On the Natural History of Destruction Quotes

“As far as I know, the question of whether and how it could be strategically or morally justified was never the subject of open debate in Germany after 1945, no doubt mainly because a nation which had murdered and worked to death millions of people in its camps could hardly call on the victorious powers to explain the military and political logic that dictated the destruction of the German cities.”
― W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction

“I spent my childhood and youth on the outskirts of the Alps, in a region that was largely spared the immediate effects of the so-called hostilities. At the end of the war I was just one year old, so I can hardly have any impressions of that period of destruction based on personal experience. Yet to this day, when I see photographs or documentary films dating from the war I feel as if I were its child, so to speak, as if those horrors I did not experience cast a shadow over me … I see pictures merging before my mind’s eye—paths through the fields, river meadows, and mountain pastures mingling with images of destruction—and oddly enough, it is the latter, not the now entirely unreal idylls of my early childhood, that make me feel rather as if I were coming home…”
― W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction

“Later, Heinrich Boll suggested that such experiences of collective uprooting are at the origin of the German craving for travel: a sense of being unable to stay anywhere, a constant need to be somewhere else. In terms of social conditioning, this would make the ebb and flow of the population bombed out of their homes rather like a rehearsal for initiation into the mobile society that would form in the decades after the catastrophe.”
― W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction

“The population decided—out of sheer panic at first—to carry on as if nothing had happened.
- “Air War and Literature: The Zurich Lectures”
― W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction

“hand.”45 The renunciation of violence, the impossibility of seeing his way clear to violence in the face of the utmost provocation, is one of the sources of Améry’s difficulty;”
― W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction

“Existence prolonged beyond the experience of death has its affective center in a sense of guilt, the guilt of the survivor, which Niederland describes as the worst psychological burden weighing on those of his patients who had escaped being murdered. It is a particularly macabre irony, as Niederland says, that the survivors and not those who committed Nazi crimes should bear the burden of such guilt.”
― W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction

“resistance quand même, out of a principle of solidarity with victims and as a deliberate affront to those who simply let the stream of history sweep them along, is the essence of Améry’s philosophy.”
― W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction

“There were no uncompromisingly negative thinkers such as Bataille or Cioran in postwar German literature, and Améry is still the only one who denounced the obscenity of a psychologically and socially deformed society, and the outrage of supposing that history could proceed on its way afterwards almost undisturbed, as if nothing had happened.”
― W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction

“The anguish of memory which is partly vague, partly full of a still acute fear of death, can be traced in Améry’s writings.”
― W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction

“Once a victim, always a victim.”
― W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction

“the essays written by Améry at this time about his personal past and present contain insights, based on the most direct experience, into the irreparable condition of those victims, and it is from such insights alone that the true nature of the terror visited on them can be extrapolated with some precision. It is part of the psychic and social condition of the victim that he cannot receive compensation for what was done to him.”
― W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction

“what we found when we came home,”8 proves on closer inspection to be an instrument already tuned to individual and collective amnesia, and probably influenced by preconscious self-censorship—a means of obscuring a world that could no longer be presented in comprehensible terms. There was a tacit agreement, equally binding on everyone, that the true state of material and moral ruin in which the country found itself was not to be described.”
― W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction

“Apart from Niederland’s professional case histories, which show that humiliation of the victim continued even in the compensation proceedings, only Améry’s writings give an adequate idea of what it means to have been delivered up to death.”
― W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction

“Resentment, writes Améry in full awareness of the illogicality of his attempt at definition, “nails every one of us onto the cross of his ruined past. Absurdly, it demands that the irreversible be turned around, that the event be undone.”16 He stands by this absurdity, recognizing its bias and regarding it as evidence that the “moral truth”17 of the conflict in which he finds himself is to be seen not in any readiness for reconciliation but in the unremitting denunciation of injustice.”
― W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction

“Améry employs a pervasive strategy of understatement which prohibits both pity and self-pity, and according to Niederland’s findings is typical of all the accounts of victims of persecution.”
― W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction

“to banish what has happened to them from their minds.3 Unlike the agents of terror, they obviously no longer have reliable mechanisms of repression at their command. Islands of amnesia do develop in them, but that is not at all the same as being genuinely able to forget. Rather, it is as if a diffuse ability to forget goes hand in hand with the recurrent resurgence of images that cannot be banished from the memory, and that remain effective as agencies of an almost pathological hypermnesia in a past otherwise emptied of content.”
― W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction

“rationality,”2 and that in the last resort the question is not so much one of constructing a plausible etiology of terror as of achieving some ultimate understanding of what it means to be marked out as a victim, excluded, persecuted, and murdered.”
― W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction

“Voilà à quoi ressemblent les abîmes de l'histoire. Tout s'y retrouve pêle-mêle et quand on y plonge le regard, on est saisi d'effroi et de vertige.”
― W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction

“From the outset, the now legendary and in some respects genuinely admirable reconstruction of the country after the devastation wrought by Germany's wartime enemies, a reconstruction tantamount to a second liquidation in successive phases of the nation's own past history, prohibited any look backward.”
― W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction

“The prerequisites of the German economic miracle were not only the enormous sums invested in the country under the Marshall Plan, the outbreak of the Cold War, and the scrapping of outdated industrial complexes-an operation performed with brutal efficiency by the bomber squadrons-but also something less often acknowledged: the unquestioning work ethic learned in a totalitarian society, the logistical capacity for improvisation shown by an economy under constant threat, experience in the use of "foreign labor forces," and the lifting of the heavy burden of history that went up in flames between 1942 and 1945 along with the centuries-old buildings accommodating homes and businesses in Nuremberg and Cologne, in Frankfurt, Aachen, Brunswick, and Wurzberg, a historical burden ultimately regretted by only a few.”
― W.G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction