05: DESTRUCTION

Lina Meruane, writer [Chile]

[Translation (subtitles): Marilena de Chiara]

Transcription:

“Destruction is the uncomfortable word with which Sebald places, against the norm, in the historical memory of the Second World War, the terrible destruction of hundreds of German cities and the illegal genocide of millons of German citizens. A truly abherrant event, without historical precedents and, at the same time – and this is what matters to Sebal – a literary record. An event silenced by the world and by the Germans themselves. An event that has obliterated the existence of the status for its own victims. The destruction of collective memory, this collective amnesia, this ruin of memory, this is what Sebald, in his literary works, especially essays, aims to understand and reconstruct.“