False alarms
Paul Addison
The story that Churchill is to be deleted from the history curriculum
in the UK would be very disturbing if true but appears to be very
misleading. In the past the curriculum authority has not only
specified the subjects that have to be taught, but has added detailed
instructions. In future the instructions are to be less detailed.
Therefore although the Second World War will remain (like the First) a
compulsory subject, the instructions will no longer refer to Hitler,
Stalin or Churchill by name. It is just conceivable that behind this
lies the notion that the 'great men' can be taken out of history,
which would certainly be a mistake, but the official argument is that
it would be impossible to teach the Second World War without
discussing Churchill, Hitler and Stalin, which is a very different
matter from deleting or downgrading Churchill. The rest of Churchill's
life has never been on the curriculum, but if it were it would
demonstrate among other things the power of press to distort the
record - with Churchill as one of the main victims.
Paul Addison
Antoine Capet
After your Dresden piece, I thought you might be interested in this H-Diplo
"dual review".
Best,
Antoine Capet
=======
Dual Review of Jörg Friedrich. The Fire: The Bombing of Germany,
1940-1945. Trans. by Allison Brown. New York: Columbia University
Press, 2006. 532 pp. Editorial remarks, afterword, photographs,
bibliographical references, and index. ISBN 978-0-231-13380-7.
Introduction by Antoine Capet, Université de Rouen (France)
Reviewed by Gerhard L. Weinberg, University of North Carolina Emeritus,
and Wilfried Wilms, University of Denver
------------------------------------------------
[Editorial note: Special characters, including umlauts and diacritics,
may not display properly on all e-mail clients and web browsers. A
fully-formatted PDF version of this review is available at
http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/books/PDF/TheFire-DualReview.pdf ]
Introduction by Antoine Capet, Université de Rouen (France)
Subscribers to H-Diplo will be aware that one of the fastest-growing
"lines" in publishing on the Second World War - admittedly catching up
on lost time - is the debate on the bombing of Germany. I was going to
say "by the Allies" - but in fact only by the two major Western Allies,
especially the Royal Air Force - since in this field the Red Air Force
is absolved from all "war crimes" (this is the expression now used by
some critics like the British philosopher A.C. Grayling,1 though
generally with a question mark - but for how long?) The debate has been
going on for a long time among military historians on the respective
merits of daylight "precision" bombing as supposedly practiced by the
USAAF (United States Army Air Forces) versus "area" or "carpet"
night-time bombing favored by the Royal Air Force.2
What is new is that the discussion has now shifted from the purely
"technical" ground - in which victims were simply mathematical
statistics providing arguments for or against a given bombing technique,
like the ratio between the forces engaged (including the losses of
personnel and aircraft) and the result in terms of casualties - to the
high moral ground of justification3 in the etymological sense: was the
Allied air war a "just" war? The trend started by seminal works like
those of Sebald4 was taken up most successfully in terms of impact and
sales in Germany (and among the commentators who could read German) by
Jörg Friedrich, with his 2002 book, Der Brand: Deutschland im
Bombenkrieg 1940-1945.5 The work was immediately perceived as highly
problematic when it was first published in German, as a number of
important reviews testify.6
Now that this English translation has appeared, making the book
accessible to those who do not read German, it seemed appropriate for
the H-Diplo editors to start a discussion in which a wider scholarly
community will be able to participate. Some specialists of the subject
who had originally agreed to give their views have finally preferred to
withdraw, for various personal reasons - but H-Diplo is proud to publish
the reactions which two scholars coming from different generations of
Second World War historians have agreed to offer.
Review by Gerhard L. Weinberg,
University of North Carolina Emeritus
Before entering my comments on the book, I need to disclose two prior
personal connections with the book and its author. Most importantly,
when consulted by another university press about the advisability of
publishing a translation of the 2002 original German edition, I advised
against doing so on the basis that the work did not advance knowledge
sufficiently to merit publication by a university press.1
Since there is no useful background provided in the book, it may be
helpful to offer a brief survey. Germany had introduced two new methods
of warfare in World War I: the bombing of cities far removed from the
fighting front and the use of poison gas at the front. Since the Allies
were unenthusiastic about these innovations, both were prohibited to
Germany by the peace treaty. As the government of imperial Germany had
done what it could to assist the Bolsheviks in gaining power in Russia,
it was perhaps appropriate that in the 1920's the latter assisted the
Germans in evading the treaty provisions. After Hitler came to power in
Germany, his government continued development in both fields but would
eventually refrain from the employment of gas for fear of retaliation.
Bombing of cities, however, was to become a critical element in German
war planning at the same time as others increasingly turned away from
it. It was while initiating the burning down of their own cities in
November 1938 by setting fire to Jewish houses of worship all over the
country that the Germans made an important discovery about the potential
role of fire in air raids. As Hans Rumpf, who would be in charge of
fire-fighting in the war, noted in his early survey of the fire bombing
of German cities, _Der Hochrote Hahn2 it was the number of fires started
simultaneous in larger cities that, though not fought under the
circumstances, showed how quickly the fire fighting facilities of a
community could be overwhelmed.
When Germany started World War II, President Roosevelt asked the
belligerents not to bomb cities; an appeal that was answered by the
dropping of a bomb on the grounds of the American embassy in Warsaw. As
the recent publication of the German Historical Institute in Warsaw
explains, the opening act of the German campaign was an early morning
air attack on the undefended Polish town of Wilun, in which 1,200
civilians were killed.3 In spite of this and other such attacks on
Polish cities, described as "terror attacks" in his diary by the chief
of the German army general staff, the British air force was restricted
by the government in London to the dropping of leaflets on German
cities. The Germans thought this a preposterous way of waging war.
They insisted on dropping bombs, not leaflets, on British towns, like
the summer resort and boarding school center of Swanage where I then
lived and survived because a large bomb dropped on the school grounds
did not explode.
It was in response to the German invasion of a series of neutral
countries in the spring and summer of 1940, accompanied by the bombing
of cities, the machine-gunning of fleeing refugees, and attacks on
cities in the United Kingdom, that the restrictions on the Royal Air
Force were lifted. If this was the sort of war that Germany wanted,
Britain would oblige them. A further element came to be included in the
British calculations. If the German people, not just their government,
were to move in new directions after Allied victory, then they needed to
see in World War II what they had not seen in World War I, namely that
devastation in modern war was not going to be restricted to the cities
and countryside of others. What came to be called "reeducation" was to
begin during hostilities. The significance of this for postwar Germany
is analyzed in Konrad H. Jarausch's recent book, After Hitler:
Recivilizing Germans, 1945-1995.4 There is only a minimal reference to
this issue on Friedrich's book (p. 353).
The bulk of the book is devoted to a very confused and confusing set of
accounts of various air raids on cities in different portions of
Germany. There is a mixture of technical detail and human stories, but
there is neither a chronological structure nor any indication of general
impact. Such critical contextual and historical issues as the so-called
"euthanasia" program (pp. 388-89), the distribution of Jewish property
to those bombed out (p. 389), and the lynching of Allied airmen (pp.
433-34) are barely touched on. Errors are scattered through the book.
Scholars who have used either the original German World War II records
in Freiburg or the microfilms of them in the United States or elsewhere
will be astonished to learn that they were "all" destroyed (p. 474). On
the other hand, the author does offer sensible comments on the issues of
looting and denunciations with the punishments inflicted on those
charged with looting or improper truths. The details of shelter and
bunker construction and the problems of underground connectors between
cellars will be of interest to those concerned with these more technical
issues. They will, unfortunately, not gain much insight into the
broader issues of the air war or its impact on Germany's population and
general war effort. As the book by the German Historical Institute in
Warsaw cited above mentions in its introduction to the air war on
Poland: "When Allied bombers years later flew above German cities, the
air war that the German armed forces themselves had begun in Poland
returned to Germany."5 On September 1, 1939, there were no four-engine
bombers in either the British or the American air force. Perhaps the
old saying that people in glass houses should not throw stones ought to
be supplemented by the suggestion that they should also not throw bombs.
Gerhard L. Weinberg is William Rand Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of
history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Weinberg's
first book was the Guide to Captured German Documents, (1952). He is
the author of many works, including the two-volume history of Hitler's
diplomatic preparations for war: The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany
(1970 and 1980; republished 1994). The first volume of The Foreign
Policy of Hitler's Germany received the George Louis Beer Prize of the
American Historical Association in 1971. Weinberg has published dozens
of articles on the war and volumes of collected essays such as World in
the Balance: Behind the Scenes of World War II (1981). He capped these
studies with his 1000-page history of the Second World War, A World at
Arms: A Global History of World War II (1994; republished in 2005).
His most recent publications are Hitler's Second Book: The Unpublished
Sequel to Mein Kampf by Adolf Hilter (2003) Visions of Victory: The
Hopes of Eight World War II Leaders (2005) and the forthcoming
re-publication of Hitler's Table Talk 1941 -1944 (2007).
The Doers of their Deeds
Review by Wilfried Wilms
University of Denver
Pasts that are no longer talked about vanish. The ruined remnants of
cities turn into stones that are no longer grasped (begriffen, as the
German has it so accurately) in physical terms - that is, once they have
been replaced by new structures, we do not, or cannot, comprehend their
meaning any longer. But neither are they grasped in an epistemological
sense, because we have already learned, presumably, all there is to
learn about the bloodiest conflict of the 20th century, at least in
terms of right and wrong, good and bad, perpetrators, victims, and
liberators.
In The Fire, however, Jörg Friedrich transforms rubble that was left
'un-grasped' for decades into perfectly graspable landscapes. Under
Friedrich's barrage, what becomes clear is how the moralistic squabble
surrounding right and wrong is of secondary importance in the face of so
much willful destruction and death. It is well worth following
Friedrich on this journey through Europe's darkest chapter at the end of
which stands, among other dark monuments, an Anglo-European
Gesamtkunstwerk of the scientific mass destruction of civilians and
historic habitat from the air, perfected and delivered, between 1940 and
1945 - and this is what certainly won't sit well with many readers of
his tome - primarily by US and British Air Forces. For anybody familiar
with heroic tales of freedom and liberation sent from the blue yonder
this book will be a bitter pill. Friedrich's Fire can be painful indeed.
His language, an odd mixture of sobriety and pathos on which I comment
further below, burns into the readers' skin. Excesses (or deformities)
of his approach, however, that spring from that very pathos, as well as
an embitterment we sense reverberating throughout the chapters, may
simply fatigue readers. His language of destruction rumbles over the
reader - and over something we may want to call 'established etiquette'
- like a freight train. It challenges, even provokes, on nearly every
page. But that, in my mind, does not disqualify the book in any strictly
academic sense. It is engagingly written, passionate in its many moments
of utter dismay and disbelief, and forceful in its criticism of what he
observes on both sides of the conflict: the sheer will to destroy life
and habitation, often largely independent of military necessity and the
custom of warfare. And here it matters little to him that Hitler's
Nazi-Germany only invited "destructive revenge" for its own "destructive
rage" (203). What lingers is destruction and eternal loss he deems
'un-grasped.' Yet, despite its linguistically gift-wrapped infatuation
with human callousness in times of total war, The Fire by no means
jettisons scholarly standards, and Friedrich is perfectly capable of
providing a balanced account. Friedrich doesn't fabricate or leave
gaping holes, and he does succeed in shedding light on German intentions
and (mis)deeds for as long as they have to do with the actual subject
matter at hand: the killing of civilians from the air in total war and,
more to the point, the planning, execution, and experience of the
strategic bombing campaign. Friedrich doesn't fail to mention Warsaw and
Rotterdam, and he describes at length German attacks on England during
the Blitz; he explains the gruesome and indiscriminate nature of V1 and
V2, recalls the lynching of Allied personnel shot down over Germany by
outraged mobs with a "seething hunger for revenge" and full of "hatred"
for the British attacker who now needed to be "exterminated" (427). When
necessary he reminds readers of the appalling treatment Jews received
and of slave laborers forced to support the German war machine, and
describes hardcore Nazis ("martial combat commanders" and "fanatics,"
142, 134) defending their positions with absurd eagerness - Friedrich,
in short, provides it all. One thing, however, that he doesn't do is to
simply fall back on the familiar schoolyard fray of the 'you started it'
or 'you had it coming to you' kind that had put a public lid on the
Allied bombing campaign for a long time.1 So what if the Germans were
the pioneers of air attacks on civilians? (they weren't, but that is
beside the point and is schoolyard material). Would that make it
obsolete to investigate - and evaluate - the Allied air campaign? And if
not obsolete: how about inappropriate, or even immoral? Or undesirable?
Dangerous? That strategic bombing was embraced as a military doctrine
primarily by England and the United States after the Great War, and that
during the Second World War it was perfected and carried out by these
two air powers over dozens upon dozens of German cities (as well as
other European cities and of course Japan) until these had simply
vanished, is hardly Friedrich's fault.
That and the manner in which, when The Fire appeared in its German
original as Der Brand in 2002, some critics found fault with Jörg
Friedrich nevertheless, is more interesting than the book itself anyway.
Friedrich doesn't unearth anything truly new. Specialized studies by
historians of many nationalities have been telling audiences about the
air war for many years now and the development of both strategy and
weapon itself in the interwar years. Think, for instance, of the many
good contributions by Rumpf, Groehler, Garrett, Schaffer, Middlebrook,
McKee, Lindquist, Longmate, Kennett, and, more recently, Grayling.
Anyone who cares to could read up on punitive bombing missions by the
British in their colonies years ago, or about 'Douhetism' and its
advocates Hugh Trenchard (in England) or Billy Mitchell (in the U.S.).
Or about German Zeppelins over London during the First World War. It's
all there. But also true is that not one of these authors provide what
we may call a Hausbuch of Germany during the air war. Friedrich, who
even decided to have parts of his book printed upfront by Germany's
notorious tabloid Bild, chose a more popular venue for his contribution.
And outside the hands of historians, that is, outside a rigorously
scholastic context, his tome indeed became a public event. In this
respect, The Fire is unique. The fact that it is now available in
English translation may be even more significant than its immense impact
on the German public sphere. To be perfectly blunt: Americans need the
book more than did the Germans. American involvement in the strategic
air campaign over Europe and Japan is disgracefully underrepresented in
the sacred memory of the 'good war.' Here, America relies on an
astonishing forgetfulness of its involvement as the systematic bombing
and killing represents a part of America's history it prefers to ignore.
One need only remember the illuminating debate around the Enola Gay
exhibit in the Smithsonian Museum a decade ago.2 With The Fire now
available in English, the air war over European and Japanese cities will
become a little harder to disregard.
Friedrich lists - especially in the third chapter, Land - city after
city, attack after attack, and does so in a way that the reading
experience itself begins to mimic the very "mindless grinding down to
the stump of cities" (218) he criticizes. The reader can't help but
repeat that process every time s/he turns the page. And it's brilliant.
The intentionally painful process aims to penetrate our imagination
until we grasp how approximately 500.000 civilians, among them tens of
thousands of slave laborers and Allied POWs, not to mention children
(about 75.000 under the age of 14), were blown to smithereens, burned,
suffocated, and boiled within the remains of a long and rich German
history. German culture had found expression in architecture heavy with
stone and wood - cultural treasures that also could not evade the
explosive and incendiary bombs that rained upon them until they were no
more. The last chapter - Stone - is a logical third step in Friedrich's
account of the air war as "Leideform" (the English translation has it as
"the suffering on the ground" 481). The Fire is all about how the bombs
were endured, received, suffered, absorbed (all possible translations of
'erleiden') by the community (chapter 3: We), by the individual (chapter
4: I) and, finally, by the habitat itself (chapter 5: Stone). The
community disintegrates along with central features of civilization,
losing all concern for those near and dear; the individual disintegrates
physically (literally, that is, crushed, pulverized, burned ... ); the
habitat - houses, churches, squares, archives, monuments, etc. - returns
irreparably to dust, and with it historical depth and origin. Chapter 5
might be Friedrich's most passionate and vivid.
Nothing but the stones have passed on the familiarity of distant places.
They were found, transformed, left behind, and they set - in addition to
a lifespan - a second measure of time. Stone gave it a physicality and
structure. The fifteenth-century city hall, with slated Renaissance
gables and set on angular columns; the Old Castle at Brandplatz, the
castle of the Hessian landgrave with a keep from the fourteenth century
that became a royal court in the nineteenth century and was later
covered with Renaissance elements; the Burgmannen House of 1349, one of
Hesse's oldest half-timbered buildings; the classicist Old Clinic of
1819; the art nouveau theater of 1906 - they all communicated their
origins. Forms and patinas were communicative even before any academic
interpretation. They generated a sound the people could simply hear.
Bomber Command eliminated this resonance in the stone all across the
country. Now it is missing. (467)
So, if Friedrich's book is indeed less remarkable for what it tells than
for how it does so, what seems to be at stake that it evokes such strong
unease? Richard Bernstein - who reviewed Friedrich's meticulously
detailed and emotively articulated blow by blow, almost bomb by bomb
account of the air war in 2003 for the New York Times - expressed
concern about the German public's reception of the book.3 "But the
reaction to Mr. Friedrich's book," he wrote, is something special, more
visceral and widespread, and it brings questions to mind: Is there a
danger that the Germans will conflate their suffering with the vastly
greater and more unforgivable suffering they inflicted on millions of
others, including both the genocidal slaughter of the Jews and the
bombing raids on London, Coventry, Warsaw and Rotterdam? Have the
Germans attached themselves to Mr. Friedrich's book...because it gives
them a rare and intoxicating taste of the moral high ground?4
Moral high ground, as Americans well know, is valuable real estate. What
is interesting here is not who gets to charge the rent, but why a
discussion of English and American bombing policy need be conducted on
that particular plot of contested turf. One can include moral/ethical
viewpoints in discussions about the history and human costs of military
and political decisions without thereby claiming to be the king of this
or that hill. Or more to the point: one can examine what those human and
cultural costs actually were (especially in relation to their "gains")
and whether they would be ever worth repeating. Such questions seem to
concern neither Mr. Bernstein nor many of Friedrich's initial critics in
Germany. Ein Volk von Opfern?5 (A People of Victims?), a collection of
dissonant voices responding to Friedrich, provides easy access to
representative positions. One finds, for instance, the occasional
positive assessment. Twisting the "inability to mourn" trope into a
shape it was not designed to take, Cora Stephan praised the book as "an
act of love, an homage to a history, the loss of which the postwar
generation of Germans were not allowed to mourn." She also reverses the
trajectory of culpability: "The undeniable guilt of the Germans has made
it possible for their neighbors to ignore their own involvement. Now,
however, the various evasions are starting to be noticed." Ultimately,
Stephan hoped that The Fire might aid a future "retreat from moral
certainty, which the enemy used to justify its terrifying means of
waging war"6 - an apparent attempt not to occupy the moral high ground,
but to leave it permanently vacant. Wolfgang Sofsky refers to the 'you
started it' mentality and specious claims that the bombing war was in
some way a direct response to or retribution for the Holocaust as the
"confused logic" of a "Sunday School morality" ("Kindermoral"). "Between
air war and genocide neither a causal nor premeditated connection
existed." We could therefore say that Friedrich's study actually shows
structural rigor by doing without excessive references to Germany's war
of aggression or, as is common in publications of this sort, the
Holocaust. No matter how cruel the Nazis were, Sofsky argued, no matter
how guilty they are and always will be for unleashing war and for
persecuting and murdering millions - the air war against German
civilians remains for him "terror" against the "defenseless."7 But apart
from these impassioned dissident views, the discussion was primarily
characterized by the resurfacing of familiar tropes and reminders, such
as Willi Winkler's complaint that The Fire is nothing but an
a-historical "balancing of accounts" ("Aufrechnungsbedürfnis"),
comparable perhaps to the self-pitying reactions of the immediate
postwar period. He concludes in time-honored fashion: "No matter what:
it was the Germans who started it."8 As might be expected, contributions
from across the Channel were even less sympathetic.9
Perhaps Friedrich's purported challenge to the former Allies' claim to
sole possession of the fabled moral high ground generated such a stir
because of the real or feigned fear of German unification and its
ultimate consequences. More likely, however, the reason lies elsewhere.
With the United States now the sole occupier of the world's military
high ground, America's claim to moral righteousness is more urgent than
ever. As the cultural and political reaction of the 1980s and '90s
demonstrated, the type of self-doubt and critical examination that the
Vietnam War provoked earlier is now strictly forbidden. Instead,
veneration of the 1940s in film, television, and the printed
hagiographies of a dying generation are to be preferred. And after
September 11, 2001, the United States could openly and eagerly embrace
the coveted badge of "victimhood" and only allow one set of legitimate
martyrs to airborne assaults. It will therefore be interesting to watch
American reactions to the English translation of Friedrich's work.
More likely than not, Friedrich's linguistic virtuosity will find its
critics. The book's tone is at times colloquial, even leaning to slang.
It can oscillate between disbelieving hilarity and downright disgust,
can convey dismay as much as scorn. One typical passage might suffice
here to illustrate this, one that describes an event late in the war -
the winter and spring of 1945 - a crucial time for Friedrich's ultimate
evaluation of events:
An inexplicable destructive drunkenness must have been what finally
reduced old Danzig to ruins on March 26, 1945. Only six weeks later it
would become a polish city, Gdansk. Not one single church remained
untouched: St. Barbara's, St. Bartholomew's, St. John's, St. Joseph's,
St. Catherine's, and St. Bridget's suffered most. Saints Peter and
Paul's, St. Elizabeth's, St. Ignatius's, St. James's, and the Church of
the holy Trinity were severely damaged. The war against Germany's
present existence had finally been won. The war against the roots of the
past that had borne the disaster still had to be brought to completion,
but it was only a matter of days, and the aim was to destroy as much as
possible. "Not wanting to die for Danzig" was an inglorious motto at the
start of the war; and at the end, Danzig had to die as proof that there
was no lack of militancy against Arthur's Court, the Great Mill, the
Main Town Hall, the Holy Ghost Gate, and the Great Crane, built in 1444
as both the city's port crane and a city gate, the symbol of the city.
The granaries on Granary Island were conquered, as were the wealthy rows
of patrician homes, demolished street by street. (163)10
Some will embrace his linguistic fireworks as brilliant and simply enjoy
the book's virtuosity - even though the English translation often fails
to reach the associative opulence of the German original; others will
dismiss it as over the top and lacking in scholastic moderation or tact.
Allow me to highlight some of these rockets - in both languages. We read
of Allied "Zündungsabsicht" ("the intention was still fireraising" 128),
the attacks themselves were sometimes "Strafaktionen" ("reprisal
actions" 144), and on occasion the air forces returned for an
"Ehrenrunde" ("a victory lap"186) over already destroyed habitat.
Similarly, the Allies "mähten die Flüchtlinge nieder" ("senseless
hunting down of people" 149), often produced a "blankes Massaker" (an
"absolute massacre" 161). "Massacre" appears often, at times in compound
form ("Zivilmassaker" - "civilian massacres" 109, 294) or
"Kolossalmassaker" ("colossal massacre" 310), and at other times with
adjectives like "blank" ("absolute" 161) or "pur" ("purely" 294). We
read of "Krematorien" ("crematoria" 93, 167, 340) and "Gaskeller" ("gas
cellar" 290), "fortgesetzte Massenausrottung" ("continued mass
extermination" 97) of German civilians, or of "Massenabschlachtung"
("mass slaughter" 253). British Bomber Command Group No. 5 are
characterized as "Massenvernichtungstruppe" ("Mass Destruction Group"
306) with "vandalischer Tobsucht" ("a vandalistic fit of raving madness"
277), and Churchill "schlachtete" ("slaughtered" 109) civilians, they
themselves are "die Gemarterten" ("the tormented bodies" 377) on the
ground. They were "vergast" ("gassed" 331), "gedämpft und geröstet"
("steamed and roasted" 339), "zerkocht", "verkohlt" ("boiled", "charred"
376). The cities and thus Germany's reified history were "niedergefeilt"
and "fortgekehrt" ("filed down" and "swept away" 467), "beseitigt"
("eliminated" 224), "verschlissen" ("worn down" 319), "zerklopft"
("pounded" 278) or just "stupide abgefeilt" ("mindless grinding down"
218). Indiscriminate and thus morally dubious from the start, the bomb
as "Erzieher" ("educator" 466) certainly loses all truly military
purpose and legitimacy for Friedrich near the end of the war when the
"Tötungsprozedur" ("killing procedure" 379) continues simply because it
can be done. But careful! What appears unduly grandiloquent in such
artificial isolation loses, for the most part, its inappropriateness in
the context in which it stands. To sack the text because of its style or
because it dares to speak of gas and
cremation outside the context of Auschwitz is, in my view, to avoid the
issue by means of a much more inappropriate withdrawal into a moral
outrage that only hides an agenda. And more importantly, it misses
Friedrich's effort to place the bombing in the vicinity of the Holocaust
not in order to claim any moral equivalency - as there is none -, but
rather to bemoan a general disregard for human life that, in both
instances, seems to go hand in hand with the scientific nature of the
planned slaughter of humans. If, provoked by these associations, readers
walk away from the text assuming that Friedrich is either negligent or
revisionist, they will have missed the mark. Friedrich's choices are, of
course, deliberate. His is a calculated comparison and provocation that
wishes to expose commonalities, not equivalencies. The commonality for
us to recognize and come to terms with is the scientific nature of
extermination in total war that befell all warring parties alike.
Friedrich concludes that an orgy of revenge becomes unleashed between
January and May of 1945 - a time during which 130.000 civilians get
killed, and cities like Pforzheim, Würzburg, and Dresden cease to exist.
Should you have trouble getting your mind around this figure: that makes
about 1000 killed a day, or two Coventrys daily when the war is already
lost. Friedrich attributes this final crescendo to one central factor:
the potential to destroy is simply at hand, meaning that after hundreds
of practice runs over large and small cities the expertise is finally
available: the planes, the bombs, the knowledge. And then there seems to
be a desire to teach these Germans a lesson. Friedrich doubts the
usefulness of the air war, especially when weighed against its gains,
even though it certainly helped to win the war. The Fire remains
unambiguous in its portrayal of this weapon as in and of itself
barbarous. Perhaps worse, the air war also broke with customs that had
at least tried to distinguish between combatants and non-combatants. But
beyond good and evil, at least for me, is something like Friedrich's
"mongolischer Luftvernichtungsorkan" ("Mongol hurricane of devastation"
118). A linguistic monster like that has downright racist undertones and
doesn't belong in the book. Here, even I give up and roll my eyes. But
maybe Mr. Friedrich can explain.
A public discussion of strategic bombing that recognizes doers and deeds
in clear terms is long overdue on both sides of the Atlantic. But maybe
the majority of us prefer to hear about 'collateral damage' over a cup
of Café Latte or Caramel Macchiato. Somehow a sanitized version of
warfare against civilians goes together better with designer coffee and
light jazz than mangled corpses, crushed limbs, or charred bodies of all
ages - not to mention a handful of gruesome photographs that are
included in the translated edition. That that conveys more about us than
about Friedrich's book goes without saying. Perhaps we have become
morally numb - or maybe just smug. The fact that we care so much about
what happened between 1937 and 1945 and not enough about what happened
before and since may be a sign of the faulty lessons that we - Allies
and Germans - drew in 1945 and that we - Americans and Europeans -
continue to draw today. Perhaps new lessons need to be learned, which
may be the most desirable reason for reopening the wounds of the past.
To talk of the mass slaughter of human beings as a "just retribution"
for the mass slaughter of human beings, especially now, in an age of
nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, would seem to disqualify
anyone from occupying anything that resembles moral ground, whether high
or low. I, for one, prefer to be disturbed, to have my own smugness
stripped away from me if only for a few hours of attention-grabbing
reading. That Friedrich's text will indeed take hold of you, I deem
quite probable.
Wilfried Wilms is an Assistant Professor of German Studies at the
University of Denver. His research focuses on the history, memory and
representation of war/conflict in literature and film. A current book
project, Proper Conduct: Taboo, Repression and the Politics of Memory,
investigates the undesired outcomes of specific Allied reeducation
strategies on German postwar politics. His publications include Editor
(together with William Rasch, Indiana U) of No Time for Love. German
Rubble Films (under review). Bombs Away - Representing the Air War over
Europe and Japan. Editor (together with William Rasch) of special issue
of Amsterdamer Beiträge zur neueren Germanistik. Amsterdam: Rodopi 2006.
404pp; "Rubble without a Cause. The Air War in Postwar Film."
Forthcoming in No Time for Love. German Rubble Films. "Dismantling the
Bourgeois Family: J.M.R. Lenz' 'Soldatenfamilie'." Forthcoming in
Monatshefte für deutschsprachige Literatur und Kultur (Fall 2008);
"Uncovering Their Stories: The Rubble of Memory and the Bombing War."
(together with William Rasch). Introduction to Bombs Away: Representing
the Air War over Europe and Japan. Special issue of Amsterdamer Beiträge
zur neueren Germanistik. Amsterdam: Rodopi 2006: 7-21; "Hollywood's
Celluloid Air War." In Bombs Away. Amsterdam: Rodopi 2006: 355-74;
"Taboo and Repression in W.G. Sebald's On the Natural History of
Destruction." W. G. Sebald: A Critical Companion. Eds. Anne Whitehead
and Jonathan Long. U of Edinburgh Press 2004 [paperback U of Washington
P 2004]: 175-90. "The Universalist Spirit of Conflict - Lessing's
Political Enlightenment." Monatshefte für deutschsprachige Literatur und
Kultur. Vol. 94.3 (2002): 306-322.
Copyright (c) 2007 by H-Net. H-Net permits the redistribution and
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For any other proposed use, contact the H-Diplo Editors at
h-d...@h-net.msu.edu.
Notes
1 Grayling, Anthony C. Among the dead Cities : Was the Allied Bombing of
Civilians in WWII a Necessity or a Crime? London : Bloomsbury, 2006
(Among the dead Cities : The History and moral Legacy of the WWII
Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan. New York : Walker & Company,
2006. Die toten Städte : Waren die alliierten Bombenangriffe
Kriegsverbrechen ? München : Bertelsmann, 2007). Interestingly, the idea
of 'war crimes' is totally absent from the title of the American
edition, while it is there in full in the German translation.
2 Arguably starting (if we discount pre-war pioneer authors who based
their theories on extrapolations from the Great War and the Spanish
Civil War) with De Seversky, (Major) Alexander Procofieff. Victory
through Air Power. London & New York : Hutchinson & Co., Ltd, 1942 (to
which a critique was promptly addressed: Stewart, Edith Helen Vane
Tempest (Marchioness of Londonderry). The Fleet of the Future : An
important Examination of Major Alexander Seversky's famous 'Victory
through Air Power'. London : Hutchinson & Co., Ltd, 1943). More recent
technical discussions will be found in Tami Davis Biddle's Ph.D. Thesis
(Yale University, 1995), 'Rhetoric and reality in air warfare : The
evolution of British and American ideas about strategic bombing,
1917-1945', now published in book form, Rhetoric and Reality in Air
Warfare : The Evolution of British and American Ideas about strategic
Bombing, 1914-1945. Princeton Studies in International History and
Politics. Princeton : University Press, 2002.
3 This is made perfectly clear in the title of a German book which
appeared in the spring: Fritze, Lothar. Die Moral des Bombenterrors :
Alliierte Flächenbombardements im Zweiten Weltkrieg. München : Olzog,
2007. The "blurb" naturally insists on the "right-and-wrong" dimension
of the bombing campaign: "Der Denkansatz des Buches beruht auf einem
unstrittigen Grundsatz: nämlich, dass auch ein gerechtfertigter
Verteidiger bei seiner Verteidigung Regeln zu beachten hat. Diese Regeln
sind teils völkerrechtlicher, teils moralischer Natur [...] Das Anliegen
des Buches ist es, am Beispiel der westalliierten Flächenbombardements
auf Deutschland die Begründungslast aufzuzeigen, die zu tragen hat, wer
die alliierte Kriegführung pauschal als legitim betrachtet".
4 Sebald, W.G. Luftkrieg und Literatur - Mit einem Essay zu Alfred
Andersch. München : Karl Hanser Verlag, 1999 (Originally published in
German by Hanser as Luftkrieg und Literatur in 1999 and in slightly
different form : On the natural History of Destruction : With Essays on
Alfred Andersch, Jean Améry and Peter Weiss. Translated from the German
by Anthea Bell. London : Hamish Hamilton, 2003).
5 Friedrich, Jörg. Der Brand : Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940-1945.
München : Propyläen, 2002.
6 Notably, in chronological order :
-Arnold, Jörg. 'Der Brand. Deutschland im Bombenkrieg 1940-1945. 11th
edition. Munich: Propyläen Verlag, 2002'. H-German (2003). Online on :
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=280291070845163
This is now part of a wider forum on H-German (with contributions by
Carole Anne Costabile-Heming, Scott Denham, Gerald Fetz, Charles Maier,
Douglas Peifer and Julia Torrie), online on :
http://www.h-net.org/~german/discuss/WWII_bombing/WWII-bombing_index.htm
-Ebbinghaus, Angelika. 'Deutschland im Bombenkrieg : Ein missglücktes
Buch über ein wichtiges Thema'. Social Geschichte : Zeitschrift für
Historische Analyse des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts 18-2 (2003) : 101-122.
-Naumann, Klaus. 'Bombenkrieg - Totaler Krieg - Massaker : Jörg
Friedrichs Buch "Der Brand" in der Diskussion'. Mittelweg 36 (4/2003) :
49-60.
-Peifer, Douglas. H-German (2003). Online on :
http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/reviewsw159.htm
-Schütze, Christian. 'On That Terrible Night . . .' London Review of
Books 25-16 (2003). Online on :
http://books.guardian.co.uk/lrb/articles/0,6109,1030343,00.html
-Süß, Dietmar. ' "Massaker und Mongolensturm" : Anmerkungen zu Jörg
Friedrichs umstrittenem Buch Der Brand : Deutschland im Bombenkrieg
1940-1945'. Historisches Jahrbuch 124 (2004) : 521-543.
-Wilms, Wilfried & Rasch, William [Editors]. Bombs Away!
Representing the Air War over Europe and Japan. Amsterdam : Rodopi,
2006. Notably Fulda, Daniel. 'Abschied von der Zentralperspektive : Der
nicht nur literarische Geschichtsdiskurs im Nachwende-Deutschland als
Dispositiv für Jörg Friedrichs Brand', pp. 45-64
- Jeffries, Stuart. 'Fanning the flames'. The Guardian (23 December
2006) : 25-26 [Review article on American translation]. Visible on:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1977920,00.html
1 Also, I was designated as commentator at a session of the 2004 annual
meeting of the German Studies Association that included a paper by the
author. At the last moment, and with no prior notice, the author failed
to appear and thus could not present his paper, entitled "Der
Bombenkrieg - Das Ende Historischer Städte" (The Bombing War -- the End
of Historic Cities" - my translation). Nonetheless, the panel went ahead.
2 Darmstadt: Mittler, 1952, pp. 24-26.
3 Jochen Böhler (ed.), "Grösste Härte . . ."Verbrechen der Wehrmacht in
Polen September / Oktober 1939 (Hamburg: Grindeldruck, 2005), p. 69.
4 Trans. by Brandon Hunziger; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
5 Böhler, p. 64 (my translation).
1 In 1990, Warner Brothers re-supplied an ill-informed American public
after a hiatus from the air war for many decades with a hopelessly
sanitized version of the bombing war with Memphis Belle, starring
Matthew Modine. Early examples of (mis)representations like Thirty
Seconds over Tokyo (1944), Command Decision (1948), or Twelve O'Clock
High (1949) were long forgotten, but have begun to reappear in recent
years on Turner Classic Movies and elsewhere.
2 For a lucid summary of the events, see Edward T. Linenthal and Tom
Engelhardt: History Wars. The Enola Gay and other Battles for the
American Past. New York: Holt 1996.
3 Friedrich's book was a bestseller from the start, certainly in part
due to the upfront publication of excerpts in Germany's most widely
distributed tabloid Bild, and aided by extensive discussion in
newspapers and magazines. TV specials followed soon thereafter.
4 Lothar Kettenacker (ed.): Ein Volk von Opfern? Die neue Debatte um den
Bombenkrieg 1940-45. Berlin: Rowohl 2003 [translations are my own].
5 Richard Bernstein: "Germans Revisit War's Agony, Ending a Taboo." New
York Times, March 15, 2003.
6 Cora Stephan: "Wie man eine Stadt anzündet." In: Kettenacker: Ein Volk
von Opfern?: Pp. 95-102 (here 98, 101).
7 Wolfgang Sofsky: "Die halbierte Erinnerung." In: Kettenacker: Ein Volk
von Opfern?: Pp. 124-26.
8 Willi Winkler: "Nun singen sie wieder." In: Kettenacker: Ein Volk von
Opfern?: Pp. 103-09 (here 106, 109).
9 See Corelli Barnett: Die Bombardierung Deutschlands war kein
Kriegsverbrechen. In Kettenacker: Ein Volk von Opfern. Pp. 171-76.
Barnett refers to Friedrich's book as a "historische Travestie"
[historical travesty]. The piece was first published as "Bombing of
Germany Not a War Crime" in the Daily Mail, November 20, 2002. That
said, many of the harshest critics of Bomber Command and Sir Arthur
Harris have come from British and American historians. It should also be
noted that during the war a small but visible minority of British
citizens - for instance the Archbishop of Canterbury and the pacifist
Vera Brittain - publicly and courageously criticized the government for
its bombing policies.
10 In passages like this one, the English translation falls short of the
German original. While "destructive drunkenness" captures Friedrich's
"Vernichtungstrunkenheit", neither "ins Nichts reissen" ("reduced to
ruins" in the English translation) nor "kappen" ("destroy") adequately
expresses Friedrich's cynicism.
Antoine Capet
Sorry for sending to you all a message which was intended for Paul Addison
(the explanation - no excuse, I admit - is that I used the "reply" function
to his recent message on the British curriculum and Churchill, not realising
that it would be sent to the whole List).
Still - some of you might be interested in the reviews since Churchill is
indirectly "implicated" and very often "indicted" in all these discussions
on the bombing of German cities (and very much so in the book reviewed, _The
Fire: The Bombing of Germany_).
With all my apologies,
Antoine Capet
Université de Rouen (France)
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Univer