Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg, 1940–1945 by Jörg Friedrich. Propyläen Verlag (http://www.propylaeen-verlag.de), Bayerstrasse 71-73, 80335 Munich, Germany, 2002, 591 pages (hardcover), Euro [D] 25.00.*
*A fuller version of this review, including notes to current literature, appeared online last year: Douglas Peifer, “Review of Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg, 1940–1945,” H-German, H-Net Reviews, November 2003, http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/ showrev.cgi?path=277121069229925. For additional reviews, links, and commentaries on Friedrich’s book, see “World War II Bombing: Rethinking German Experiences,” H-German Forum, http://www.h-net.org/~german/discuss/WWII_bombing/WWII-bombing_index.htm.
For decades, mainstream German historians and authors have trod carefully when discussing German victims of the Combined Bomber Offensive lest they be accused of relativizing Germany’s aggression and the Holocaust. Yet, for an entire generation of Germans, the World War II experience is intimately linked to childhood memories of air raids, nights spent in bomb shelters, and the flight from the cities to the countryside. Jörg Friedrich’s Der Brand (The Fire), which appeared shortly before the acrimonious German-American debate concerning the use of force against Iraq, generated an unprecedented level of public interest about the civilian and cultural costs of the Allied urban-bombing campaign against Germany, with commentators frequently drawing upon Germany’s experience in World War II to comment about the potential impact of an air campaign against Iraq. German historians, literati, and public intellectuals contributed reviews and newspaper commentaries on the Allied air campaign against Germany from the perspective of the bombed. German television, the popular press, and the book industry capitalized on public interest by airing documentaries, publishing serials on the aerial destruction of Germany’s cities in World War II, and spurring book sales on firebombing, bomb shelters, airpower, and civilian casualties. British historians joined the fray, with the British popular press lambasting Friedrich’s work and warning of German revisionism. Despite mixed reviews, Der Brand proved wildly successful in Germany because it addressed an issue where history, memory, and current security debates intersected—namely, the use and misuse of airpower.
Der Brand engendered this amount of attention and debate not because it unveiled startling new revelations or called for fundamental reinterpretations of the historical record, but because it touched several sensitive points of contention. First, the book is one of several in which the German Left has rediscovered events from the past that have never faded from the memory of the conservative Right: the German civilian casualties of the Anglo-American air campaign, the maritime evacuation of Germans from East Prussia, and the post–World War II expulsions of Germans from the Sudetenland, Poland, and elsewhere. The German Left’s reacquisition of a portion of the memory spectrum, long voluntarily ceded to conservatives, has raised concern that Germans may embrace a cult of victimhood that relativizes Germany’s role in the outbreak of war, in the implementation of the Holocaust, and in the Wehrmacht’s deliberate violation of rules of warfare on the Eastern Front.
Second, the book has stirred interest because it tackles a long vein of scholarship on the issue of morality in war—specifically, a long-running debate about jus in bello criticisms of Allied area-bombardment strategies during World War II. The British reaction to Friedrich’s work focuses on this issue, with the British boulevard press particularly enraged by the author’s assertion that Churchill was responsible for the death of tens of thousands of innocent women and children. In addition, Friedrich correctly points out that from the ground perspective, the much-publicized contrast between British nighttime area bombardment and American high-altitude precision daylight bombing was often moot, with American bomber groups exacting a high casualty rate among civilians. Although Friedrich’s analysis of the brutalization of the air war presents nothing new, his previous work examining Wehrmacht crimes and Nazi justice enables him to approach the subject without risking automatic dismissal as a right-wing apologist. For a German public sensitized to the distinction between legal and illegal conduct in war as a result of decades of scholarship on German war crimes, Der Brand offered the opportunity to broaden focus and subtly reengage German Nuremberg-era rebuttals of tu quoque (legal defense of “you did likewise”).
Tied to this historical analysis of the morality of the Anglo-American air campaign against the Third Reich is a related third debate—namely, what lessons one can draw from the past that have current relevance and applicability. Der Brand was published in November 2002, shortly before the high-water mark of the Bush administration’s effort to garner international support for the forcible removal of Saddam Hussein. German peace activists frequently proclaimed that history proved that force was not an answer, with commentators such as Hans Mommsen noting that no one should be surprised at the Germans’ opposition to war, given their historical experience. Friedrich echoed similar sentiments elsewhere, commenting that since 1945 Germans have empathized more with the bombed than the bomber. Evidence linking sales of Der Brand to then-current discussions of war against Iraq is circumstantial, but numerous interviews make connections between the two, suggesting that the interaction among history, memory, and current affairs increased interest in and readership of Der Brand.
Despite all the attention it has garnered, Friedrich’s 591-page work is problematic, approaching the subject in an impressionistic, suggestive manner that leaves the reader with a sense of unease. He divides his work into seven main parts, with the first two (“Weapons” and “Strategy”) accounting for approximately a third of the book, the next section (“The Land”) accounting for another third, and the final four parts (“Refuge,” “We,” “I,” and “Stone”) accounting for the final third. Throughout, he eschews traditional citation methods, simply listing his largely secondary sources for each page without the use of endnote numbers. His thematic approach tends to blur the chronological sequence of events, and his use of terminology deeply associated with the Holocaust and National Socialism (e.g., cellars as “crematoria,” the Royal Air Force’s 5th Bomber Group as an “Einsatzgruppe,” cities as “execution sites,” and the incidental destruction of libraries as “book burning”) is deliberately provocative.
Friedrich’s treatment of the weapons and strategy of the air campaign against Germany provides a fair introduction to the topic for nonmilitary historians and the public. He commences his work with a detached, technical discussion of the weapons and platforms that made a strategic-bombing campaign possible: explosive and incendiary bombs, long-range bombers, radar technology, and bomber crews. Moving to strategy, he traces the evolution of strategic air war from its World War I roots through the Combined Bomber Offensive against Germany, although his propensity to move back and forth in time and his conflation of strategic and tactical air raids make it difficult to follow the overall evolution of the bombing campaign. Others have written better and more detailed analyses of weapons development and airpower strategies in World War II. What Friedrich does well, however, is to translate what these weapons and strategies meant to the citizens of Lübeck, Cologne, Hamburg, the Ruhr, Berlin, and some 158 midsize towns similar to Pforzheim, Würzburg, and the like. His imagery of women stuck in the melting tar of a street like flies on flypaper, of families recovering the charred remains of their loved ones in buckets, and of cellars baking their inhabitants alive is stirring and unforgettable. Friedrich writes in terms of images, experience, and emotion, providing graphic depictions of human suffering at the expense of a careful, chronological reconstruction of the air war against Germany.
He devotes over one-third of his study to discussion of the German land. Loosely following the chronology of an air campaign limited by range and front line, he first discusses air attacks on the cities of North Germany, then shifts to the West and the Ruhr attacks. He subsequently examines the fate of South German cities and ends his city-by-city examination with a discussion of Berlin and the East. Friedrich’s approach is relentless and detailed: with each city or town, he presents a brief account of its history, heritage, and main cultural treasures before examining its demise and destruction. The entire section is marked with a sense of sadness and loss—not just for the miserable death of thousands of innocents, described in vivid and unrelenting specificity, but for a cultural loss that can never be restored.
The chapters on “Refuge” and “We” are the most intriguing sections of his study. In “Refuge” Friedrich describes the hierarchy of refuge (from blast trenches to cellars to elaborate bunkers), civil-defense measures, the recovery and disposal of bodies, and the state’s role in aiding bombing victims and evacuating nonessential personnel from Germany’s cities. Rather than driving a threatened population to revolt, the bombing of cities initially brought the people closer to the state. Using both positive and negative tools of persuasion, the same state that gave out buttered bread and soup to bombing-raid survivors was ready to ruthlessly execute plunderers and those who subverted the military spirit (Wehrkraftzersetzer). Friedrich develops this theme in greater detail in his discussion of the collective “We.” He notes how as the situation worsened, the repressive state focused on the issue of Haltung (conduct) over Stimmung (morale). German propaganda emphasized grim perseverance, promising that wonder weapons would soon allow Germany to strike back at the Allies and exact a bloody revenge. Each of these topics has been treated in greater detail elsewhere, and Friedrich overlooks much of the most recent scholarship in German and English. Nonetheless, these sections succeed in laying bare the interaction between protection and repression in the individual/state relationship.
Der Brand’s final two sections are less effective. In the chapter “I,” Friedrich attempts to describe the individual’s sensory and psychological reaction to bombardment. His discussion of the physical reaction of the body to extreme stress rests on a handful of books and memoirs, overlooking the wealth of literature on the related phenomenon of combat stress, war neurosis, and shell shock. In “Stone,” Friedrich examines German efforts to rescue cultural sites, works of art, libraries, and archives. Placing this discussion at the end of the work, however, violates the book’s overall framework of decreasing concentric rings (strategy, the land, refuge, we, I) and proves disconcerting by following several chapters devoted to group and individual suffering. The section would have been much more effective as part of Friedrich’s earlier discussion on “The Land,” which focused on history, heritage, and destruction.
Overall, Der Brand is an evocative book, heavy on imagery, eyewitness accounts, and impressions. Highly effective as a literary dirge and lamentation, it comes up short when judged by the standards of the history discipline. Friedrich blurs chronology, overlooks the newest scholarship on many of his topics, skims over the broader context in which the strategic air war developed, and employs terminology in a careless or deliberately provocative manner. Most troubling to historians will be his narrow focus and lack of context: although he briefly mentions Warsaw, Rotterdam, Coventry, and the Holocaust, they fade from view throughout much of the book as Friedrich examines German suffering and loss in unrelenting detail. The topic itself—the German experience at the receiving end of a prolonged and costly strategic-bombing campaign—is a valid and important area of historical inquiry that should not be taboo to German scholars. Indeed, a body of German scholarship does exist on the topic, ranging from detailed analyses of Freiburg, Münster, and numerous other German cities during the Bombenkrieg (the German term for the Allied aerial bombing campaign in World War II) to studies focusing on popular opinion, the evacuation of children, life in the bunker, flak helpers, and the mechanisms of relief and repression. One might even concede that some of the military history on the strategic-bombing campaign focuses too heavily on operations, aircraft, technologies, and the war in the air, with insufficient description of the human costs of war. Thus, Friedrich’s work performs a valuable function of redirecting attention to war’s terrible cost in lives, suffering, and cultural treasures. What makes one uneasy about the book is that it addresses only one dimension of the human aspect, focusing sharply on German loss but scarcely acknowledging the death and devastation that Germans inflicted on others during World War II.
Given these flaws, the prospect of Der Brand’s being translated into English appear dim. Yet, for those willing to make the effort, reading the piece is worthwhile. Friedrich’s comment in one interview that since 1945 Germans have identified with the bombed rather than the bomber explains in part Germany’s opposition to the war in Iraq. Overall, Der Brand is deeply moving as a literary work, troubling as a work of historical scholarship, and most useful as an illustration of the interplay among history, memory, and current affairs in present-day Germany.
Dr. Douglas Peifer
Maxwell AFB, Alabama
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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