Air Raid

Alexander Kluge

Air Raid

Alexander Kluge

Distributed for Seagull Books

Translated by Martin Chalmers with an Afterword by W. G. Sebald
138 pages | 44 line drawings | 5 1/2 x 7 3/4 | © 2014
The German List
Cloth $21.00 ISBN: 9780857420794 Published November 2014 World sales rights except India

On April 8, 1945, several American bomber squadrons were informed that their German targets were temporarily unavailable due to cloud cover. As it was too late to turn back, the assembled ordnance of more than two hundred bombers was diverted to nearby Halberstadt. A mid-sized cathedral town of no particular industrial or strategic importance, Halberstadt was almost totally destroyed, and a then-thirteen-year-old Alexander Kluge watched his town burn to the ground. 

Translated by Martin Chalmers, Kluge’s Air Raid is a touchstone event in German literature of the postwar era. Incorporating photographs, diagrams, and drawings, Kluge captures the overwhelming rapidity and totality of the organized destruction of his town from numerous perspectives, bringing to life both the strategy from above and the futility of the response on the ground. Originally published in German in 1977, this exquisite report, fragmentary and unfinished, is one of Kluge’s most personal works and one of the best examples of his literary technique.
 
Now available for the first time in English, Air Raid appears with additional new stories by the author and features an appreciation of the work by W. G. Sebald.
 
“More than a few of Kluge’s many books are essential, brilliant achievements. None are without great interest.”—Susan Sontag
Contents

The Air Raid on Halberstadt on 8 April 1945

What Does ‘Really’ Mean in Retrospect? 17 More Stories About the Air War

Dragonflies of Death

Commentary on ‘Dragonflies of Death’

The Dragonfly

The Long Paths to Knowledge

What Does ‘Really’ Mean in Retrospect?

Love 1944

Cooperative Behaviour

Fires Inside People

Zoo Animals in the Air Raids

What Holds Voluntary Actions Together?

Fire Brigade Commander W. Schönecke Reports

The Run-Up to the Catastrophe

Inexplicable Reactions in Sandstone Rock

How the ‘Flying Fortresses’ Disappeared in Lake Constance

The Gleam in the Enemy’s Eye

Total Toothache

News of Star Wars

W. G. Sebald

Between History and Natural History.

On the Literary Description of Total Destruction. Remarks on Kluge

Sources

Review Quotes
On the Seawall
“An accomplished filmmaker as well as a novelist, Kluge was trained as a lawyer and studied cultural theory with Theodor Adorno. An attorney’s reserve and gravitas are evident throughout his work. The harnessed energy is incorporated in various forms. . . . In Air Raid, one voice is followed by another—the testimonies of survivors, observations of reporters, explanations by American officers.”
Financial Times
“An extraordinary book by an extraordinary artist, Air Raid might be seen less as a reckoning with the second world war as a manual for grappling with manufactured realities and media-filtered landscapes in the age of the drone.”
Rain Taxi
“Excellently and integrally translated. . . . Exquisite. . . . This multimedia work was ahead of its time, and it’s still effective; as long as aerial militarism continues to rain misery on millions, Air Raid remains timely.”
Verso Books
“A small masterpiece of exploratory fiction.”
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