How I Wished During Those Sleepless Hours

As Far As I Know, The Question Of Whether And How It Could Be Strategically Or Morally Justified Was Never The Subject Of Open Debate In Germany After 1945, No Doubt Mainly Because A Nation Which Had Murdered And Worked To Death Millions Of People In Its Camps Could Hardly Call On The Victorious Powers To Explain The Military And Political Logic That Dictated The Destruction Of The German Cities.

At The Most We Gaze At It In Wonder, A Kind Of Wonder Which In Itself Is A Form Of Dawning Horror, For Somehow We Know By Instinct That Outsize Buildings Cast The Shadow Of Their Own Destruction Before Them, And Are Designed From The First With An Eye To Their Later Existence As Ruins.

We All Have Appointments With The Past.

There Is Something Peculiarly Dispriting About The Emptiness That Wells Up When, In A Strange City, One Dials The Same Telephone Numbers In Vain.

And So They Are Ever Returning To Us, The Dead.