V. G. Sebald. Air war and literature

In 1997, V. G. Sebald (1944–2001) lectured at the Zurich Puppet Theater about the carpet bombing of German cities in the last years of World War II. As a writer and literary critic, he pointed to the void in the collective memory of Germans regarding the experience of destruction, and relied on rare examples of literary works that attempted to describe the horror of the total destruction of cities.

The lectures simultaneously raised two difficult and, moreover, irritating questions: about the social contract based on the silence of experienced events, and about the language of literature against the background of disasters. Criticism of the texts allowed Sebald to see different ways of writing that arise in the silent tension, on the one hand, justified by the right to remain silent, which belongs to the survivors, and on the other - threatening, when the consequences of silence become individual, collective and cultural amnesia.

In 1999, due to numerous requests to republish the lectures, Sebald prepared the text for the book Luftkrieg und Literatur (Luftkrieg und Literatur), to which he also added an essay on Alfred Andresch. In 2003, an expanded version of the book, with added essays by Peter Weiss and Jean Amery, was published in London under the title On the Natural History of Destruction.

This Ukrainian-language edition includes four texts: "Air war and literature. Zurich lectures", "Writer Alfred Andersch", "Sorrow of the heart. About memory and cruelty in the work of Peter Weiss" and "Eyes of a night bird. About Jean Amery".

Language: Ukrainian.
Cover: soft.