A Time for Ruins

Abstract

The English translation of W. G. Sebald’s slim volume of reflections on air war and literature, On the Natural History of Destruction, took its title from Solly Zuckerman’s 1945 project to report on the destruction of Cologne. Overwhelmed by the experience, he never wrote the report realizing that he did not have the language to describe the utter desolation of that “ravaged” city. Over the years, images of Cologne’s ruins retreated and he only remembered the “blackened cathedral rising from the stony desert around it,” and a “severed finger” he had found on a heap of rubble.¹