Sebald returns to his theme of WWII and Germany’s horrible history. In this volume, he describes the incredible toll that Allied bombing took on Germany’s cities in 1944-1945—600,000 civilian victims in 131 towns and cities; 7.5 million homeless by war’s end; 42.8 cu meters of rubble for every inhabitant of Dresden—-and then explores why German literature after the war was nearly completely silent on this devastating legacy. He describes a lack of moral sensitivity bordering on the inhuman in the effective taboo on discussing inward and outward destruction and the incredible faculty for ‘self-anesthesia’ that characterized German writers between 1945- 1960. He discusses the ‘entire absence’ of profound disturbance and the psychic energy needed to ‘keep the secret of the corpse built into the foundation of the new state’. He touches on Britain’s soul searching regarding the civilian bombing and wholesale destruction (the title is taken from a report by Solly Zuckerman, a scientist and later Baron Zuckerman, who described the results of the bombing immediately after the war) but focuses on German authors and painters, specifically three: Alfred Andersch (whom he attacks for his feckless resistance and self-promotion), Jean Amery (whom he honors for his true resistance and willingness to write about the Nazis, torture, and totalitarian state which achieve its ‘full realization in the persecution, torture, and extermination of an arbitrarily chosen adversary’ and the resulting power and unchecked ‘self-expansion where man exists only by the ruining of the other person who stands helpless before him’.), and Peter Weiss a courageous painter and writer who also addressed Nazism in his play Marat/Sade. Amery was born Hanns Meyer, half Jewish. He fled to Belgium during the War and was tortured there for his resistance activity, finally being sent to Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen, and Buchenwald before being liberated. He committed suicide in 1974. Weiss was also half Jewish and his family fled to Sweden where he took citizenship and lived out his life. Andersch created the concept of ‘internal emigration’ to excuse his lack of active resistance. He deserted the Whermacht in 1944 and was imprisoned in the US in Louisiana. Sebald’s endless processing of Germany’s descent and embrace of Nazism is evident in this book—a search for explanations where none exist.