The father of a murderer was in real life the father of the german nationalsocialist politician Heinrich Himmler, one of Hitler's nearest compains. Himmler educated greece at a humanistic school in munich, but he was not human at all. Andersch had to leave school after a very bad verbal test - as well as his brother, who should finish school soon. This little book shows the character of one of the most important leaders in Nazi-Deutschland, and Anderschs finishes the story with a question: "Does humanism protects against nothing?"

A very troubling book, especially in the wake of the 9-11 events. The author asks why the air war over German in the last years of WWII has not received more attention by German postwar authors. Troubling in the dimensions of the impact of the air war as he relates it: 600.000 civilian lives lost, 400.000 missions (counting single planes) flown by the RAF alone, 20.000 civilians or more killed in a single night's raid, etc. More troubling when one consideres the psychological impact on the survivors (short and long term).
Besides Sebald's question regarding the air war over Germany, it would be important to review the literature, produced by writers of the respective cultures, of air wars over Japan, Vietnam, Iraque or, now, Afghanistan.
It appears mass destructions of civiizations are not the provenance of one people or culture, hence long term morning efforts of affected people or cultures might benefit by being done jointly.
Certainly an important addition to any Holocaust library.

Andersch's story is rather easy: in 1937, five people meet by accident in a little German village on the shore of the Baltic Sea. They all have to do with escape in some way: Judith (a Jewish girl) has to flee from the Nazi, "the boy" (he remains nameless) wants to go to foreign countries because his home town bores him, Gregor (a communist) is in danger like Judith, and Helander (the local priest) does not want to get away himself, but there is a sculpture in his church which is made by Ernst Barlach, a "forbidden" artist, and this sculpture shall be destroyed by the Nazi. Helander wants to bring it into safety, and he gets help by Judith and Gregor. The most important person for them all is Knudsen, a fisherman and ex-communist, who owns a boat which they all would need in order to escape to Sweden. Andersch uses a very interesting kind of telling: he divides the whole book into small chapters, and each contains the inner monologue of one of the persons. Thus, the reader can indentify directly with them.

Another feature of the book I like very much is that the author does not describe the persons, but we have to imagine them just by the things they say and think. He also uses some descriptions of nature that create a unique atmosphere (the seashore, full of birds, at dawn; pine forests; the brick-wall of the church), but it is still the characters who provide these descriptions with their inner monologue.

The book remains very simple through the restriction to five persons - and Barlach's sculpture, which is actually treated as it were a person and maybe the center of the whole book.

I won't tell more. Read that book, you won't need much time.

I read "Winterspelt" in 1979 for the first time. Since that first time I read it again not once. I think it's a masterpiece, really a great novel, and the best one by Andersch. I would include it in the "20th Century 20 Best Novels" list of mine. By the way, I'm looking for any French translation of "Winterspelt" for a French-speaking friend of mine, who failed to find it in Paris. Any help on this matter to be appreciated.

W. G. Sebald, "On The Natural History of Destruction," Random House, NY, 2003, originally published in German as "Luftkrieg und Literatur," 1999, translated by Anthea Bell.

During World War II, Allied bombers attacked 131 German towns and cities destroying 3.5 million homes and killing or injuring 600,000 German civilians. In 1997, Mr. Sebald gave a series of lectures on the literature describing the effects of these attacks. He was surprised that so little had been written about them. He infers that Germans are still in denial about these horrors of war. This volume summarizes his lectures plus the letters he received in response to news reports of his lectures. Appended are three additional essays.

Central to his theme is the fire storming technique developed by the Allies to destroy major cities. Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne, Nuremberg, Ludwigshafen, Darmstadt, and Halberstadt are named as destroyed in this way. The destruction of Hamburg on July 27, 1943, by the RAF supported by the US Eighth Air Force, is described in gruesome detail. High explosive bombs weighing up to 4000 lb. were used to destroy windows and doors. They were followed by incendiary devices both light (to ignite upper stories) and heavy (to ignite lower floors). Within 20 minutes, massive fires were burning that created flames to a height of 2000 meters and hurricane force winds that stripped roofs from buildings and drove human beings along like torches. The fire burned intensely for three hours. Glass windows melted. Sugar stocks boiled. Corpses sank into molten asphalt streets. Survivors were found aimlessly wandering the streets-some carrying deceased infants. Numerous people died in bomb shelters, in cellars, and buried in the rubble. Flies, maggots and rats soon swarmed through the area. The stench of rotting corpses was everywhere. Eventually dense green vegetation grew over the ruins. Photos of the destruction at that stage are many. A selection of these photos is included in the book.

The letters Sebald received confirmed a general lack of detailed information. A few accounts were found in diaries and in several novels. Some accounts were privately published. An apparent taboo by publishers was reinforced by the poor commercial success of the few works that did make it into print. Considerable amounts of disinformation circulated in Germany making it difficult for individuals to know the facts of these raids. The author cites the traditional strict control of intimate feelings within the German family as one cause of the apparent lack of interest in the destruction caused by the war.

One book his letters did find is: Dr. Hans Joachim Schroeder, "Die gestohlenen Jahre-Erzaehlgeschichten und Geschichterzaehlung im Interview: Der zweite Weltkrieg aus der Sicht ehemaliger Mannschaftssoldaten, (The Stolen Years-Narratives and History in Interviews: The Second World War as Seen by Former Soldiers), Niemeyer, 1992. The author discounts this source as being surprisingly stereotypical.

Seebald's thesis may in fact be overdrawn. Numerous disasters-both natural and military-have occurred over the centuries. Few are described from the victim's viewpoint. The Japanese have publicized the effects of nuclear war using survivors' stories from Hiroshima and Nagasaki (seen here on public television), but similar accounts of the destruction of Tokyo or the Battle of Okinawa are lacking. Even reports of the London Blitz tend not to be told from the point of view of the victims.

The normal reaction to any tragic event is for people to get on with their lives as soon as they are able. Germans seem to have done that. Only Germans can decide whether they need to re-examine the pain of wartime destruction.

This volume is translated from German. It reads reasonably smoothly. Classical German is enamored with long, multi-clause, compound sentences. A few of these got by the translator. The second sentence of Chapter 1 runs 133 words. The Foreword ends with a 78 word sentence, followed by a 47 worder.

All of this is closely related to German efforts to come to terms with World War II. That process seems to be moving along. The current volume is a glimpse of that dialog. The book does demonstrate the difficulties Germans have writing about World War II-even 60 years after the event. Sebald retells the story of animals injured in the bombing of the Berlin zoo. Published soon after the war, that report reeks of Nazi propaganda. Later, in an apparent effort to ward off charges of Neo-nazism, he replies to a letter with charges of pseudo-intellectualism and with strongly anti-Nazi comments. No matter how innocent, any discussion of the war risks the suspicion of spin meisters. References. No index.

This posthumous volume of Sebald's non-fiction writing is a major contribution to German literary criticism and politico-cultural analysis. Accompanying his reflections on the traumatic impact of the air war against German cities are essays studying the very diverse reactions of three 'witnesses' of that time as reflected in their post-war literary works. In AIR WAR AND LITERATURE, originally presented as the Zurich Lectures, Sebald delves deeply into some very uncomfortable questions. The air war on 131 German cities killed some six hundred thousand civilians and destroyed more than the homes of seven and a half million people. Why have these events resulted mostly in public silence for decades? Why have so few literary works attempted to speak to the traumatic impact on the population? Most Germans seem to have tried to come to terms with the realities of the war years by suppressing their immediate pain and the longer-term suffering. Sebald has thoroughly researched a multitude of authors, both in fiction and non-fiction. Yet, he deems their explanations unsatisfactory. Heinrich Boell is cited as one of the early exceptions, yet publication of his book, The Silent Angel, was delayed by forty years.

Sebald contemplates the different causes for this persistent silence. For example, basing himself on a range of contemporary sources, he confronts the reader with a detailed description of the Hamburg firestorm. As disturbing as his account is, Sebald's reflective style makes it readable. His objective reporting neither criticises the Allies' campaign nor does he apologise for German actions leading to the war. He wonders, though, whether the depth of the traumatic experiences of this and other air attacks may have left many people numb and dazed, unable to express their reactions for a long time. The account of a young mother wandering through the station confused and stunned is one of several examples. Her suitcase suddenly opens onto the platform revealing the charcoaled remains of her baby.

Sebald's intent is not to shock but to explain the deep sense of loss that must have been felt by people like her. He further contends that at that time in the war, the growing acceptance of guilt for the Nazi's atrocities led in many civilians to an acknowledgment of justified punishment by the Allied forces. Last, not least, after the war many Germans experienced a 'lifting of a heavy burden' that they felt they had lived under during the Nazi regime. Concentrating on building the new Germany focused their minds on a better future. The publication (in German) of his Lectures in 1997 resulted in a range of reactions from readers. He reflects their varied views and comments in a postscript, thereby adding a fascinating 1990's dimension to his "rough-and-ready collection of various observations, materials, and theses".

The three authors who are the subject of the essays in this volume may be better known to students of German literature and culture. They represent a fine example of Sebald's skill as a contemplative and sensitive literary critic. At the same time, these essays complement Sebald's Lectures in a more fundamental way. In terms of coming to terms with the Nazi period and its atrocities, each one represents a specific type of German with his own means and ways of dealing with the recent past. Alfred Andersch is presented as having reinterpreted his personal history to fit his vision of self-importance in post-war Germany. Jean Amery, of half Jewish parentage, suffered through SS torture and survived various concentration camps. For the rest of his life, which he ended himself, he did not lose the nightmares of his torment. It was not until the mid-sixties, that he found his voice to impart his experiences in the form of essays on exile, genocide and resistance. Peter Weiss, who had lived in exile most of his life, found his self-expression mainly through painting and theatre productions until he published late in life his major fiction work, Aesthetics of Resistance.

This collection of "mediations on natural guilt, national victimhood, and the universal consequences of denying the past" is a significant socio-political document. Its importance for today's reader goes beyond the concrete German situation. As it addresses more fundamental issues of dealing with a society's traumatic past experiences, Sebald also confronts the need to develop the capacity to heal while learning and sharing the lessons from that past. [Friederike Knabe, Ottawa Ontario]

I found Sebald's descriptions of the Allied firebombing to be moving. One reviewer faults Sebald for his inclusion of several pages on the destruction of the zoo, because the reviewer thinks the original description that Sebald uses gives comfort to neo-Nazis. Perhaps it does, but that doesn't make it invalid. And if you look at the totality of this work, it certainly does not in any way condone Germany's Nazi past.

What Sebald is discussing is human memories of the bombings, and the repression of those memories. He isn't discussing the rights or wrongs of the bombings, which he mentions only briefly in what he calls a postscript. I don't think this should be used, as another reviewer has, to argue that he is minimizing German guilt. You could take the other point of view equally well: that he is minimizing Allied guilt by not discussing criticisms of the Allied bombing campaign. These issues are not germane to his narrowly-defined topic. In other words, the book is not a history of bombing, nor is it a discussion of the ethics of bombing civilians; rather, it is a description of what people remember about these events in later years.

I found the second part of the book, a discussion of Alfred Andersch, to be equally interesting. Here is a man who, according to Sebald, used his novels to rewrite the story of his life, and he wrote it as he probably should have lived it, rather than as he did live it. And he did this without ever apologizing for (or even admitting) his less than heroic behavior in real life.

The last two essays were less interesting to me than the rest of the work. They might be more useful to specialists in modern German literature. This brings me to what I consider a defect in this book. Surely the people about whom Sebald is writing are not household names in the U.S. I think that the translator or publisher should have included brief biographies of these individuals.

And while we are on this subject, I think the translator could have added to Sebald's footnotes too. In the section on Andersch, we are told that he divorces his wife in 1943 because she is Jewish, thus leaving her and their daughter at the mercy of the Nazi regime. But, although we are told of the fate of Andersch's mother-in-law, we are never told what happens to his ex-wife & daughter.

All in all, however, I think this work is well worth reading. It's not one that you will forget once you have finished reading it.