New film about the bombing of German cities in World War II

Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s latest film begins innocently enough – people go about their daily lives, stroll through Berlin, peer out a window into a southern German village and watch what is happening in the village square. There’s even a scene where a cow is taken onto a river raft.

Then, 12 minutes into the film, the first bombs fall from thousands of planes, dropped on German cities including Cologne, Dresden and Berlin.

In his new film “A Natural History of Destruction”, which opened in Germany in Berlin on March 15 and opens in domestic theaters on March 16, Loznitsa focuses on the Allied bombing raids on Nazi Germany.

For the film, he edited World War II-era archival material and set it to a score by Dutch composer Christiaan Verbeek—a score that gives audiences goosebumps.

Loznitsa has been producing documentaries exclusively from archival footage for many years. His goal is to “bring the skeletons out of history,” he told DW. His films are about traumas that no one talks about.

Lessons to be learned from history

“If something isn’t discussed openly and honestly, it becomes a skeleton in the closet that will eventually come back to haunt you,” says Loznitsa. And that can have serious consequences, award-winning director adds.

“History follows certain laws and tends to repeat itself, especially if you don’t reflect and analyze certain events, don’t draw lessons from them; there is a danger that they will recur,” he says.

Who is Sergei Loznitsa?

Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa knows what he’s talking about. The 58-year-old has experienced historical twists firsthand. He grew up in the former Soviet Union, a totalitarian state, and finally experienced its collapse in the late 1990s. Almost simultaneously, he changed his profession. The trained mathematician became a filmmaker.

He is now one of Europe’s best known documentarians and has a unique approach. In his directorial role, he sees himself only as an observer, which means that critics regularly accuse him of lacking insight. Is it permissible to simply set up the camera on the grounds of the former Auschwitz concentration camp and film happy groups of tourists as they take selfies there? This is exactly what Loznitsa did in his film “Austerlitz” (2016) – he did not comment on the disturbing scenes.

For his film “Babi Yar. Context” (2021), Loznitsa scoured German, Russian and Ukrainian archives and put together a film from the images that recall the Babi Yar massacre, which was suppressed and forgotten for decades. In a ravine in Kiev, 33,771 Jewish men, women and children were murdered over two days in September 1941 by German Nazis and Ukrainian auxiliary police. The fact that the film also featured Ukrainians who greeted approaching Nazis was met with criticism in her homeland.

Loznitsa occasionally makes feature films. More recently, he dedicated “Donbass” (2018) to the war that has raged in eastern Ukraine between Ukrainian forces and pro-Russian separatists since 2014. Its protagonists have withdrawn from society, they no longer believe in the government, fake news is omnipresent. After the Russian invasion, Loznitsa’s work feels eerily prescient.

harrowing footage

That’s why he took a closer look at brutal episodes in European history in “The Natural History of Destruction.”

Some of the images shown are harrowing. In one scene, dead bodies are placed side by side on a street in the ruins after a night of bombing. One image shows the body of a child dressed in a thin, light-colored dress, looking lifelessly up at the sky.

Loznitsa says he is used to working with difficult material and is careful not to go too far and shock the audience too much. His objective, he says, is that both he and the spectators can create a certain distance from the events shown.

“The further away you are from what’s in the film, the less personal it is, the less emotionally disturbing,” he says, which makes it possible at times to “step back and rationally understand what happened.” That distance can help us learn from experience, he says.

The Russian Invasion of Ukraine Is Not Unexpected

Loznitsa says he was inspired by an essay by WG Sebald, a 20th-century German author. “I started planning this film in 2017,” quoting Sebald’s “On the Natural History of Destruction.”

“Sebald inspired me to make a film before, which was ‘Austerlitz’, and I wanted to continue from there.”

“Another reason for making the film was that I was already expecting this new war”, says the Ukrainian filmmaker, referring to the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. “I could have predicted that. In a way, I expected the horror of what’s happening now.”

However, he doesn’t want his film to be seen only in the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine. We already knew that such things were happening, he argues, for example in Syria, where cities were bombed and the population attacked. “That might be another reason why I felt the issue was more relevant than ever,” he says.

Loznitsa read a lot before making “A Natural History of Destruction”.In an interview with DW, he referred to war theorists, including the 19th-century General Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian archconservative who espoused the view that war is the real normal state of humanity – and peace the exception.

‘Conflict of mentalities’

“As soon as humans organize themselves into groups, certain patterns seem to emerge,” says Loznitsa, arguing that the problem is not human nature but a clash of mindsets.

“We think we all live in the same era, but that’s a mistake. Some people still live in the Stone Age, some in the Middle Ages, some in the 19th century, some in the 21st century. For some, the most important thing is conquering territory; for others, individual freedom and intellectual development are the greater good”, he observes.

The problem, he adds, is that these values ​​are really incompatible. “Conflict arises from the fact that mindsets cannot be reconciled,” he says.

His film shows the effects such conflicts can have. Nobody says much in “The Natural History of Destruction.” The machinery of war continues until the cities depicted are in ruins.

It is “difficult today to form even a half-adequate sense of the extent of the devastation of German cities that occurred during the last years of the Second World War, and even more difficult to reflect on the horror associated with that devastation,” wrote WG Sebald.

In recent years, neo-Nazis in Germany have repeatedly used the attacks to relativize the crimes of the Nazi regime. This is not Loznitsa’s intention.

However, the lack of context and the focus on the plight of the German population pose potential for criticism. Thus “an irritatingly distorted view of war emerges, in which the victims of Nazi terror remain a blank space,” said cultural journalist Christian Berndt on Deutschlandfunk radio. Film critic Patrick Seyboth also notes that Loznitsa’s attitude is “very consistent, but also worthy of discussion”.

In DW’s conversation with him it’s clear that he wants to raise the following questions: What happened in that period and how do we deal with it today? “The answer to the first question is relatively simple”, says the director. “The second question – what does this really mean for people – is still a mystery.”

This article was originally written in German.