Air, War and Words

History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions.  —W.H. Auden, “Hic et Ille” (1956)

In 1783, an unmanned hydrogen balloon was released from the area of Paris known as the Champ de Mars. It flew northwards for forty-five minutes, followed by chasers on horseback, and landed at the village of Gonesse, whose bemused inhabitants immediately attacked it with pitchforks. Later that year, before 400,000 spectators, two men in a balloon ascended to a height of nearly 2000 feet. They flew for two hours and covered a distance of thirty-six kilometres. The first military application of a hydrogen balloon occurred in 1794, when a tethered French apparatus was deployed to observe manoeuvres by the Austrian army during the Battle of Fleurus.

A century later, the completion of Gustave Eiffel’s eponymous tower (built incidentally on the same patch of land where the first balloon had been released) enabled the ordinary citizenry of Paris—and a large number of visitors to that city’s 1889 World Fair—to view that which lay beneath them as something akin to a series of abstract patterns. This was an experience to be marvelled at, for the sense of detachment it gave from the busy activity of the environs below.

Move forward just over a decade and America’s Wright brothers make the first aeroplane flight in 1903, while the Frenchman Louis Blériot, to the glee of all, defies the breadth of the English Channel by air in 1909; by which date, most people will have viewed a photograph of some part of the earth as it appears when seen from above.

Seventy years after the first person had handed over five francs and ridden Eiffel’s mechanical lifts to the tower’s uppermost deck, W.H. Auden, in his essay “Hic et Ille” (1956), makes observations on what had become, by then, routine travel by air at a height of 10,000 feet and where:

the earth appears to the human eye as it appears to the eye of the camera; that is to say, all history is reduced to nature. This has the salutary effect of making historic evils, like national divisions and political hatreds, seem absurd. I look down from an airplane upon a stretch of land which is obviously continuous. That, across it, marked by a tiny ridge or river or even by no topographical sign whatever, there should run a frontier, and that the human beings living on one side should hate or refuse to trade with or be forbidden to visit those on the other side, is instantaneously revealed to me as ridiculous. Unfortunately, I cannot have this revelation without simultaneously having the illusion that there are no historical values either. From the same height I cannot distinguish between an outcrop of rock and a Gothic cathedral, or between a happy family playing in a backyard and a flock of sheep, so that I am unable to feel any difference between dropping a bomb upon one or the other.

A little over a decade earlier, the Royal Air Force alone had dropped one million tons of incendiary bombs on enemy territory. Six hundred thousand civilians were killed, three and a half million homes destroyed and seven and a half million citizens left homeless. During an operation known as Gomorrah, the saturation bombing of Hamburg, groups of people were incinerated so effectively that collecting their remains required only a single basket. In other cities, the firestorms confused the local flora, so that in their aftermath, chestnuts and lilacs which had somehow miraculously survived flowered a second time. In Berlin, giraffes wandered down streets while many of their less fortunate neighbours at that city’s zoo were eaten rather than let their flesh go to waste. Staff at besieged railway stations reported women in such states of trauma, that in their haste to escape, they had stuffed dead children into suitcases along with clothes and belongings. In Dresden, thousands wandered into nearby forests in a catatonic state.

A BBC Home Service radio broadcast, “live” from one of the Lancaster heavy bombers used in a Berlin raid, illuminates as to the varied backgrounds of some of its crew. The reporter, Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, informs us that Scottie had been a cinema projectionist in Glasgow and that Connolly is an “Aussie from Brisbane”. We learn also that the mid-upper gunner had been in advertising and that the rear gunner had farmed in Sussex. When the attack begins, Vaughan-Thomas describes it as “running straight into the most gigantic display of soundless fireworks in the world”. Another voice offers, “By God, that looks like a bloody good show!” and another, “Best I’ve seen” and then “Oh boy!”

In two essays, “Between History and Natural History” and “Air War and Literature”, the former written before his Zürich lectures (1997) and the latter afterwards, the German writer W.G. Sebald argues that, despite the total destruction of German cities, there was amongst Germans “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”. Further: “People’s ability to forget what they do not want to know, to overlook what is before their eye, was seldom put to the test better than in Germany at that time.”

He speaks of growing up in Germany (he was born in 1944) with the distinct impression, at home and at school, that to speak of the closure of the war in particular was taboo. As an adult he was surprised that it was barely mentioned in post-war German literature. And while he acknowledged that a right to silence was “inviolable”, the question for Sebald remained “of why German writers would not or could not describe the destruction of the German cities as millions experienced it”.

Before looking for definitive answers in the aftermath of the Allied carpet bombing of Germany, it may prove useful to look at the populace of Dresden immediately before that city’s annihilation (on February 13, 1945) as an example of a group that had already developed a skill base centred around the necessity to ignore. Daily life requires at least the pretence of disregarding the mutterings that Germany is losing the war—as well as the stories of rape and mutilation concomitant with the Soviet advance. Best too, not to make much of the growing rumours of death camps. Dresden has embraced slavery: in the revamped factories such as Zeiss Ikon, former inmates of the Flossenbürg, Auschwitz and Ravensbrück labour camps are put to work for long hours with no pay and little food. Five days before Dresden burns, a rural medical practitioner has been guillotined. She was unwise enough, when treating the children of a Nazi officer, to express doubts of a German victory. A survival mode based on ignorance also needs to be fuelled by denial. One rumour—to counteract other less palatable rumours—does the rounds to the effect that Winston Churchill has expressly given orders for Dresden not be bombed because his American grandmother had once enjoyed staying there.

Hamburg’s Gomorrah was extensively written about by Hans Erich Nossack, a writer that Sebald cites as the only genuine exception to his thesis. In The End: Hamburg, 1943, Nossack describes raids where:

I wished very clearly: let it be a very bad one! I felt it so very clearly that I might almost say that I cried that wish alone to heaven. It was not courage but curiosity to see if my wish would be granted that never let me go down to the cellar but held me spellbound on the apartment balcony.

Many years later he would speak of “the totally unreal kind of reality in which we had to spend years … accepting it as the form of existence allotted to us”.

It was an existence that became more bizarre still as Germany floundered. Florian Huber’s Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself: The Mass Suicide of Ordinary Germans in 1945 (2019) tells of Hitler Youth members handing out cyanide capsules on April 12 at the close of the final wartime concert by the Berlin Philharmonic. Huber estimates that 4000 suicides occurred during the Battle of Berlin (April/May 1945) and quotes estimates that, in the aftermath, as many as 10,000 women may have suicided after being raped.

Photographs taken by Margaret Bourke-White and Lee Miller under the auspices of the Allied Forces depict Ernst Kurt Lisso, the once deputy mayor and city treasurer of Leipzig at his desk—slumped across it in fact—since he has not long taken his poison. So has his adult daughter, who is sprawled on a settee, one of her lifeless arms bearing an armband with the insignia of the German Red Cross. Propped nearby in a chair is the dead Mrs Lisso. Miller supposed that the Leipzig Town Hall had planned a “great party, toasted death and Hitler and poisoned themselves” for in adjoining rooms were many other bodies including the mayor and his family and the Commander of the Volkssturm.

Leipzig’s top echelon had found mirror time demanding. Auden wrote of mirrors: “some magnify, some diminish, others return lugubrious, comic, derisive, or terrifying images”. We shall be judged, he said, “by our riposte to our reflection”:

To have a face, in the European sense of the word, it would seem that one must enjoy and suffer but also desire to preserve the memory of even the most humiliating and unpleasant experiences of the past.

Sebald would agree. And this had also been the sentiment expressed poetically by Bertolt Brecht, in “Motto”, written while exiled in Denmark in the late 1930s:

In the dark times,

Will there also be singing?

Yes, there will be singing.

About the dark times.

It is important, and at some point redemptive, not to forget.

A selective memory operates in works such as Erich Kästner’s When I Was a Little Boy (1959). He describes Dresden as having been a wonderful city, adding:

And you have to take my word for it, because none of you, no matter how rich your father may be, can go there to see if I am right. For the city of Dresden is no more … In one single night … the Second World War wiped it off the map …

But he chooses not to dwell on the dark times, nor what he sees as only futility in apportioning blame.

Sebald relates how, in 1946, the Swedish journalist Stig Dagerman wrote of having felt exposed as a foreigner on a crowded German train, simply because he was the only one in his carriage prepared to look through a window. In the British Occupied Zone, Victor Gollancz writes of witnessing a “lethargy” and “lassitude” so profound in German pedestrians which, combined with an obliviousness to their surroundings, had him constantly fearing that he would run them down in his motor car.

A country that had bragged to the rest of the world of its intentions to sanitise Europe, now ironically found its devastated cities being overrun by every form of vermin, parasite and contagion. Nossack writes of the dead bodies in shelters covered by flies. Corpses in some air shelters need to be cremated in situ, using flame throwers.

So why was it that German literature, for the most part, turned its back? Sebald’s premise is that, on the one hand, the assumed “order” associated within the construct we call “natural history” had at least for a time been disassembled. He speaks of “a biological reflex set off by destruction”. While the rats and flies did very well, many human survivors seemed content to simply give up. Even many of those who maintained a stronger will did so only by accepting a form of primitivism: becoming nomads and scroungers, or living underground in what were essentially urban caves. In Hamburg in 1946, the ever-inquisitive journalist Dagerman interviewed a bank clerk who had been living as a “caveman” for three years.

For Sebald, it was Nossack alone who understood the difficulty of immediate post-war writing in Germany. Essentially it amounted to the fact that memory itself had become shameful—and unmentionable. Ponderers of the past ran the risk, in Sebald’s view, of being turned into Hamlet-types, ripe for admonishment by the machinery of an inevitable new power base. This difficulty became more pronounced with time. Why? Because the acceptable new view which evolved would necessarily console itself with the idea that the destruction of the old was an opportunity to be rid of historical burden. Over time the new view would become eulogised as the prospect of—in the western part of Germany’s post-war carving up at least—economic miracle. Ironically, however, this new view would be clearly dependent on, in Sebald’s view, the same “unquestioning work ethic” which had been “learned in a totalitarian society”. By 1975, the new view would be exported worldwide: witness to this, the insistent advice of crazed hotelier Basil Fawlty in the episode of the British television comedy Fawlty Towers titled “The Germans”: “Don’t mention the war!”

When news of Germany’s capitulation reached Thomas Mann in California, it seems to have registered only a sort of numbness. The May 1945 diaries of Germany’s most famous exile and its most vehement critic of National Socialism critic revealed only, “What I feel is not exactly rejoicing.” After a time, he comes to ask, “Rejection and condemnation of the crimes committed by National Socialism at home and abroad; expression of desire to get back to truth, justice and humanity—where are they?”

A keen student of Nietzsche, he may have had cause to remember the dictum: “He who despises himself nevertheless esteems himself as a self-despiser.” Whatever the case, he felt obliged to write: “Everything German is affected and called into question, including the German mind, German ideas, the German word …”

One of Franz Kafka’s diary entries for August 1914 reads: “Germany declared war on Russia. Swimming lesson in the afternoon.” Flippant yes, but not glib—for the two statements brilliantly and deliberately convey the idea of the great divide which lies between mere words and the horrors of war.

An entry in Mann’s August diaries for 1945 strangely echoes that of Kafka and reads: “Went to Westwood to buy white shoes and coloured shirts.—First raid on Japan with bombs utilising the energy of the split atom (uranium).”

The Second World War had left the old town of Glatz, in Lower Silesia, unscathed. There had been no bombings, no bullet had been fired. For Johannes Theiner and his wife Hildegard it was only the prospect of war’s end and a German defeat that delivered the onset of fear. Johannes had taught Latin in one of the Adolf Hitler Schools, so named because they catered for the children of the Nazi elite. The Theiners’ foreboding was intensified by a visit to Glatz by a past pupil who was on leave from the Eastern front and who had spoken at length of the atrocities he had witnessed. The couple had been shocked; Hildegard’s diary entry reveals: “Johannes had listened to it all in silence. All evening and into the night he sat pale and slumped at the window … like a man turned to stone.”

As the end approached, Johannes and Hildegard came to accept that they would be seen to have been complicit in the abominations that had been described to them. They knew that with the Soviet advance, there must be consequences.

Not long after the Russians entered the town—and having already heard that a local doctor had killed his wife and daughters, then himself, and also that a local landlord had hanged his wife—Johannes shot Hildegard, then shot himself. Those who discovered the bodies found Hildegard’s diary lying beside them. Its final entry asks: “Who will think of us, who will know how we ended? Do my words have any meaning?”

Barry Gillard, who lives in Geelong, is a frequent literary contributor. He wrote on James Joyce in the January-February issue