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The End: Hamburg 1943
One didn't dare to inhale for fear of breathing it in. It was the sound of eighteen hundred airplanes approaching Hamburg from the south at an unimaginable height. We had already experienced two hundred or even more air raids, among them some very heavy ones, but this was something completely new. And yet there was an immediate recognition: this was what everyone had been waiting for, what had hung for months like a shadow over everything we did, making us weary. It was the end.
Novelist Hans Erich Nossack was forty-two when the Allied bombardments of German cities began, and he watched the destruction of Hamburg—the city where he was born and where he would later die—from across its Elbe River. He heard the whistle of the bombs and the singing of shrapnel; he watched his neighbors flee; he wondered if his home—and his manuscripts—would survive the devastation. The End is his terse, remarkable and moving memoir of the annihilation of the city, written only three months after the bombing. A searing firsthand account of one of the most notorious events of World War II, The End is also a meditation on war and hope, history and its devastation. And it is the rare book, as W. G. Sebald noted, that describes the Allied bombing campaign from the German perspective.
In the first English-language edition of The End, Nossack's text has been crisply translated by Joel Agee and is accompanied by the photographs of Erich Andres. Poetic, evocative, and yet highly descriptive, The End will prove to be, as Sebald claimed, one of the most important German books on the firebombing of that country.
"A small but critical book, something to read in those quiet moments when we wonder what will happen next."—Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
Novelist Hans Erich Nossack was forty-two when the Allied bombardments of German cities began, and he watched the destruction of Hamburg—the city where he was born and where he would later die—from across its Elbe River. He heard the whistle of the bombs and the singing of shrapnel; he watched his neighbors flee; he wondered if his home—and his manuscripts—would survive the devastation. The End is his terse, remarkable and moving memoir of the annihilation of the city, written only three months after the bombing. A searing firsthand account of one of the most notorious events of World War II, The End is also a meditation on war and hope, history and its devastation. And it is the rare book, as W. G. Sebald noted, that describes the Allied bombing campaign from the German perspective.
In the first English-language edition of The End, Nossack's text has been crisply translated by Joel Agee and is accompanied by the photographs of Erich Andres. Poetic, evocative, and yet highly descriptive, The End will prove to be, as Sebald claimed, one of the most important German books on the firebombing of that country.
"A small but critical book, something to read in those quiet moments when we wonder what will happen next."—Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
112 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1948
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About the author
Hans Erich Nossack
42 books9 followersHans Erich Nossack war ein deutscher Schriftsteller, der zunächst als Lyriker und Dramatiker, später jedoch vor allem als Prosaautor in Erscheinung trat.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 48 reviews
October 21, 2020
Το μικρό αυτό χρονικό γράφτηκε τον Νοέμβριο του 1943, δηλαδή μόλις λίγους μήνες μετά την Επιχείρηση Γόμορρα, κατά την οποία βομβαρδίστηκε ανηλεώς η πόλη του Αμβούργου από τους Συμμάχους, με αποτέλεσμα των θάνατο δεκάδων χιλιάδων αμάχων και την καταστροφή δεκάδων χιλιάδων κατοικιών, δημοσίων κτιρίων και εργοστασίων. Ο Νόσακ καταφέρνει μέσα σε λίγο σχετικά χώρο να μεταφέρει με γλαφυρό τρόπο στους αναγνώστες τον πόνο, τον τρόμο, τον φόβο και την αβεβαιότητα που επέφερε το ανήθικο και φυσικά απάνθρωπο αυτό χτύπημα στους κατοίκους της πόλης. Στο "Η καταστροφή" θα διαβάσει κανείς βινιέτες από τη ζωή μετά το χτύπημα, καθώς επίσης και κάποιους φιλοσοφικού ύφους σχολιασμούς του συγγραφέα σχετικά με τον βομβαρδισμό της πόλης του, τον πόλεμο και τις επιπτώσεις όλων αυτών στους ανθρώπους γύρω του. Η γραφή είναι δυνατή, διεισδυτική και σε σημεία συναισθηματικά πολύ φορτισμένη, σίγουρα με τις περιγραφές και τις σκέψεις του ο Νόσακ δημιουργεί έναν κόμπο στο στομάχι. Ένα βιβλίο μικρό στο μάτι, αλλά έντονο και συγκλονιστικό.
December 1, 2014
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.
HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION
HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMMENDATION
January 14, 2023
Απορώ που δεν έχαιρε μεγαλύτερης αναγνώρισης!
October 6, 2019
Nossack könyvében az a pláne, hogy 1943-ban íródott, így az élmény (brrrr… hülye szó ez itt) frissességével beszél Hamburg lebombázásáról. Ha valaki évtizedek távlatából visszatekintve igyekezne rekonstruálni egy város porig égését, alighanem a rárakódott utólagos tudás torzítaná az elbeszélést: olyan elemekkel terhelné meg a történetet, ami akkor még nem volt tudható, és esetleg olyanokkal, amik ugyan abban a pillanatban az elbeszélőnek nem voltak fontosak, de fontossá tették őket az azóta eltelt évek. Ezért ebben a könyvben ne is keressük a terrorbombázás horrorisztikus pillanatképeit – ilyenből csak mutatóba akad –, és azt se várjuk el, hogy a szerző teljességre törekedjék. Ez a könyv szükségszerűen csak töredék lehet, mert egyetlen ember benyomásait tükrözi, és töredék azért is, mert írója az idő jó részében távolról figyeli az eseményeket – és pont ez a távolság és töredezettség teszi rá a hitelesség pecsétjét a szövegre. Mert aki elmondhatja, hogy látta Hamburg pusztulását, annak megfelelő távolságból kellett azt néznie. Különben nem mondhatna el semmit.
(Általában hiányérzetem van, amikor lerakom a RaRe könyvtár köteteit. Gondolom, tudatos koncepció volt a Magvetőtől, hogy a szövegeket mindenfajta mellékelt információ – az író életrajzi adatai, esetleg egy nyúlfarknyi kiadói utószó – nélkül pottyantotta az ölünkbe, merthogy ugye a jó irodalom az mindenféle kontextustól megfosztva is jó irodalom. Én a magam részéről viszont szeretem az utószavakat, sőt: a jól megírt utószavakba konkrétan bele tudok szeretni. A jó utószó nem vakvezető kutya, aki átvonszol a könyv sötétségén egészen a megfejtésig, mintha világtalan lennék – de segíthet rámutatni a lehetséges olvasatok gazdagságára. Pláne nem ártana ez a RaRe sorozat esetében, ami egyébként is gyakran dolgozik olyan szövegekkel, amik mintha picit csonkabonkák lennének. Amilyen például ez a könyv.)
(Általában hiányérzetem van, amikor lerakom a RaRe könyvtár köteteit. Gondolom, tudatos koncepció volt a Magvetőtől, hogy a szövegeket mindenfajta mellékelt információ – az író életrajzi adatai, esetleg egy nyúlfarknyi kiadói utószó – nélkül pottyantotta az ölünkbe, merthogy ugye a jó irodalom az mindenféle kontextustól megfosztva is jó irodalom. Én a magam részéről viszont szeretem az utószavakat, sőt: a jól megírt utószavakba konkrétan bele tudok szeretni. A jó utószó nem vakvezető kutya, aki átvonszol a könyv sötétségén egészen a megfejtésig, mintha világtalan lennék – de segíthet rámutatni a lehetséges olvasatok gazdagságára. Pláne nem ártana ez a RaRe sorozat esetében, ami egyébként is gyakran dolgozik olyan szövegekkel, amik mintha picit csonkabonkák lennének. Amilyen például ez a könyv.)
November 5, 2016
I’m fully aware of the arrogance it takes for someone to argue that someone didn’t have the “correct” perspective on the tragedy they experienced, but there is certainly something disturbing about the metaphysicality and transcendentalism in this text’s recounting of the 1943 bombing of Hamburg. Nossack constantly describes the events as “eternal,” an elimination of the past that makes everything appear as an act of “fate.” 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’s 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.
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’s 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.
December 27, 2015
A sombre retelling of the bombing of hamburg by someone who lived through it. Well-written with sharp visual imagery.
April 26, 2023
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.
February 24, 2016
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.
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.
November 7, 2013
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.
January 4, 2015
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.
As such, don't expect too much beyond a certain feeling or tone.
August 18, 2025
Impossible to read this without thinking of Gaza. Nossack wrote this 3 months after the bombing of Hamburg in 1943, it was published in German in 1948 … wasn’t released in English translation until 2004. I can’t help comparing it to John Hersey’s magnificent ‘Hiroshima’, published five months after that perhaps more historic bombing.
I note the differing provenances of these two accounts of atrocity, both perpetrated by the winning side, neither exonerated from that description. Winners can be as guilty of obscenities as losers, winners write the histories and can thus silence truths, sanitise lies, massage distortions.
And, until 2004, publishers clearly felt Germans wouldn’t get a sympathetic hearing if they complained about their suffering in World War 2. The dropping of A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaka clearly took the role of the bomber into new dimensions of horror, exemplified by the speed with which Hersey’s account was brought before an American then a world public. With nuclear weapons the focus, why would an account of firebombing warrant attention?
The firebombing of Hamburg in 1943 resulted in a (disputed) death toll of 34,000. In 1945, 25,000 died in the firebombing of Dresden (disputed), 100,000 in Tokyo. With the ever-increasing range of the bomber, its size and lethality of its payload, civilians were viable targets regardless how far they lived from the actual front line. I remember the booklet issued across the UK advising us how to protect ourselves and survive a nuclear attack … bullshit of the first order, but I’m sure the authors meant well.
What Nossack brings home is the individualising nature of atrocity. No matter how many thousands die, both dead and survivors experience the atrocity as individuals. The survivors incubate terror, pain and loss as individuals, enduring a claustrophobic horror, perhaps survivor guilt.
Some individuals try to record … record the emptiness of a city which has vanished. But there’s an implicit divisiveness. Is the everything I’ve lost more of an everything than the everything you’ve lost? There’s a need to get people to work together, to cooperate in constructing day-to-day survival never mind building a future, yet people are so trapped in individual pain collaborative efforts can be beyond contemplation.
Nossack emphasises the individualising nature of shared horror – it locks you in a selfish need to survive, not just to continue living, but to find reason for survival. Survivor guilt … or just an overwhelming sense of the inexplicable?
People lose everything. Their home. Their neighbourhood. Family, friends, the everyday, the routines, a favourite teddy bear or book or chair or pipe or photo or toothbrush or … .
And there’s that question of status. Survivor? Refugee? Maybe even witness, finding a need to record … but where’s the paper, where’s the pen, where’s the ink?
There are telling lines. The smell – gave rise to a “sudden craving for perfume”. People grew thinner, rats and flies grew fat.
It’s not a book which reproduces a lot of ‘history’. The writer meanders, ideas come and go. There’s no animosity, no anger at the bomber crews. But there is emotional turmoil – he’s trying to make sense of self rather than of the situation. The narrative certainties which once filled his mind – knowing who you are where you live, what you do, etc., now become a confused kaleidoscope of images and memories. Life is occupied with the practical and the pragmatic, but it's also about reshuffling a confused and dissipated identity, trying to make sense of self and rediscover who you are and who you might yet be.
Not an easy read – you have to try to absorb this confused identity and picture it on a city-wide scale as thousands struggle to make sense of themselves and their world. Nossack delivers the odd image of the city, describes one or two events, but what really comes across is this disjunction of identity, the sense that individuality has been erased as thoroughly as the city has been reduced to rubble.
I note the differing provenances of these two accounts of atrocity, both perpetrated by the winning side, neither exonerated from that description. Winners can be as guilty of obscenities as losers, winners write the histories and can thus silence truths, sanitise lies, massage distortions.
And, until 2004, publishers clearly felt Germans wouldn’t get a sympathetic hearing if they complained about their suffering in World War 2. The dropping of A-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaka clearly took the role of the bomber into new dimensions of horror, exemplified by the speed with which Hersey’s account was brought before an American then a world public. With nuclear weapons the focus, why would an account of firebombing warrant attention?
The firebombing of Hamburg in 1943 resulted in a (disputed) death toll of 34,000. In 1945, 25,000 died in the firebombing of Dresden (disputed), 100,000 in Tokyo. With the ever-increasing range of the bomber, its size and lethality of its payload, civilians were viable targets regardless how far they lived from the actual front line. I remember the booklet issued across the UK advising us how to protect ourselves and survive a nuclear attack … bullshit of the first order, but I’m sure the authors meant well.
What Nossack brings home is the individualising nature of atrocity. No matter how many thousands die, both dead and survivors experience the atrocity as individuals. The survivors incubate terror, pain and loss as individuals, enduring a claustrophobic horror, perhaps survivor guilt.
Some individuals try to record … record the emptiness of a city which has vanished. But there’s an implicit divisiveness. Is the everything I’ve lost more of an everything than the everything you’ve lost? There’s a need to get people to work together, to cooperate in constructing day-to-day survival never mind building a future, yet people are so trapped in individual pain collaborative efforts can be beyond contemplation.
Nossack emphasises the individualising nature of shared horror – it locks you in a selfish need to survive, not just to continue living, but to find reason for survival. Survivor guilt … or just an overwhelming sense of the inexplicable?
People lose everything. Their home. Their neighbourhood. Family, friends, the everyday, the routines, a favourite teddy bear or book or chair or pipe or photo or toothbrush or … .
And there’s that question of status. Survivor? Refugee? Maybe even witness, finding a need to record … but where’s the paper, where’s the pen, where’s the ink?
There are telling lines. The smell – gave rise to a “sudden craving for perfume”. People grew thinner, rats and flies grew fat.
It’s not a book which reproduces a lot of ‘history’. The writer meanders, ideas come and go. There’s no animosity, no anger at the bomber crews. But there is emotional turmoil – he’s trying to make sense of self rather than of the situation. The narrative certainties which once filled his mind – knowing who you are where you live, what you do, etc., now become a confused kaleidoscope of images and memories. Life is occupied with the practical and the pragmatic, but it's also about reshuffling a confused and dissipated identity, trying to make sense of self and rediscover who you are and who you might yet be.
Not an easy read – you have to try to absorb this confused identity and picture it on a city-wide scale as thousands struggle to make sense of themselves and their world. Nossack delivers the odd image of the city, describes one or two events, but what really comes across is this disjunction of identity, the sense that individuality has been erased as thoroughly as the city has been reduced to rubble.
October 28, 2018
"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."
"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."
March 2, 2025
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.
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.
July 24, 2022
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.
[German language]
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.
[German language]
March 14, 2018
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.
March 30, 2018
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.
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.
October 10, 2020
I’m 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’s 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.
April 17, 2023
Not really what I expected.
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.
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.
December 30, 2022
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!!!
April 26, 2022
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.
July 1, 2023
Descrizione molto coinvolgente del bombardamento e distruzione di Amburgo nel luglio del 43. L'autore l'ha visto da lontano ed è tornato in città per vedere se la sua casa era ancora in piedi.
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April 19, 2024Glad Sebald turned me onto this
July 14, 2024
Avgrundssvart men ack så viktig memoar från bombningarna av Hamburg.
July 25, 2024
Poetic evocation of trauma, loss and devastation.Nossack manages to capture the unimaginable, the evanescent and the unfathomable with glorious imagery.
December 4, 2024
Sober and powerful description of the bombing of Hamburg in 1943. The writer uses metaphorical language that isn’t often used. In this context.
October 19, 2016
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."
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."
February 9, 2017
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."
"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."
May 7, 2016
Pequeña crónica de la desolación moral y psicológica que siguió a la destrucción sistemática de Hamburgo por parte de la Royal Air Force en 1943. Murieron cuarenta mil personas, pero eso no lo sabía el autor cuando vio como la ciudad ardía hasta los cimientos desde un pueblo cercano. Tras constatar la destrucción 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 él, lo han perdido todo, pero también a la hipócrita sociedad que les dio de lado y renegó de ellos precisamente por haberlo perdido todo. El ser humano es el mismo en todas las épocas y todos los lugares.
March 15, 2010
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.
July 28, 2011
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.
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