On the History of Destruction

Most writers, even good ones, write of what can be written. . . . The very greatest write of what cannot be written. . . . I think of Akhmatova and Primo Levi, for example, and of W. G. Sebald. The New York Times [Sebald] is writing about what he regards as a disquieting refusal to face facts--not only about what was done to the nation, but by implication, by the nation. . . . No better future for humankind is possible if we do less than look upon the crimes of our past, and their catastrophic results, with 'a steadfast gaze.'The Boston Sunday Globe. This may well be the last of Sebald's writing we'll ever have, so how amazing--and fitting--it is that it seems, in a fashion as uncanny as his prose and perceptions could often be, to close the circle of the ruminations that preoccupied his writing life. The Washington Post. Sebald approaches his subject with sensitivity, yet avoids neither descriptions of horrible carnage nor criticism of writers too preoccupied with absolving themselves of blame to faithfully portray a destroyed Germany. The result is a balanced explication of devastation and denial, and a beautiful coda for Sebald. The secret of Sebald's appeal is that he saw himself in what now seems almost an old-fashioned way as a voice of conscience, someone who remembers injustice, who speaks for those who can no longer speak. --The New York Review of Books

Published in English after the author's untimely death in 2001… Sebald's essay on the 1943 bombing of Hamburg asks how to capture true horror when all human expression tends towards the norm. --Lesley Chamberlain, New Statesman Books of the Year 2009