Imagining Abjection: The Missing Bodies of the Bombed

SINCE W. G. SEBALD RAILED IN HIS Zurich lectures of 1997 against what he described as postwar German writers' lily-livered, even calculated evasion of the experience and consequences of the Allied bombing campaigns of German cities, the literary representation of this phase of the Second World War has been the subject of some debate. The argument, now more than ten years old and modified by others, centered on the repression and taboo of the memory of the bombings. Sebald claimed that the writers of the immediate postwar period chose not to focus on the devastation that, leaving aside the traumatization of German civilians, in environmental terms remained rudely palpable and, one would think, impossible to ignore for many years to come (LL 8). Using Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlichs' thesis regarding the German inability to mourn, Sebald argued that the energy of the new West German nation had been invested in the task of frenzied rebuilding and material gain. Distracted thus, the majority gaze could avoid the obviously morbid foundations on which the pristine edifice of economic success rested: the rank, warmly malodorous, vermin-infested, steadily liquefying putrefaction of the dissolving dead (LL 12–13). Almost Baudelairean in his invocation of, in Julia Kristeva's sense, the abject human corpse, Sebald appeared to be saying that even those writers who did engage with the bombings failed to capture this vital level of the experience: the intimate proximity to all civilian survivors of rotting, stinking bodies.