On the natural history of destruction

This title explores the strange silence surrounding the destruction of German cities through Allied bombing - a subject which remained almost entirely out of sight in post-war German writing.Yet the RAF alone dropped a million tons of bombs on enemy territory, 131 towns and cities were attacked - many almost entirely flattened, seven and a half million people were left homeless, and there were 31.1 cubic metres of rubble for everyone in Cologne and 42.8 cubic metres for every inhabitant of Dresden.Interweaving accounts of survivors with discussion of published writers this text aims to become a landmark study of a "forgotten" topic. Air war and literature - Zurich lectures; between the devil and the deep blue sea - on Alfred Andersch; against the irreversible - on Jean Amery; the remorse of the heart - on memory and cruelty in the work of Peter Weiss.