SOURCE: Gimson, Andrew. “Looking—and Looking Away.” Spectator 291, no. 9106 (15 February 2003): 37-8.

In the following review, Gimson discusses Sebald's attempt in On the Natural History of Destruction to address the silence of German writers on the devastation inflicted by Allied bombings during World War II.

Sebald is perturbed by the almost complete failure of German writers to describe the devastation of their country by British and American bombers during the second world war. Here, one might have thought, was an inescapable subject, a reality which confronted anyone who was in Germany during or after the war. About 600,000 civilians were killed in the raids and, as Sebald points out, ‘even after 1950 wooden crosses still stood on the piles of rubble in towns like Pforzheim, which lost almost one third of its 60,000 inhabitants in a single raid on the night of 22 February 1945’. Among the ruins dreadful smells emanated from the corpses...