"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.