On The Natural History Of Destruction: by Winfried Georg Sebald - Softcover

Sebald, W. G.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140298002 ISBN 13: 9780140298000

Publisher: Penguin, 2004

Synopsis

Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction explores German writers' silence about a moment of mass destruction

In the last years of World War II, a million tons of bombs were dropped by the Allies on one hundred and thirty-one German towns and cities. Six hundred thousand civilians died, and three and a half million homes were destroyed. When it has cast such a very dark shadow over his life and work, Sebald asks, how have so many writers allowed themselves to write it out of their experience and avoid articulating the horror? W.G. Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction sparked a wide-ranging debate in the German press.

'Sebald makes exquisite art out of vile history' Boyd Tonkin, Independent

'One of the most important writers of our time' A.S. Byatt, New Statesman

'Demands to be read for its grand emotional power ... it absorbs and horrifies and illuminates' Scotsman

'Brilliant and disturbing' Antony Beevor, The Times

W . G. Sebald was born in Wertach im Allgäu, Germany, in 1944 and died in December 2001. He studied German language and literature in Freiburg, Switzerland and Manchester. In 1996 he took up a position as an assistant lecturer at the University of Manchester and settled permanently in England in 1970. He was Professor of European Literature at the University of East Anglia and is the author of The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn, Vertigo, Austerlitz, After Nature, On the Natural History of Destruction, Campo Santo, Unrecounted, For Years Now and A Place in the Country. His selected poetry is published in a volume called Across the Land and the Water.

About this title

Review:

Most writers, even good ones, write of what can be written. . . . The very greatest write of what cannot be written. . . . I think of Akhmatova and Primo Levi, for example, and of W. G. Sebald. The New York Times [Sebald] is writing about what he regards as a disquieting refusal to face facts--not only about what was done to the nation, but by implication, by the nation. . . . No better future for humankind is possible if we do less than look upon the crimes of our past, and their catastrophic results, with 'a steadfast gaze.'The Boston Sunday Globe. This may well be the last of Sebald's writing we'll ever have, so how amazing--and fitting--it is that it seems, in a fashion as uncanny as his prose and perceptions could often be, to close the circle of the ruminations that preoccupied his writing life. The Washington Post. Sebald approaches his subject with sensitivity, yet avoids neither descriptions of horrible carnage nor criticism of writers too preoccupied with absolving themselves of blame to faithfully portray a destroyed Germany. The result is a balanced explication of devastation and denial, and a beautiful coda for Sebald. The secret of Sebald's appeal is that he saw himself in what now seems almost an old-fashioned way as a voice of conscience, someone who remembers injustice, who speaks for those who can no longer speak. --The New York Review of Books

Published in English after the author's untimely death in 2001... Sebald's essay on the 1943 bombing of Hamburg asks how to capture true horror when all human expression tends towards the norm. --Lesley Chamberlain, New Statesman Books of the Year 2009

Synopsis:

In the last years of World War II, the Allies dropped a million bombs on Germany. Yet the German people have been silent about the resulting devestation and loss of life, failing to recognise the terrible shadow that destruction from the air cast over their land. Here W.G. Sebald asks why it is we turn our backs on the horrors of war, and in addressing our response to the past, offers insights into how we live now.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0140298002
• ISBN 13: 9780140298000
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224