(...)
In a reckoning so ironic and fateful that even Faustus
himself might have gasped at it, he and his wife were saved by the immolation
of Dresden, on February 13 and 14, 1945, beginning just a few hours after they
had been informed that all remaining Jewish spouses must report for
deportation, which they both understood to be the end. The now overworked word
“holocaust” means literally “destruction by fire”: The old Klemperer couple
escaped holocaust in one sense by passing through it in another. On the
smoldering morrow they took advantage of the utter havoc, removed Victor’s
yellow star, and set off on foot toward survival and, ultimately, liberation.
(...)
Can the survival of the Klemperers, weighed on a scale of
ultimate judgment, balance or cancel the mass killing in Dresden? This is,
without its being defined quite so strenuously, the question confronted by the
author of On the Natural History of Destruction.
(...)
Looking over Sebald’s evocative paragraphs, though, I find
that I pause immediately at the terse way in which he says “war of
annihilation.” I also wince a bit at the way he mourns the Luftwaffe crew
slightly more than he regrets the “raid” on Norwich. I don’t do this, I trust,
for any insular or tribal reason. In a letter left for his sons, the late
Heinrich Böll told them that they would always be able to tell everything about
another German by noticing whether this fellow citizen, in conversation,
described April 1945 as “the defeat” or as “the liberation.”
(...)
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, the most astute and mordant of the
German critics, phrased it more dialectically when he argued that this very
docility was a source of strength. “The mysterious energy of the Germans” could
not be understood, he wrote, “if we refuse to realize that they have made a
virtue of their deficiencies. Insensibility was the condition of their
success.” The British liked to put this in an unworthily scornful tone. The
Germans, one used to hear it said in my father’s circles, are either at your
throat or at your feet … But Sebald’s well-chosen excerpts from Janet
Flanner’s reportage, and from the Swedish writer Stig Dagerman, suggest a
missing element of German stoicism. Dagerman noticed that he could easily be
identified as a foreigner on a train passing through the leveled city of
Hamburg because he was the only one staring out the window.
(...)
do ensaio: "W. G. Sebald: Requiem for Germany", 2003.
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