Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Germany's Memory Contests and the Management of the Past
- Positions
- Mediations
- Ethnicity/Hybridity
- Memory Politics
- 11 The Anxiety of German Influence: Affiliation, Rejection, and Jewish Identity in W. G. Sebald's Work
- 12 Between “Restauration” and “Nierentisch”: The 1950s in Ludwig Harig, F. C. Delius, and Thomas Hettche
- 13 On Forgetting and Remembering: The New Right since German Unification
- 14 A Heimat in Ruins and the Ruins as Heimat: W. G. Sebald's Luftkrieg und Literatur
- Works Cited
- Notes on the Editors and Contributors
- Index
14 - A Heimat in Ruins and the Ruins as Heimat: W. G. Sebald's Luftkrieg und Literatur
from Memory Politics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Germany's Memory Contests and the Management of the Past
- Positions
- Mediations
- Ethnicity/Hybridity
- Memory Politics
- 11 The Anxiety of German Influence: Affiliation, Rejection, and Jewish Identity in W. G. Sebald's Work
- 12 Between “Restauration” and “Nierentisch”: The 1950s in Ludwig Harig, F. C. Delius, and Thomas Hettche
- 13 On Forgetting and Remembering: The New Right since German Unification
- 14 A Heimat in Ruins and the Ruins as Heimat: W. G. Sebald's Luftkrieg und Literatur
- Works Cited
- Notes on the Editors and Contributors
- Index
Summary
Published in 1999, the essay Luftkrieg und Literatur (Air Raids and Literature), a revised version of Sebald's Zurich lectures on poetics from 1997, deserves particular attention in a present-day context as it thematizes the wartime destruction of the Heimat with a palpable vehemence. On a thematic level the essay deals superficially with a critical stock-check of postwar society and literature, against which Sebald levels the charge that they have up to the present day suppressed both the destruction of German cities during the Allied bombings of Germany and the disastrous long-term effects of this event on the collective psyche. The essay's characteristic tone is struck by Sebald at the very beginning when he formulates the following hyperbolically pointed notion that in several modifications will accompany almost refrain-like the broader strand of his argument:
Die in der Geschichte bis dahin einzigartige Vernichtungsaktion ist in die Annalen der neu sich konstituierenden Nation nur in Form vager Verallgemeinerungen eingegangen, scheint kaum Schmerzensspuren hinterlassen zu haben im kollektiven Bewußtsein, ist aus der retrospektiven Selbsterfahrung der Betroffenen weitgehend ausgeschlossen geblieben, hat in den sich entwickelnden Diskussionen um die innere Verfassung unseres Landes nie eine nennenswerte Rolle gespielt, ist nie, wie Alexander Kluge später konstatierte, zu einer öffentlich lesbaren Chiffre geworden.
(LL, 11–12)[The destruction, on a scale without historical precedent, entered the annals of the nation as it set out about rebuilding itself only in the form of vague generalizations. […]
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- German Memory ContestsThe Quest for Identity in Literature, Film, and Discourse since 1990, pp. 287 - 302Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2006