Hans Erich Nossack war ein deutscher Schriftsteller, der zun盲chst als Lyriker und Dramatiker, sp盲ter jedoch vor allem als Prosaautor in Erscheinung trat.
My heart is broken after reading this slim memoir about the firebombing of Hamburg in 1943. What makes me saddest is the realization that humanity has not learned anything from the atrocities of WWII. I pray that my children will never have to endure something like this. I wish I could pray that no child would have to experience this but I know that would be a fruitless prayer.
Nossack k枚nyv茅ben az a pl谩ne, hogy 1943-ban 铆r贸dott, 铆gy az 茅lm茅ny (brrrr鈥� h眉lye sz贸 ez itt) frissess茅g茅vel besz茅l Hamburg lebomb谩z谩s谩r贸l. Ha valaki 茅vtizedek t谩vlat谩b贸l visszatekintve igyekezne rekonstru谩lni egy v谩ros porig 茅g茅s茅t, alighanem a r谩rak贸dott ut贸lagos tud谩s torz铆tan谩 az elbesz茅l茅st: olyan elemekkel terheln茅 meg a t枚rt茅netet, ami akkor m茅g nem volt tudhat贸, 茅s esetleg olyanokkal, amik ugyan abban a pillanatban az elbesz茅l艖nek nem voltak fontosak, de fontoss谩 tett茅k 艖ket az az贸ta eltelt 茅vek. Ez茅rt ebben a k枚nyvben ne is keress眉k a terrorbomb谩z谩s horrorisztikus pillanatk茅peit 鈥� ilyenb艖l csak mutat贸ba akad 鈥�, 茅s azt se v谩rjuk el, hogy a szerz艖 teljess茅gre t枚rekedj茅k. Ez a k枚nyv sz眉ks茅gszer疟en csak t枚red茅k lehet, mert egyetlen ember benyom谩sait t眉kr枚zi, 茅s t枚red茅k az茅rt is, mert 铆r贸ja az id艖 j贸 r茅sz茅ben t谩volr贸l figyeli az esem茅nyeket 鈥� 茅s pont ez a t谩vols谩g 茅s t枚redezetts茅g teszi r谩 a hiteless茅g pecs茅tj茅t a sz枚vegre. Mert aki elmondhatja, hogy l谩tta Hamburg pusztul谩s谩t, annak megfelel艖 t谩vols谩gb贸l kellett azt n茅znie. K眉l枚nben nem mondhatna el semmit.
(脕ltal谩ban hi谩ny茅rzetem van, amikor lerakom a RaRe k枚nyvt谩r k枚teteit. Gondolom, tudatos koncepci贸 volt a Magvet艖t艖l, hogy a sz枚vegeket mindenfajta mell茅kelt inform谩ci贸 鈥� az 铆r贸 茅letrajzi adatai, esetleg egy ny煤lfarknyi kiad贸i ut贸sz贸 鈥� n茅lk眉l pottyantotta az 枚l眉nkbe, merthogy ugye a j贸 irodalom az mindenf茅le kontextust贸l megfosztva is j贸 irodalom. 脡n a magam r茅sz茅r艖l viszont szeretem az ut贸szavakat, s艖t: a j贸l meg铆rt ut贸szavakba konkr茅tan bele tudok szeretni. A j贸 ut贸sz贸 nem vakvezet艖 kutya, aki 谩tvonszol a k枚nyv s枚t茅ts茅g茅n eg茅szen a megfejt茅sig, mintha vil谩gtalan lenn茅k 鈥� de seg铆thet r谩mutatni a lehets茅ges olvasatok gazdags谩g谩ra. Pl谩ne nem 谩rtana ez a RaRe sorozat eset茅ben, ami egy茅bk茅nt is gyakran dolgozik olyan sz枚vegekkel, amik mintha picit csonkabonk谩k lenn茅nek. Amilyen p茅ld谩ul ez a k枚nyv.)
I鈥檓 fully aware of the arrogance it takes for someone to argue that someone didn鈥檛 have the 鈥渃orrect鈥� perspective on the tragedy they experienced, but there is certainly something disturbing about the metaphysicality and transcendentalism in this text鈥檚 recounting of the 1943 bombing of Hamburg. Nossack constantly describes the events as 鈥渆ternal,鈥� an elimination of the past that makes everything appear as an act of 鈥渇ate.鈥� But it is precisely this matter of fate, or rather Necessity, that constantly arises as a problematic in historicism. To deny an event its past is to make it appear as if it were fate, to destroy the linearity of the causal timeline so that events appear as expressions of Necessity. However, one of the key issues that has always existed in historicism is to take historical events as acts of Necessity and simply attempting to retroactively construct the conditions that led to the Necessary.
But having a truly historical vision is to understand that past events were never mere steps along the teleological path to the present. Before the Event, there was always the possibility that it could not have happened. To call the horrific bombing of Hamburg a creation of fate or an expression of Necessity is to ignore the fact that before they happened, they could have not happened. We thus find in this memoir the same problem that we find in Elie Wiesel鈥檚 writings on the Holocaust. To call the Event metaphysical, atemporal, and ahistorical is to say that it must have happened and thus, to deny the possibility that we could have avoided it. To continue down the path of memorialization we see in this text is to blacken out the revealing light of historicism, the light that shows us how that we always have the ability to defy the Necessary and realize a better future for humanity.
Het eerste verhaal 'de ondergang' is aangrijpend en prachtig. Het gaat over Hamburg, de stad die in 1943 als eerste ten prooi viel aan het bommentapijt dat de komende twee jaar over Duitsland zou vallen. De schrijver vertrekt met zijn vrouw net vlak voor de bombardementen, die drie nachten volop doorgaan, naar een zomerhuisje vlak buiten de stad. Ze zien het van ver gebeuren en gaan vlak daarna op zoek naar hun wijk en huis. Dit verhaal krijgt zeker vijf sterren, maar ik kon niet door de andere twee verhalen heenkomen. Vandaar drie sterren.
I didn't appreciate Nossack's surrealistic musings about what he saw and experienced. I founded it tedious and at times incoherent.
Understand that this is a reflection of my tastes in literature. You might find it just zippy.
In any case, a starker, more grounded set of observations might have moved me more. At times Nossak does this, as when he describes the thirty-seven people who were trapped in a bomb shelter that was directly adjacent to a coal bin that had caught fire. They roasted.
But no...he turns inward and talks about himself and his experiences much more. He loses my sympathy very quickly.
Personal accounts like these are best when they are passionate, descriptive, and most of all, concise. "The End" accomplishes all of these goals while eloquently describing the horrific burning of Hamburg. Nossack effectively conveys his story while admitting to the shortcomings of his narrative caused by poor memory and how he is limited to only is his personal experiences. Great worthwhile read that will only take you a day or two to finish.
An interesting little book that captures the feeling of returning to one's home (or lack thereof) in the immediate aftermath of destruction. The writing offers a very sparse examination of the effects of on the remaining inhabitants and offers a number of seemingly incomplete vignettes of life.
As such, don't expect too much beyond a certain feeling or tone.
"But even the most generous hand can become tired of giving, and it is even more difficult to learn to let oneself be the recipient of gifts and to receive, always and only to receive, without thereby losing one's freedom."
"So it came to pass that people who lived together in the same house and ate at the same table breathed the air of completely different worlds. They tried to reach out to each other, but their hands did not meet."
"The most dangerous thing was the words, 'could have.' It required a painful vigilance not to say 'could have.'"
"To an uninvolved observer it must have looked as if we had a lot of time; but actually we were driven. We didn't have much time; indeed, we no longer had any time at all, we were outside of time. Everything we did immediately lost its meaning."
"The cold, meanly divisive window glass was shattered, and through the wide openings the infinite behind man wafted unhindered into the endlessness before him and hallowed his countenance for the passage of what is beyond time."
"People were simply without a center."
"What surrounded us did not remind us in any way of what was lost. It had nothing to do with it. It was something else, it was strangeness itself, it was essentially not possible."
"But the dead did not wish to be conquered by logic. Today the number again wavers between sixty thousand and a hundred thousand, and no one dares to object. Why do they try to lie to the dead? Why don't they say: We can't count them! That would be a simple statement such as the dead, too, could understand."
"It is so incomprehensible that it cannot be weighed at all. And how dreadfully heavy that weight is -- so heavy that one dares not breathe and moves through the world only with great caution -- is almost impossible to put into words."
"All the things that surrounded us were only our guests."
"For what we have gained and what has changed is this: We have become present. We have slipped away from the precincts of time."
Pairing this with my readings and course work around the Holocaust in German literature. I've been curious, in my perhaps fools-errand desire to always pair my judgement with my sympathy. Complexities and intellectual humility are my game, so I wanted to hear from voices who endured and witnessed some of the brutality the allies inflicted in the final stretches of the war.
Often times we feel uncomfortable with acknowledging suffering as it finds victims "on both sides of the gun" as it were. Beyond the brutalities and evil of the Nazis, beyond the bludgeoning destruction of cities and citizen, the real enemy (I would suggest) is our endless capacity to war against one another. Dehumanizing at the expense of our desire to domineer, to take and to possess. So, in some regard, any account of suffering is an account of the same human suffering.
Here it is at times beautifully articulated. There are some really moving passages, mostly those that escalate into the ultimate questions of life itself. How can so much be destroyed and lost so quickly? With that, how precariously do we hang on to our identities and histories within particular places... the accumulation of self that is projected in a home, with its memories, its histories, its objects like sacred artifacts to the memory of our selves. Then, how to be once all these things are shattered and quite physically scattered. How do you rebuild? Should you? What turns neighbours into strangers, into savages in the desperation of war? How can some drawn line divide one from another and claim they are enemies, simply due to the side on which they reside of this imaginary line?
These, and many questions articulated in this book, are perhaps not fully answerable. But the great work of compassion, of wisdom, of learning is to return to these questions again and again and hope that history will not continue its commitment to repeating the need for their articulation.
A worthy, desperate, beautiful and difficult little book.
Coming in the form of a long autobiographic essay, Nossack's 1943 piece (published in post-war Germany, 1948) is a breathtaking contribution to anti-war literature.
The author describes his experience of the 1943 bomb attacks on Hamburg, as well as the following days.
Not taking any side apart from the side of humanity and humans, the reader gets an insight into the brutality of war, including the immaterial side of destruction.
As German post-war literature mostly comes in the form of reduced language and read-between-the-lines, Nossack's approach to processing "The End" of Hamburg is exactly the opposite: Flourishing, expressive, not shy of words and very precise about the horrors of the dead and the surviving.
Being as up-to-date as ever, Nossack's voice as a war survivor surely will be echoed by witnesses from Kyiv, Aleppo, Sanaa and the like someday.
A fascinating book (63 pages)...The translation by Joel Agee is in itself quite remarkable. The German author shares his reflections on the firebombing and all but total destruction of Hamburg by RAF and US firebombing over the period of a week in 1943. He wrote the book three (3) months after this event. Much of the text deals with how people cope with total loss of everything in their lives,; their homes, possessions and often family members and friends. The book is a short book and delves a great deal into the feelings of the author and people he met coping with the devastation of their lives after this singular event. Much of the psychology and reflections might well mirror the thoughts of those who have lost their homes, possessions, family and friends after contemporary fires, floods, and hurricanes.
It was W.G. Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction which alerted me to this book. It has a fine Foreword by the translator, Joel Agee, and incredible black-and-white photographs by Erich Andres. Nossack's account of the devastation of Hamburg has a shell-shocked quality to its prose. One recalls sporadic details such as the fat green flies, the starving cats attacking the morsels of food that they have been given or the mangled frame of a grand piano through which a rose has grown and bloomed. There is no anger here, no thirst for revenge. This is a benumbed landscape which can never be the same again. It is a very fine work.
I鈥檓 not sure about this book I wanted it to be something else not just the ramblings of someone who had lost everything in the bombing of Hamburg in 1943 but that鈥檚 the point what do you do when you lose all of your possessions, your apartment and place of work everything! You become consumed with grief , confusion and loss. The very things that the Author describes in details charred by fire themselves.
I suppose I expected something more like "The Fire" by Jorg Friedrich, which gives you more of a historical context for the raids.
"The End" gives you a sense of devastation and loss and landmarks swept away. It didn't help that this short book had a long introduction that sampled parts of the text, so when you read these passages in the text, they were already familiar.
The author lived in Hamburg during the 1943 fire-bombing. Luckily he and his wife were on vacation in the mountains above Hamburg when the planes arrived but he lost his home and business. It is an interesting look into a person's reaction when they suddenly lose everything and well worth the read!!!
An account of the firebombing of Hamburg during WWII by a survivor including a lot of photos. A look at what happened to some of the cities in Germany and it's citizens.
Descrizione molto coinvolgente del bombardamento e distruzione di Amburgo nel luglio del 43. L'autore l'ha visto da lontano ed 猫 tornato in citt脿 per vedere se la sua casa era ancora in piedi.
Poetic evocation of trauma, loss and devastation.Nossack manages to capture the unimaginable, the evanescent and the unfathomable with glorious imagery.
This slim volume, which includes a foreword by Joel Agee (also translator) and photos by Erick Andres, packs a punch. Nossack is a writer who lived in Hamburg when it was destroyed by allied bombers in 1943. He happened to join his girlfriend at a cabin in the country--out of the ordinary for him--and thus missed the bombing. They heard the planes. I hadn't ever thought about the sound that 1800 planes make, "like an oppressive weight." (7) I hadn't realized it took more than one raid, that it happened over the course of 4 non-consecutive nights. A few months after the bombing, he wrote this account. He opens by saying he feels he's been given a mandate, that he must write about this. He repeats words like abyss, catastrophe, and calamity. Of course, he called the book "The End." He has moments of fancy, no doubt his writing style, but he's calm and objective. He criticizes neighbors who clapped when a plane was downed and says others were critical. He compares it to Odysseus chastising the old women who celebrated the suitors' deaths. "It is an unholy thing to vaunt over dead men" (11). 12 Nossack considers his own fate and Hamburg's entwined. 14 Describes a river of refugees 15 Says all of Hamburg is now "on vacation." 18 "incomprehensible belongings" 18-19 He describes help offered willingly but then begrudgingly. And theft justified--because all has been lost. He explores envy of victims. 19-25 Misunderstandings bet givers /receivers. 22-23 "We no longer have a past." 24 Misi learns their apt destroyed 25 The trivial takes precedence; obsession with a deck chair 26 "But a unique work of art or a faded photo or an old doll from one's childhood, what does all this have to do with numbers? These things have their life from us, because at some time we bestowed our affection on them; they absorbed our warmth and harbored it gratefully in order to enrich us with it again in meager hours." 29 Many refugees forced to move south 30 He and Misi didn't go to Hamburg till Saturday--the last raid would be Monday. 31 "The force that drives a murderer back to his crime." [What?] 31 The survivors' conversations resemble those recounted in Diary of a Woman in Berlin; a shared experience 32 They feel the war is over for them. Really thought it would be a matter of days for the whole thing to end 33 "impotence of the state" 34 He says there was no general feeling of hatred toward enemy or wish that it had happened to others. Why should others suffer. "All this mss be said once and for all; for it redounds to the glory of man that on the day of reckoning he experience his fate with such largeness of spirit. Even though it was just for a brief period; for in the meantime the picture has become confused again." 36 Why he's writing--though he said at the beginning he felt he had to: "why go on? I mean, why record all this?" 36-37 Considers future readers: "what if they read it only to enjoy something strange and uncanny and to make themselves feel more alive." 38 Like tourists 38-9 cemetery 41 "Everything that men have to say about this is a lie. It is not permissible to talk about it except in the language of women" I don't really know what he means? Talk of domestic matters? 43 The numbers and "the Reich" 44 "worthless eagle chiseled" 47 Where was his office. A magazine? They save a typewriter and hide others. 50 They didn't look for friends. Too upsetting. 51 cats 53 The loss of everything, not heavy but incomprehensible 54 He sounds modern as he writes, "The stupid notion that women want to be possessed." 58 His journals lost [although translator says in foreword that he didn't lose manuscripts] 59 Fate 63 "The truly sad thing is the mind, because it thinks it has wings, but it keeps falling back to earth."
Detailing Operation Gomorrah, the decimation of Hamburg by the Allies in 1943, this brief memoir is ... hard to stomach, beautifully written and an absolute testament to the horrors of war.
"Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima and Nagasaki" is what I texted [my friend who sent it to me] in regards to WW2 and the Allied annihilation of civilians.
I can't give this work more weight; it is heavy. So heavy.
"Even today [3-4 mos after the bombing] we are still unable to listen to music, we have to stand up and go away. When I say music I mean Bach's Air or something like that. There is something consoling in it, but it is precisely that consolation that makes us feel naked and helpless, at the mercy of a force that wants to destroy us."
Peque帽a cr贸nica de la desolaci贸n moral y psicol贸gica que sigui贸 a la destrucci贸n sistem谩tica de Hamburgo por parte de la Royal Air Force en 1943. Murieron cuarenta mil personas, pero eso no lo sab铆a el autor cuando vio como la ciudad ard铆a hasta los cimientos desde un pueblo cercano. Tras constatar la destrucci贸n de su casa (y de toda la manzana, el barrio y la ciudad) el autor se convierte en refugiado, y en ese viaje se asoma al alma destruida de los que, como 茅l, lo han perdido todo, pero tambi茅n a la hip贸crita sociedad que les dio de lado y reneg贸 de ellos precisamente por haberlo perdido todo. El ser humano es el mismo en todas las 茅pocas y todos los lugares.
This eye-witness account of the destruction of Hamburg, one of hundreds of cities in Germany targeted during the Second World War, is a profoundly horrifying and tragic tale of human savagery. Written with no trace of rancor or enmity, this straight-forward depiction and description of the carnage and devastation leaves no doubts as to the barbarity and blindness underlying the Allied bombings campaigns. Much like the historic baroque city of Dresden, Hamburg and its residence become helpless victims of war atrocities committed by the US and British air forces.
This book has beautiful word choice and descriptions of one man's experience during and after the Hamburg bombing by the Allied forces in 1943. Originally written in German and kept from a widespread audience for years, this offers a rarely seen apolitical point of view from "the other side" of WWII - the Germans'. It also includes many photos taken around the destroyed Hamburg that only adds to the narrative. I would recommend this for anyone interested in WWII history.
A most moving book written so lyrically that a year later I still see the images Nossack paints via language. One may ask for more, but this truly is just a snapshot of an event and the aftermath. It isn't meant to be a complete historical account, but as a personal documentation of one immersed in a tragedy that is but a shard from the millions that never shall be inked. Grateful for the translation of this little book -- truly a work of prose poetry. ~