The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945. Jörg Friedrich. Columbia University Press, 2006, 552 pp. $35.00
This horrific and fascinating study of the Anglo-American air assaults on German cities during World War II, which was published a few years ago in Germany, requires a very strong stomach: Reader beware. It is about as thorough and methodical as a history book can be. Friedrich examines the weapons used; the firestorms that engulfed many German cities; the crews that carried out the bombing missions; Winston Churchill's determination -- until the winter of 1945 -- to destroy German cities; the Allies' strategy; the fate of the populations in their shelters, their rubble, their hospitals, and the cities to which they were evacuated, their defiance and despair, their anxiety and frequent emotional paralysis. He studies the fate of German monuments, works of art, libraries, and archives ("the largest book-burning of all time") -- all this in a matter-of-fact, dispassionate style. As the events of 2006 have once again shown the illusions of victory through airpower, Friedrich's book underscores that precision bombing is anything but a scientific enterprise that will spare the innocent, that nothing can justify this kind of warfare, and that the human capacity for barbarism, often kindled by the desire for revenge, thrives on technological and scientific prowess. - Foreign Affairs
Additional Reviews on Amazon and description of the book
"Exhaustive and harrowing … Friedrich's aim seems to be not only to wrest the history of German suffering from the clutch of the far right but to rescue the glories of German history from the twelve years of Hitler's thousand-year Reich." -- Ian Buruma, New York Review of Books, German Edition
" The Fire represents the continuation of Friedrich's generation's indictment of National Socialism& mdash;except now the finger is pointed at the Allies, and sympathy is extended to the civilian Germans who were their victims." -- The Nation
"What W. G. Sebald lamented about the lack of open discourse on the air war appears to have been blown apart with the publication of The Fire." -- Noah Isenberg, Bookforum, German Edition
"Jörg Friedrich's achievement in The Fire has been to tell this tale of death and destruction with a rare plasticity and vividness." -- German Historical Institute London Bulletin, German Edition
"Riveting." -- TIME Europe , German Edition
"Jörg Friedrich describes in stark, unrelenting and very literary detail what happened in city after city as the Allies dropped 80 million incendiary bombs on Germany.... There is … an edginess to Friedrich's writing and commentary, an emotional power." -- New York Times
"Jörg Friedrich tells the story from the viewpoint of the bombed with... great skill and objectivity." -- Paul Johnson, The American Spectator
"Mr. Friedrich deserves credit for both his diligence and his descriptive powers." -- Economist
"An indictment both of Hitler's appropriation of German history and of the Allies' destruction of a nation's culture... Thoughtful and detailed." -- Library Journal
"This is a book that demands to be read, no matter how uncomfortable the experience." -- David Cesarani, The Independent
"[A] haunting book… forceful, incendiary." -- Atlantic Monthly
"A well-documented piece of historical writing... [that] is also a poignant, lyrical and terrible account of human suffering." -- Adam R. Seipp, Houston Chronicle
"A vivid and powerful critique of war... [ The Fire is] fascinating, ground-breaking, and thought-provoking." -- Roger Moorhouse, BBC History Magazine
"A contribution to the German literature of remembrance; it is also a passionate denunciation of the excesses of the air war." -- Harold Dorn, Technology and Culture
Book Description
For five years during the Second World War, the Allies launched a trial and error bombing campaign against Germany's historical city landscape. Peaking in the war's final three months, it was the first air attack of its kind. Civilian dwellings were struck by-in today's terms-"weapons of mass destruction," with a total of 600,000 casualties, including 70,000 children.
In The Fire, historian Jörg Friedrich explores this crucial chapter in military and world history. Combining meticulous research with striking illustrations, Friedrich presents a vivid account of the saturation bombing, rendering in acute detail the annihilation of cities such as Dresden, the jewel of Germany's rich art and architectural heritage. He incorporates the personal stories and firsthand testimony of German civilians into his narrative, creating a macabre portrait of unimaginable suffering, horror, and grief, and he draws on official military documents to unravel the reasoning behind the strikes.
Evolving military technologies made the extermination of whole cities possible, but owing, perhaps, to the Allied victory and what W. G. Sebald noted as "a pre-conscious self-censorship, a way of obscuring a world that could no longer be presented in comprehensible terms," the wisdom of this strategy has never been questioned. The Fire is a rare account of the air raids as they were experienced by the civilians who were their targets.
About the Author
Jörg Friedrich was born in Tyrolia in 1944 and grew up in the Ruhr District (Essen). A broadcaster in Berlin, Friedrich became a historian after he reported on the Majdanek Trial during the 1970s. His first comprehensive history of the prosecution of Nazi criminals in Germany, The Cold Amnesty (1984), was a bestseller in the Federal Republic. In 1993 he published a monograph on the forgotten Nuremberg Trial of the German High Command titled The Law of War: The German Army in Russia, which earned him a honorary doctorate from the University of Amsterdam. The idea for The Fire came to Friedrich accidentally one night in February 2002, and since its publication, the book has been translated into ten languages, sparking debate worldwide.