The Natural History of Destruction. 2022. Written and directed by Sergei Loznitsa

The Natural History of Destruction. 2022. Germany/Netherlands/France. Written and directed by Sergei Loznitsa. DCP courtesy Atoms & Void. In German, English; English subtitles. 109 min. At a time when the traditional rules of wartime engagement are increasingly violated, civilian populations are used as human shields, and cities are targeted and laid to waste without consequence or legal redress, W. G. Sebald’s book On the Natural History of Destruction has assumed an even deeper moral gravity than when he wrote it in 1999. Sergei Loznitsa’s brilliantly edited archival documentary uses German, British, and American wartime footage in ironic counterpoint to evoke not only the appalling devastation of the Allied air raids that decimated some 131 German cities and towns in the last years of the war, including Cologne, Dresden, and Hamburg (the latter in “Operation Gomorrah”), but also the sense of willed national amnesia—the widespread appeal of kitschy Heimat nostalgia to banish feelings of shame, complicity, and defeat—that Sebald diagnoses and exposes in postwar German society.