This is a strange book, disturbing in a way neither its author nor Joel Agee, who provides the foreword as well as the translation, appears to understand. A brief reportage by the German writer Hans Erich Nossack about the destruction of his native Hamburg by Allied bombers in July 1943, it has poignant descriptive passages and alludes to the mechanics of destruction: 1,800 Allied aircraft were involved, a firestorm (then not understood) developed and Nossack estimated the numbers of dead at between 60,000 and100,000. Yet it is not a purely factual account, nor is its purpose to blame the Allies.
What matters is the tone. The high points of Nossack's description are poetic, but neither tragic nor elegiac. The most fitting word is lyrical.
But the visage of man in those days - who would dare to forget it? The eyes had grown larger and more transparent, as they appear in icons. The cold, meanly divided window glass was shattered, and through the wide openings the infinite behind man wafted unhindered into the endlessness before him and hallowed his countenance for the passage of what is beyond time. Let us cast this visage as a constellation into the sky, to remind us of our last chance before everything turns into a faceless mass.
This and similar finely written passages are misty with relig- iosity, redolent of German Romanticism and Caspar David Friedrich - and more than a little creepy. Once you get the smell, things follow with a certain predictability. Just as the images of the incineration of 3,000 souls in New York's twin towers were too alluring for aesthetes to resist applauding, the firestorm of Hamburg, says Nossack, "was almost lovely to look at". For him, this vision of hell becomes a great, mystic, chaotic thing. Rather as many a Nazi envisaged war, in fact.
Creepier still is the passage where he praises the survivors he met for their lack of wish for revenge: "for it redounds to the glory of man that on the day of reckoning he experienced his fate with such largesse of spirit". Death, glory, fate and the greatness of the people - das Volk. Are we allowed to intrude the thought that a little more German largesse of spirit (savour the phrase) in their prosecution of the war might have obviated the need for Allied attacks on the German people and for "the day of reckoning" to have come at all?
Then there came over me, I don't know from where, a feeling of joy that was so true and so compelling that I was hard put not to shout exultantly: Now at last real life begins. As if a prison door had sprung open before me and the clear air of freedom, long anticipated, were suddenly blowing in my face. It was like a fulfilment.
Do not be deluded. What Nossack has in mind is nothing so rational as freedom from the "paralysing compromises we had gotten ensnared in" (the sole reference to any personal culpability in the book) but, as he quickly makes clear, the more exalted liberation of annihilation. All this recalls the German word zerstorungslustig - taking joy in destruction. Further on, we read such phrases as "the raging of the world against itself", another fine-sounding poetic lie. Allied bombers raged against Hamburg because it was an industrial and communications centre of Hitler's war machine, whose destruction damaged his ability to vent his own infernal rage on innocents across Europe.
"The personal truth of a conscience engaged in scrupulous self-reckoning" is how the introduction describes this document, though confidence in Nossack's scrupulosity is not improved by what Agee tells us about his personal life: "The poet told some fibs and half-truths about himself - a sterner judge would call them lies . . . One of that myth's ingredients was a legend according to which the Nazis imposed an edict denying him the right to publish." Ach so. Forgive me, but I am tempted to judge him sternly, especially as we are told that he was apparently "radically un-political". Why would a non-political, conscience-scrutinising poet pretend to be an intellectual victim of the Nazis? Agee also mistranslates the title. The End has few of the Wagnerian/Faustian/Spenglerian overtones of Der Untergang, the original.
Nossack's book should be read in tandem with Diary of a Man in Despair, an evocation of a nation's diseased spirit leading to war - written by Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, a German who did not equivocate and was consequently shot. Here you get the full moral stench exuded not just by the Fuhrer (Reck-Malleczewen met him when he addressed a private group; after Hitler left the room there was silence, then someone got up and opened a window), but the schoolteachers, shopkeepers, labourers or sub-postmasters who helped give him 88 per cent of the vote. The sweat from their brown-shirted armpits is none the sweeter for coming from humble bodies.
For there is such a thing as the guilt of whole nations. Our reluctance to admit the principle is strange. We are ready enough to insist that we must all pay for the excesses of colonialism, yet we flinch from the notion that an entire generation of Germans was engaged in an evil more repellent than anything the British ever contrived.
The timing of this translation is fortuitous, but suggestive. A new film (also called Der Untergang, but to be shown in the UK as Downfall - a better translation) is said to humanise Hitler (though there are different views, and I haven't seen it). The young mayor of Berlin was recently unable to give the dates of the Second World War in a radio interview (could Prince Harry have managed it?). In framing his (otherwise understandable) appeal just before his death for franker treatment of Allied bombings in German literature, W G Sebald appeared to call for a sort of moral equation of destruction. Then there is the appalling Bernhard Schlink, whose sickly moralism and dishonest concoctions, having more to do with self-gratifying sentimentalism than remorse, go down well with German readers. Even the award-winning French novel Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky (an account of the German occupation yet to appear in English) is tougher on the French than the Germans, whom she is at pains to display in a human light. She was murdered at Auschwitz a year after finishing her novel. Meanwhile, war films continue to show the Nazis in a guyed, formulaic way and Springtime for Hitler, the musical within a musical, pokes "outrageous" fun at the Fuhrer.
Even the starkest images of the war can be overlaid with suspect motives. In Moscow recently, I saw film footage of the German occupation of Ukraine on Russian television, images more terrible than any I had seen, though the reason they were being replayed at that moment was patently to justify Moscow's interference in the Ukrainian presidential elections.
Each of these evocations of the Nazis, whether comic, factual or fictional, has its more or less persuasive rationale. Together, however, they constitute a kind of ethical obscurantism as reality slips away inch by inch. "Of course you have to remember . . ." goes the inadvertently relativising, unconsciously exculpatory refrain. There is always something we have to remember, it appears, except the enormity of Nazi evil itself. Paradoxically, Nossack's account of one of the grimmest tragedies of the war is part of this process of forgetting.
George Walden's most recent book is Who's a Dandy?: dandyism and Beau Brummell (Gibson Square)
