author comments, that to implement a “strategy from below” such as Gerda has in mind would have required “seventy thousand determined schoolteachers, all like her, each of them teaching hard for twenty years from 1918 onward, in every country that had fought in the war.”60 Despite the ironic style, the prospect suggested here of an alternative historical outcome, possible in certain circumstances, is a serious call to work for the future in defiance of all calculations of probability. Central to Kluge’s detailed description of the social organization of disaster, which is preprogrammed by the ever recurrent and ever intensifying mistakes of history, is the idea that a proper understanding of the catastrophes we are always setting off is the first prerequisite for the social organization of happiness. However, it is difficult to dismiss the idea that the systematic destruction Kluge sees arising from the development of the means and modes of industrial production hardly seems to justify the abstract principle of hope. The construction of the air war strategy in all its monstrous complexity, the transformation of bomber crews into professionals, “trained administrators of war in the air,” the necessity of countering, as far as possible, any personal perceptions they might have such as “the neat and tidy fields below them, or any confusion of the sight of urban streets and squares with impressions of home,” and of overcoming the psychological problem of keeping the crews interested in their tasks despite the abstract nature of their function, the problems of conducting an orderly cycle of operations involving “200 medium-sized industrial plants” flying toward a city, the technology ensuring that the bombs would cause large-scale fires and firestorms—all these factors, which Kluge studies from the organizers’ viewpoint, show that so much intelligence, capital, and labor went into the planning of such destruction that, under the pressure of all the accumulated potential, it had to happen in the end.61 The central point of Kluge’s comments is to be found in a 1952 interview between the Halberstadt journalist Kunzert, who had gone west with the British troops in 1945, and Brigadier Frederick L. Anderson of the U.S. Eighth Army Air Force. In this interview Anderson tries, with some patience, to answer what, from the professional military viewpoint, is the naïve question of whether hoisting a white flag made from six sheets from the towers of St. Martin’s church in good time might have prevented the bombing of the city. His comments, initially dealing with military logistics, culminate in a statement illustrating the notorious irrationality to which rational argument can lead. He points out that the bombs they had brought were, after all, “expensive items.” “In practice, they couldn’t have been dropped over mountains or open country after so much labor had gone into making them at home.”62 The result of the prior claims of productivity, from which, with the best will in the world, neither responsible individuals nor groups could dissociate themselves, is the ruined city laid out before us in one of the photographs included in Kluge’s text. The caption he gave it is from Marx: “We see how the history of industry and the now objective existence of industry have become the open book of the human consciousness, human psychology perceived in sensory terms.…” (Kluge’s italics).