As far as I know, the question of whether and how it could be strategically or morally justified was never the subject of open debate in Germany after 1945, no doubt mainly because a nation which had murdered and worked to death millions of people in its camps could hardly call on the victorious powers to explain the military and political logic that dictated the destruction of the German cities.

We all have appointments with the past.

The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives.

Like our bodies and like our desires, the machines we have devised are possessed of a heart which is slowly reduced to embers.

This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was.

Men and animals regard each other across a gulf of mutual incomprehension.

We learn from history as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that's performed upon it.