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Publisher's
Note Campo Santo
brings together pieces written over a period of some twenty years
touching, in
typical Sebaldian fashion, on a variety of subjects. None has been
previously
published in book form, but the ideas expressed in 'Between History and
Natural
History' will be familiar to some readers - the essay is the
predecessor of the
Zurich lectures which later became the backbone of On the
Natural History of Destruction. Between
History and Natural History On the
literary description of total destruction The trick
if elimination is every
expert's defensive reflex. I drove
through ruined Cologne late
at dusk, with terror of the world and of men and of myself in my heart. To this day
there is no adequate explanation of why the destruction of the German
cities
towards the end of the Second World War was not (with those few
exceptions that
prove the rule) taken as a subject for literary depiction either then
or later,
although significant conclusions could certainly have been drawn from
this
admittedly complex problem. It might, after all, have been supposed
that the
air raids very methodically carried out over the years and directly
affecting
large sections of the population of Germany, as well as the radical
social
changes resulting from the destruction, would have been an incitement
to writers
to set down something about such experiences. The dearth of literary
records
from which anything might be learned of the extent and consequences of
the
destruction which is so obvious to a later generation, although those
involved
clearly felt no need to commemorate it, is all the more remarkable
because
accounts of the development of West German literature frequently speak
of what
they call Trummerrliteratur (the
literature of the ruins). Heinrich Boll, for instance, says of that
genre in a
book written in 19.P: 'And so we write of the war, of homecoming, of
what we
had seen in the war and what we found on returning home: we write of
ruins.'
(1). The same author's Frankfurter
Vorlesungen ['Frankfurt Lectures'] contains the comment: 'Where
would 1945,
that historic moment in time, be without Eich and Celan, Borchert and
Nossack,
Kreuder, Aichinger and Schnurre, Richter, Kolbenhoff, Schroers,
Langgasser,
Krolow, Lenz, Schmidt, Andersch, Jens and Marie Luise von Kaschnitz?
(2) The
Germany of the years 1945-1954 would have vanished long ago had it not
found
expression in the literature of the time.' (3). One may feel a certain
sympathy
for such statements, but they hardly offset the near-incontrovertible
fact that
the literature cited here, which is sufficiently known to have dealt
primarily
with 'personal matters' and the private feelings of its protagonists,
is of
relatively slight value as a source of information on the objective
reality of
the time, more particularly the devastation of the German cities and
the
patterns of psychological and social behavior affected by it. It is
remarkable,
to say the least, that up to Alexander Kluge's account of the air raid
of 8
April 1945 on Halberstadt, published in 1977 as Number 2 in his series
of Neue Geschichten ['New Stories'], there
was no literary work that to any degree filled up this lacuna in German
memory,
which is surely more than coincidental, and that Hans Erich Nossack and
Hermann
Kasack, the only writers who attempted any literary account of the new
historical
factor of total destruction, embarked upon their works in that vein
while the
war was still in progress, and sometimes even anticipated actual
events. In his
reminiscences of Hermann Kasack, Nossack writes: At the end of 1942 or the
beginning of 1943 I sent
him thirty pages of a prose work which after the end of the war was to
become
my story Nekyia. Thereupon Kasack challenged me to a competition in
prose. I
didn't understand what he meant by that; only much later did it become
clear to
me. We were both dealing with the same subject at the time, the
destroyed or
dead city. Today it may seem that it was not too difficult to foresee
the
destruction of our cities. But it is still remarkable that before the
event two
writers were trying to take an objective view of the totally unreal
kind of
reality in which we had to spend years at the time, and in which we
fundamentally still find ourselves, accepting it as the form of
existence
allotted to us. (4) * 'Internal
emigrants' were those people who, while dissociating themselves
intellectually
from the Nazi regime, remained in Germany during the Hitler period. the facades
of the buildings in the surrounding streets still stood, so that a
sideways
glance through the rows of empty windows gave a view of the sky.' (7)
And it
could be argued that the account of the 'lifeless life's of the people
in the
limbo of this twilight kingdom was also inspired by the real economic
and
social situation between 1943 and 1947. There are no vehicles anywhere,
and
pedestrians walk the ruined streets apathetically, 'as if they no
longer felt
the bleak nature of their surroundings'. (9). Others 'could be seen in
the
ruined dwellings, now deprived of their purpose, searching for buried
remnants
of household goods, here salvaging a bit of tin or wire from the
rubble, there
picking up a few splinters of wood and stowing them in the bags they
wore slung
around them, which resembled botanical specimen tins'. (10). There is a
sparse
assortment of junk for sale in the roofless shops: 'Here a few jackets
and
trousers, belts with silver buckles, ties and brightly colored scarves
were
laid out, there a collection of shoes and boots of all kinds, often in
very
poor condition. Elsewhere hangers bore crumpled suits in various sizes,
old-fashioned rustic smocks and jackets, along with darned stockings,
socks and
shirts, hats and hairnets, all on sale and jumbled up together.' (11).
However,
the lowered standard of living and reduced economic conditions that are
evident
as the empirical foundations of the narrative in such passages are not
the
central constituents of Kasack's novel, which by and large mythologizes
the
reality as it was or could be experienced. But the critical potential
of the
type of fiction developed by Kasack, which is concerned with the
complex
insight that even those who survive collective catastrophes have
already
experienced their death, is not realized on the level of myth in his
narrative
discourse; instead, and in defiance of the sobriety of his prose style,
Kasack
aims to present a skilful rationalization of the life that has been
destroyed.
The air raids which caused the destruction of the city appear, in a
pseudo-epic
style reminiscent of Doblin, as trans-real entities. 'As if at the
prompting of
Indra, whose cruelty in destruction surpasses the demonic powers, they
rose,
the teeming messengers of death, to destroy the halls and houses of the
great
cities in murderous wars, a hundred times stronger than ever before,
striking
like the apocalypse.' (12). Green-masked figures, members of a secret
sect who
give off a stale odor of gas and may be meant to symbolize murdered
concentration camp victims, are introduced (with allegorical
exaggeration) in
dispute with the bogeymen of power who, blown up to over life-size,
proclaim a
blasphemous dominion, until they collapse in on themselves, empty husks
in
uniform, leaving behind a diabolical stench. In the closing passages of
the
novel an attempt to make sense of the senseless is added to this mise en scene, which is almost worthy of
Syberberg and owes its existence to the most dubious aspects of
Expressionist
fantasy. A venerable Master Mage sets out the complex preliminary
doctrines of
a combination of Western philosophy and Eastern wisdom. 'The Master
Mage
indicated that for some time the thirty-three initiates had been
concentrating
their forces on opening up and extending the region of Asia, so long
cut off,
for reincarnations, and they now seemed to be intensifying their
efforts by including
the West too as an area for the resurrection of mind and body. This
exchange of
Asiatic and European ideas, hitherto only a gradual and sporadic
process, was
clearly perceptible in a series of phenomena.' (13). In the
course of further pronouncements by the Mage, Kasack's alter ego is
brought to
realize that millions must die in this wholesale operation 'to make
room for
those surging forward to be reborn. A vast number of people were called
away
prematurely, so that they could rise again when the time came as a
growing
crop, apocryphally reborn in a living space previously inaccessible to
them.'
14 The choice of words and terminology in such passages, speaking of
the
opening up 'of the region of Asia, so long cut off', of the benefit of
'European
ideas', and 'living space [Lebensraum]
previously inaccessible' show with alarming clarity the degree to which
philosophical speculation bound to the style of the time subverts its
good
intentions even in the attempt at synthesis. The thesis frequently held
by the
'internal emigrants' that genuine literature had employed a secret
language (15)
under the totalitarian regime is thus proved true, in this as in other
cases,
only in so far as its own code accidentally happened to coincide with
Fascist
style and diction. The vision of a new educational field proposed by
Kasack, as
it also was by Hermann Hesse and Ernst Junger, makes little difference
to that
fact, for it too is only a distortion of the bourgeois ideal of an
association
of the elect operating outside and above the state, an ideal which
found its
ultimate corruption and perfection in the officially ordained Fascist
elites.
When it seems to the archivist at the end of his story, then, 'as if a
sign
formed in the place that the departed spirit had touched with its
finger, a
small stain, a final rune of fate', 16 we are looking at an example
that can
hardly be surpassed of the tendency developing in Kasack's work,
against his
narrative intention, to bury the ruins of the time under the lumber of
an equally
ruined culture once again. Even Hans
Erich Nossack' s description of the destruction of Hamburg, 'Der
Untergang',
which, as we shall see, gives a much more exact account of the real
features of
a collective catastrophe, lapses here and there into the mythologizing
approach
to extreme social circumstances which had become almost habitual since
the time
of the First World War, when realism gave up the ghost. Here too the
writer resorts to the arsenal of the apocalypse, speaking of peaceful
trees
transformed in the beam of searchlights into black wolves 'leaping
greedily at
the bleeding crescent moon', and of infinity blowing at its will
through the
shattered windows, sanctifying the human countenance 'as the place of
transition for the eternal' . (17) Nowhere in Nossack, however, does
this
fateful rhetoric, obstructing our view of the technical enterprise of
destruction, degenerate to the point where he compromises himself
ideologically
as a writer. It is undeniably to Nossack's credit that in his thinking
and in
the writing of this piece of prose, which in many respects is
exceptional, he
largely resists the style of the time. The view of an immemorial city
of the
dead which he presents is thus much closer to reality and has a value
qualitatively different from the account of the same theme in Kasack's
novel. I saw the faces of those
standing beside me in the
vehicle as we drove down the broad road over the Veddel to the Elbe
bridge. We
were like a tourist party; all we needed was a loudspeaker and the
explanatory
chatter of a guide. And we were all at a loss, and could not take in
the
strangeness. Where once your eyes met the walls of buildings, a silent
plain
now extended to infinity. Was it a cemetery? But what beings had buried
their
dead there and then put chimneys on the graves? Nothing grew there but
the
chimneys emerging from the ground like monuments, like dolmens or
admonitory
fingers. Did the dead lying below them breathe the blue ether through those chimneys? And where, among this strange undergrowth, an empty facade hung in the air like a triumphal arch, was it the resting place of one of their princes or heroes? Or was it the remnant of an aqueduct of the ancient Roman kind? Or was all this just the stage set for a fantastic opera? (18) The monumental
theatrical scene of a ruined city presented to an observer passing by
reflects
something of Elias Canetti's later comment on Speer's architectural
plans: for
all their evocation of eternity and their enormous size, their design
contained
within itself the idea of a style of building that revealed all its
grandiose
aspirations only in a state of destruction. The curious sense of
exaltation
that sometimes seems to overcome Nossack at the sight of the
devastation in his
native city is very appropriate to that observation. Only from its
ruins does
the end of the Thousand-Year Reich that intended to usurp the future
become
conceivable. The emotional conflict arising from the fact that total
destruction
coincided with his personal liberation from an apparently hopeless
situation
was not, however, something that Nossack could reduce to a common
denominator.
In view of the utter catastrophe there seems to be something scandalous
about
the 'feeling of happiness' that he experiences on the drive 'towards
the dead
city' as something 'true and imperative', the need 'to cry out
rejoicing: now,
at last, real life begins', (19) and Nossack can justify
it only by cultivating an awareness of shared guilt and responsibility.
These
circumstances also made it impossible for him to let his mind dwell on
the
agents of the destruction. Nossack speaks of a deeper insight that
forbade him
'to think of an enemy who had done all this; he too was at most a tool
of
inscrutable powers that wanted to destroy us'. (20) Like Serenus
Zeitblom* in
his cell in Freising, Nossack feels that the strategy of the Allied air
forces
was the work of divine justice. Nor is this process of revenge solely a
matter
of retribution visited on the nation responsible for the Fascist
regime; it is
also concerned with the need for atonement felt by the individual, in
this case
the author, who has long yearned to see the city destroyed. 'In all
earlier
raids I wished clearly: let it be a very bad one! I felt it so very
clearly
that I might almost say I cried that wish aloud to heaven. It was not
courage
but curiosity to see if my wish would be granted that never let me go
down to
the cellar but held me spellbound on the apartment balcony.' (21) 'And
if it is
the case,' writes Nossack in another passage, 'that I called down the
city's
fate on it to force my own fate to its moment of decision, then I must
also
stand up and confess myself guilty of its fall.' (22) Such explorations
of the
conscience arise from the scruples of the survivors, their sense of
shame at * The
narrator of Thomas Mann's Dr Faustus.
'not being
among the victims', (23) and were later to feature among the central
moral
dimensions of West German literature. Reflections on the guilt of
survival were
probably presented most cogently by Elias Canetti, Peter Weiss and
Wolfgang
Hildesheimer, 24 which suggests that not much might have come of the
process
known in Germany as 'coming to terms with the past' but for the
contribution
made by writers of Jewish origin. There is further evidence in the fact
that in
the years following the fall of the Third Reich, the sense of guilt
expressed
by Nossack was initially transformed into an existential philosophy
which still
nurtured a belief in fate and endeavored to face 'the void . . . with
composure', a philosophy with a concept embracing personal failure, in
which
Nossack too sees 'the appropriate way of death for us'. 25 The crux of
this
resolution of the opposition between destruction and liberation lies in
the
fact that it upholds the promises of Death, which itself appears at the
end of Nossack'
s text as an allegorical figure coming 'through the arch of the old
gateway
every afternoon' , (26) enticing children out to play. The image of
death as a
companion of the writer's imagination is a metaphor for the mourning in
which
the population as a whole could not afford to indulge, as Alexander and
Margarete Mitscherlich explained in their famous essay on the
psychological
disposition of the German nation after the catastrophe - for 'the
mother of the
family still has a great deal of work, she does the laundry, she cooks,
and she
must go down to the cellar from time to time to fetch coal'. (27) The
ironic
detachment here, complementing the melancholy of Nossack's narrative,
demolishes
the claim to the superior significance of death that pervades Kasack's
novel,
and does not deny those who managed to survive the right to a secular
continuation of their existence. Although in
some of its amplifications Nossack's text goes beyond the plain facts
of what
happened, veering into personal confession and mythically allegorical
structures,
it may be understood in its entirety as a deliberate attempt to give as
neutral
as possible an account of an experience exceeding anything in the
artistic imagination.
In an essay of 1961 where Nossack speaks of the influences on his
literary
work, he writes that after reading Stendhal he was anxious to express
himself
'as plainly as possible, without well-crafted adjectives, high-flown
images or
bluff, more like someone writing a letter in almost everyday jargon'.
28 This
stylistic principle proves its worth in his depiction of the ruined
city, in
that it does not allow traditional literary methods which tend to
homogenize
collective and personal catastrophes; Mann's novel Dr
Faustus is the contemporary paradigm. In direct contrast to the
traditional approach to writing fiction, Nossack experiments with the
prosaic genre
of the report, the documentary account, the investigation, to make room
for the
historical contingency that breaks the mould of the culture of the
novel. Where
Kasack's book about the city beyond the river, which in its opening
passages
also tries to maintain the neutrality of an impersonal report, very
soon lapses
into features like those of fiction, Nossack manages to preserve, over
long
tracts of his work, the documentary tone that set an example for the
later
development of West German literature. If familiarity with social and
cultural circumstances
is the crucial prerequisite for both writing and reading novels, then
the
attitude of an agency that simply presents a report conveys a sense of
reality
that appears foreign. That is evident in Nossack's prose work 'Bericht
eines
fremden Wesens uber die Menschen' ['Account of Mankind by a Strange
Creature'],
which is also associated with the themes described above and ascribes
to the
narrator the 'strangeness' in the title, but asks the reader whether
the reason
for it is not a mutation in mankind that makes the author an
anachronistic
figure. The wide distance between the subject and object of the
narrative
process implies something like the perspective of natural history, in
which
destruction and the tentative forms of new life that it generates act
like
biological experiments in which the species is concerned 'to break its
mould
and abjure the name of man' . (29) As the first sentence of his account
tells
us, Nossack witnesses the fall of Hamburg as a spectator. Shortly
before the
air raid on the city of 2 I July 1943 he had gone to spend a few days
in a
village on the Luneburg Heath, fifteen kilometres south of its
outskirts. The
timelessness of the landscape reminds him 'that we come from a fairy
tale and
shall return to a fairy tale again', 30 which in the circumstances
suggests not
so much the idylls of Hermann Lons (the poet of that area) as the
precarious
achievements of the technological civilization that was shortly to
return large
parts of the population to the hunter-gatherer stage of development.
From the
Heath, the approaching destruction of the city appears like a natural
spectacle. Sirens howl 'like cats somewhere in distant villages', the
sound of
the bomber squadrons coming in hovers in the air 'between the clear
constellations and the dark earth', the shapes like 'fir trees'
dropping from
the sky resemble 'red-hot drops of metal flowing' down on the city,
until they
later disappear in a cloud of smoke, 'lit red from below by the fire'.
(31) The
scene thus suggested, still containing aestheticized elements, already
shows
that a 'description' of the catastrophe from its periphery rather than
its
centre is possible. If Nossack's text conveys only a reflection of the
inferno,
his own real evidence begins when the raid is over and the extent of
the
destruction is gradually revealed to him. Even before his return to
Hamburg he
is amazed by the 'constant coming and going' that begins with the
firemen
hurrying to the city's aid from nearby towns, and continues 'on all the
streets
of the region around ... by day and by night' during the throng's
flight from
Hamburg, no one knew where. It was a river for which there was no bed;
almost
silently but inexorably deluging everything, carrying disquiet along
little
rivulets and into the most remote villages. Sometimes fugitives thought
they
could cling to a branch and so get a footing on the bank, but only for
a few
days or hours, and then they threw themselves back into the torrent to
let it
carry them on. None of them knew that they carried restlessness with
them like
a sickness, and everything it touched lost its firm foundation. (32) Later
Nossack comments on his impression that the journeying of the countless
throngs
of people on the move daily was by no means necessary 'to salvage
something or
keep an eye open for relatives ... Yet I would not like to call it mere
curiosity. People simply had no central point . . . and everyone was
afraid of
missing something.' (33) The aimlessly
panic-stricken conduct of the population reported here by Nossack
corresponds
to no social norms, and can be understood only as a biological reflex
set off
by the destruction. Victor Gollancz, who in the autumn of 1945" visited
several cities in the British-occupied zone, including Hamburg, in
order to
make first-hand reports which would convince the British public of the
necessity of rendering humanitarian aid, notes the same phenomenon. He
describes a visit to the Jahn Gymnastics Hall, 'where mothers and
children were
spending the night. They were units in that homeless crowd that goes
milling
about Germany' 'to find relatives" , they said, but really, or mainly,
I
was told, because a restlessness has come over them that just won't let
them
settle down.' (34). The extreme restlessness and mobility to which
Gollancz
testifies were the reactions of a species seeing itself cut off from
its ways
of escape, which biologically speaking always lay ahead of it, and as
preconscious experience those reactions affected the new social dynamic
developing
out of the destruction. Boll, who understood the constant movement
associated
with the war as a very specific aspect of human misfortune, with
peacefully
settled populations returning to the nomadic way of life, ascribes the
post-war
West German liking for speed, and the passion for travel which drives
people
out of that country every year in great droves, to the experiences of a
historical period when whole social groups were removed from the last
secure
factor in their lives, the places where they lived. (35) Literature
tells us
very little more about the archaic behavior that broke through in this
way.
Nossack does indicate that 'the usual disguises' of civilization fell
away as
if of their own accord, and 'greed and fear showed themselves naked and
unashamed'.
(36) The reversion of human life to the primitive, starting with the
fact that,
as Boll remembered later, 'this state began with a nation rummaging in
the
refuse', (37) is a sign that collective catastrophe marks the point
where
history threatens to revert to natural history. In the midst of the
ruined
civilization, what life is left assembles to begin at the beginning
again in a
different time. Nossack notes how unsurprising it seems 'that people
had lit
small fires in the open, as if they were in the jungle, and were
cooking their
food or boiling up their laundry on those fires'. (38) There is not
much
comfort, however, in the fact that in Nossack's account the city, now
reduced
to a desert of stone, soon begins to stir, that trodden paths appear
across the
rubble, linking up - as Kluge remarks - 'to a faint extent with earlier
networks of paths' , (39) for it is not yet certain whether the
surviving
remnants of the population will emerge from this regressive phase of
evolution
as the dominant species, or whether that species will be the rats or
the flies
swarming everywhere in the city instead. The revulsion at this new
life, at the
'horror teeming under the stone of culture' 40 to which Nossack gives
expression in one of the most terrible passages of his text, is a
pendant to
the fear that the inorganic destruction of life by the firestorm which
(according to Walter Benjamin's distinction between bloody and
non-bloody
violence) might yet be reconcilable with the idea of divine justice,
will be
followed by organic decomposition caused by flies and rats, to which in
Kasack's book to the river drawing the line between life and death
'forms no
barrier' . (41) Writing from such an extreme situation required a
redefinition
of the author's moral position, which for Nossack can be justified only
by the
necessity of rendering accounts, or as Kasack puts it the need 'to note
certain
procedures and phenomena before they fall into oblivion'. (42) In such
conditions writing becomes an imperative that dispenses with artifice
in the
interests of truth, and turns to a 'dispassionate kind of speech',
reporting
impersonally as if describing 'a terrible event from some prehistoric
time' . (43)
In an essay he wrote on the diary of Dr Hachiya from Hiroshima, Elias
Canetti
asks what it means to survive such a vast catastrophe, and says that
the answer
can be gauged only from a text which, like Hachiya's observations, is
notable
for precision and responsibility. 'If there were any point,' writes
Canetti,
'in wondering what form of literature is essential to a thinking,
seeing human
being today, then it is this.' (44) The ideal of truth contained in the
form of
an entirely unpretentious report proves to be the irreducible
foundation of all
literary effort. It crystallizes resistance to the human faculty of
suppressing
any memories that might in some way be an obstacle to the continuance
of life.
The outcast, says Nossack, 'dared not look back, since there was
nothing behind
him but fire'. (45). For that very
reason, however, memory and the passing on of the objective information
it
retains must be delegated to those who are ready to live with the risk
of
remembering. It is a risk because, as the following parable by Nossack
shows,
those in whom memory lives on bring down upon themselves the wrath of
others
who can continue to live only by forgetting. He writes of survivors
sitting round
the fire one night: Then one man
spoke in his dream. No one understood what he was saying. But they were
all
uneasy, they rose, they left the fire, they listened fearfully to the
cold dark
around them. They kicked the dreaming man, and he woke. 'I have been
dreaming.
1 must tell you what 1 dreamed. 1 was back with what lies behind us.'
And he
sang a song. The fire burned low. The women began to weep. 'I confess,
we were
human beings!' Then the men said to each other, 'If it was as he
dreamed we would
freeze to death. Let us kill him!' And they killed him. Then the fire
burned
hot again, and everyone was content. (46). The reason
for the murder of memory lies in the fear that Orpheus's love for
Eurydice
might, as Nossack puts it in another passage, (47) turn to a passion
for the
goddess of death; it knows nothing of the positive potential of
melancholy. But
if it is true that 'the step from mourning to being comforted is not
the greatest
step but the smallest' , (48) 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 bomb-proof shelter because the doors had jammed and coal
stored in
the rooms next to it caught fire. '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 Brandennburg
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 hopes in the will
to tell
the truth, and helps to overcome the tension between two poles by his
un-emotive
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.
Hifte 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
writerbringing
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 8 April 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 8
April 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,
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 Allied staff officer by a correspondent
for the Neue Ziircher 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 pre-programmed 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
programme -
it has been maintained for years, and the movie showing today, 8 April,
is an
Ucicky film starring Wessely, Petersen and Horbiger* - disrupted by the
prior
claims of a programme 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
matinee tellingly illustrates 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' , (55)
with no idea of the purpose of 'this operation' in the present
circumstances.
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
misfortune' , (56) resembles Frau Schrader in following his
professional
instincts. The only reason why his declared intention of * A film by the director Gustav Ucicky, starring the actors Paula Wessely, Peter Petersen and Attila H6rbiger. The film was called Heimkehr ['Homecoming'). 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
Zum Ross inn 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, (59) 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. (60). 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 towards
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
'70,000 determined school teachers, all like her, each of them teaching hard for twenty years from 1918
onwards, in every country that had fought in the war'. (61). 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
pre-programmed 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' 2 00 medium-sized industrial
plants'
(62) flying towards 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. 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 US
Eighth Army Air Force. In this interview Anderrson tries, with some
patience,
to answer what from the professional military viewpoint is the naive
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. ' (63)
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). The
reconstruction that Kluge was thus able to make of the disaster, in far
more
detail than the summary of it given here, can be likened to the
revelation of
the rational structure of something experienced by millions of human
beings as
an irrational blow of fate. It almost seems as if Kluge were responding
to the
question put by the allegorical figure of Death in Nossack' s Interview mit dem Tode ['Interview with
Death'] to his interlocutor: 'If you like you can see how I go about my
business. There's no secret to it. The fact that there is no secret is
the
point. Do you understand me?, (64). Death, introduced to us in this
text as a
suave entrepreneur, explains to his listener, with the same ironic
patience as
is evident in Brigadier Anderson's attitude, that fundamentally
everything is
just a question of organization, and organization manifested not merely
in the
collective catastrophe but in all areas of daily life, so that to find
out its
secret all you need to do is visit a tax office or some similar civil
service
department. In Kluge's work, this very link between the vast extent of
the
destruction 'produced' by human beings and the realities we experience
daily is
the point upon which the author's didactic intention turns. Kluge
reminds us
all the time, and in every nuance of his complex linguistic montages,
that
merely maintaining a critical dialectic between past and present can
lead to a
learning process which is not fated in advance to come to a 'mortal
conclusion'. The texts with which Kluge seeks to promote this aim
correspond,
as Andrew Bowie has pointed out, (65) neither to the pattern of
retrospective
historiography nor to the fictional story, nor do they try to offer a
philosophy of history. Instead, they are a form of reflection on all
these
methods of ours for understanding the world. Kluge's art, to use the
term in
another way here, consists in using details to illustrate the main
current of
the dismal course so far taken by history. For instance, there is his
mention
of the fallen trees in the Halberstadt town park, 'where silk-moth
caterpillars
had lived when they were planted in the eighteenth century', and the
following
passage: (Number 9
Domgang) In the windows stood a selection of tin soldiers, which had
fallen
over immediately after the raid, the rest of them being packed away in
boxes
stored in cupboards, 12,400 men in all, Ney's Third Corps as they
desperately
advanced through the Russian winter towards the eastern stragglers of
the
Grande Armée. They were put out on display once a year, during Advent.
Only
Herr Gramert himself could arrange the company of soldiers in their
correct
order. In his terrified flight, leaving his beloved soldiers, he has
been
struck on the head by a burning beam, and can form no further plans.
The
apartment at Number 9 Domgang, with all its marks of Gramert's personal
style,
lies quiet and intact for another two hours, except that it grows
hotter and
hotter during the afternoon. Around five o' clock it catches fire and
so do the
tin soldiers, who melt into lumps of metal in their boxes. (66) A
briefer
didactic fable than this could hardly be written. Kluge's way of
providing his
documentary material with vectors through his presentation of it
transfers what
he quotes into the context of our own present. Kluge 'does not allow
the data
to stand merely as an account of a past catastrophe,' writes Andrew
Bowie; 'the
most unmediated document ... loses its unmediated character via the
processes
of reflection the text sets up. History is no longer the past but also
the
present in which the reader must act. ' (67) The information that
Kluge's style
thus imparts to readers about the concrete circumstances of their
present
existence, and possible prospects for the future, marks him out as an
author
who, on the perimeter of a civilization to all appearances intent on
its own
end, is working to revive the collective memory of his contemporaries
who 'with
the obviously inborn desire for narrative, [have] lost the
psychological power
to remember even within the destroyed city itself'. 68 It seems likely
that
only his preoccupation with this didactic business enables him to
resist the
temptation to offer an interpretation of recent historical events
purely in
terms of natural history, just as elements of the science fiction genre
which
knows all along what the end will be appear again and again in his
work.
Instead, he interprets history in a way rather like, for instance,
Stanislaw
Lem's: as the catastrophic consequence of an anthropogenesis based from
the
first on evolutionary mistakes, a consequence that has long been
foreshadowed
by the complex physiology of human beings, the development of their
hypertrophic
minds, and their technological methods of production.
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