W.G. Sebald, born May 18, 1944, wrote On the Natural History of Destruction to explore why the devastation of their country in World War II left so little a mark on German cultural memory. During the war, 131 German cities and towns were attacked by Allies, many of them were entirely destroyed. Six hundred thousand civilians died, and seven and a half million were left homeless. Below, an excerpt from On the Natural History of Destruction.

They did not try to provide a clearer understanding of the extraordinary faculty for self-anesthesia shown by a community that seemed to have emerged from a war of annihilation without any signs of psychological impairment.  The almost entire absence of profound disturbance to the inner life of the nation suggests that the new Federal German society relegated the experiences of its own prehistory to the back of its mind and developed an almost perfectly functioning mechanism of repression, one which allowed it to recognize the fact of its own rise from total degradation while disengaging entirely from its stock of emotions, if not actually chalking up as another item to its credit its success in overcoming all tribulations without showing any sign of weakness.  [Hans Magnus] Enzensberger points out that it is impossible to understand “the mysterious energy of the Germans . . . if we refuse to realize that they have made a virtue of their deficiencies. Insensibility,” he adds, “was the condition of their success.”  The prerequisites of the German economic miracle were not only the enormous sums invested in the country under the Marshall Plan, the outbreak of the Cold War, and the scrapping of the outdated industrial complexes – an operation performed with brutal efficiency by the bomber squadrons – but also something less often acknowledged: the unquestioning work ethic learned in a totalitarian society, the logistical capacity for improvisation shown by an economy under constant threat, experience in the use of “foreign labor forces,” and the lifting of the heavy burden of history that went up in flames between 1942 and 1945 along with the centuries-old building accommodating homes and businesses in Nuremberg and Cologne, in Frankfurt, Aachen, Brunswick, and Würzburg, a historical burden ultimately regretted by only a few. And in addition to these more or less identifiable factors in the genesis of the economic miracle, there was also a purely immaterial catalyst: the stream of psychic energy that has not dried up to this day, and which has its source in the well-kept secret of the corpses built into the foundations of our state, a secret that bound all Germans together in the postwar years, and indeed still binds them, more closely than any positive goal such as the realization of democracy ever could.

*Photo courtesy monkeyinfez.