"the Crow on the Crematorium Chimney": Germany, Summer 1945‪.‬

In the half-century since the end of the second world war our sense of its moral economy has begun to change. It has always been easy to dismiss Nazism, Fascism, and Japanese imperialism as morally bankrupt. The conduct of the Axis powers has received intensive scrutiny and been established as the contrary moral reference point, as against Allied virtue, in the familiar Anglo-American narrative about the War. But in recent years, the issues raised by the conduct of all sides have complicated the historical accounting of the war even in the victorious West. This new attentiveness has also begun to disclose the place of the war and its aftermath in the philosophical evolution of modernity (see, for example, Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust and Emil L. Fackenheim, "The Holocaust and Philosophy"). The morality of using the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki has entered public discourse not only in terms of military strategy, but in ethical terms as well. (1) The same re-consideration of the Allied strategic bombing offensive against weakly defended German cities in the European theatre has begun to change our views of the morality of Allied tactics. Air Vice-Marshall Arthur "Bomber" Harris, the British commander of the Allied air assault on Germany, has been the flashpoint of a heated debate (see, for example, "Death by Moonlight"). German historian Jorg Friedrich has ignited an even more heated controversy with a book on the air war from the German perspective. Der Brand has upset Anglo-American readers, not because it emphasizes the devastation wrought on urban Germany by the Allies, but by his use of the language in German normally reserved for writing about the Holocaust, but applied now to Hitler's "willing executioners" (Goldhagen 1996) recast in the role of victims of Allied barbarity. Of course most people at the end of the war were not particularly concerned with the politics of a nuanced moral accounting of the victor's conduct. Teat good had triumphed over evil was, for the most part, a satisfactory ethical lesson. The public narrative promoted by the victor's publicists had reduced the matter of "our" values and "theirs" to the lowest common denominator of moral calculation, However, there were voices in the immediate aftermath whose responses to the situation at the end of the fighting were rather more complex and, if I may be permitted to say so, rather more profound, than the conventional ethical complacencies mouthed by the Allies. But these more perceptive responses were very quickly silenced. Well, not exactly "silenced," if we mean by the word some form of external censorship. These responses were, to put it more accurately, very quickly unfocussed, not by any official disapproval, but by a personal process of philosophical self-censoring, a kind of internal repression of "truths" that a liberal, humanist intelligence found too difficult to endure. The unacceptability of raising questions about "our" values in the general stir of victory was perhaps partially responsible for the philosophical retreat, for the unfocussing of the hard truths glimpsed by these moralists. But I don't think this is the whole story. The withdrawal into the familiar terrain of conventional moral discourse had in the end nothing really to do with the war at all, The war was only the signpost on the road to a more inhospitable moral geography, one that we have come to inhabit ourselves in postmodernity. Elizabeth Bowen put it well in her war time novel, The Heat of the Day (1949) when she has one of her characters say that "War, if you come to think of it, hasn't started anything that wasn't there already" (33). The human prospect at the end of the war opened paths into unexpected moral and philosophical perplexities that shook those few who were able to see past the moral triumphalism of the victors.