SINCE W. G. SEBALD WAS LARGELY RESPONSIBLE for putting “German wartime suffering” back on Germany's intellectual agenda with his 1997 Zürich lectures about the air war and German literature — published in book form in Germany in 1999 under the title Luftkrieg und Literatur (Air War and Literature) — it is reasonable to inquire how he dealt with the problem of German suffering in his own literary works. After all, in Luftkrieg und Literatur Sebald argued that German writers, far from dwelling excessively on the problem of German suffering in the Second World War — and in particular on the air war that destroyed so many German cities — had actually avoided it, even treated it as a taboo subject. Seeing German writers as seismographs for the German intellectual and spiritual condition as a whole during and after the war, Sebald argued that writers' silence, reserve, and “instinctive looking away are the reasons why we know so little of what the Germans thought and observed in the five years between 1942 and 1947.” In other words, it was not just that Germans in general and German writers in particular largely avoided the problem of other people's suffering in the postwar years — the suffering of Jews, of Poles, of Russians, and so on — but that they largely avoided the problem of suffering in general, even (or especially) German suffering.