On The Natural History of Destruction

W G Sebald; translated by Anthea Bell

Hamish Hamilton, £16.99, pp 205

ISBN 0 241 14126 5

Rating:

This final work by W G Sebald, late professor of European literature at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, is strikingly relevant, when “smart” bombs and missiles nowadays supposedly avoid “collateral damage.” Its primary subject is literature and the Allied air raids on Germany during the second world war, but it is just as much about the psychopathology of destructiveness, repression in the mass memory of succeeding generations, …