Aerial Bombing and Catastrophic Modernism

Home , Aerial bombing of cities, Gert Ledig, Vergeltung

Neohelicon DOI 10.1007/s11059-017-0412-y

Aerial bombing and catastrophic modernism

Nil Santia´n˜ez1

Ó Akade´miai Kiado´, Budapest, Hungary 2017

Abstract This article approaches the narration of catastrophe by focusing on the aerial bombing of cities during the Second World War as represented in German, French, and British modernist novels. It makes two claims. First, of all the literary modes available for representing bombing as a catastrophic event, modernism seems to be the most adequate for conveying its complexity and multiple dimensions. Second, the modernism of experimental works on aerial bombing is a function of the catastrophe that they depict. For this reason, this paper argues for the existence of a catastrophic modernism; its main family resemblances are analyzed throughout its pages.

Keywords Modernism Á Catastrophic modernism Á Air war and literature Á Second World War and literature Á Catastrophe Á Catastrophe and literature

Catastrophes challenge the human capacity for processing, understanding, remem- bering, and representing experience. As is well known, catastrophic events may even temporarily knock down the mental tools used by human beings for their cognition and storage of reality, thereby triggering in survivors of catastrophes a post-traumatic stress disorder. In his book on the ‘‘writing of disaster,’’ Maurice Blanchot (1980) has argued that disasters constitute a break with any form of totality. They mean the ‘‘ruin of the word’’ and entail the dissolution of the unity of the subject who has lived it. A disaster is a reminder that ‘‘would cross out through invisibility and illegibility all that shows itself and all that is said’’ (Blanchot 1980, 68–69).1 Hence a disaster, according to Blanchot, ‘‘unwrites’’; it limits and erodes

1 Unless otherwise indicated, all translations into English are mine.

& Nil Santia´n˜ez [email protected]

1 Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO, USA 123 N. Santia´n˜ez the individual’s ability to understand and express it through language. Catastrophes may be considered, therefore, as the ‘‘end of meaning’’ (Gumpert 2012). Given such effect of catastrophic events on cognition and verbal expression, given, also, the excess inherent in catastrophes, a crucial question immediately arises: Which are the most cogent literary modes, rhetorical strategies, and linguistic tools for confronting catastrophes and their impact on language, space, cultural memory, and social relations, as well as on the human body and mind?2 In order to provide a focused response to that question, this article explores several late modernist narratives produced to represent a very speciﬁc man-made catastrophe: the aerial bombing of European cities during the Second World War.3 The so-called strategic bombing of civilian targets in the world war of 1939–1945 constitutes one of the most notorious catastrophic events of the twentieth century.4 Under the bombs dropped by British and American squadrons, in Germany alone between 410,000 and 500,000 civilians perished; in Britain 60,000 people were killed as a result of the Luftwaffe’s campaign, while the Anglo-American air raids on Italy and France left 60,000 and 75,000 dead respectively.5 Aerial bombing brought also the destruction of both human habitation and cultural memory. In the summer of 1945 the urban landscape in Europe was one of utter desolation. In relation to the strategic bombing of Germany, the historian Jo¨rg Friedrich (2002) has underscored the destruction of German cultural memory as a consequence of the Allied aerial campaign, providing extensive descriptions of the monuments, churches, libraries, archives, museums, and artworks that were destroyed or seriously damaged by the Allies’ bombing campaign in 1940–1945. The obliteration of cultural memory in Germany and other European countries placed many people in a discontinuous space in which many traces of a shared communal past had disappeared a` jamais.6 As a result in part of the destruction of landscape, urban space, and cultural memory, social ties were eroded or severed.

2 Much has been written on catastrophe. Two sample works of the extensive bibliography on the topic are Cavarero’s theoretical book on ‘‘horrorism’’ (2009), and Bostrom and C´ irkovic´ selection of essays on global catastrophic risks (2008). 3 The written representation of the aerial bombing of cities and towns conducted during the Second World War is ﬁnally catching the attention of scholars. With few exceptions, for many years literary and cultural critics remained silent on this topic, particularly in Germany. This pattern has been altered in the last ﬁfteen years thanks in part to the famous lectures on ‘‘Luftkrieg und Literatur’’ (Aerial war and literature) delivered by W.G. Sebald in Zu¨rich in 1997 (Sebald 2005). For the scholarship on the aerial bombing of Germany and its cultural representation, see Arnold (2011), Hage (2003), Hundrieser (2003), Huyssen (2003), Lawson (2009), Moeller (2009), Preußer (2004), Sauer (2010), Sebald (2005), Vees- Gulani (2003), and several contributions to a book edited by Wilms and Rasch (2006, 149–229, 281–294, 329–342). For the literature produced on the air war against Great Britain, see Calder (1991, 153–179), Feigel (2013), Grayzel (2012, 295–314) and Miller (2009). 4 On this score, see, for instance, Overy (2013) and Baldoli et al. (2011). 5 For Germany: Friedrich (2002), Overy (2013, 237–485). For Great Britain: Calder (1991), Gardiner (2010), Overy (2013, 59–234). For France: Baldoli and Knapp (2012), Florentin (1997), Overy (2013, 556–582). For Italy: Baldoli and Knapp (2012), Overy (2013, 486–546). 6 For a general discussion of the meaning and consequences of the deliberate and systematic destruction of architecture in times of war, see Bevan (2006). 123 Aerial bombing and catastrophic modernism

Strictly speaking, air war was nothing new in 1939–1945.7 But the scale of the air raids, the lifting of all moral reservations against bombing civilians—reservations that had found legal expression in international treaties forbidding the aerial targeting of undefended cities, buildings, and non-combatants since the Hague Convention of 1899—,8 the intensity and viciousness of the bombardments, and the huge devastation that they brought on the receiving end made the aerial bombing in the Second World War a new, and in many cases a traumatic, catastrophic experience, one of a sort that defies both ethics and understanding. One may wonder, in this sense, whether language can depict, for example, the horrific firestorms of Hamburg (24 July–3 August 1943) and Dresden (13–14 February 1945), whether literature can represent them without falsifying or trivializing human experience, or whether there are suitable narrative modes and linguistic means for making them believable to readers who have never been bombed. Charged with ethical implications, those questions could be hardly dismissed by writers interested in representing aerial bombing. Facing those and similar questions, several authors opted for the realist mode to narrate the aerial bombing of urban centers. Graham Greene’s 1943 The Ministry of Fear, Otto Erich Kiesel’s 1949 Die unverzagte Stadt (The undaunted city), and Max Zimmering’s 1954 Phosphor und Flieder (Phosphor and lilacs) are three cases in point. In contrast, other writers chose modernism as the literary mode for representing the bombing of cities in the world war of 1939–1945.9 A list of late modernist representations of the aerial bombardment of Germany would include Arno Schmidt’s 1952 Aus dem Leben eines Fauns (Scenes from the life of a faun), Gert Ledig’s 1956 Vergeltung (Payback), Louis-Ferdinand Ce´line’s 1969 Rigodon (Rigadoon), Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 Slaughterhouse-Five, Hubert Fichte’s 1971 Detlevs Imitationen ‘‘Gru¨nspan’’ (Detlev’s imitations), Alexander Kluge’s 1977 Der Luftangriff auf Halberstadt am 8. April 1945 (The air raid against Halberstadt on 8 April 1945), and Walter Kempowski’s 2001 Der rote Hahn (The red rooster). To this list we could add experimental works totally or partially devoted to the aerial bombing of countries other than Germany: I am thinking of Ce´line’s 1952–54 Feérie pour une autre fois (Fable for another time)—whose second part narrates at length an Allied air raid on Paris—, Curzio Malaparte’s 1944 Kaputt—in whose last chapter the narrator relates a bombardment of Naples—, and of course the modernist narratives on the aerial bombing of Great Britain: Henry Green’s 1943 Caught, James Hanley’s 1943 No directions, Elizabeth Bowen’s 1948 The heat of

7 See Lindqvist’s fascinating history of bombing (2001). 8 See Biddle’s piece on ‘‘air power’’ (1994) for a good overview of the international laws concerning aerial warfare. 9 In this article, modernism is conceived as a longue-dureé mode of writing, and not as a movement. Furthermore, in contrast to McHale (1987), Hutcheon (1988), and other scholars who have argued for the existence of postmodernism, I consider modernism and postmodernism to be one and the same, for they share core family resemblances (e.g., experimental language, dissolution of personal identity, spatial form, preponderance of discourse over story, tendency towards parody, metaliterature, distancing from the communicative function of language, employment of multiple or limited narrative voices, epistemological relativism, ontological instability). On modernism, see Childs (2000), Eysteinsson (1990), Levenson (1999), Santiań˜ez (2002), Sherry (2017). On (British) modernism in the Second World War, see MacKay (2007). 123 N. Santiań˜ez the day, Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 Gravity’s rainbow, and Michael Moorcock’s 1988 Mother London.10 Modernist literary artifacts refract the ‘‘unwriting’’ caused by disasters with more precision than realist literature does. Through experiments with style, language, and literary conventions, they formally display the discontinuous, disruptive, and massive nature of disasters. Catastrophe somehow seems to have partly determined the creativity of a significant number of authors, its substance leading them towards choosing those literary devices most cogent for portraying the many dimensions, as well as the variegated consequences, of disasters. Given this interconnection between catastrophe and modernism, modernist works written on catastrophic events belong to what I suggest calling catastrophic modernism.Bycatastrophic modernism I refer to the specific type of modernism produced in response to catastrophes such as war, the Nazi extermination program, natural disasters, and global terrorism. Its family resemblances (to use Wittgenstein’s notion) are similar to those of interwar modernism.11 However, they ought to be seen as both directly responding to, and being determined by, catastrophe. The modernism of catastrophic modernist works is, therefore, a function of the horror that they depict. Furthermore, catastrophic modernism seeks to transfer the destructive effects of catastrophes to the readers’ understanding and affectivity. The literary artifacts comprised within catastrophic modernism may be characterized as ‘‘passionate utterances,’’ a notion suggested by Stanley Cavell (2005, 186) to designate perlocutionary speech acts produced to have consequential effects on the reader’s feelings, affects, thoughts, and actions. As passionate utterances, catastrophic modernist works are intended to lead the reader, through their experiments with form, language, and convention, to somehow feel the emotional distress, existential precariousness, and cognitive disorientation experienced by individuals who have endured a disaster. My approach to catastrophic modernism, I would like to underscore, is mostly morphological. I am interested in scrutinizing a specific manifestation of catastrophic modernism within what Fernand Braudel termed middle or conjunctural time span. As Braudel (1969) has taught us, history consists of the dialectical relation among several dureés or time spans, and events (and by extension cultural artifacts) may be studied either in one of their historical dureés, or in all of them. The conjunctural time span covered in these pages goes from the war years to the historical period marked by the end of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany. This article has two main goals. On the one hand, it aims at describing and analyzing some of the most common family resemblances of several representative late modernist novels devoted to the narration of aerial bombing during the Second World War; I have chosen this corpus of catastrophic modernist literature so as to give a more cohesive description of catastrophic modernism. On the other hand, this paper attempts to sketch both a morphology and a partial typology of catastrophic modernism on air raids that may be extrapolated to other

10 Except for Pynchon, all the aforementioned authors experienced, either as adults or as children, aerial bombings. Their ﬁction on air raids contains, therefore, a strong autobiographical undercurrent. 11 For a very detailed analysis of modernism’s family resemblances, see Santia´n˜ez (2002, 121–135, 247–380). 123 Aerial bombing and catastrophic modernism corpuses of modernist literature on disaster (i.e., on modern wars, the destruction of the European Jews, colonialism, terrorism, natural catastrophes, and so on). In order to show its diversity, I will center on three different strands or modalities of catastrophic modernism. First, I study a catastrophic modernism centered on collage, montage, and spatial form that disrupts the readers’ demand for narrative unity and cognitive cohesiveness. Second, I analyze an expressionist kind of catastrophic modernism; in addition to its search for an adequate language and imagery to represent the violence of, and the chaos unleashed by, aerial bombing, this expressionist strand of catastrophic modernism communicates the emotional intensity and affective charge involved in the human experience of air raids. Third, I concentrate on a catastrophic modernism that gravitates around an impressionist approach to air raids; this modality attempts to capture the sensory richness of bombing, as well as the perceptual and cognitive disorientation felt by its victims. A brief discussion of intricate style and syntax closes my scrutiny of catastrophic modernism on aerial bombing. In varying degrees, the above-mentioned late modernist artifacts on air raids put forth experimental strategies for representing a catastrophic event that utterly affected both time and space. Indeed, life in an obliterated city is mostly a spatial affair. In their annihilation of urban centers, the bombers turned into rubble a good deal of the community’s cultural memory, thereby wiping out crucial foundations of communal and national identity. Suddenly lacking some of the familiar memory sites by which individuals negotiated a shared past, lacking, also, a place of their own, and having lost most, if not all, of their possessions, bombed-out people found themselves forcefully expelled from their personal and collective past. Everybody’s being-in-the-world acquired an entirely unexpected aspect. In Germany, for instance, 7.5 million people were—in the parlance of Bomber Command— ‘‘dehoused’’ as a result of the Allied bombing campaign, which all in all affected 20 million Germans. Those who remained in bombed cities had to adjust to a new place. The people’s sense of place had been altered as much as their sense of time. The time continuum was affected by the bombs as well. Gert Ledig was no doubt thinking of this when he wrote in Vergeltung that bombing ‘‘annihilated both the past and the future’’ (2001, 198). In his detached account of the annihilation of Hamburg in summer 1943, titled Der Untergang (The end), Hans Erich Nossack would put it tersely: ‘‘We have no longer a past’’ (1976, 30).12 Realizing that, like so many inhabitants of Hamburg, he and his wife had lost everything in the bombing, including the cultural memory of the city, Nossack observes in Der Untergang that they had been taken ‘‘out of time’’ (1976, 36). Because of this temporal discontinuity, everything they did immediately became ‘‘meaningless’’ (1976, 36). Forcefully expelled from time, they had become sheer present devoid of meaning. Nossack again: ‘‘We have become pure present. We have been disassociated from time’’ (1976, 71). This was literally a Stunde Null or zero hour in the sense that, upon witnessing the vast destruction of Hamburg, after looking into nothingness and learning that he had lost everything, living in a space that he did not recognize any

12 Compare my comments about Nossack’s memoir on the bombing of Hamburg with Saint-Amour’s analysis of that book (2015, 4–6). 123 N. Santiań˜ez longer, Nossack felt excluded from the time continuum. Time and existence had been spatialized. By razing to the ground 75% of Hamburg’s urban space, the Royal Air Force had literally taken the inhabitants of that city out of their spatio-temporal habitat, erasing, as Hubert Fichte put it in his modernist novel on that catastrophic event, their concept of ‘‘Dauer’’ or ‘‘continuity’’ (2005, 34). Many of them lacking a house of their own, having lost most of their possessions, the people of Hamburg— like the inhabitants of so many bombed-out cities—found themselves to be living in a present without a past; they had become both homeless and pastless. Being thrown out of time means being expelled from conventional narrative. In a world without a past there can be no narrative based on history and chronology— two pillars of realist writing. It is not surprising, therefore, to find most of the catastrophic modernist accounts of aerial bombing to be instances of what Joseph Frank (1991, 31–132) has labeled ‘‘spatial form.’’ Instead of organizing the plot through chronology, a spatial form consists of a set of discontinuous events that demand from the reader to be apprehended as if one were viewing a painting. Simultaneity predominates over sequentiality. Spatial form produces episodic narratives, which Fredric Jameson characterizes as ‘‘the supersession of plot by scene, of imagination by fancy, and of narrative by a kind of non-narrative perceptuality’’ (2013, 154), a phenomenon that Jameson connects to modernism. In the case of the catastrophic modernist writing on aerial bombing, spatial form establishes a relation of homology between, on the one hand, the reality described at the level of the story, and on the other the way this reality is shown at the levels of the plot and discourse. The juxtaposition of storylines and the fact that they are usually told discontinuously create a fictional world whose atomization refracts the fragmentation of the city caused by the bombing, the destruction brought about by the squadrons of bombers, the multi-dimensionality of the bombing (which of course includes the experiences of the people being bombed as well as those of the crews doing the bombing), and finally, the psychological and psycho-social traumata caused by it. Traditional storytelling and chronology do not properly capture the spatialization of existence, the air raids, and the trauma they trigger. Since both time and existence have been spatialized, it would seem that the most adequate mode of writing for conveying aerial bombing and its consequences on urban space would be one based upon space. Narratives become spatial form in the same way that bombed cultural memory conveys the erasure of historical time, breaking up the individuals’ connections to their past. A shattering experience is represented through the shattering of form. To read modernist writing organized through spatial form impels readers to symbolically enact the disoriented and discontinuous movements of the characters during and after the bombing. Gert Ledig’s novel Vergeltung belongs to the first strand of catastrophic modernism—the one based on collage, montage, and spatial form. Published in 1956 and widely criticized at the time, in the German Feuilletons, for its experimental depiction of aerial bombing and its effects on space and people,13 Vergeltung is divided into fifteen unnumbered chapters; each chapter comprises a varying number of discontinuous scenes, and interspersed between each

13 On the reception of Vergeltung, see Berlemann (2012, 88–92), Hundrieser (2003). 123 Aerial bombing and catastrophic modernism chapter there is an autobiographical or biographical short narrative typeset in italics that summarizes the life of a specific character from the novel. By means of interweaving several storylines, in Vergeltung Ledig exclusively represents a 69-min aerial bombing of an unnamed German city conducted on 2 July 1944 by American squadrons of bombers. The extradiegetic narrator moves quickly from one story to the next; his narrative is a fragmented succession of juxtaposed scenes that covers several spaces and places of the city: a graveyard, an anti-aircraft battery as well as its bunker and dug-out, a building of apartments and its cellar, a flak tower and its dependencies (bunker, air-lock, control room), the Cheovskis’ apartment, and the streets of the city. In his all-encompassing gaze, the narrator also describes the bombing from the perspective of the perpetrators, specifically focusing on the crew members of an American bomber. Some characters remain trapped in the same place, while others move across the city during the air raid. Sergeant Strenehan, the American airman who bails out after his airplane is hit by anti- aircraft fire and who, once in the city, walks around before being captured and eventually murdered, refracts the double movement followed by the narrator of the novel: a vertical one, which covers the different heights of the spaces and places depicted in the novel (American bomber in the sky, roof of flak tower, house interiors and staircases of buildings, the streets of the city, and the cellar of a building), and a horizontal one, a movement that mirrors the narrator’s shifting attention from one storyline to the next. Moreover, Vergeltung provides a vertical view of the action in the two possible directions, from above (the American bomber before being hit) and from below (gunners shooting the attacking squadrons and people in the city looking up at the sky and seeking refuge), as well as a horizontal one thanks to the gaze of several characters, among them the teacher assigned to serve in an anti-aircraft battery who leaves his combat station in order to search for his missing son, the rescue party mustered to dig out the people buried alive in a cellar, and a group of Russian prisoners of war wandering through the graveyard and the city while bombs are dangerously falling all over the place. To say it with two terms developed by Michel de Certeau (1984, 119–122), in Ledig’s novel the ‘‘tour’’ (i.e., the set of discursive operations needed to proceed from one place to the other) alternates with the ‘‘map’’ (i.e., the description of a place in terms of the distribution of all its elements as well as their static relation with other places). The narrator’s motion from scene to scene is as quick as the movement of the firestorm caused by the bombs, and it creates in the reader the impression that the catastrophic event is lived simultaneously by a multitude of individuals. Moreover, the rapid succession of scenes and the resulting plotlessness make of Vergeltung a difficult novel to read. Spatial form and the complex montage of discontinuous scenes and chapters seek to disrupt the readers’ cognition of reality in order to place them in a situation similar to the disoriented and panic-ridden characters of Vergeltung. Like the story and the plot, the discourse of Vergeltung is discontinuous; sentences are unusually short, and they are articulated by a staccato style that refracts at once the plot’s fragmentary structure as well as the bombing and the explosion of the bombs told at the level of the story. Form underscores the fact that violence is Vergeltung’s protagonist. As Colette Lawson (2009, 33–40) has rightly claimed, Ledig’s novel fits in within the parameters of what the novelist and essayist 123 N. Santiań˜ez

W.G. Sebald has called in Luftkrieg und Literatur (Air war and literature), apropos of the representation of the aerial bombing of Germany, ‘‘a natural history of destruction.’’ There is no teleology or justification of violence in Vergeltung; there is no explanation of the bombing according to preconceived cultural paradigms; there is no promise of redemption; there is no possible empathy with the characters, who are portrayed as lacking agency: the Germans described by Ledig are not subjects, but rather objects of raw historical forces. Vergeltung is a phenomenology of war (Ahrens 2001, 165) and violence (Lawson 2009, 35) in which both war and violence are the real subjects of the narrative. As Susanne Vees-Gulani has put it, the true hero of the novel is ‘‘destruction itself’’ (2003, 90). Few novels on aerial bombing have described with such crudeness and pitilessness the aerial bombing of civilian targets. In what is perhaps the most experimental and original novel ever written on the strategic bombing of Germany, Vergeltung sets the tone with the crude narration in the first chapter of the bombing of a graveyard that kills women and children who had sought shelter there (2001, 9–10). With a detached and ostensible laconic tone, the narrative voice relates with detail in Vergeltung the atrocious death of people, the destruction of buildings and streets, the firestorm triggered by the incendiary bombs. The laconic tone and the matter-of-fact language used for describing destruction are ultimately addressed to stir and unsettle the affects and emotions of readers. Violence is present, therefore, at the level of the story told by the narrative voice, at the level of discourse in the syntax and words chosen by the narrator and some characters, and at the level of the plot due to the broken-up, choppy, spatial articulation of Ledig’s narrative. The violence performed on space, places, humans, and language is also performed, in other words, by shattering the very form that represents it. In 1977 Alexander Kluge published, as part of his Neue Geschichten. Hefte 1–18 (New stories: Notebooks 1–18), a novella entirely devoted to the aerial bombing of his hometown at the end of the war: Der Luftangriff auf Halberstadt am 8. April 1945.14 Like Vergeltung, Alexander Kluge’s novella is a spatial form centered on one single air raid. However, Kluge follows a path different from Ledig’s. As he had already done in his 1964 novel on the Battle of Stalingrad, Schlachtbeschreibung (Description of a battle), Kluge puts together fictional texts and documentary material (i.e., journalistic interviews, archival documents, photographs, drawings, and diagrams). Divided into two parts and thirty short chapters, the resulting collage zooms in on a number of simultaneous scenes of the bombing of Halberstadt as well as situations that took place later on. In a manner somewhat reminiscent of Ledig’s in Vergeltung, Kluge offers both the view from above, that is from the perpetrators of the bombing, and the view from below, namely the one natural to those being bombed. In the first part of the novella the narrator focuses on situations lived by a handful of characters: the lady in charge of administering a movie-theater (2008, 7–10), a company of soldiers (2008, 10–11), a photographer who takes pictures of the bombing (2008, 12–16), the gardener of the local cemetery (2008, 16–18), two female volunteers of the O¨ ffentliche Luftwarnung (2008, 18–22), the guests of a wedding (2008, 22–25), sixty people who

14 For other approaches to Kluge’s novella, see, among other studies, Meyer-Minnermann (2012), Murphy (2007, 87–93), Shahan (2010). 123 Aerial bombing and catastrophic modernism seek shelter in a cellar (2008, 25–27), the narrator’s family in the cellar of their house (2008, 27–29), the editorship of a periodical in their office (2008, 29–30), the citizens who live on 9 Domgang Straße (2008, 30–31), ending with a scene that describes the burning of a local Kneipe or pub (2008, 31). The second half of Der Luftangriff auf Halberstadt am 8. April 1945 is a bit more complex. It begins with two chapters that offer what Kluge calls ‘‘Strategie von unten’’(strategy from below) (2008, 31–38) and ‘‘Strategie von oben’’ (strategy from above) (2008, 39–53). In the first of these two chapters, the narrator relates in much detail the superficially rational strategy followed by Gerda Baethe to save herself and her children during the bombing. She counts the seconds between explosions, calculates accordingly the time needed to move from one point to the other, evaluates, in sum, the different aspects of the bombing in order to make rational choices. The chapter on ‘‘Strategie von oben’’provides the reader with a detailed account, accompanied by graphics and drawings, about the tactics and strategy of the Allied air-force high command, as well as the reason that led the squadron’s leader to order the bombing of the exceedingly insignificant city of Halberstadt. The remaining chapters complement that chapter or give the reader additional information on the bombing. Thus Kluge includes, among other materials, an interview with Brigadier Anderson (2008, 53–61), an interview published in a Swiss newspaper of a high-ranking officer from the general staff (2008, 61–65), passages on the fate of several places in Halberstadt (2008, 73–75), a chapter on the firefighters’ actions during the bombing told by an officer of a firefighting squad from Cologne (2008, 81–84), closing his novella with the account of a survey conducted by the Americans in order to measure the effect on people of the aerial bombing of Germany (2008, 86–90). In Der Luftangriff auf Halberstadt am 8. April 1945 bombing is represented through the collage of texts, voices, focalizers, and several types of discourse (i.e., images and written speech). The violence narrated in the story projects itself onto a shattered plot, even to the discourse, for while the narrator’s tone and voice is detached and rational, both detachment and reason somehow mimic the detachment and rationality that Kluge detects as the main elements behind the industrial production and delivery of the bombs. It is true that the author projects himself onto one of his characters: in his novella Kluge proceeds not unlike a photographer who meant to bear witness to the event by taking pictures of the catastrophe (2008, 12). Kluge’s style is indeed documentary; it has the detached quality of a photographer’s job (see, for instance, his short description of what was left of the city after the bombing [2008, 85]). At the same time, however, Kluge’s cold and analytical approach to the topic, which appeals not only to the readers’ emotions and affects, but to their intelligence as well, is not unrelated to the equally detached rationality underlying the planning of the bombing itself. Whereas the fragmentation of the plot and discourse perfectly mimics—as in Ledig’s Vergeltung—the catastrophic destruction described in the novel, the narrative tone as well as the approach adopted by Alexander Kluge uneasily reproduce the logic followed by the perpetrators.15 This unexpected complicity of Kluge’s novella with

15 Compare the affinities between Kluge’s book and the logic underpinning the mass production of bombs and aerial bombing with the synergy between cinema and modern warfare explored by Paul Virilio (1989). 123 N. Santiań˜ez the dehumanizing rationality that underpins the production and dropping of bombs places readers in an uncomfortable situation, one that somehow duplicates the role of victims in an air raid. Because of that complicity, the experimental form that articulates Der Luftangriff auf Halberstadt is much more than an innovative response to the challenges posed by bombing to representation. In addition, it may be read as imposing on the reader the same disturbing logic that led to the bombing of Halberstadt. The second modality of catastrophic modernism that I would like to examine is epitomized by the oeuvre of Louis-Ferdinand Ce´line published after the Second World War. Deeply indebted to Expressionism, Ce´line’s first postwar novel constitutes a fascinating actualization of catastrophic modernism: I am referring to Feérie pour une autre fois, published in two installments in 1952 and 1954. The first of a series of four novels based on Ce´line’s life from June 1944 to the end of the war and its immediate aftermath, Feérie pour une autre fois meant, as other scholars have already pointed out, a sharp departure from Ce´line’s previous fiction.16 In Feérie pour une autre fois the writer radicalized his tendency to produce plotless, digressive narratives, offering the reader a unique, to a certain extent difficult and unpleasant-to-read novel.17 The air raid narrated in the second part of the novel is much more than a simple ‘‘dećor for the absurd events that constitute the novel’s minimal plot’’ (Thiher 1972, 156). In stark contrast to this and similar critical views that minimize the relevance of the air raid described at length in Feérie pour une autre fois, I claim that the second part of the novel is, first of all, a reflection on aerial bombing in general, on the difficulties posed by bombing to language and representation, and on the psychological and psycho-social traumata that it may cause. Second, it constitutes a practical lesson on how to represent an air raid. Finally, Feérie pour une autre fois is, to a degree, a literary artifact written against the readers. Ce´line’s overt hostility towards the readers is a pragmatic refraction of the aerial bombing described in the novel; by relentlessly ‘‘bombing’’ them with aggressive remarks, as well as an expressionist language and imagery that ultimately seek to stir their affects, Ce´line wants his readers to feel the fear, the existential precariousness, and the cognitive disorientation triggered by an air raid. Ce´line’s style e´motif is meant, therefore, not only to render the emotion of spoken French; it also purports to have consequential effects on the readers’ affectivity vis- a`-vis aerial bombing. Therefore, Feérie pour une autre fois is, like the novels previously analyzed, a passionate utterance—one that can hardly leave anyone indifferent. Neglected by much of the criticism devoted to the study of Feérie pour une autre fois, those three foci of the novel are important determinants powering Ce´line’s radical experimentation with language, imagery, and form. The aerial bombing of Paris represented in the novel did not take place on the date given in the novel (18 June 1944), but two months earlier, on the night of 20–21 April 1944. It was a heavy attack, which hit hard, among other areas, the Parisian neighborhood

16 O’Connell (1978, 159–160), Sautermeister (1979, 94), Scullion (1998, 28). 17 On the modernist technical devices of Feérie pour une autre fois, see, among other studies, Bellosta (1978), Hainge (2005), McCarthy (1978), Nettelbeck (1979), Scullion (1998), Staskova´ (1999), Wagner (2003). 123 Aerial bombing and catastrophic modernism where Ce´line lived during the war (Montmartre) leaving behind around 640 dead and 370 wounded. What needs to be emphasized here is the connection between the real bombing and its effects on the one hand, and Ce´line’s radicalization of his modernist discourse on the other.18 Announced in the last scene of part 1 (1995, 203–206), the Allied air raid of Paris is told in the second part of Feérie pour une autre fois. It covers a temporal spectrum of a few hours only, from the outset of the attack early in the evening to the small hours of the following day. Ce´line compares the Allied bombing to natural disasters (e.g., 1995, 373), the biblical Deluge (e.g., 1995, 294, 355, 385–386, 463), the eruption of the Vesuvius (e.g., 1995, 288, 473, 475), and the Apocalypse (e.g., 1995, 387, 388–389). The bombing of Paris is seen as an event that belongs, to quote again from Sebald’s book on air warfare and literature, to the natural history of destruction. The French novelist does not explain, justify, or condemn violence, nor does he relate it with a promise of redemption; with the exception, perhaps, of a character named Jules, the characters lack real agency during the air raid, and the narrator does not let the reader feel empathy for any of them. Instead, he focuses on destruction itself, namely on the grammar and pragmatics of aerial bombing. To begin with, the destruction wrought by the Allied bombers is correlated to a peculiar kind of writing. This is how Ce´line describes the formation of the squadrons flying towards their targets: ‘‘the giant S’s!… the O’s!… the Z’s!… phenomenal speeds!… They made Z’s!… O’s! U’s!… but that meant this! and that!… messages! They knew them all! They knew!… it was necessary to decipher!… scrutinize!… The O! the Z!… it was writing on the clouds!’’ (1995, 204). Even the bombs, when dropped, have a writerly order (1995, 258). Flying and bombing are types of writing that need deciphering. In the sky there are ‘‘signs,’’ and the writer’s duty resides in ‘‘knowing how to decipher them’’ (1995, 264). This is precisely what Feérie pour une autre fois does for the reader: it deciphers the complex writerly nature of aerial bombing by means of experiments with expressionist language and imagery as well as the complete fragmentation of both the story and the plot. Bombing is described as a stunningly beautiful spectacle of colors and sounds not unlike painting and music (e.g., 1995, 252–253, 255–256, 263–264, 494). Ce´line is also fascinated by the orderly movement of the airplanes (e.g., 1995, 253, 256–257, 306–307). This writing, this pictorial and musical spectacle of colors, sounds, and movement, this deadly ballet on the sky mimicked by Ce´line in his own writing, radically transforms the usual spatial order. In a way, the bombers on the sky rewrite spatial relations on the ground in unexpected ways; Ce´line mirrors in his experimental novel this multiple rewriting. Thus the bombing of some areas of Paris and its banlieu is depicted as inverting the spatial order: ‘‘I see the houses… they are pulled off, they climb up, they get tangled up with each other… everything up there, very high up! I recognize the boulevard de Lorraine!… they swirl around even farther away!… there is an entire city in the air!… upside down!… it’s an optical effect, everything! all the buildings… and the shops and the trees… the

18 See Bellosta (1978, 41–58) and Nettlelbeck (1979, 73–74) for an analysis of the aerial bombing narrated by Ce´line. Compare with Brown (2000), who talks, apropos of Feérie pour une autre fois,ofan ‘‘aesthetic of cataclysm,’’ and with Cliche’s study of Ce´line as a ‘‘chronicler of disaster’’ (2005). 123 N. Santiań˜ez sarabande by repercussions! everything is projected above the clouds!’’ (1995, 295). Trees are taken off from the ground and start flying (1995, 298); the Luxembourg Gardens are also in the air (1995, 320). The usual spatial relation between sky and earth has been reverted (1995, 346). There has been, in short, a ‘‘revolution of the space’’ (1995, 346) that has altered not only the geometry of places, but also the usual hierarchy of moral values (1995, 386). As the narrator says with more detail in another passage, the city has been turned upside down by the bombing (1995, 351–352). Once the bombing is over, the city goes back to its usual spatial order (1995, 502–503, 509, 515–516). The inversion of the spatial geometry is reproduced in the novel’s plotlessness, in its digressions, in the endless delirious monologue of the narrator, in its spatial form, in short: in its radical inversion of the traditional realist novel. It is not by chance that Ce´line’s chose the feérie or fable for shaping his novel.19 The plot structure, as well as the experiments with time, space, imagery, syntax, and morphology are closely related to that sub-genre: ‘‘confusion of places, of times!… This is the fable, you understand, fable is this… the future! The past! False! True!’’ (1995, 36). In the context of this novel, feérie means at once ‘‘theatrical play, spectacle where supernatural characters appear’’ (2001, def. 2), ‘‘splendid, marvelous spectacle’’ (2001, def. 3), and ‘‘irrational and poetical universe’’ (2001, def. 4). The generic rules of a feérie refract, in Feérie pour une autre fois, the confusion of time and space characteristic of any aerial bombing, the murderous beauty and spectacular dimension of such kind of attacks, and the sense of absurdity caused by the bombs among the people. Feérie pour une autre fois, with its multiple digressions and analepses, is one of the most extraordinary expressionist catastrophic modernist artifacts ever devoted to aerial bombing. There is a connection between the bombers’ destruction of space, cultural memory, and sense of time with the novel’s expressionist experimentalism and spatial form. As Ce´line himself acknowledges, he simply reports what he saw. Throughout the novel the narrator insists once and again on the historicity of everything he tells in it. Despite appearances to the contrary, he underscores that his is the procedure of a historian who has witnessed the events (e.g., 1995, 259, 260, 261, 268, 288, 301, 390). Hence his comparison of himself with Plinius the Elder (1995, 272, 288, 456, 463, 475). But most important, the nature of the bombing determined both the author’s language and the narrative form. He says that much: ‘‘You will tell me: not very organized, your chronicle!… Is there an order in deluges?… and a lousy liar, be sure about that, that who tells you calmly that he has seen melting, in certain order!… the proof: my last start!… Try to narrate that calmly!…’’ (1995, 424). Therefore, the carnivalesque expressionist language, the plotlessness, the verbal excesses, the mystifications, the broken-up syntax, and the spatial form of Feérie pour une autre fois have to be considered as Ce´line’s deliberate and self-aware response to the challenge posed to representation by a catastrophic event such as aerial bombing. This confirms my initial hypothesis according to which the modernism of catastrophic modernist works is a function of the catastrophe that they narrate.

19 See Bellosta (1978) for a critical consideration of that novel as fe´erie. 123 Aerial bombing and catastrophic modernism

Ce´line would revisit aerial bombing in Rigodon. In addition to describing the annihilated urban space of Hamburg (1969, 200–240), the narrator and main character—a literary refraction of the author—evokes the bombing that he and his wife suffered in Hannover (1969, 161–178). What is indeed remarkable of this episode is not, however, Ce´line’s modernist description of the scarred urban landscape of Hannover, but rather his confession to the reader, right before his narration of the air raid against that city as they were crossing it on a cart, that from that point on his narrative will be sketchy and disorganized: ‘‘From now on, I warn you, my chronicle is a bit choppy, I myself, who lived through what I am telling you, can barely find myself in it… earlier I was telling you about comic-strips, even in the comics you’d have a hard time finding a sudden break like that in the continuity, thread, needle, and characters… such a brutal event’’ (1969, 169–170). The reason behind these problems with memory and writing is pointed out in the same paragraph: the nearby explosion of a bomb (1969, 170). Immediately after acknowledging his inability for properly capturing that episode, Ce´line moves on to narrate the air raid that took place as they were arriving to the train station where they had to board a train to Hamburg (see 1969, 171–172). Addressing the reader, he writes: ‘‘you will never see this sort of ambiances and tragedies in films!… don’t even think of a scene!… to what is real! since that incident I cannot look at a photograph!… to translate, to betray! yes! to reproduce, to take photographs, to rot!…’’ (1969, 175). In Rigodon not only does Ce´line describe aerial bombing; in addition, he inserts metatextual passages in which he confesses, rather uncharac- teristically, the difficulty of capturing in words an event utterly seen as devoid of meaning. The third and last modality of catastrophic modernism that I have chosen to scrutinize in this paper is represented by James Hanley’s No directions, a novel published in 1943.20 Today only read by specialists in wartime Britain, No directions constitutes nonetheless a significant spatial form on, as well as a noteworthy impressionist approach to, aerial bombing. Fragmented and plotless, this claustrophobic two-part novel focuses on what goes on in a building of flats in Chelsea shortly before a German air raid against London (part 1) and during the attack until it is over (part 2). Except for chapters 3 (which narrates Lena Stevens’s walk through a blacked-out London) and 7 (devoted to relating the artist Clement Stevens’s wandering on the neighboring streets during the last phase of the bombing), the rest of the chapters narrate events that take place inside of the building. Action is told discontinuously, and the formal element that links the different stories is to be found in Richard Jones, the warden in charge of making sure that official regulations are met by the neighbors. In No directions, space is far more important than time. Temporal indications are sparse and vague. Thus the narrator writes that ‘‘A nearby clock was striking’’ (1990, 10) without indicating the hour, and the same happens on other occasions (e.g., 1990, 58, 68). In none of these cases does the reader learn the exact time marked by the clock. The same indetermination can be found in the presentation of the characters. Except for

20 There is a dearth of critical studies on Hanley’s No directions. Exceptions to the norm are Mengham (2001) and Murat (2009). 123 N. Santia´n˜ez

Clement and Lena Stevens, whose biographies are briefly summarized (1990, 63–68), all the other characters practically lack a past. Little is known about them aside from their professions. The only thing that counts is the present—the present of catastrophe, that is. In contrast to this scarcity of temporal markers and biographical details, space is treated with much more specificity. The same can be said of movement, for the narrative voice relates horizontal movement (Richard Jones taking a drunken sailor from the street to the building, Lena and Clem walking through Chelsea) as well as vertical itineraries (Jones frantic going up and down the staircase of the building, the neighbors walking down the stairs towards the cellar when the sirens go off). In No directions spatial form refracts the nature of the bombing and its destruction of continuities. The main storylines may be arranged into three groups. The first group covers stories that are closely connected to the new ways of experiencing private and public space caused by the Blitz and by the regulations issued by the British authorities on air-raid defense. Mrs. Emily Frazer, for instance, does not want to leave her flat (whose door is out of its hinges since the previous air raid); she refuses to move away from the door (1990, 14–16). Mrs. Frazer defends a sense of privacy that has been shattered by the war. Her awareness that the usual meaning of private and public space has been altered because of the war worries her to the point of obsession (1990, 15). Mr. Frazer tries hard to persuade his wife to seek shelter in the cellar when the air raid starts (1990, 100–102), and after much resistance they go down to the cellar, but not for long: Mrs. Frazer goes back to her flat before the All Clear (1990, 122, 124–125). Part of the problem lies in the fact that life in the cellar is alienating and lacks meaning, at least for some characters. According to Gwen, in the cellar ‘‘nothing seemed to have meaning’’ (1990, 18). The tempo of life and language are new ‘‘down there’’ (1990, 101). The interaction of the neighbors in the cellar during the bombing takes much attention from Hanley, who devotes chapters 4, 5, and 6 to that place. In the second group of storylines we can see the treatment of existential issues. First of all, chapter 2 narrates the casual sexual encounter between a former model of Clem’s, Celia Downs, and the unknown sailor taken by the warden into the building at the beginning of the novel. Both characters break into an unoccupied flat, and after drinking and flirting they end up making love. This story shows the loosening up during the war of the sexual strictures usually imposed by social conventions on people, as well as the vindication of life at its most basic before the deadly danger posed by the air raids. Significantly, during the flirting and also during sexual intercourse, Celia Downs believes to hear the buzz of approaching squadrons and seems to be much frightened (1990, 43). The other storyline within this second group centers on Clem and Lena’s efforts to take to the cellar an unfinished painting by Clem (1990, 72–75, 109, 112, 126, 129–131). If we are to believe his wife, Clem ‘‘always takes it down below whenever there’s a raid’’ (1990, 126). While in the sexual affair between Celia and the sailor there is a vindication of the body and life, in Clem’s attempt to save his art from destruction there is a defense of the spiritual world and cultural memory. The third group comprises two vanishing points of the novel: Lena’s walk shortly before the bombing starts, and Clem’s wandering through the streets as the bombing 123 Aerial bombing and catastrophic modernism is ebbing away. The visual contrast between the two scenes is quite remarkable. In the former, the entire city is immersed in darkness, while in the latter the explosions produce fascinating colors and alter shapes in striking ways: Clem the painter is clearly contemplating a sort of painting as it is being made by the bombers. A disturbing and ambiguous projection of Clement Stevens himself, the Germans ‘‘paint’’ the city of London. In Lena’s walk, Hanley presents by using impressionistic techniques a ghostly and threatened city, repeatedly compared to a ‘‘dark sea’’ whose black-out engulfed and protected everything, establishing a new spatial grammar. The last chapter, which obviously dialogues with chapter 3 (each of them closes one part of this two-part novel), depicts an entirely different panorama. Clem cannot resist the temptation to leave the sheltering cellar and go out to see the bombing (‘‘I must see this. I must see this’’ [1990, 134], he says repeatedly, fascinated by the visual spectacle that he imagines is going on in London). This is the only chapter that truly describes the bombing. In the previous chapters it had been narrated through what the tenants of the building heard from their cellar. Initially, mentions to the on-going raid as well as to the Germans are understated (1990, 91–93, 103, 109). Even references to the Germans are elliptical, and they lack animosity (e.g., 1990, 98–99). But at some point, the bombing becomes more intense, and the bombers drop their load near or over Chelsea (e.g., 1990, 134). As the intensity of bombardment grows, the neighbors’ nervousness increases (1990, 134). In all those cases, characters sense the bombing, but they do not see it. In contrast, chapter 7 describes directly the air raid. Like Henry Green (pen name of Henry Yorke) in his 1943 novel Caught, which does not describe an aerial bombing until the last twenty pages of the novel (Green 2016, 168–191), Hanley’s No directions defers the visual depiction of bombing to the closing chapter. Also like Green, Hanley depicts the bombing as a painter would, that is by focusing on, and describing in impressionistic terms, its visual elements, thereby introducing in the novel the principle of ekphrasis, a metatextual device characteristic of modernist literature that underscores the very texture of the novel by emphasizing the pictorial dimension of a scene or a character. This is achieved by focalizing the impressionistic description of bombed-out London through the painter Clement Stevens (see, for instance, 1990, 135–136). The narrator occasionally points out this ‘‘artist’s gaze’’: ‘‘He didn’t hear, didn’t feel, he only saw’’ (1990, 136). From the roof of a high-rise, Clem saw the following view of the city: ‘‘Wood and stone and steel alive with wrecking power. Roads opened, streets collapsed, hollow sounds where once old giants had stood, great gaps, fissures, rivers in tumult, showering glass, old giants flat. He looked down from the heights. An orgy of movement, in one direction, moving under the light. An ocean of floating trash’’ (1990, 136). This is precisely what Clem admires: the pictorial side of the bombing. Clem’s artistic attitude is similar to the one displayed by Guy Crouchback, the main character of Evelyn Waugh’s 1966 trilogy of novels on the Second World War, Sword of honor. Back in England after a tour of duty, Crouchback exclaims after witnessing an air raid on London—something that he finds ‘‘most exhilarating’’ (Waugh 2012, 250): ‘‘Pure Turner’’ (2012, 249). No directions ends, in sum, with an ekphrasis, specifically with the impressionist pictorial description of bombing and its effects on the urban landscape. 123 N. Santiań˜ez

The devastation caused by strategic bombing is refracted not only through collage, montage, spatial form, expressionist language and imagery, or impressionism. In certain cases, it also finds expression in the shattering of syntax. As is the case with the other family resemblances of catastrophic modernism, such shattering of syntax seeks to alter the readers’ cognition of reality and produce in them feelings of disorientation and emotional distress. This is certainly the case of the aforementioned novels of Arno Schmidt, Gert Ledig, Louis-Ferdinand Ce´line, and Hubert Fichte, in which the authors experiment with morphology, syntax, and paragraph-structure. The intricate, convoluted, demanding syntax of Elizabeth Bowen in The heat of the day has been interpreted similarly by some scholars, that is as being a modernist literary response to the Blitz of London.21 The same could be said of the sentence-structure in the 1999 trilogy of novels by Dieter Forte Das Haus auf meinen Schultern (The house on my shoulders), particularly in those passages in which the author describes with some detail heavy bombings of (without naming the cities) Du¨sseldorf (2002, 449–468, 476–478) and Cologne (2002, 541–544).22 In the second and third installments of this trilogy of novels, the narrator focalizes the action through a character always referred to as ‘‘the boy’’ (der Junge) and describes many dimensions of the bombing: the loss of the sense of time, spatial disorientation, the workings of air-defense, the fear felt by people sheltering in cellars, the crumbling down of houses during the bombing, the enormous fires, and also the traumatic effects of the air raid, manifested in the boy’s loss of his ability to speak for several months. But the most striking feature of Forte’s representation of aerial bombing is his manipulation of syntax: the sentences that narrate the air raid become extremely long and challenging, and the narration of one of them is told in one single three-page-long sentence (2002, 455–457). To be sure, the German language allows for the construction of long sentences: the syntax of W.G. Sebald’s novels, to exemplify my point with one of the foremost German novelists of the last twenty-five years, is quite intricate, and single sentences go on for pages. But this is not the case of Forte. His sentences are not consistently long. Sometimes Forte even employs a staccato style, as for instance in his description of the fire that destroys a whole street (2002, 464–465). The three-page-long sentence on the bombing is the longest sentence in the novel. In the same way that there is a correlation between strategic bombing on the one hand, and collage, montage, expressionism, impressionism, and spatial form on the other, the destructiveness of a massive air raid may be also mimicked by the fragmentation of syntax, namely by one endless sentence that leaves no respite to the reader. Catastrophic modernism offers some of the most interesting answers to the question on how to represent catastrophes, for it formally captures important elements and dimensions of disaster. Some constituents of the very morphology of modernism, such as spatial form, collage, montage, expressionist or impressionist imagery, and convoluted or experimental syntax liken this mode of writing to the grammar and effects of catastrophes, as if modernism and catastrophe somehow belonged to the same class of things. This homology between modernism and

21 See, for instance, Teekell (2011). 22 For more information on Forte’s trilogy, see Vees-Gulani (2003, 111–119). 123 Aerial bombing and catastrophic modernism disasters is already evident in the experimental literature produced on the Great War, a cataclysmic event that provided a perfect field for the practice of catastrophic modernism. Several authors who faced the challenges inherent in representing the horror of the war of 1914–1918 opted for producing catastrophic modernist works. Examples of catastrophic modernist narratives are Leonhard Frank’s 1917 Der Mensch ist gut (Men are good), Ford Madox Ford’s 1924–28 tetralogy Parade’s end, Mary Borden’s 1929 The forbidden zone, Edlef Ko¨ppen’s 1930 Heeresbericht (Army communique´), Ce´line’s 1932 Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the end of the night), and David Jones’s 1937 In parenthesis. By reason of its central interest in the destruction wrought by the Great War, its formal dislocation, and its apocalyptic atmosphere, T. S. Eliot’s 1922 The Waste Land represents the first full- fledged manifestation of catastrophic modernist poetry, while Karl Kraus’s 1915–22 Die letzten Tage der Menschheit (The last days of mankind) is the earliest instance of catastrophic modernist drama.23 The Second World War is yet another milestone in the history of the synergy between catastrophe and modernism. Due to the extreme and unspeakable nature of its catastrophic events (e.g., the strategic bombing of cities), the Second World War brought about the radicalization of modernist discourse on catastrophe. In fact, the catastrophic modernism on the world war of 1939–1945 constitutes an extreme manifestation of modernist writing. Walter Kempowski’s Das Echolot. Ein kollektives Tagebuch (The sonar: A collective diary) (1993–2005), a ten-volume collage of thousands of texts, epitomizes the radical experimentalism intrinsic to the catastrophic modernism devoted to the Second World War.24 The novels on aerial bombing that I have analyzed in these pages, together with others mentioned earlier but left unexplored, bring us closer to catastrophe by means of experiments with vocabulary, syntax, imagery, form, and genre. These literary works employ a rich, complex language for narrating the experience of catastrophe. On the one hand, they tacitly acknowledge the difficulty, if not the outright impossibility, of cognitively mastering the catastrophic event; their awareness of the utter incommensurability of disaster allows us to conclude that catastrophic modernism is a modern sublime. On the other hand, catastrophic modernist artifacts contain a therapeutic function, for they deploy linguistic tools and rhetorical strategies that may be perfectly applied for effectively working through the psychological and psycho-social traumata caused by catastrophe. Finally, the study of catastrophic modernist works on air raids provides us with a model for exploring catastrophic modernism on other disasters, such as the Nazi destruction of European Jewry, or, more recently, global terrorism.

References

Ahrens, J. (2001). Macht der Gewalt: Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno und die Prosa Gert Ledigs. Literatur fu¨r Leser, 24(3), 165–178.

23 Although solely centered on the Anglo-American literary field, two outstanding approaches to the modernist literature on the Great War are Saint-Amour (2015) and Sherry (2006). 24 For the modernism of Das Echolot, see Santiań˜ez (2016). 123 N. Santiań˜ez

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