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In late July 1943, during the Allied air raids codenamed Operation Gomorrah, Nossack and his wife were staying in a small cottage on the heath south of Hamburg. He later walked back into the ruins and wrote his account that November, while the city was still largely rubble.
When catastrophe destroys every material trace of a former life, including home, papers, objects and streets, that life stops feeling like memory and starts to feel like a legend. Survivors begin to speak of their own recent past as 'once upon a time,' because nothing is left to anchor it as real. The break is felt as a line across time, not simply as damage to things.
Nossack records grief at losing everything, and also a disturbing lightness at being freed from the weight of possessions and accumulated identity. Seen this way, destruction does two things at once: it removes the props that held up a settled self, and it forces life to be lived only in the present. The survivor's relief is part of the damage, not a sign that the damage was small.
Nossack deliberately refuses to frame the bombing in terms of a villain, a grievance or revenge. He presents the fire as something that fell on the city the way a natural disaster would, a fate without an author. This refusal to assign blame lets him record the survivors' experience directly, without turning their suffering into a political argument.