As an analysis of the cultural implications of the Allied strategic bombing of German cities in World War II, Jörg Arnold's The Allied Air War and Urban Memory stands out for the sophistication of its approach, and the sharpness and complexity of its analysis. To explore the mark that the air war left on German society, and the extent to which politics shaped post-war public memory, Arnold presents a comparative study of the memory cultures of the cities of Kassel and Magdeburg from the mid-1940s to the late 1990s. As Arnold explains, although they shared among others a common medieval origin and a prominent role in Nazi Germany's armament economy, Kassel and Magdeburg processed their experience of destruction very differently owing to three main factors. First, there was a time lag between the attacks: Kassel's worst air raid came on 22 October 1943; Magdeburg's on 16 February 1945. Second, unlike Magdeburg, Kassel had never experienced destruction. Third, throughout the Cold War, with Kassel incorporated into the Federal Republic and Magdeburg into the German Democratic Republic, public memories of the attacks were re-contextualized from above (East) and below (West) to strengthen the political narratives that provided a raison d'être to the two antagonistic states. The evolution of these memory cultures involved commemorative practices that crystallized around specific dates and sites and rituals where dominant narratives found symbolic and discursive renewal. But it also involved the physical, symbolic and social reformulation of the urban environment, a process that was fraught with difficulties.
The Allied Air War is organized along chronological and thematic lines. Arnold examines the impact of the air raids on people and the environment, but his main interest lies in understanding the ways in which such events entered public memory. By adopting a long time frame (1940s to 1990s), he is able to contextualize the development of urban memory against the framework of different political regimes and the Cold War. This, combined with the ways in which Arnold telescopes national and international debates into the evolution of local memories spares The Allied Air War from the fate of so many local studies whose narrowness renders them not comparable, and therefore of limited interest. The Allied Air War will indeed prove insightful for cultural, political and urban historians alike.
Arnold starts by presenting the destruction of Kassel and Magdeburg as it was represented by those that experienced it. Departing from a poem and a photograph, he identifies three vectors of memory (death, destruction and survival) that since the 1940s have guided the construction of local notions of victimhood, loss and history. These vectors also act as organising principles for the tripartite book structure. Displaying great analytical skill, and in a prose that is as precise as it is engaging, Arnold produces a complex, even-handed, and illuminating work. In the historiography of the air war in Germany this is a rare achievement. Until recently, German victimhood has been mostly ignored or manipulated for ideological reasons, but it has rarely been examined with rigour. Given that since the late 1990s, debate on the Allied strategic bombing of German cities ‘has become something of “a collective obsession” in Germany’ (p. 317), the need for rigorous scholarship has never been greater.
The Allied Air War is a great contribution to the study of the cultural implications of the Allied strategic bombing of German cities in World War II and how they came to be. Besides Arnold's commendable scholarship and engaging writing, the book's greatest contribution in my view is that it contextualizes German suffering within and yet beyond the set of circumstances that led to the strategic bombing of German cities and the ulterior manipulation of public memory for political purposes. In other words, it brings people back to the centre of the cultural memory of the attacks; that is, to where they belong.
