Air Raid (The German List)

I enjoyed every chapter of this book about an air raid on a German town on April 8, 1945. Alexander Kluge was 13 when the British-U.S. air raid pulverized his hometown. Halberstadt was not of any crucial importance in industrial and strategic terms. There was no strategic value in selecting the town as the target of a massive air bombardment. In its chapters, Kluge blends journalistic reporting with a novelist touch and reconstructs the lead-up to the attack, which only came after the U.S. air fleet was directed from its original target due to cloudy weather. The total war's insane brutality and utter nonsense could not be captured better. Kluge wrote the book in the 1970s, nearly three decades after the date of the attack. Although many decades have passed since WWII, there is still no moral reckoning over the strategic air raids on German cities.

Translation fairly good. Kluge uses a lot of intricate and ambiguous wording. Sense of the original caught rather well.

The power of this curious little book comes not from narrative (it has none), but rather from the kaleidoscopic gathering together of fragments from a single event. It's as if the air raid on Halberstadt had broken the mirror of historical "reality" into a million pieces; though Kluge sticks as many of the shards back together as he can, the resulting surface is inevitably uneven, and the picture we get is fractured and distorted. I found it unconventional and very effective. The most intriguing portions of the book are those in which German observers confront American air force strategists about the raid. Wasn't it unnecessary? How could it have been avoided? The discussants are metaphorically occupying very different air space -- about 20,000 feet apart, and the dialog puts in stark relief the complexity of passing moral judgment on the air war.I have to say that the consensus view of those in Halberstadt (echoed by W.G. Sebald in his perceptive afterward) that the raid was "unjustified" is far from self-evident, and reflects a constricted view of Germany's responsibility for initiating and prosecuting the war. For all its strengths, if you find this narrative of victimhood grating, you may not enjoy the book.

This is a simply wonderful short book that sneaks up on you as it gradually uncovers the horrors of one particular incident during the fire bombing of German cities by the Allies towards the end of the Second World War. Along with John Hersey's "Hiroshima", it should be compulsory reading in our schools.

GREAT