Atrocity: A Literary History

Atrocity

A Literary History

Bruce Robbins

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

© 2025 by Bruce Robbins. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Robbins, Bruce, author.

Title: Atrocity : a literary history / Bruce Robbins.

Description: Stanford : Stanford University Press, 2025. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024037988 (print) | LCCN 2024037989 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503640559 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503641419 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Violence in literature. | Atrocities in literature. | LCGFT: Literary criticism.

Classification: LCC PN56.V53 R63 2025 (print) | LCC PN56.V53 (ebook) | DDC 809.933552—dc23/eng/20240816

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024037988

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024037989

Cover design: David Drummond

Cover image: David Drummond and Shutterstock

Of the gods we hold the belief, and of men we know, that by a necessity of their nature wherever they have power they always rule. And so in our case since we neither enacted this law nor when it was enacted were the first to use it, but found it in existence and expect to leave it in existence for all time, so we make use of it, well aware that both you and others, if clothed with the same power as we are, would do the same thing.

The Athenians to the Melians, 415 BC, Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, book 5, chapter 105

All I said is that we will do to you what you would do to us.

Brigade Commander Gutman to the Palestinian Dignitaries, Lydda, July 1948

Contents

Preface

Introduction

One. Violence Was Like the Weather

Two. Plunder: Historicizing Atrocity

Three. Self-Scrutiny in the Era of High Imperialism

Four. Contextualizing and Decontextualizing in the Twentieth Century

Five. Confusions of Self-Indictment

Six. Strategy from Below

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Preface

Mass violence against noncombatants did not always have a name. Once upon a time, it was more likely to be seen as a misfortune than an injustice. Like conquest, of which mass violence against noncombatants is a reliable feature, what we now call atrocity was not seen as inviting indignation. Often, like conquerors, it was hailed as heroic—the more dead, the more heroism. Something had to happen in order for mass violence to be paired with outrage. Minds had to change, and not just about the legitimacy of conquest. A lot of violence had to be meted out and suffered before a concept of atrocity could arise, not to speak of the possibility—in modern times, more than a possibility, though less than the rule—of writers accusing their own country of atrocities committed against the inhabitants of other countries.

When I was fishing for a title for this book, I tried out The Invention of Atrocity on some friends. One preferred Manufacturing Atrocity. Another suggested Fabricating Atrocity. These suggestions didn’t dispel my unease about proposing a title phrase whose structure was so painfully unoriginal. A search of Google Scholar yielded over 7,000,000 hits for titles of the form The Invention of X, one of them Gaurav Desai’s essay The Invention of Invention. Desai’s essay came out in 1993. Discomfort with the formula goes back at least three decades, if not more. I surrendered. But the friendly counterproposals did help me clarify one thing about what I was trying to say, even if I eventually gave up on that title as uninspiring. As Desai observes, the invention of always refers both to making and to faking. In the minds of readers, it’s the faking that most often seems paramount, no doubt because of the desire to credit the exposure of its constructedness as a critique of the object constructed. Desai gives the examples of primitive society, virginity, and tribalism. All of them are instances of fakery (that is, they are misleading), and all are demonstrably harmful in their effects. Among the first items that came up in my Google Scholar search were the inventions of development, the Mizrahim, monolingualism, kleptomania, and nature. In each of these cases, the assumption seems to be that we would be better off without the thing invented. That assumption holds even more dramatically for fabricating and manufacturing, as in Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky’s coauthored 1988 protest against media manipulation.

The concept of atrocity does not belong in this company. It departs from recent critical habits in presenting an unembarrassed example of making that is not an example of faking. One argument of this book is that, though there are obvious grounds for skepticism, and though failing to embrace skepticism may make the argument seem unenlightened to the point of perversity, the invention of the concept was on the whole a good thing. The concept was manufactured, but its manufacture is not something to be regretted or rescinded. Before the term was invented, the terrible violence it registers was largely not registered, or was not thought of as terrible in the way we, or most of us, would now understand it to be. Although registering that violence has not resulted in all the actual benefits that might have been hoped for, and has resulted in some collateral damage, like inciting further violence and distracting from injustice that doesn’t take openly violent forms, it is surely better for the human species that the concept now exists and the terribleness of the violence is widely acknowledged and deplored. Anyone coming to this book expecting the revelation of sinister powers conspiring to produce a piece of injurious distortion will therefore be disappointed. But even if that is the reaction, I hope the disappointment will serve as an opportunity to rethink what shape modern history has taken. If there was a prolonged period in which indignation at mass violence against noncombatants enjoyed no adequate or convenient mode of expression, it’s not because noncombatants were not slaughtered on a large scale. Adding this old violence to the newer forms of violence with which we are more familiar does more than extend a modern name to an already-existing premodern thing. Expanding the temporal frame of moral judgment cannot help but have an effect on judgments in the present.

Indignation, an indispensable component of atrocity, is anger in the face of perceived unfairness. It is not just anger, that quintessential political emotion. Nor is it just the anger that follows the suffering of a harm, one’s own or someone else’s. Rather, indignation is the anger provoked by someone or something held to be wrong or unworthy. The sufferer is in the right. And the sufferer knows it. Their anger is righteous anger. Like dignity, which has the same root and originally belonged only to the nobility, indignation may include a sense of disdain. Hence the possibility of an unpleasant aftertaste. Disdain presumes a certain entitlement. Democracy, for all its imperfections, has increased the number of the entitled and made indignation as pervasive as it now is. (Not always for the better.) Since the period following World War II, a crucial period in the history of the concept of atrocity, dignity, presented now as a universal, has been central to the discourse of human rights. As a way of registering indignation at mass violence, the understanding that norms and solidarities have been violated, the concept of atrocity cannot be disentangled from the history of human rights and (not quite the same thing) the history of humanitarianism. But my subject here is literary representations of atrocity, and there is thus a certain tension, I hope a productive one, between what the discourse of human rights has to say about atrocity and what other sorts of texts do, foremost among them literary texts. A tension, and also an overlap. Dignity and indignation are among the raw materials out of which narratives are fashioned, and changes in how those materials are allocated seems sure to have narrative effects. The hypothesis presents itself that accounts of atrocity will follow a trajectory of literary democratization, though (as I will show) it’s not the trajectory that might have been expected.

Indignation had a moment, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, when it became the central organizing principle of anti-austerity protesters, first in Spain in 2011, then in Greece and elsewhere, including Occupy Wall Street. As an organizing principle, indignation proved both powerful and imprecise, the imprecision allowing it to gather up (like populism) potentially incompatible kinds of outrage, including in this instance those of the proto-fascist right—perhaps too many to maintain its political integrity. (In this sense it resembles anger.) I do not try to run away from that imprecision, which also characterizes responses to atrocity. But my intention is not so much to delimit or defend it as to give indignation about violence a literary history, and a much longer history. My working assumption is that even something as apparently natural and inevitable as a sense of victimhood had to be born, and that its birth (or fashioning) required some of that sense of entitlement or self-worth that comes of what we have learned to call agency. The victims are not always better seen as the vanquished. They did not always arm themselves with agency and go into battle with their victimizers. But Nietzsche, who has taught many of us to despise passive suffering, is right at least that passive suffering is not enough to make history. Suffering alone was never enough to make history do anything but repeat. It’s not enough to look for even when one looks into the very heart of atrocity.

One objection I anticipate is that war will always produce what we now call atrocities, so the real problem is not atrocities but war. War is the atrocity. The anti-militarism of the Vietnam War generation that I carry in my personal baggage does not lead to the conclusion that to reject atrocity is meaningless because what must be rejected is war itself. I never felt I had the right to rebuke the Vietnamese for their resistance to their American invaders. Ditto, more recently, for Ukrainians resisting the Russians and Palestinians resisting the Israelis. Violence is always terrible, but sometimes flagrant injustice in the absence of violence is worse. Atrocity, as the most terrible violence, remains therefore something to be set apart.¹ Another objection to be anticipated is that, the world being in the state it’s in, to celebrate the invention of a concept that has had so little effect on the state of the world is in bad taste, or a symptom of moral laziness or complacency. The desire to avoid moral complacency at all costs is itself a symptom of our times, in my view, and one that obscures the true complexity of our times, which contain such moral achievements as the naming of atrocity, atrocity as a cause of collective shame. If such a thing has indeed been achieved, by whatever twisted means, it ought to have a recognized place in our history, including the history of literature. Ethnocentrism being as pervasive and as violence-producing as it has been, the concept certainly also deserves a place in the history of cosmopolitanism. The overlap between these two histories does not cover the whole moral history of humankind, but the premise here will be, from the perspective of the full archive of atrocity stories old and new, that history will look different.

This book can be thought of, then, as an experiment in cosmopolitan literary history. Definitions of cosmopolitanism are notoriously fuzzy. At one end of the spectrum is a big-tent version that celebrates as cosmopolitan any and all traces of transnational or transethnic hybridity. A chillier, less populated pole demands the prioritizing of the welfare of all members of the species equally, whether they are known and loved or distant strangers. Another definition, closer to the latter but not identical with it, is the ability to take critical distance from one’s own culture—not in general, but in a moment of urgency when one’s own culture has (for example) committed violence against the members of another, most likely in wartime, and when the pressure to fall into line will therefore be most intense. This understanding of cosmopolitanism, universalizing but also situated, has been somewhat neglected in the critical discourse, but it will be assumed here. This book takes special interest in representations of atrocity that have been committed by one’s own people—what I will refer to, with legalistic awkwardness, as national self-indictments. The premise is that these self-indictments are valuable both from a moral and from an aesthetic point of view even if, as will be apparent, there are never enough of them and such examples as exist are often somewhat unsatisfying. However limited in number and quality, they offer a stopgap answer to the objection to the atrocity story genre that George Orwell records in his diary for June 11, 1942. The Germans have massacred all the male inhabitants of the Czech town of Lidice, sent the women to concentration camps, sent the children to be reeducated, razed the village to the ground and changed its name.² They have done this because the population of Lidice had harbored the assassins of a high Nazi official, Reinhard Heydrich, who as it turns out (Orwell could not know this at the time) had also been a leading architect of the final solution for Europe’s Jews and thus deserved assassination even more than other, run-of-the-mill Nazis. The announcement comes via the BBC, but it also comes from the Germans themselves, who are obviously not afraid to publicize what they have done. Publicizing it, they assume, will discourage resistance elsewhere. It does not particularly surprise me that people do this kind of thing, Orwell tells his diary, nor even that they announce that they are doing them. What does impress me, however, is that other people’s reaction to such happenings is governed solely by the political fashion of the moment.³ What surprises Orwell is that the news of an act of disproportionate and indiscriminate violence aimed at civilians does not give rise to instinctive, universal horror and indignation. Instead, he says, people react according to their preexisting political loyalties. Political loyalties are so strong that they cannot be overridden even by an atrocity as atrocious as the destruction of a whole village, most of the inhabitants of which could not have had anything whatsoever to do with the killing of Heydrich, however justified we may judge that killing to have been. Simple human decency, confronted by the simple facts, seems unable to suspend partisanship. To Orwell, this failure comes as an especially unpleasant revelation. He wanted very badly to believe in the power of the bare facts. He based his own politics—socialist politics, as is often forgotten—as well as his strategies for getting his politics across to the unconverted on the assumption that human decency, once put in clear, forceful possession of the facts, is capable of overriding differences of allegiance, whatever their basis, and coming to an independent, fair-minded conclusion.

If this is the argument that Orwell was preparing, the slaughter at Lidice does not seem an ideal example of it, and that is perhaps why he did not put the event to direct use in an essay. Could there really have been, as Orwell grumpily suggests, people around him in England in mid-1942 who were ready to write off all horror stories as ‘propaganda’ (387), including horror stories about the Nazis? That seems unlikely.⁴ Orwell would surely have done better to cite some of the earlier atrocities that he lists on the next page of his diary. They are arranged in two columns, the first titled Believed by the Right, the second Believed by the Left. In the first column are, for example, atrocities attributed to Sinn Fein and the Bolsheviks; in the second, atrocities attributed to the Black and Tans in Ireland, the Americans in Nicaragua, and the British in India (387). The ones Orwell knew best were from British rule in India, where he had served (in Burma) as a military policeman, and from the Spanish Civil War, where he fought for the Left and where each side did indeed point to the atrocities committed by the other while ignoring or justifying those its own partisans had perpetrated. He himself had taken sides, and he seemed to want to continue taking sides. And yet the logic of atrocity as he saw it pushed against side-taking—that is, against politics. By politics, Orwell means taking sides and doggedly sticking to your own side no matter what. And that in turn means, he suggests, that your side, whichever side it may be, is finally not worth sticking to. Political adhesiveness allows for no space outside itself. And that space seems unworthy of adhesion—if not morally uninhabitable, then unspeakable, placing a burden on speech that no principled speaker will want to tolerate.⁵ This book does not pretend that atrocity is always a reliable guide to political side-taking, but in documenting a history of side-taking that refuses to be contented with national loyalty, it brings us a step closer to a politics that is worth the commitment, or what has come to be called a cosmopolitics.

Cosmopolitanism is also relevant here because of its unresolved business with deep time—that is, with the scale of geological, archaeological, and environmental temporality that notoriously makes the concerns of modernity (a highly contested concept that will be at issue below) look different, and perhaps slighter. Cosmopolitanism in its most familiar guise is spatial and normative. As such, it entails putting the welfare of those outside the borders of your nation on the same moral plane as the welfare of your fellow citizens. In recent years, as the term has made room for plural, limited, adjectivally qualified forms of cosmopolitanism, there has also been a shift from spatial toward temporal cosmopolitanism: an expansion of its timescale to make room for the more distant past, including the distant past of distant places. And like the pluralizing of cosmopolitanism, which has been one of my own projects for twenty years now—I mean the shift from one ethical cosmopolitanism to many anthropological cosmopolitanisms, defined not by an overriding fidelity to the good of humanity but by multiple and overlapping commitments to different social collectivities—this inclusion of a more distant past creates problems for anyone who wants to see cosmopolitanism as exerting normative pressure on us: pressure to behave differently, to throw our loyalties into question. The tension between deep time and ethical judgment is not susceptible to any easy resolution, but it’s an animating framework for the readings and reflections that follow. An expanded past would include the acknowledged greatness of historical actions, cultural traditions, and literary canons. But it would also include a great many atrocity stories, and the question of how to look at them if we aren’t prepared either to judge them by the moral standards of the present or to give up on judging them at all.

There are good reasons for simply looking away from atrocity stories. They seem to promise a quick moral-political fix, a shortcut to clarity on unfamiliar and perhaps disorienting terrain, but they cannot always deliver on that promise, at least not quickly. They are often untrustworthy. The emperor Nero, who supposedly fiddled while Rome burned, is accused by classical authors of perpetrating an impressive amount of torture and murder. Modern scholars have determined, however, that many of the tropes used to characterize his depravities bear a remarkable similarity to literary accounts of mythical events. One authority adds that much supposed testimony against Nero is based on literary techniques that were taught in Roman rhetorical schools.⁶ (For what it’s worth, violins weren’t invented until the sixteenth century, and it appears that Nero wasn’t in Rome when the fire broke out.) Stories of the deaths of martyrs, once a hugely popular atrocity-based genre, are often demonstrably untrue. According to historian Candida Moss, for the first two hundred and fifty years of the Christian era there are only six martyrdom accounts that can be treated as reliable (16).⁷ Even when atrocity stories do turn out to be reliable, they can make one wonder why one is reading them. To prevent future atrocities? Martyrology does not lend itself to a promising program of atrocity prevention. When Agrippa d’Aubigné writes about the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of 1572 in Les Tragiques, he suggests that the Protestants who were killed are martyrs who gained eternal life while their Catholic murderers lost their souls. That suggestion makes violent death sound like a not unreasonable bargain.⁸ It invites the counterintuitive but perhaps theologically tenable idea that when your killers put you to the sword, they were actually doing you a favor. If this is how you find meaning in violence, the intuitive modern option—to admit that mass violence cannot be made sense of—is going to look attractive, and humanity’s relentless drive to make sense, whatever the cost, is going to look like an obstacle to be overcome. Stop making sense—it’s a version of today’s common sense to which atrocity seems to offer a great deal of support.

Like the idea that your suffering is God’s punishment for your sins (a popular refrain among the English victims of Native American violence in colonial New England), the martyrdom story exemplifies the redemptive view of violence that Etienne Balibar very properly warns his readers to avoid.⁹ It makes violence seem too easily justifiable. (Not that it never can be). Even in their more modern, more secular form, atrocity stories also often neglect systemic, impersonal injustice in favor of actions for which particular persons can be held accountable, the accountability then serving as a sort of rite of exorcism or illusory redemption. For the purposes of political decision-making—to take a familiar American example, the decision to bomb or not to bomb—it is never sufficient to know that there are very bad people out there doing very bad things. There are, and the things done are often very bad, but your intervention against the perpetrators of atrocity may make things much worse. Examples are easy to come by. In some cases, as has often been said, it might be better to treat the bad actors, even very bad actors, as something less than absolute monsters. If they are seen as monsters, and impermeable to reason of any kind, the possibility is of course foreclosed that they might become acceptable participants in a negotiated settlement that might end up leaving fewer corpses on the ground. As humanitarians have often observed, holding perpetrators to account and preventing future atrocities are different goals, though they can overlap, and even a piece of humanistic scholarship concerned with accountability for the past has got to keep an eye on the telos of fewer future atrocities.

Atrocity doesn’t help you understand everything. Suffering is not always a result of physical violence. Neither is injustice itself. From the perspective of justice, the claim that atrocity makes on our attention, while peremptory, should never be seen as an exclusive claim. On the other hand, as we will see, finding ingenious ways to indicate that it is not an exclusive claim, and doing so in the very act of faithfully transcribing the horror, is one unexpected virtue of the best literary accounts of atrocity, a discovery that makes the assembling of those accounts seem worth the effort.

That’s not the end of arguments against the project of assembling an atrocity archive. What is such an archive good for? An account of the literature, of how atrocities have been described, of the sense people have made of them, is a different thing than a chronicle of atrocities themselves. For one thing, it makes for a slimmer and more selective volume. Yes, even in the most violence-prone regions of the world, it’s by descriptions, not by direct experience, that most people tend to encounter atrocities. That gives a certain significance to the descriptions. When they are encountered, however, the descriptions tend to be mere slivers of larger texts that are mainly about something else. They also tend to be propagandistic and sensational.¹⁰ Too small and marginal an archive, suspicion of the motives for the telling, and suspicion of the reductiveness of the tale told: three more things to worry about.

One final source of qualms, perhaps the most compelling, is the proposition that, as Siep Stuurman writes in The Invention of Humanity, ethnocentrism . . . is ubiquitous (11). Not all atrocities target ethnic, racial, or religious outsiders. But when they do, as is frequently the case, ethnocentrism prevents the violence from being understood as blameworthy. If it is indeed everywhere, or has been until quite recently, ethnocentrism puts a severe limit on both the quantity and the quality of the available materials out of which a literary history of atrocity could be composed. If, in the writings that humanity has seen fit to preserve, the alien has mostly been presented as savage, barbarian, irrational, inscrutable, uncivilized, irreligious, heathen, idolatrous, nonwhite, colored, primitive, backward, traditional, premodern—and the list goes on (3), the description of the killing of large numbers of aliens, internal or external, will not have seemed morally scandalous, and reading such descriptions is not likely to issue in an instructive or gratifying reading experience, at least to modern eyes.¹¹ It is not rare in adventure tales of the imperial period (a period that may not be over) for the protagonist to slay hordes of racialized others, the anonymous expendable zombies of yesteryear. But this genre does not satisfy modern expectations of readability, and for my purposes those expectations will be decisive. What this project demands are literary texts of a certain quality which invite some degree of readerly reflection. The premise that ethnocentrism was both ubiquitous and essential to atrocity (a premise at which we will take a closer look) would imply that such texts will not be abundant. As it happens, they are less abundant than one might have liked. Great writing about atrocities committed by one’s own countrymen, like Leo Tolstoy’s account of the Russian conquest of the Caucasus in Hadji Murat or Ishikawa Tatsuzo’s account of atrocities committed by the Japanese army against Chinese civilians in the 1930s, are exceptions. Even the most virtuous, like Bartolomé de las Casas’s descriptions of Spanish atrocities in the Americas, tend to be predictable and repetitive. In Las Casas and elsewhere, what might seem to be arrestingly original details turn out to be borrowed from classical sources, themselves borrowed from earlier sources.¹² Taking off from the extraordinary horror of the event, describers of atrocity are often quick to declare ordinary language incapable of capturing that horror, or the evildoers responsible for it. Gladstone’s Bulgarian Horrors pamphlet (protesting Ottoman atrocities committed in 1876) speaks in this mode of crimes and outrages, so vast in scale as to exceed all modern example, and so unutterably vile as well as fierce in character, that it passes the power of heart to conceive, and of tongue and pen adequately to describe them.¹³ What the inexpressibility trope lacks in descriptiveness it makes up in power to provoke the passions, passions which would frequently have to be described as racist. (In Gladstone’s case, they were.) But once the moment for taking indignant action has passed, a writer’s announcement of failure to do justice to their subject cannot compensate; what remains is a writerly failure, if an understandable one. Will I put prose like this on my syllabus? Probably not. No one can feel good about imposing more than a taste of it on impressionable minds.

Writing like Gladstone’s is, however, good to think with. One might even have to admit that it represents moral progress. It recognizes atrocity as a moral scandal about which something should be done and can be done. For much of the West’s cultural history, it’s unclear whether either of those premises would have pertained. But Gladstone’s moral outrage will itself outrage modern readers. Humanitarian principles emerge (good), but they are applied so unevenly, so blatantly in the interests of the great powers (bad), that it would be misleading in the extreme, morally or politically, to speak of a step forward. Where atrocity is concerned, can one ever speak of a step forward? It’s with that question foremost in mind that this book addresses itself to atrocity’s literary archive, the putative line between modern and premodern treatments of mass violence, and a few distinctive modern renderings.

The Allied bombing of the German cities during World War II, in which hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed, is seen by some and not by others as an atrocity. The same can be said of the Israeli bombing of Gaza which began (the latest episode, that is) in October of 2023, after the Hamas attack of October 7, and continued as I was finishing the revisions to this manuscript. There is no mystery as to why the accusatory label atrocity, like the stronger label genocide, has been resisted by those whose collectivity stands accused. There is some mystery, on the other hand, swirling around the historical fact that, in certain times and places, it has become possible for the people of country X to accuse themselves of committing an atrocity against the people of country Y. How could something so seemingly unlikely have come to pass? Is it registered in the literary record? Assuming it is, is self-indictment of violence against foreigners and noncombatants solely a modern phenomenon, a product of the modern discourse of human rights? Does the same hold for the concept of atrocity itself? Is indictment too crude a measure of what literature can do with atrocity, or what needs to be done? Along with a kind of stunned bafflement that human beings continue to do such things to each other, these are the questions that have animated this book.

Introduction

The Air Raid on Halberstadt on 8 April 1945

In the spring of 2016, preparing to teach a summer seminar on world literature, I lay down on the living room sofa to read a recently published book by the German writer, filmmaker, philosopher, and TV producer Alexander Kluge. The book was called Air Raid. At least, Air Raid was the title on the cover. Inside, there was a longer title: The Air Raid on Halberstadt on 8 April 1945.¹ As I read about the American bombing of the small German city of Halberstadt, the city where the thirteen-year-old Kluge and his parents hid in the cellar of their house while bombs exploded across their neighborhood, a small but uncomfortable thought tickled the edge of my consciousness. April 8, 1945. Halberstadt. It seemed unlikely, but hadn’t I seen those words somewhere before? I got up from the sofa and went into my office. On the wall, beneath a framed photo of my father’s plane, taken in the air over Germany in the last months of World War II and sent to me after my father died by his buddy and wing man, there is a list of his missions. There it was, on a yellowed piece of paper that I kept meaning to put under glass, in my father’s own handwriting. April 8, 1945. Halberstadt. The mission was number 14 on the list, between Bayreuth on April 5 and Oranienburg on the April 10. While a barely adolescent Alexander was somewhere below, unknown and unknowable to him, my father, Captain Eugene Rabinowitz, pilot and squadron commander, just eight years older, was in the air over Halberstadt, leading the B-17s of his squadron to their target, the bomb bay doors opening.

Some months later, I managed to meet Alexander Kluge. I got a notice from the Goethe Institute that he would be doing a book tour in the New York area, and I wrote back asking if they could give me his email address. My father, I said, had bombed him. I thought this excuse had a good chance of working. It didn’t. Still, the organizers said they had forwarded him my message. The result, after exchanges with assistants, was that a few weeks later we met for an hour in the lobby of a hotel in Chelsea. The lobby was modern, narrow, noisy, drafty, not the ideal spot for a significant encounter. One or two young people who seemed to be traveling in Kluge’s party passed by from time to time, trying not to look as if they were protecting him from whatever threat I might pose—maybe only the threat of taking up too much time. I knew he had to prepare for an event that night. But Kluge himself smiled kindly, seeming totally untroubled by the time I was taking out of his schedule. I didn’t apologize to him for what my father had done, and whatever he expected, it obviously wasn’t an apology. The men in those planes, he told me, were like workers in factories. Workers in factories do not decide what is produced by their factories. He had said the same thing in the book. And why not repeat what was in the book, since what he had written there was clearly the outcome of careful thought? In the book he had decided, for example, not to describe his own firsthand experience of the bombing. I assumed he didn’t want the gut-level sympathy that a first-person narrative would have pretty much guaranteed he would get. Who could refuse it? Over 2,000 of his neighbors died around him that day, their homes and shelters smashed and incinerated, and for absolutely nothing. The goal of bringing the war to a speedy conclusion could not possibly justify the destruction. Yes, there were munitions factories in the area, but they were well outside of town, while the bombers deliberately and successfully targeted the city center. US ground forces were only a day or two away. That morning in the hotel lobby, however, Kluge didn’t seem interested in reexamining the evidence in what I was not thinking of as my father’s case. Instead, he mentioned the awful situation at that moment in Aleppo, and then Max Horkheimer’s gratitude to the US, in the 1960s, for rescuing him from the Nazis, despite what the US was doing at that moment in Vietnam. The conversation jumped from period to period. He put some emphasis on a pogrom against the Jews in Prague in the seventeenth century. His point, not that he seemed eager to make one, might have been to remind me of what the Nazis had done to my fellow Jews. Or it might have been to suggest that these old outrages had to be remembered even if they seemed to take something away from the intensity of feeling about more recent outrages. It occurred to me that he might be wanting to relativize modern violence in general, even violence so bad that there seems nothing left to say about it. Given the passage of time, does any atrocity stay a moral absolute? Is any atrocity exempt from time’s relativizing power, which as it passes drags us further and further away from the reactions we would have had, would have had to have, in the moment itself? Moral sentiments that would otherwise appear firm, inevitable, eternal seem to drown and dissolve in the depths of time.

Edmund Burke noted this logic in a haunting letter to a friend written during the French Revolution: "It is possible that many estates about you were obtained by arms, that is, by violence: . . . but it is old violence; and that which might be wrong in the beginning, is consecrated by time, and becomes lawful."² If the unsettling effect of time on moral judgment is not morally unspeakable, it is certainly hard to speak about without some fear of getting morally lost. The fear of getting morally lost among the world’s many atrocities, coupled with a certain temptation to get lost, is among the motives behind the writing of this book.

Later, when I thought about how Kluge had juggled with time in the book’s description of the bombing, jumping backwards from the explosions, fires, and falling buildings to a past that, had it been otherwise, might have left Halberstadt intact, yet not forgetting that for the inhabitants of Halberstadt it was already much too late, it started to make sense that his conversation, in that hotel lobby, also skipped around and went back so far. At one point it bounced all the way back to the violence that Homo sapiens had committed against the Neanderthals. Then it bounced forward to the divorce of Kluge’s parents. The divorce of his parents had to be counted as another reason, I suppose he was saying, to help explain how bad he had felt after the bombing. A banal, everyday reason for emotional trouble that he might have presented, instead, as grandly traumatic, a way of synching his childhood up with world history. If there was a larger history of the world that his family and my family could synch up to, the moral seemed to go, it would have to include seemingly disparate materials, some of them widely distanced in time and space, resistant to any one linear narrative.

The idea for this book was not born out of my conversation with Kluge. I was reading Air Raid on the sofa because I was already hooked, no doubt in large part for personal reasons. I had decided that there are more atrocities out there than get acknowledged as such, that a great deal of what passes as history, including and perhaps especially literary history, is history whitewashed of violence, even violence noteworthy for the very high price paid in human lives. But I had also acknowledged that I had doubts about my own apparent convictions. The conversation with Kluge had a certain complicating effect on the indignation that initially fueled the project. It made me wonder, among other things, whether history, with its aspiration to coherent narrative, was the most accurate name for what I was trying to do. It cast some doubt on my professional habit (which other humanists may recognize) of taking quiet credit for the preservation of historical memories, some of them distant and unpleasant, that society would prefer to forget. Our conversation was richly enigmatic, and not, I think, just because Kluge was avoiding the event itself, the obvious subject of our shared concern. Yes, there was a certain delicacy in the apparent randomness of the topics he touched on, but I felt sure that his delicacy was not the whole story. Kluge’s accumulation of seeming irrelevancies had an aesthetic force, as if it were calculated to display the bombing in