Hans Erich Nossack

(1901 - 1977)

Born in Hamburg in 1901, Hans Erich Nossack was staying with his wife in a vacation cottage when, on July 27, 1943, nearly eight hundred Royal Air Force Halifaxes and Lancasters began the incendiary bombing of his hometown, in which nearly forty thousand Hamburgers died. “It seems that no German writer, with the sole exception of Nossack,” wrote W.G. Sebald in 1999, “was ready or able to put any concrete facts down on paper about the progress and repercussions of this gigantic, long­-term campaign of destruction.”