Hans Erich Nossack - In a delicately allusive prose that resonates with overtones of man's ancient past and darkly apocalyptic warnings, Nossack, like Joyce and Proust before him, exposes the mythical undercurrents of contemporary life. Past, present and future blend into an eternal return of archetypal figures

Hans Erich Nossack, The End: Hamburg 1943, ETrans. by rich Andres, University Of Chicago Press, 2006.

excerpt

read it at Google Books

One didn't dare to inhale for fear of breathing it in. It was the sound of eighteen hundred airplanes approaching Hamburg from the south at an unimaginable height. We had already experienced two hundred or even more air raids, among them some very heavy ones, but this was something completely new. And yet there was an immediate recognition: this was what everyone had been waiting for, what had hung for months like a shadow over everything we did, making us weary. It was the end.
Novelist Hans Erich Nossack was forty-two when the Allied bombardments of German cities began, and he watched the destruction of Hamburg—the city where he was born and where he would later die—from across its Elbe River. He heard the whistle of the bombs and the singing of shrapnel; he watched his neighbors flee; he wondered if his home—and his manuscripts—would survive the devastation. The End is his terse, remarkable memoir of the annihilation of the city, written only three months after the bombing. A searing firsthand account of one of the most notorious events of World War II, The End is also a meditation on war and hope, history and its devastation. And it is the rare book, as W. G. Sebald noted, that describes the Allied bombing campaign from the German perspective.
In the first English-language edition of The End, Nossack's text has been crisply translated by Joel Agee and is accompanied by the photographs of Erich Andres. Poetic, evocative, and yet highly descriptive, The End will prove to be, as Sebald claimed, one of the most important German books on the firebombing of that country.
“Nossack was the only writer of the time to try recording what he actually saw as plainly as possible,” writes W. G. Sebald about this memoir of the firebombing of Hamburg in 1943. Nossack watched the destruction of his city—in the first firestorm achieved by Allied bombers—from across the Elbe River. Only three months after the event, he completed The End, one of the most remarkable literary responses to the phenomenon of total destruction.

German novelist Nossack's brief (63 pages in this edition) contemporary account of the 1943 destruction of Hamburg by Allied bombardment is one of the small number of works available in English that deal with the events of those years from a German perspective. Its publication is clearly owed to its mention in another book, the late W.G. Sebald's best-selling and controversial On the Natural History of Destruction, which speaks highly of Nossack's account. The narrative is indeed clear-eyed and dispassionate, possessed of the emotional distance necessary to regard the terrible events in their totality. The account begins as Nossack and his wife are on holiday in the city's idyllic rural outskirts; the reader is then carried through wave after wave of firebombing and retrenchment to the point of total devastation; the confusion and horror of events are rendered with immediacy and power. (Also included are 11 contemporary halftone Erich Andres photographs.) What's missing from Nossack's account is any political or historical dimension: a reader coming to this book for primary knowledge would learn little about why the bombings took place, or why so many people accepted them with numb resignation instead of anger. But as a supplement to Sebald's more detailed consideration, Nossack's remarkable witnessing has real and urgent value.  - Publishers Weekly

"A small but critical book, something to read in those quiet moments when we wonder what will happen next."—Susan Salter Reynolds


How ought such a natural history of destruction to begin? With a summary of the technical, organizational, and political prerequisites for carrying out large-scale air-raids? With a scientific account of the previously unknown phenomenon of the firestorms? With a pathological record of typical modes of death, or with behaviorist studies of the instincts of flight and homecoming?
In Air War and Literature, the essay that dominates W.G. Sebald’s book of essays On the Natural History of Destruction, Sebald deplored what he saw in immediate post-war writing by Germans about the devastation that their country suffered in its defeat, especially the near total destruction that resulted from the Allied tactic of firebombing German cities. “There was a tacit agreement,” he suggested, “equally binding on everyone, that the true state of material and moral ruin in which the country found itself was not to be described.” Sebald then named a handful of writers who “ventured to break the taboo on any mention of the inward and outward destruction,” even if they “generally did so rather equivocally.”
Indeed, it seems that no German writer, with the sole exception of Nossack, was ready or able to put any concrete facts down on paper about the progress and repercussions of this gigantic, long-term campaign of destruction.
Sebald particularly praised Der Untergang, Hans Erich Nossack’s account of the July 1943 firebombing of Hamburg, which was included in a group of stories in a book called Interview mit dem Tode (Interview with Death), first published in Germany in 1948. Probably because of the attention it received in Sebald’s book, Der Untergang finally appeared in English in 2004 from the University of Chicago Press, translated by Joel Agee and retitled The End: Hamburg 1943.
By sheer luck, Nossack, a writer living in Hamburg in 1943, took his first vacation in years on the very week that the city was firebombed by Allies. Staying in a small rental cottage within sight of the city, Nossack witnessed the days of bombing and the ensuing flight of survivors before making his way back into Hamburg to see if anything was left of his home and office. At the outset, Nossack identifies himself as a “spectator,” an observer who used his location at the fringe of events – rather than at their center – to his advantage. There was a “danger,” he said, at “knowing the entirety.” Though his writing vacillates between the utterly precise and the casually impressionistic, Nossack uses his relentless sense of observation to try to understand the survivors, who, because of their experiences at the center of the firebombing, stand on the other side of “an invisible abyss.” “Why didn’t they cry and lament?” It seemed to him that “shelter, food, and clothing basically didn’t make any difference at all.” At this level, Nossack’s enterprise of trying to comprehend this horrendous experience from which he was largely exempt is not unlike Sebald’s own attempt to slowly excavate the damaged lives of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust in The Emigrants.
But Nossack is more than an observer, he is also a moralist.  Watching others applaud each time an Allied plane is downed, he declines to join in.  “Now was no longer the time for petty distinctions as that between friend and foe,” he writes before quoting from Homer’s Odyssey about the unholiness of rejoicing over the death of enemies.    But Nossack goes even further and confesses his own sense of guilt “in the city’s destruction.”   Moreover, he suspects other Germans also secretly harbor the same sense of guilt, a theme on which he elaborates throughout The End.
Nossack’s brief book is the document of someone who records the nuances of his own response as the world around him is being destroyed.  “One must confess or forget, there is no third option.”  Ironically, it is only as he returns to “the dead city” that “at last real life begins.”  At that point, it felt “as if a prison door had sprung open before me…”
Sebald’s essay (based on lectures delivered in Zurich in 1997 and later published in The New Yorker) created its own little firestorm. There have been questions about his motivations, his circumscribed list of responsible writers, and his basic thesis – none of which do I really want to wade into. But over the weekend, as I reread The End after a lapse of several years – Nossack’s piece is a mere 63 pages long – I found myself inevitably caught up in the controversy all over again, because the topic somewhat oddly consumes much of translator Joel Agee’s Foreword. “It is worth taking a closer look at Sebald’s thesis,” Agee writes, “because it espouses a program in which Nossack cannot be enlisted without misunderstanding him.” (Agee’s Foreword can be read here.)
There is no doubt that Air War and Literature is a problematic essay. In this and many of Sebald’s later essays, we are presented with an author that is a blend of Sebald the writer of prose fiction and Sebald the historian and critic of German-language literature. Eschewing academic approaches for a more personal essay, Sebald approaches the complex issues of German guilt and Allied moral culpability through the more informal avenues of lecture and essay, rather than developing a tightly argued case. At times, his uncharacteristic imprecision about what he likes and dislikes in German literature of the war era provides an opening for the objections of Agee and others. For example, Sebald makes the somewhat odd claim that Nossack was “primarily concerned with the plain facts,” a statement that earns him the disdain of Agee.  In Sebald’s eyes, Nossack stood out from other German writers on the subject of the firebombings because he wrote about
the season of the year, the weather, the observer’s viewpoint, the drone of the approaching squadrons, the red firelight on the horizon, the physical and mental condition of refugees from the cities, the burnt-out scenery, chimneys that curiously still remain standing, washing put out to dry on a rack outside a kitchen window, a torn net curtain blowing from an empty veranda, a living room sofa with a crochet cover, countless other objects lost forever, the rubble burying them and the dreadful new life moving beneath it, people’s sudden craving for perfume.
Agee disputes Sebald’s claim. “These are not ‘plain facts’,” he writes. And he has a point. For, as one reads and rereads Sebald’s comments on Nossack, his position becomes ever more convoluted. In addition to delivering the “plain facts,” Sebald praises Nossack for the manner in which he delivers his facts. He approves of Nossack’s tendency to link “the sacred with the utmost profanity…a device that always proves effective.” Moreover, Nossack’s “narrative tone here is that of the messenger in classical tragedy.” Flipping and and forth between Nossack’s book, Sebald writing about Nossack, and Agee writing about Sebald, I began to think that the differences between Sebald and Agee are more semantic than substantive. Nossack, it seems to me, is not notable for his “plain facts” (although there are plenty of them) as much as for the telling details, which are something altogether different. One night, while taking shelter from the bombing in the cabin’s basement, Nossack knocks something over in the dark and it breaks. It was “a glass bowl that didn’t belong to us.” It’s a typical Nossack moment to register the brief concern that he has broken something that belongs to the cabin’s owner while all of Hamburg is on fire. Or to notice that some escaped pet parakeets have taken to sitting in the branches of a poplar tree. In fact, Nossack himself admits he didn’t remember much of what the survivors said to him as they fled. “It’s not really important,” he writes, as if what they might say was far less important than what they were doing.
Agee’s Foreword has the tone of someone quickly trying to mark the boundaries of his turf as an unwanted stranger approaches. Nonetheless, I also think he properly suggests one of the motivations of Sebald’s essay in something he writes at the end of one of his footnotes:
An unstated motif throughout Sebald’s essay appears to be a polemical claim for his own quasi-documentary aesthetic as the only responsible way to contemplate the bitter truth of historical memory.
While Agee is correct here, I don’t think he should be in the least surprised. Writers and artists have always proposed their own aesthetic lineage (often through a process of misdiagnosing or creatively misreading the work of their predecessors) and they often find ways to leave a trail of breadcrumbs between themselves and those fore-bearers they most admire. Sebald practically said as much himself in Air War and Literature.
It is with this documentary approach, which has an early precursor in Nossack’s Der Untergang, that German postwar literature really comes into its own and begins the serious study of material incommensurable with traditional aesthetics.
- sebald.wordpress.com/2010/05/04/nossacks-the-end-caught-in-the-middle-2/

In July 1943, Hans Erich Nossack, along with his wife Misi, watched as the Allied forces bombed the city of Hamburg. For several days, vacationing in a cabin on the outskirts of the city, they witnessed the repeated air raids and the resulting fire-storm that razed the city and left the majority of Hamburg's inhabitants, at least those fortunate enough to survive the bombing, as refugees in a fire-swept wasteland. Three months later, living in London, Nossack set to work on preserving his memories in Der Untergang, an eyewitness account of the bombing and its aftermath. This short book is at once a dispassionate, documentary report of annihilation and total destruction, and a narrative that describes the author's immediate and personal experience with the horrors of total war. However, it simultaneously bears the metaphysical struggle of a literary mind trying to find a new language to articulate and convey the incomprehensible. As the original German title suggested, Nossack is a witness on the edge of the abyss, a spectator to the apocalyptic end. "Imagine closing your eyes for a second," he writes, "and when you open them again, nothing is left of what was there before" (p. 22).

This recent translation of Der Untergang comes at a fortuitous time, as the sixtieth anniversary of the German defeat, as well as the recent commemoration of the bombing of Dresden, have refocused popular (and academic) interest on the air war and German memory.[1] While the larger ongoing discussion of German memory incorporates the air war, particularly in regards to the victim/perpetrator dichotomy, it has been Jörg Friedrich's incendiary Der Brand (we still await its translation), and W.G. Sebald who have largely set the tone of scholarly debate on the bombings. The success of Sebald's controversial On The Natural History of Destruction is undoubtedly responsible for this appearance of Nossack's text in translation. Until Sebald's text was published (as the reworked English translation of his 1997 Luftkrieg und Literatur lectures in Zurich), Nossack's memoir was all but forgotten in the German literary world.[2]

If we are to believe W.G. Sebald's critique of postwar German literature, Nossack stands amongst a select number of writers--Hermann Kasack, Arno Schmidt, Heinrich Böll and Peter de Mendelssohn--"who ventured to break the taboo on any mention of the inward and outward destruction" resulting from the aerial bombardment of Germany.[3] Indeed, while Sebald criticized German writers for failing to explore the inward and outward destruction of the allied bombing campaigns, he reserved for Nossack special regard, claiming that "he was the only writer of the time to try recording what he actually saw as plainly as possible," and that Nossack was "primarily concerned with plain facts."[4] Sebald is partly right. Nossack's memoir-like essay, at once part story, testimonial, and report, is a rich repository of facts outlining the destruction of the material and spiritual life-world of Hamburg and its citizens.[5] However, as Joel Agee points out in the excellent foreword to this translation, to read The End as a catalogue of destruction is a misreading. Sebald's analysis came dangerously close to this very type of misreading. As Agee suggests, "It is the little word 'I' at the start of his record and the presence, throughout, of a vulnerable conscience intent on being true to itself that makes all the difference between objective reporting and authentic witness" (p. xiv). It is the personal vision of destruction, the moral prescience of Nossack to bear witness that elevates this text above the recording of facts.

One element of Nossack's personal "mandate to render an account," however, constitutes a deep and significant absence within the text. Nossack describes the bombardment and destruction of Hamburg as the will of an ultimate power, the alignment of fate against a people abandoned to their situation. Nossack self-consciously juxtaposes Arcadia with the abyss, describing the natural "idyll on the other side of the abyss so precisely because perhaps a way can be found back from there to the past we have lost" (p. 6). It is this coupling of the "past that is lost," the discourse of biblical fate, and the detached, apocalyptic, arbitrary "raging of the world against itself" that establishes the absence of the political context of National Socialism (p. 15). Indeed, in Nossack's rendering of events, the bombing of Hamburg transcends the political realm and enters the realm of natural destruction; war as the revolt of nature rather than a manifestation of politics. Nossack writes that "After everything I have heard, I am coming to the conclusion that no greater contempt could have been shown to what is called the State than to treat it as something completely irrelevant that could neither be blamed for a fate such as Hamburg had suffered nor be expected to do anything about it" (p. 33). It was "unknowable forces that sought to annihilate" Hamburg and its citizens, not an enemy with political and military motives (p. 34). The only direct reference to the atrocities of National Socialism are the "convicts in striped suits" that are enlisted to clear the streets and buildings of corpses following the firestorm (p. 44). The political reality of Nazi Germany is an unsettling non-presence as a result of Nossack's end-of-times leitmotif.

As an eyewitness to destruction, however, Nossack's writing bears a greater clarity and creates a terrifying vision of the sublime, despite his penchant for "philosophical exaggeration and false notions of transcendence."[6] As a spectator to destruction, Nossack struggled to record the ruined landscape objectively, yet continuously encounters the inability to convey the totality of his experience. In his conclusion he enlists a short story recounted to him by a survivor, and lauds the man for "his imageless language" that creates "an image such as no poet can create" (p. 63):

Then a man came into the cellar and told us, you've got to come out now, the whole house is burning, it is going to collapse any minute. Most of us didn't want to, they thought they'd be safe where they were. But they all died. Some of us listened to him. But it took a lot to do that. We had to go out through a hole, and in front of the hole the flames were beating back and forth. It's not so bad, he said, look, I came in to get you, don't you see? So I wrapped a wet blanket around my head and crawled out. Then we were through it. Some people keeled over in the street then. We couldn't take care of them" (p. 63).

Ironically, it is perhaps in Nossack's inability to make sense of the destruction of the material world that we can best understand the totality of human loss and suffering. Descriptions of corpses "pressed together, bloated from the heat," written with the distant language of a reporter, encounter the outer limits of representation (p. 51). It is to Nossack's credit that he does not indulge his philosophical tendencies in his rendering of human suffering and instead writes in a quiet, detached prose. Rather, it appears that the destruction of Hamburg's everyday life-world presented the greatest challenge to Nossack's sensibilities; Nossack continuously struggled to comprehend what was and what now is: "And why are the chimneys still there, meaningless and without smoke? But there's no stove left. What did we cook for? And no beds, either! Why did we sleep? Why did we sustain ourselves? Why did we collect provisions and save money?" (p. 41). Indeed, the largest portion of this short account describes Nossack, and the other survivors, who, like himself, are "wandering in a dream through the eternal wasteland" left by the firestorm, refusing to look to the past, overcome by the weight of the present (p. 42). And as Nossack writes, "how dreadfully heavy that weight was--so heavy that one dares not breathe and moves through the world only with great caution--is almost impossible to put into words" (p. 53).

This new translation represents one of those intriguing paradoxes of the publishing industry; this printing is a beautiful treatment of a terrible subject. Erich Andres's photos, set at the back of the book, only diminish the text if one considers them to reinforce a "documentary" reading. The inclusion of Andres' photos follows a trend established by Ernst Kabel Verlag, a Hamburg publisher who, noting the similarity between Andres's photos and Nossack's writing, first included them together.[7] Indeed, it is Andres's quiet pathos for his subject that reflects the moral and aesthetic principles of Nossack's writing; his picture of the older gentleman plugging his ears, seemingly to the deafening silence of the Hamburg wasteland, and the photos of personal inquiries written on burnt-out buildings (for example, "Hilde wo bist Du?") attest to the themes of total loss and dislocation.

While scholars and teachers may appreciate the availability of the text in English, they may wonder whether it will broaden the field of debate. As it has played a rather limited role in German scholarship until now, it is difficult to believe that this translation offers a point of departure or a new area of inquiry for scholars already immersed in research on German memory and the Nazi past. Rather, I suspect that The End will enjoy its Sebald-inspired renaissance and will pique the interest of the English-speaking scholar who has not had access to the original German printing. However, this all remains to be seen. Beyond the boundaries of this debate, one may regard The End as a piece of writing that is, as Nossack intended, an account of the terror and destruction unleashed by the Second World War. As such it both illuminates and condemns the human tendency to rain ruin upon humanity. - Ryan Berry

Notes

[1]. See H-German forum on this theme at http://www.h-net.org/~german/discuss/WWIIbombing/WWII-bombingindex.htm .

[2]. See Andreas Huyssen, "Rewritings and New Beginnings: W.G. Sebald and the Literature on the Air War," in Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 138-157. Huyssen argues that Sebald's use of Nossack's writing, along with other literary texts of the bombings, "gives us not so much an analysis as a reinscription of the trauma by means of quotation" (p. 156).

[3]. W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction trans. Anthea Bell (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2004), p. 11.

[4]. Sebald, Natural History, p. 51.

[5]. See Scott Denham, "Review of Hans Erich Nossack, Der Untergang," H-German, H-Net Reviews, November 2003. URL: http: . Denham comments on the ambiguous nature of Nossack's narrative and provides a synopsis of Der Untergang's publishing history in Germany.

[6]. Sebald, Natural History, p. 51.

[6]. Denham, "Review," p. 2.

Joel Agee: Foreword: The End, by Hans Erich Nossack

Hans Erich Nossack, An Offering for the Dead. Trans. by  Joachim Neugroschel. Marsilio Pub, 1992.

"In a delicately allusive prose that resonates with overtones of man's ancient past and darkly apocalyptic warnings, Nossack, like Joyce and Proust before him, exposes the mythical undercurrents of contemporary life. Past, present and future blend into an eternal return of archetypal figures whose stories transform human history into a timeless parable of creative memory and immemorial destruction." - BOOK JACKET

 

Jean-Paul Sartre considered Nossack (1901-1976) one of the great German existentialists, and this hypnotic short novel indeed testifies to an extraordinary artistic sensibility. An unexplained catastrophe has stripped an unnamed city-and most likely the world-of all inhabitants except for the narrator, who wanders its silent streets. Without relationships to others, he has lost himself, and he finds that his dreams and musings hold more clues to his identity than does his waking life. His memories escape individual experience and dive into archetype, so that what Nossick ultimately presents is a mythopoetic history. A disciplined prose style wards off authorial self-indulgence, always a risk with this kind of visionary or apocalyptic fiction. Giving the novel another, more urgent aspect, the publisher explains that most of Nossack's manuscripts were destroyed in the Allied bombings of the author's native Hamburg in 1943; An Offering for the Dead was first published in 1947. - Publishers Weekly

 

Published in 1947, this short tale--the first major book in print by the author of Wait for November ( LJ 8/92)--is considered by many to be a compendium of the themes developed in his later works, which were esteemed for their literary embodiment of the existentialism then in vogue. The narrator tells of his journeys and experiences, both real and dreamed, that follow the destruction of an unnamed city (Nossack witnessed the destruction of Hamburg in 1943) and of his attempts to salvage human hope from the culture of rationalism that could wreak such devastation. Nossack's classically simple prose seems rather wooden in English, even when rendered by estimable translator Neugroschel. Recommended for lovers of serious and ambitious fiction. - Michael T. O'Pecko

Hans Erich Nossack, Wait for November, Fromm Intl, 1982.