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“Doors into Nowhere”: Dead Cities and the Natural History of Destruction

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Cultural Memories

Part of the book series: Knowledge and Space ((KNAS,volume 4))

Abstract

W. G. Sebald’s lectures on “Air war and literature” have been criticized on two fronts. His claim that the Allied bombing offensive against Germany was erased from public memory has been challenged, and his appeal to a “natural history of destruction” to account for that lacuna has been condemned for its “naturalization” of military violence. Read differently, however, Sebald’s inquiries identify a crucial link between trauma and the rupture of language, and they can be elaborated in ways that reveal the indispensable role of abstraction in the construction of a “kill-chain” through which cities are converted into targets. Visualization is a central modality of this process, in which targeting is made to appear as a purely technical and perfectly rational exercise. Seen thus, the kill-chain is an apparatus that enframes and entrains all those caught up in it. Conversely, its performative power can be called into question by novelists, artists, and others who draw attention to the process of abstraction in their re-presentations of bombing.

Memory is not an instrument for exploring the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, as the ground is the medium in which dead cities lie interred.

Walter Benjamin, “Excavation and memory” (1932, p. 611)

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Acknowledgement

I am immensely grateful to Peter Meusburger for his invitation to take part in the symposium from which this chapter derives, and to Trevor Barnes, Anthea Bell, Felix Driver, Jessica Dubow, Stuart Elden, Mike Heffernan, Sara Koopman, Stephen Legg, John Morrissey, Simon Ward, Elvin Wyly, Marilyn Young, Maja Zehfuss, and Howard Zinn for their comments on an earlier version. I am also grateful to elin o’Hara slavick for permission to reproduce two of her drawings.

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  1. Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, V6T 1Z2

    Derek Gregory

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  1. Abt. Geographie, Universität Heidelberg, Berliner Str. 48, Heidelberg, 69120, Germany

    Peter Meusburger

  2. School of Geography, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, United Kingdom

    Michael Heffernan

  3. Abt. Geographie, Universität Heidelberg, Berliner Str. 48, Heidelberg, 69120, Germany

    Edgar Wunder

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Gregory, D. (2011). “Doors into Nowhere”: Dead Cities and the Natural History of Destruction. In: Meusburger, P., Heffernan, M., Wunder, E. (eds) Cultural Memories. Knowledge and Space, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-8945-8_15

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