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I wanted to reply to a couple of the statements in Charles Maier's thoughtful contribution to the forum on Friedrich, _Der Brandt_: 1) "Some Germans, I believe, were silent not merely because they couldn't process the deaths, but because they really did understand where the chain of murderous warfare began." I think we have to distinguish the silence of the Germans in the immediate post-war period from the sustained "historical" silence that has just recently been interrupted by Sebald's more essayistic and Friedrich's more historical treatment of the aerial bombardment of Germany. Regarding the silence of the Germans in the immediate post-war period, the enormity of the destruction, the immense nature of the loss so apparently total and final, on a scale and with a ferocity that had not been seen in Germany itself, a technological devastation unimaginable in previous war produced massive trauma that would reverberate for several decades, both in those who witnessed the destruction and survived, as well as those of the younger generation who grew up in the _Wirtschaftswunder_ of the 50s and were unable to truly struggle either with the Nazi Genocide of the Jews or the aerial bombardment by the Allies. The _Inability to Mourn_ (A. and M. Mitscherlich) describes, I think, only one side of this: not merely the guilt for having started the whole mess in the first place, but a "Culture of Defeat" (Wolfgang Schivelbusch) informs this post-war state of "moving-on", accelerated Americanization, and preoccupation with other, more "urgent" concerns, such as the ideological and physical division of their country. Forgetting and "getting on with it" were the orders of the day, as much as a psychological necessity of the Germans themselves as one ordained by the Allies in their attempt to "wrap up" the denazification as quickly as possible and move on with the task of rebuilding the country that would serve as the pivotal barrier against communism. The deeper question is the longer-term "historical" silence, why the aerial bombardment of Germany -- not as a military or military-historical question but as a social, cultural, and moral issue -- would emerge now might have something to do with our own historical context, the use of United States bombing in various "theaters" throughout the world (Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq), where the number of civilian casualties has remained conspicuously underreported and unreflected. In the media, the marvel of JDAMs and MOABs, and the rhetoric of "shock and awe" have somehow induced yet another amnesia to the vast ongoing trauma and suffering of civilians. Is there a residual guilt of the West that is somehow being articulated and expressed through the present attempts at reworking? Conversely, is there an equation being subliminally constructed both in Sebald and Friedrich to make the use of devastating air force part of an ongoing "natural history of destruction" that is now being continued under a different name, with a new agenda and new technology, by the United States? Maier's remark at the end of his contribution about where Friedrich's study begins is surely to the point. Any historical treatment of the aerial bombardment and destruction of Germany in WWII would have to begin not in 1940, but in 1936, and with the Condor Legion of the German Luftwaffe, whose terrorization of the Spanish populace and the intentional and brutal bombing of Guernica and many other cities really created the historical precedent for the Allied bombing of Germany in WWII. This history would also have to continue forward, and again to the United States. The American Army Air Corps under General LeMay unleashed a particularly brutal version of this form of air assault in Tokyo in 1945. It began on March 9, 1945. 334 B-29s dropped thousands of incendiary bombs, mixed with delayed-fuse high-explosive bombs, to hamper fire-fighting efforts. The fire storm raged for 4 days, and no one has ever determined how many civilians died. The official count of the known dead ran up to 83,793 -- on a par with the number killed outright by the Hiroshima nuclear bomb, twice the number killed outright by the Nagasaki bomb. There were over 40,000 civilians seriously injured. The fire destroyed nearly 16 square miles of the city. 2) "It is appropriate to convey testimony, indeed, I think, often a duty. But doing justice to the witness is not the same as writing history. It may be the beginning or the end of historical reflection, but is a different sort of exercise. No history perhaps without memory, but no history that does not discipline memory." This raises an extremely important issue, one that would require its own discussion thread. I would, however, like to place a warning that the disciplining of memory can be tricky and dangerous business, as it runs the risk of excluding or marginalizing other forms of history that depart from, or might question or indeed enhance the existing historical scholarship. Our historical understanding of the horrible trauma of the aerial bombardment of Germany by the Allies has been enhanced by this recent proliferation of texts such as Sebald and Friedrich, and even though one cannot rely solely on individual testimony and the accounts of witnesses, the statements of witnesses and the testimony of survivors can open up new portals of historical understanding and research that might have been occluded without them. When the Hamburg police chief described the bombing of that city as "a fire typhoon such as was never before witnessed against which every human resistance was quite useless," he was not merely making a factual historical statement concerning the firestorm itself, however metaphorical, but another type of historical statement, one that concerns the absolute helplessness and horror many Germans must have experienced. That too is history. Rob Leventhal
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