The End: Hamburg 1943

German novelist Nossack's brief (63 pages in this edition) contemporary account of the 1943 destruction of Hamburg by Allied bombardment is one of the small number of works available in English that deal with the events of those years from a German perspective. Its publication is clearly owed to its mention in another book, the late W.G. Sebald's best-selling and controversial On the Natural History of Destruction, which speaks highly of Nossack's account. The narrative is indeed clear-eyed and dispassionate, possessed of the emotional distance necessary to regard the terrible events in their totality. The account begins as Nossack and his wife are on holiday in the city's idyllic rural outskirts; the reader is then carried through wave after wave of firebombing and retrenchment to the point of total devastation; the confusion and horror of events are rendered with immediacy and power. (Also included are 11 contemporary halftone Erich Andres photographs.) What's missing from Nossack's account is any political or historical dimension: a reader coming to this book for primary knowledge would learn little about why the bombings took place, or why so many people accepted them with numb resignation instead of anger. But as a supplement to Sebald's more detailed consideration, Nossack's remarkable witnessing has real and urgent value.