Stratigraphy of an Inferno a Whole Series of Experiences of Bombardment
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Gert Ledig. Payback. London: Granta Books, 2003. xv + 200 pp. $12.95, paper, ISBN 978-1-86207-565-8. Reviewed by Julia Torrie Published on H-German (November, 2003) Stratigraphy of an Inferno a whole series of experiences of bombardment. It Gert Ledig's novel Vergeltung begins in a is as if one were looking at a collection of very graveyard, in the middle of an aerial bombard‐ vivid segments of flm, retrieved from a cutting- ment. "When the frst bomb fell," he writes, "the room foor. Each belongs with the others, but the blast hurled the dead children against the wall. exact order is unclear, and there is little continu‐ They had suffocated in a cellar the day before. ity from one to the next. The novel ostensibly They had been laid in the graveyard because their takes place over sixty-nine minutes, but in fact, fathers were fghting at the front, and their moth‐ time seems to slow down and speed up at will. ers were still missing. Only one was found, but One moment, we are underground, with the fami‐ she was crushed under the rubble. That was what lies huddled in a cellar. The next, we are up in a payback looked like" (p. 1). This laconic reporting bomber with an attacking crew of Americans. of unfathomable events is typical of Ledig's work, Then, Ledig leaves us hanging somewhere in be‐ first published in 1956, but only recently translat‐ tween, watching a group of young boys on a high- ed into English as Payback. The work is graphic, rise bunker, literally strapped to the Flak guns shocking, and so vividly written that the reader is they are aiming at the enemy above. The novel appalled, yet fnds the book difficult to put down. creates, in effect, a vertical cross-section of the Ledig opens a window into the experience of aeri‐ city at a particular point in time. As it skips ran‐ al bombardment that no historian's account can domly from one stratum to the next, the only con‐ match. stants are chaos and destruction. The subject of the novel is the bombing of an When Ledig's book was frst published in the unnamed German city in July 1944. Instead of mid-1950's, its reception was disastrous. A review‐ telling a single story from beginning to end, how‐ er in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung called ever, the book is composed of vignettes. The read‐ the work "a deliberately macabre horror-paint‐ er is offered glimpses into a whole series of lives, ing," while his counterpart at Die Zeit suggested H-Net Reviews that the work was so appalling as to be barely nich. Thus, Ledig came to know not just the sol‐ credible.[1] Ledig had written a successful frst diers' war, but also the civilians' war from the in‐ novel about war on the Eastern Front (Die Stali‐ side, and these experiences formed the basis for norgel), that was rapidly translated into fourteen Payback.[4] languages, but Payback was something else. The The work is valuable, from a historian's point Stalin Organ depicted the chaotic amorality of of view, for several reasons. It is fction, to be battle, but when Ledig tried to suggest that war on sure, and it is at times overwrought. Sebald writes the home front had often been just as bad, the in Luftkrieg und Literatur that in Ledig's text, public did not want to listen. As W.G. Sebald put it, "manches wirkt unbeholfen und uberdreht."[5] Ledig's works "wurden aus dem kulturellen Still, this is fction written by someone who expe‐ Gedachtnis ausgeschlossen, weil sie den cordon rienced aerial bombardment himself, and who is sanitaire zu durchbrechen drohten, mit dem die therefore able to describe it with an immediacy Gesellschaft die Todeszonen tatsachlich ent‐ that evades the historian, no matter how hard he standener dystopischer Einbruche umgibt."[2] or she tries. Even Jorg Friedrich's chapter on the Ledig broke the quarantine seal on the past, re‐ experience of bombing, Ich, which does a good minding Germans about something that most pre‐ job of capturing the absurdity of an air raid and ferred, at least for a time, to forget. the population's near-hysterical vacillation be‐ The fact that an English translation of Vergel‐ tween despair and grim humour, cannot bring the tung has only just appeared testifies to the depth reader into a bombed city the way Ledig's fction of the black hole into which Ledig's work fell. An‐ can. This kind of novel feshes out gaps in the doc‐ other sign of this is that Sebald did not even men‐ uments, and brings them to life. tion the book in his initial series of lectures in Contributing to the realistic quality of the Zurich, from which he drew the material for novel is the fact that Ledig allows almost no dis‐ Luftkrieg und Literatur. Sebald was simply not tance between the reader and the events he de‐ aware that the work existed, until the discussion picts. This is in direct contrast to most other Ger‐ surrounding his own lectures helped to bring man authors who have described the experience Ledig back into the public eye. A German republi‐ of an aerial bombardment. To take perhaps the cation of Vergeltung appeared in 1999, just after best-known example, Hans Erich Nossack's Der its author's death.[3] Untergang is written from the perspective of a The mercilessly graphic quality of Ledig's narrator who has left Hamburg for a short vaca‐ work, clearly part of what offended his contempo‐ tion. The narrator watches his home city burn raries, had its roots in the fact that Ledig wrote, at from out on the heath, then studies the aftermath least in general terms, about his own experiences. of the bombardment when he returns to town. He Michael Hoffmann informs us, in the short essay is merely an observer, and Nossack's text reads that opens the English translation of Payback, that much like a report.[6] Ledig's characters, in con‐ Ledig volunteered for the German army in 1939, trast, are inside the inferno, living through fre- at age eighteen. He fought for about three years, bombing, and dying in it. In many ways, the book including time spent in a punishment unit in bears a greater resemblance to later American 1942, as a result of "inflammatory talk" (he was novels, like Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, later a convinced Communist). After the loss of or Joseph Heller's Catch 22, than to contemporary two fngers of his right hand and part of his lower German works. jaw on the Eastern Front, he returned to Ger‐ Ledig's novel is an uncomfortable read, par‐ many, where he worked as an engineer in Mu‐ ticularly so in Shaun Whiteside's effective English 2 H-Net Reviews translation, which captures the economy of tions, but Payback offers no redemption, no hap‐ Ledig's language, and his edge. For an Anglo‐ py ending. In contrast to others who have written phone, even one well-versed in German, this ver‐ fiction about the bombing, Ledig refuses to assign sion brings the stories closer to home, and it it a deeper significance.[7] Each life the reader sometimes seems more "real" than the original visits in the course of the novel is profoundly af‐ German. The translation makes the work accessi‐ fected by the air raids, but this experience does ble to non-German speakers, and it would be an not make anyone better. There is no easy resolu‐ excellent addition to any undergraduate course tion offered, there are no platitudes about re‐ on the Second World War, or war and society demption in the ashes or phoenixes rising from more broadly. The language is clear and direct, flames. the text is relatively short, and most importantly, Even the victors are denied comfort. Ledig Payback offers no easy answers. does not allow any reader to see these bombings Indeed, perhaps the most striking aspect of as just punishment, revenge, or even fair play. He the novel, and one which surely contributed to its fights our desire to simplify war, to read it as a glacial reception in post-war Germany, is Ledig's clear matter of good and evil, victory or loss. The refusal to judge, his refusal to be caught up in de‐ English version makes this explicit, translating the termining who is guilty, who is innocent. A reader German title Vergeltung as Payback, when "re‐ of Payback enters into the world of both perpetra‐ venge" might also have been used. Revenge im‐ tors and victims, moving from bunker to bomber, plies honour, however, and suggests that a just and back again. The novel is built, in fact, on the punishment has been visited on one's enemies. conviction that there is no point in making a clear This is not what Ledig means. The author's dis‐ distinction between one group and the other, for comfort with moralizing "justifications" is evident perpetrators and victims are often one and the from the novel's very frst paragraph, quoted same. In one scene, a young girl is raped by a man above. We are shown dead children thrown into while they are both buried under a collapsed the air, killed, in effect, for a second time, and told building. We may be tempted to assume that the that this "was what payback looked like." The girl, at least, is an innocent victim, until we re‐ scene is ugly, and even though we later fnd out member that in an earlier episode, she grew tired that the American setting the target aimed for the of carrying an elderly neighbour down the stairs graveyard precisely to avoid killing any more Ger‐ into the cellar, and dropped her.