The End: Hamburg 1943
Hans Erich Nossack

The novelist Hans Erich Nossack was forty-two when the Allied incendiary bombardments of German cities began, and he watched the destruction of Hamburg. The End is his memoir of the annihilation of the city, written only three months after the bombing. A remarkable firsthand account of one of the most notorious events of World War II, The End is also a meditation on war and hope, history and its devastation. And it is the rare book, as W. G. Sebald has noted, that describes the Allied bombing campaign from the perspective of the German survivors.

In the first English-language edition of The End, Nossack’s text has been elegantly translated and introduced by Joel Agee and is accompanied by the wrenching photographs of Erich Andres. Poetic, evocative, and yet highly descriptive, The End will prove to be one of the enduring literary responses to the phenomenon of total destruction.