Quotes of the Day

When the British air force raided the German city of Darmstadt on Sept. 11, 1944, the fires set by the incendiary bombs were so intensely hot that, of the night's 12,300 mortalities, the bodies of many of those who were trapped in underground shelters shriveled to the size of dolls. "A crying boy in an air force uniform came out of the cellar, a covered enamel bucket in his hand," an anonymous survivor remembers. "It contained his parents."

The military details of the Allied air warfare on Hitler's Germany between 1940 and 1945 have been extensively described by professional historians. Yet the suffering of those who experienced the bombing has largely been relegated to fireside tales, memoirs, and fictional accounts. A new book by Berlin historian Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand (The Conflagration, Propyläen; 592 pages) now brings to life the horror of those nights when British and American fighter planes dropped half a million bombs on some 1,000 towns and cities, killing 635,000 people. "I wanted to show what happens when the bomb hits the ground," Friedrich told Time about his collage of eyewitness and later reports. "Not what happens until it is dropped."

Riveting passages such as the Darmstadt incident have helped make Der Brand a huge success with German readers. With 50,000 copies sold in three weeks it is already in its third printing and has rocketed onto Internet bookseller Amazon.de's Top 10.

What exactly is the book's appeal? For those who lived through the aerial attacks, it's the authentic description of life under the bomb. "It's almost unbearable to read", says Elisabeth Schumacher, a 79-year-old former diplomat from Bonn who spent many hours in air-raid shelters. "It conjures up the indescribable noise, heat and stench of cold sweat in the cellars." And younger readers, says Friedrich, are fascinated by the picture of a ruined Germany they never imagined looked "just like Sarajevo."

It's also undeniable that Germany, for the moment, needs a public exploration of its past. Since his account of human pain and misery is so highly evocative, critics both at home and across the Channel have accused Friedrich of trying to blur the traditional distinction between the Germans as the war's perpetrators and the Allies as its victims — an accusation he doesn't deny. "Historiography, which is not a divine revelation, has to be revised all the time or we will come to a standstill," says the 58-year-old author, who has also written several critical books about the Third Reich and the legal treatment of Nazi crimes in postwar Germany. "We also have to write history from the victims' point of view."

Although Friedrich acknowledges that "Churchill and Roosevelt had no choice but to overcome the German threat through total war," he is quite aware that right-wing extremists might misconstrue parts of his book as morally equating Nazi and Allied guilt. But the ubiquity of those groups, he believes, is precisely the reason why Der Brand had to be written. "These people's monopoly on the subjects of expulsion, rape and the bombing war has to be broken by democratic and neutral historians who take a balanced view," he argues.

The question of German victimhood has been much-discussed all year. This past spring, Nobel prizewinning novelist Günter Grass published Im Krebsgang (Crab Walk), a novella about the millions who perished on the eastern front and in particular the 1945 sinking in the Baltic Sea of the Wilhelm Gustloff, when as many as 9,000 lives were lost. The debate about the novel soon centered on the political correctness of dealing in literary form with the once-taboo suffering of German wartime refugees fleeing from the Red Army.

Even beyond the similar, painful debate it has caused, Der Brand's most lasting contribution will be its depiction of war, no matter how inevitable, as cruel and inhumane. "Does the end justify all means?" Friedrich asks. "That is a question everyone has to ask themselves." Especially today, when the prospect of heavy bombing looms once again.

• URSULA SAUTTER/Bonn
• The devastation of German cities under Allied bombing recalled