Mark Almond
Survivors’ Tales
On the Natural History of Destruction
By W G Sebald
Hamish Hamilton 205pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
IN THE YEARS that immediately followed the Second World War, West German society shrouded the Holocaust in silence. Nazi mass murder was the shadow which hung over the Federal Republic as it progressed fiom wartime ruin to economic miracle. But well before reunification in 1990, the media. universities and schools had undone the self-induced amnesia of the postwar generation with such blanket coverage of Nazi crimes that exposure to them became routine.
The details of the Nazi genocide are irrefutably established, but one subject has remained taboo until recently. Outside the diatribes of neo-Nazi apologists and the narrow field of architectural and urban history, the devastation inflicted on Germany by the Allies was too sensitive a subiect for re~utableG erman authors.
Last year,
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'What Bower brings sharply into focus here is how lonely Johnson is, how dependent on excitement and applause to stave off recurring depression.'
From the archive: Michael White analyses the life and leadership of Boris Johnson.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/crisis-what-crisis-3
'Sometimes, dragons’ greed can have comic consequences, including indigestion. We read the 1685 tale of the dragon of Wantley, whose weakness is, comically, his arse. The hero delivers a lethal kick to the dragon’s behind, and the dragon dies.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/terrors-of-the-sky
'We must all "shoot down the canard", McManus writes, that the World Cup is going to a nation "that doesn’t know or appreciate the Beautiful Game".'
Barnaby Crowcroft on the rise of Qatar.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/full-of-gas