"In the last years of World War II, a million tons of bombs were dropped by the Allies on one hundred and thirty-one German towns and cities. Six hundred thousand civilians died, and three and a half million homes were destroyed. Yet German writers have been strangely silent about this mass destruction. When it has cast such a very dark shadow over his own life and work, Sebald asks, how have so many writers allowed themselves to write it out of their experience and avoid articulating the horror? " "W. G. Sebald's essays on literature and the air raids of the Second World War sparked off a wide-ranging debate in the German press when they were published in 1999. This is the first of Sebald's non-fiction books to be translated into English. "--Jacket.