id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentence	flesch	summary	cache	txt
fogs-612	Zelechowski, Jamie	Emplotting the Air War: Jörg Friedrich’s Brandstätten (2003)	2016	20	.pdf	application/pdf	9157	621	63	For historian Horst Boog, the isolation of the air war undermines Friedrich’s argument: had Friedrich actually situated his book in the greater context of the war, Boog claims, he would have discovered quickly the unsustainability of his thesis: “die Behauptung, Engländer und Amerikaner hätten die systematische Vernichtung der deutschen Zivilbevölkerung in den Städten von vornherein geplant und dann durchgeführt” (133).2 This lack of context also quickly leads Friedrich’s reviewers to the conclusion that his account of the air war attempts to balance out German crimes with German suffering – a perpetuation of the myth of the German as Opfer.3 Nevertheless, as Peter Schneider warns:   Focus on German Studies 22         53   Zelechowski           “[...] wer Jörg Friedrich deswegen gleich als Geschichtsrevisionisten abstempelt, macht es sich zu leicht und weicht der Frage aus, die dessen Buch einkreist: Ist ein Kriegsverbrechen dann legitimiert, wenn es die Antwort auf einen faschistischen Angreifer ist, der die Logik der Vernichtung mit allen erdenklichen und unausdenklichen In Brandstätten, the literary quotes, statistics, and photos depicting aspects of life before, during, and after the bombings reinforce a much more conservative interpretation of the air war in which the resilience of the German spirit triumphs in the face of the catastrophic loss of what Friedrich calls “die materielle Spur der Damaligen” (7).9 Friedrich presents the reader with two protagonists: German culture and the German people.	cache/fogs-612.pdf	txt/fogs-612.txt