Aerial Bombing and Catastrophic Modernism

Neohelicon DOI 10.1007/s11059-017-0412-y Aerial bombing and catastrophic modernism Nil Santiań˜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 Santiań˜ez [email protected] 1 Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, Saint Louis University, St. Louis, MO, USA 123 N. Santiań˜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

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