Citation

Lubrich O. Ger. Life Lett. 2009; 62(4): 415-429.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2009, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1468-0483.2009.01472.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Non-German accounts of the air war from inside Germany, 1939–1945, offer perspectives and evidence that are very distinct from what most German authors have been able to contribute. Yet they have not been registered in the recent debates about representations of German suffering in testimonies and literature (initiated by W. G. Sebald ten years ago). By looking at five issues specific to non-German writing, the present article proposes to open up the debate to these new voices: (1) Foreign experiences are distinctively sudden, open, ambivalent, dynamic and, by contrast, sharper in perception. (2) International reports are historical documents that have a particular value for understanding contemporary expectations, relative information and shifting judgments on the Allied bombing campaign. (3) Writers like Curzio Malaparte, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Kurt Vonnegut or Marie Vassiltchikov developed rhetorical and poetical means for representing the destruction without succumbing to the faults that Sebald diagnosed in most German writers, who repressed, stylised or banalised it. (4) Unlike many of their contemporary German counterparts, most international authors dealt with the uncanny aesthetics of an air raid without aestheticising it. (5) Finally, the article attempts an explanation for why international witnesses have not been heard in the politicised German debates. Their tendency to overemphasise introspection and moralism over comparative philology and historiography may have made many Germans deaf to the voices of foreigners.