On the Natural History of Destruction

by W.G. Sebald

Germans today are a nation strikingly blind to history and lacking in tradition.

The destruction of someone’s native land is as one with that person’s destruction.

writing is an attempt “to preserve our equilibrium among the living with all our dead within us, as we lament the dead and with our own death before our eyes,”3 in order to set memory to work, since it alone justifies survival in the shadow of a mountain of guilt.