Bombing, the Sublime, and the minutiae of life

As a schoolboy during World War II, Walter Kempowski hoped for an Allied bombing raid on his hometown, the Baltic port of Rostock, to save him from having to hand in his Latin homework.

I dimly recall reading the story of a Greek boatman who when German Stukas dived from the sky in a terrifying attack simply stood on his deck, not seeking cover, but watching the awe-inspiring scene above him. (If anyone knows the source of this let me know).

John Colville, an assistant private secretary to Winston Churchill (and two other Prime Ministers) watched an air raid in the London Blitz from his bedroom window. His diary entry for Sunday September 22nd 1940 concludes: “The night was cloudless and starry, with the moon rising over Westminster. Nothing could have been more beautiful and the searchlights interlaced at certain points on the horizon, the star-like flashes in the sky where shells were bursting, the light of distant fires, all added to the scene. It was magnificent and terrible: the spasmodic drone of enemy aircraft overhead, the thunder of gunfire, sometimes close sometimes in the distance, the illumination, like that of electric trains in peace-time, as the guns fired, and the myriad stars, real and artificial, in the firmament. Never was there such a contrast of natural splendour and human vileness. Later thick palls of smoke rose from the Embankment where bombs had fallen on Dolphin Square — and it went on all night long.”

And this is Charles Simic in the essay ‘Reading Philosophy at Night’ which appeared in 1987 in a special issue of Antaeus: “I remember lying in a ditch and staring at some pebbles while German bombers were flying over our heads. That was long ago. I don’t remember the face of my mother nor the faces of the people who were there with us, but I still see those perfectly ordinary pebbles. “It is not ‘how’ things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists,” says Wittgenstein. I felt precisely that. Time had stopped. I was watching myself watching the pebbles and trembling with fear.”

Gerald Durrell wrote regarding the autobiographical book Climax on Crete by Theodore Stephanides, the naturalist who loomed so large in Durrell’s autobiographical Corfu trilogy: “Theodore, the most unwarlike of men, was bombed and machine-gunned with the rest by the Germans. Yet who but Theodore would relate how, when the Stukas dived and machine-gunned the road, he flung himself face downwards in a ditch and was ‘interested to note’ two species of mosquito larvae he had not previously noted.”

In his brief piece ‘Spaziergang’ for the Berliner Börsen-Courier of 24 May 1921, Joseph Roth wrote “Nur die Kleinigkeiten des Lebens sind wichtig” ... It's only the minutiae of life that are important.