" The Spring is well underway: this time not afraid of the ocean are too frantic extravagance, and we hope that our maritime strength is equal to moderate demands, especially considering in the tablets Vasan quietly in my bag, also a very human way to cover a withdrawal. It would be different if we were in winter! Friends, traveling virtuosos, have told me the ridiculous scare cruise of those, on a day either avoided having self able confront. "Waves? Those mountains! Gaurisankars Son! It is forbidden to set foot on the deck - to screwed Goncharov would not have made up, is best seen through the porthole secure. You're tied to your bed, climb, fall, is the complicated motion of some amusement shaky torturers folk festivals, confusing directions, churning stomach and the brain. From a dizzying height you see coming into your sink, and the slope of the cabin alternating slip into clumsy dance your bags making cannons. Reina a terrible, an infernal noise, caused partly by outside elements unleashed in part by the ship continues to move stubborn and racked up their last pieces. The thing lasts three days and three nights, suppose you had already spent two and this is the third. You have not eaten anything during that time, it's time that you have to remember this custom. As you do not die, despite being decidedly willing to do that for whole quarters of an hour, you have to eat something come a moment and call the waiter, as the electric bell works and service first class hotel of the boat is still standing amid the collapse of the world, disciplined to the end - is delicate and very admirable heroism of human civilization . The man who comes with a napkin and white jacket - does not enter his head, stands by the door. In the infernal scandal catches your custom exhausted, he goes back and forth, keeping balance with flexible arm threatened his tray very hot. You have to bide his time, one particular in which the world situation allows you to land the dish on your bed in an arc, if not mastered at least estimated. The waiter takes his time, holds what is in your hands with courage and intelligence, and momentum seems to work. In the same second, however, has changed the world situation in the sense and to the effect that once the tray face down on the bed of your wife ... It is not possible. "
Thomas Mann, Viaje por mar con Don Quijote , (1934), Barcelona, RqueR, 2005. ISBN 84-934047-6-4
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" All over Germany, one way or another, news of the horrors of the destruction of Hamburg must have been spread by distraught refugees vacillating between a hysterical will to survive and leaden apathy. Reck´s diary at least makes it clear that in spite of the news blackout suppressing all detailed information, it was not impossible to know how horribly the cities of Germany were being destroyed. A year later Reck describes ten of thousands camping out around the Maximilianplatz after the latest major raid on Munich. He writes: "On the nearby main road an endless stream of refugees is moving, frail old women with bundles containing their last possessions carried on sticks over their backs. Poor homeless people with burnt clothing, their eyes reflecting the horror of the firestorm, the explosions blowing everything to bits, burial in the rubble or the ignominy of suffocating in a cellar." The remarkable aspect of such accounts is their rarity. Indeed, it seems that no German writer, with the sole exception of Nossack, was ready or able to put any concrete facts down on paper about the progress and repercussions of this gigantic, long-term campaign of destruction. It was the same when the war was over. The quasi-natural reflex, engendered by feelings of shame an wish to defy the victors, was to keep quiet and look the other way. Stig Dagerman, reporting from Germany in the autumn of 1946 for the Swedish newspaper Expressen , writes from Hamburg that on a train going at normal speed it took him a quarter of an hour to travel through the lunar landscape between Hasselbrook and Landwerh, and in all that vast wilderness, perhaps the most horrifying expanse of ruins in the whole of Europe, he did not see a single living soul. The train, writes Dagerman, was crammed full, like all trains in Germany, but no one looked out of the windows, and he was identified as a foreigner himself because he looked out. (...) People´s ability to forget what they do not want to know, to overlook what is before their eyes, was seldom put to the test better than in Germany at that time. The population decided - out of sheer panic at first- to carry on as if nothing had happened. Kluge´s account of the destruction of Halberstadt begins with the story of Frau Schrader, employed at a local cinema, who gets to work with a shovel commandeered from the air raid wardens immediately after the bomb falls, hoping "to clear the rubble away before the two o´clock matinee". (...) On his return to Hamburg a few days after the air raid, Nossack describes seeing a woman cleaning the windows of a building "that stood alone an undamaged in the middle of the desert of ruins".(...) On the other hand, Keeping up everyday routines Regardless of disaster, from the baking of a cake to put on the coffee table to the Observance of more elevated cultural rituals, is a tried and trusted method of Preserving What is Thought of as a healthy human reason. "
WG Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction , New York, Random House, 2003. ISBN 0-375-50484-2
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