I have posted before (here and here) on the horrors of Dresden, W. G. Sebald’s book “On the Natural History of Destruction“, and “Crabwalk” by Gunter Grass, about the sinking of the German refugee ship, the “Willem Gustloff”, in 1945 with the loss of a staggering 10,000 lives.

I would like to add a new book to the genre:

The End: Hamburg 1943 by H.E. Nossack

Nossack was the only writer of the time to try recording what he actually saw as plainly as possible,” writes W. G. Sebald about this memoir of the firebombing of Hamburg in 1943. Nossack watched the destruction of his city—in the first firestorm achieved by Allied bombers—from across the Elbe River. Only three months after the event, he completed The End, one of the most remarkable literary responses to the phenomenon of total destruction. MORE

You can read an extract from the book here.