His indictment of the Germans as a nation "blind to the past" had a political implication that could scarcely have been clearer. A country that could deceive itself about its past and, even more, about how much it had learnt from the past, might still be capable of repeating the mistakes of the past. The central thesis of the Zurich lectures is more specific: that the destruction of the German cities left next to no mark on post-war literature. But the context in which Sebald chose to present this thesis was bound to incense many of his own generation, who were too young to remember the air war and had little interest in literature, but who prided themselves on having "come to terms with the past". The present German Chancellor, Gerhard Schroder, is one such figure: a politician who constantly insists that Germany has sufficiently atoned for the Nazi past and earned the right not to be overshadowed by it. Yet Schroder is the perfect illustration of Sebald's critique: a leader whose diplomatic ineptitude and cynical exploitation of anti-Americanism have left Germany more isolated and despised than at any time since the 1940s. A nation that not only elected but re-elected Schroder is indeed "blind to history and lacking in tradition". Germany's misfortune today is no longer Thomas Mann's unpolitical man, but Sebald's unhistorical man.

The catastrophe that befell the cities of Germany between 1940 and 1945 was, as Sebald says, on an unprecedented scale, yet "left scarcely a trace of pain behind in the collective consciousness". How could a nation of 80 million, the great majority of whom at the time had first-hand experience of this catastrophe, have consigned to oblivion the experience itself, along with the memory of victims and landscape? And how could the Germans have remained in denial about events that so irrevocably transformed their physical environment?

One part of the answer is that the task of reconstruction was so immense, the hardships of life in an occupied and divided land so all-consuming, that most Germans were indifferent to the loss of their civilization, in the literal sense of an urban culture that had endured since medieval times. This might explain why the bombed cities were rebuilt with so little feeling for the past, but not why this uncanny indifference should have persisted into the second and third generation. Another answer is that guilt about Nazi war crimes, above all against the Jews, rendered German suffering taboo. There is some truth in this, but not much. The Holocaust only became known as such a generation after the war; until then, it exercised limited influence on retrospective attitudes, not least because few Germans, whether soldiers or civilians, admitted to contemporaneous knowledge of the Final Solution. The bombing, however, impinged directly on everyone and to acknow-ledge the horror did not imply culpability, except in the eyes of the Nazi authorities at the time. Was it the thoroughness with which the Third Reich inculcated the population with its Durchhaltewille, the determination to hold out against the odds, that rendered Germans incapable of articulating their nightmare? Did the Nazi criminalization of complaint endure long into the post-war era? How important was the fact that the British and Americans who had carried out the bombing had become occupiers, re-educators and, in due course, benefactors?

In the eyes of the post-Nazi generation, the Allies were not the enemies but the saviours of West Germany from Soviet tyranny. For decades, the denunciation of Allied bombing was a theme of East German propaganda rather than West German public discourse: the destruction of Dresden in February 1945, which had been carried out solely to assist the Soviet advance, was declared a uniquely heinous atrocity, comparable in horror only to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and exceeding both in numbers killed. Ironically, it was Goebbels who had already assigned Dresden a special place in the mythology of the air war; his propaganda was simply adopted by his Communist successors. In Britain and America, it took on a symbolism of its own, bringing together such unlikely bed- fellows as David Irving (who propagated Goebbels's grossly exaggerated death toll of 135,000), Kurt Vonnegut, who witnessed the raid as a prisoner and later made it the subject of his novel Slaughterhouse-Five, and the wholly admirable Dresden Trust, which has contributed to the restoration of the Frauenkirche.

In West Germany it was chiefly the nationalist Right that kept the memory of the air war alive, to be aired as a grievance in order to depict the Germans as victims, the Allies as war criminals and the Nazis as no worse than those who sat in judgement on them. Those who harboured such resentments were ignored by the liberal consensus, which caricatured them as die Ewiggestrigen, the stick-in-the-muds. Since reunification, such nationalists have become bolder and less marginal. One of them is Klaus Rainer Rohl, a pupil of the revisionist historian Ernst Nolte, whose book, Verbotene Trauer: Ende der deutschen Tabus ("Forbidden Mourning: End of the German taboos") equates the Allied bombing of German civilians with the attacks of September 11, 2001, on New York and Washington. Rohl has no doubt whatever that the "systematic war of annihilation against the civilian population" was a crime by the standards of the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal. With scarcely disguised Schadenfreude, he claims that New Yorkers will, after September 11, no longer regard the bombing of Germany with the same "polite indifference".

Revisionists like Rohl have nothing in common with a left-liberal historian such as Friedrich, let alone a writer of Sebald's stature. Yet the political consequences of the past year may have blurred the old distinctions. Here is Gunter Grass, interviewed by the New York Times, explaining the strength of opposition to the war in Iraq: "It's not a pacifist thing. It's remembering the air raids on German cities, the feeling of impotence and terror. Somehow the memory has been passed down to the younger generation".

Grass has no doubt that the Allied bombing was a war crime because it lacked military objectives. "The Allies tried to break the resistance of the German people by killing hundreds of thousands, but the resistance grew."

Speaking before the collapse of Saddam's regime, he was equally sure that the Iraqis would defend their country "because of the bombing". Grass evidently identifies with "the German people" in their "resistance" to the Allies; as a young soldier, he was after all one of them. He approves of Friedrich's book, but not of Sebald's: he resents the suggestion that his generation remained silent about the experience of bombing, perhaps because it is too near the bone. Grass, and many like him, prefer to condemn the Americans and British, now that it is safe and even obligatory to do so, rather than to recall the moral cowardice of the Germans, not only during but even long after the war.

So Germans of Left and Right are united in their sense of victimhood and in their visceral hostility to the use of the same strategy by the same Allies today. The fact that fewer than one in a hundred German civilians was killed by bombing, and an incomparably smaller proportion of Iraqis today, does not prevent many Germans from equating such "collateral damage" with the genocidal policies of the Third Reich. In the general acceptance of this false moral equivalence, there is grave danger for the future, not only of Germany but of Europe.