The End: Hamburg 1943

The original title of THE END is DER UNTERGANG, which means "the destruction," "the downfall," "the collapse." Translator Joel Agee, bearing in mind the "total collective ruin" narrated in the book, chose the title he did. Other possibilities might have been "The World Gone Under," "Fallen Away," or even "Everything in Ruins," but perhaps these alternatives are too descriptive, and the translator is right. In context, the original title signifies the end of the world that is known.Author Hans Nossack wrote down his account three months after the Allied incendiary bombing of Hamburg in July 1943. Operation Gomorrah burned up fifty thousand lives. Nossack and his wife escaped by pure chance. In the first lines he explains that he could not delay writing for fear that his mind would return to the usual ways of thinking, with their conventional verities, and lose its ability to relate the other reality of his experience. The resulting short work--63 pages of inexplicably small type--must be called a memoir, yet is something quite different: the record of a mental state, the way a person thought after being stunned into a new or previously unrecognized reality. Agee, in his short foreword, calls it a report, a testimony, yet notes that it is unbalanced as reportage and not always factual as recollection. Reality has changed, so its description falls outside of any genre. The author is still in shock but emerging from his altered state, recovering his literary powers, but as yet unable to pull himself out of the void.One can read the book as a historical document, but there is little attention to the dead, to the horrors that everyone would expect, and close attention to little details and missing objects. The Nazis and the Allies fighting the war do not seem to exist. The survivors of the bombing who need to bind together understand their special category without words and resent direct expressions of the obvious. They are like zombies. There is an occasional blurring between real and imagined or semi-hallucinatory events. It is bleak, streetless and chilling. Reading this book is like bending over a person lying in the road who softly tells you what he feels and what is numb, what is important and what no longer matters, what is real and what is not.Why stop and listen? Why dip into another's misery, now so old? Well, for one thing, we always need to consider the most horrible possibilities. For another, we are still jumpy after the attacks of 9/11, and perhaps can profit from an account of ultimate disaster and survival. For a third, it is good for the soul to look back to Hamburg 1943 and hear from the victims, since it is always better to identify with victims, whether they be Jews in Nazi concentration camps or German citizens in Allied firestorms. But one advisory: don't read this book for its literary quality. It's too real for that.

Nossack's text is only sixty-three pages -a one to two hour read that you will not forget. What is most remarkable about this eye-witness description of the annihilation of Hamburg is the understatement throughout. "We had no beds, no blankets, no coats, no warm underwear and above all no shoes. Suddenly we thought we had come to realize that these things were the only necessities of life. We passed on this new insight to friends in urgently worded letters: Drop everything. Just keep your winter clothes and solid shoes!" Or later he writes: "But now when nothing was left? Not the corpse of the city, not something known and now dead, that would speak to us: Alas yesterday, when I still lived, I was your home -- no, there was no need to mourn. What surrounded us did not remind us in any way of what was lost. It had nothing to do with it. It was something else, it was strangeness itself, it was the essentially not possible." The book is filled with passages like this and filled with least details that in some mysteriously poetic way let you approach the boundary of the "essentially not possible". I haven't read the original German but the translation reads superbly and there's a fine foreword by the translator, Joel Agee. In sum: a powerfully moving threnody not only for the horrors of all wars but for all lost things, for the "always leaving" of our lives...

Found this from W.G. Sebald's remarks about post war German writing on the bombing devastation, or lack of much such writing. This is as fine as Sebald felt it was. The photos added to the text were harrowing. Nossack is remarkable in his utterly unsentimental dispassionate, matter of fact recording of his experiences of the firebombing of Hamburg. When an experience of such utter devastation and the destruction of all ones personal bearings of identity and place and belonging have been utterly destroyed - randomly, arbitrarily (our apartment-house was gone, the neighbors' still stood) - words of sentiment, judgement or moral reference lose all meaning or significance. It is only for works such as this that the word "awesome" retains its original and true meaning. - I can also recommend Sebald's other positive reference Heinrich Boll's "The Silent Angel" A very early work long withheld from publication. Brilliant. And, indeed, Sebald's own non fiction lectures"On The Natural History Of Destruction. Why?50,000,000 died because some others lost touch with reality. Reality? That which is left to us when all our illusions are obliterated before our eyes. And we are still alive.

I cannot rave enough about this book. At this point in my life I have read many many books and I put this one on my favorites list. The language is of the highest level. Nossack writes poetically and this is no simple feat considering the subject. The book contains photos which are as heart wrenching as the tale itself. I could not put this book down I was moved to tears by the suffering and devastation recounted by Nossack.

Great book. I wrote my senior thesis on the fire bombings of WWII and was shocked with the atrocities that occurred in the name of science. This is a very short read and sheds light on one of the most deadliest fire bombings of WWII.

Fantastic book. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in a first-hand description of the civilian experience of war.

great

book arrived as promised

Required reading for university