Volume 52, Number 15 · October 6, 2005
When the Russians Came
By Gabriele Annan
A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Conquered City
by Anonymous, translated from the German by Philip Boehm
Metropolitan Books, 261 pp., $23.00
In a recent review in these pages of two posthumous works by W.G. Sebald, perhaps the greatest of contemporary German writers, Charles Simic mentioned Sebald's nonfiction book On the Natural History of Destruction, in which the subject was 'the carpet bombing of German cities by the Allies and the strange silence in German literature after the war about that experience.' Sebald, he continues, makes in another essay, Campo Santo, the 'interesting point that the most effective descriptions of total destruction of cities, an experience that surpasses all imagination, is to be found in the most matter-of-fact reports, such as letters.'[*]
Review, 3426 words
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