Sebald's 'On the Natural History of Destruction' Examines German Wartime Silence

W.G. Sebald's 1999 essay 'On the Natural History of Destruction' (published in French as 'De la destruction comme élément de l'histoire naturelle' by Actes Sud) investigates the Allied bombing raids on German cities during World War II and the subsequent silence in German literature. Sebald (1944–2001) argues that most German writers avoided the subject in fiction, with exceptions like Nossack, Kasack, and Böll, whose 'The Silence of the Angel' remained unpublished for 40 years. He cites statistics: seven million homeless, six hundred thousand civilian casualties, one million tons of bombs. The essay critiques the denial and aestheticization of destruction in ruin literature, noting that even authors who testified failed to convey the true tragedy of burned populations and devastated cities like Cologne, Dresden, and Hamburg. Sebald questions where the ideal of truth lies, showing how some novelists wrapped historical facts in kitsch. A second essay examines Alfred Andersch, who masked his biography through fiction. The book reveals the perverse effects of language on a generation marked by the evacuation of truth.