The End: Hamburg 1943

Reviews

...one of the most riveting accounts of the war, novelist Hans Erich Nossack's threadbare, laconic rendering of the firebombing of Hamburg... The End portrays, in a number of revealing instances, how the trauma from the attacks manifested itself: "People were simply without a center, the roots were torn out and swayed back and forth in search of some soil."
BOOKFORUM, Summer 2005

The book is a work of art, distilling into sixty-three short pages the German experience of total destruction, just as John Hersey’s Hiroshima distilled the Japanese experience three years later.... It gives authentic testimony, untainted by knowledge of later events, of the effect of strategic bombing on a civilian population.
New York Review, April 28, 2005

It's difficult to celebrate the arrival of a new book when the subject is so awful. Not all writing lends itself to celebration. Non-fiction especially can be a tawdry business (look at any recent list of non-fiction bestsellers). Yet books like this justify the craft.
Done with Mirrors, December 6, 2004

Sebald was right about The End. It is a brave, honest and eloquent book. It is honest not only about the non-human consequences of total destruction — huge, bloated rats, maggots and flies everywhere — but about the human consequences, which were much worse. Nossack writes vividly, dramatically, and with deep, withheld emotion.
Literary Review, February 2005

Many readers remember the firebombing of Dresden in World War II largely because of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. Undoubtedly, the destruction of Hamburg, Germany, as the result of massive Allied bombing raids in July 1943 will become associated with this slim yet compelling memoir by German novelist Nossack. Nossack's prose is both direct and dreamlike. This book deserves a place next to John Hersey's Hiroshima on the top shelf of modern war literature.
Library Journal, January 2005

Rather than the surrealism or kitsch melodrama of other writers, Sebald wrote, Nossack brought to his memoir “a steadfast gaze bent on reality.” “The ideal of truth inherent in its entirely unpretentious objectivity,” Sebald writes of The End, “proves itself the only legitimate reason for continuing to produce literature in the face of total destruction.”
New York Sun, December 8, 2004

The End adds to a growing genre most identified with novelist W.G. Sebald: studies of that once unspoken subject, German suffering during World War II. Most observers welcome the light so long as it also illuminates the larger context of that suffering. Sebald castigated many postwar German writers for suppressing the topic, while praising this text. Nossack also articulates the subtle and unexpected.
Philadelphia Inquirer, February 2, 2005

In his foreword, Joel Agee refers to "the windless calm" in Nossack's report, a rare and fine example of what W.G. Sebald called a "natural history of destruction." The End is a small but critical book, something to read in those quiet moments when we wonder what will happen next.
Los Angeles Times, January 16, 2005

The narrative is indeed clear-eyed and dispassionate, possessed of the emotional distance necessary to regard the terrible events in their totality. As a supplement to Sebald’s more detailed consideration, Nossack’s remarkable witnessing has real and urgent value.
Publishers Weekly, December 2004

In his foreword, Joel Agee refers to "the windless calm" in Nossack's report, a rare and fine example of what W.G. Sebald called a "natural history of destruction." ... "The End" is a small but critical book, something to read in those quiet moments when we wonder what will happen next.
LA Times, January 2005

What matters is the tone. The high points of Nossack's description are poetic, but neither tragic nor elegiac. The most fitting word is lyrical.
The New Statesman, January 2005

"The End: Hamburg, 1943" by Hans Erich Nossack (1901-77), is a freshly translated memoir by a German novelist who wrote it three months after "Operation Gomorrah" incinerated his city.
Entertainment News, February 2005

Like Levi, [Nossack] writes vividly, dramatically, and with deep, withheld emotion...It is the same as Levi's, and Sebald's: the plain language of a plain man, more powerful than any poetry. But only a poet could put it on the page.
Literary Review, February 2005