FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1956, Gert Ledig's novel Vergeltung (Payback) is an unremittingly brutal account of sixty-nine minutes of an Allied air raid on a German city toward the end of the war. Following the success of his first novel, Stalinorgel (The Stalin Organ, 1955), a similarly stark narration of warfare on the Eastern front, Ledig had been celebrated and invited to meetings of the Group 47. The novel Vergeltung, by contrast, was uniformly dismissed by critics as everything from unrealistic and sensationalist to badly written and ungrammatical. It achieved none of the commercial success of the first novel and sank, along with Ledig's literary career, into obscurity.

The novel was rediscovered and republished in 1999 in response to the debate surrounding W. G. Sebald's Luftkrieg und Literatur (Airwar and Literature, published in English as On the Natural History of Destruction) of the same year. The critical response to Sebald's thesis — that the bombings and their aftermath had been poorly represented in German literature — centered on the notion of a taboo on representing German suffering. Contributors to the debate either praised Sebald for bringing forgotten suffering into the public realm, or rejected his taboo theory by pointing to the existence of many postwar texts in which the bombs and the ruins were featured. Volker Hage championed Ledig's Vergeltung as a forgotten masterpiece that went some way to disproving Sebald's argument.