In July 1943 the celebrated German photographer Erich Andres, who had been drafted into a Luftwaffe propaganda unit, went home on leave to Hamburg. As a result, Andres was on hand with his camera when, on the night of July 27, the Royal Air Force began the most devastating raid of World War II up to that point. Some 800 bombers dropped 2,000 tons of high explosives and incendiary devices; in the subsequent firestorm, four square miles of the city were obliterated and approximately 40,000 people died, including 5,000 children. The blaze was so intense – temperatures reached 1,800 degrees – that those who escaped the explosions and the flames perished from asphyxiation, in vacuums created by hurricane-force winds.

Andres’s photographs, taken without permission and hidden until the end of the war, give some sense of the scope of the devastation. We see a line of refugees streaming past a mountain of rubble, a street filled with carbonized logs that only gradually reveal themselves as charred corpses. One of the most striking images, however, is less graphic: a brick wall on which someone has chalked “Hilde where are you? We are alive – Lupi, Trudi. “It is impossible not to think of the fliers that sprang up around Manhattan after September 11, as people tried to get word of their missing loved ones.

That comparison immediately starts to unsettle our usual ideas about World War II. We are forced to identify ourselves with the villains of what we too readily call a “good war,” and to wonder about the Allied strategy that inflicted the equivalent of a dozen September 11s on a single night. What does the story of Hamburg, and Dresden, and dozens of other German cities, do to our understanding of the war as a whole? What should we feel towards the 600,000 German civilians who died as a result of Allied bombing – pity, regret, grim indifference, gratified vengeance?

These are not new questions. The ethics of Allied bombing were debated in some circles during the war itself: the military historian Basil Liddell Hart wrote in 1942 that “it will be ironical if the defenders of civilization depend for victory upon the most barbaric, and unskilled, way of winning a war that the modern world has seen.” More doubts surfaced after the war was over. The physicist Freeman Dyson, who worked in operations research for the RAF, later said that “I felt sickened by what I knew” about British bombing strategy, and even compared himself to the functionaries who worked for Adolf Eichmann: “Probably many of them loathed the SS as much as I loathed Bomber Command,” he wrote, “but they, too, had not the courage to speak out.”

Such an equivalence is unjust and unacceptable. But the danger of ignoring moral distinctions is one reason why the ongoing German debate over Allied bombing has inspired so much unease, both inside and outside Germany. The current phase of the discussion was launched in 1997, when the novelist W.G. Sebald delivered a series of lectures titled “Air War and Literature” (published in the United States last year in “On the Natural History of Destruction”). Sebald’s thesis was that postwar German writers had defaulted on their obligation to describe and remember the trauma of the bombing. “The darkest aspects of the final act of destruction, as experienced by the great majority of the German population,” he claimed, “remained under a kind of taboo like a shameful family secret.”

This was something different from the standard complaints of the German far right, who have always tried to deflect attention from Nazi crimes by casting blame on the British and the Russians. Sebald, who spent his whole adult life in England – and wrote, in “The Emigrants,” one of the most powerful books about the legacy of the Holocaust – was no apologist, and his criticism was not uttered in a spirit of German self-justification (though it was frequently misinterpreted that way, by both his opponents and his supporters, in the ensuing debate). To make himself perfectly clear, Sebald added an appendix to the published version of his lectures, reminding the German reader that “we actually provoked the annihilation of the cities in which we once lived.”

For Sebald, the failure of German literature to deal with the bombing was part of its larger failure to accurately remember the Nazi period and the war. The vaunted economic miracle of the Federal Republic, Sebald wrote, “prohibited any look backward … pointing the population exclusively towards the future and enjoining on it silence about the past.” Seen in this light, paying attention to German suffering is a necessary part of contemporary Germany’s “Vergangenheitsbewaltigung,” or “coming to terms with the past.”

Much the same motive seems to lie behind Jorg Friedrich’s “Der Brand” (“The Fire”), a detailed study of the Allied bombing campaign, which became a German bestseller in 2002. Mr. Friedrich, like Sebald, has strong anti-Nazi credentials – he was a contributor to the “Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.” Yet certain features of his book, which has not yet been translated, have drawn strong criticism – above all, his deliberately provocative use of Holocaust terminology to describe the bombing campaign. Friedrich calls basement shelters “crematoria,” and refers to RAF bombers as Einsatzgruppen – the name for the mobile killing units that carried out the first phases of the Holocaust in Eastern Europe.

It is thanks to this debate, and in particular to Sebald’s lectures, that Americans now have a chance to read one of the few first-hand accounts of the destruction of a German city. “The End: Hamburg 1943” (University of Chicago Press, 86 pages, $20) is a translation of Hans Erich Nossack’s brief memoir “Der Untergang,” which was written three months after the bombing of Hamburg, and first published in 1948. Nossack, a leading postwar German novelist, was virtually the only writer whose treatment of the air war won Sebald’s praise. Rather than the surrealism or kitsch melodrama of other writers, Sebald wrote, Nossack brought to his memoir “a steadfast gaze bent on reality.” “The ideal of truth inherent in its entirely unpretentious objectivity,” Sebald writes of “The End,” “proves itself the only legitimate reason for continuing to produce literature in the face of total destruction.”

Now that we have the chance to read it, however, Nossack’s brief essay (bulked out, in this edition, with a selection of Andres’s photographs) does not seem like quite the monument of objectivity that Sebald leads us to expect. It is true that Nossack keeps strictly to a first-person account, recording nothing he did not see himself. But he is not quite content to allow his experiences to speak for themselves, in a way that the contemporary reader might find appropriate in a witness to tragedy. Instead, Nossack strives to evoke the psychology or phenomenology of the bombing, the state of mind and soul into which it plunged him. And this licenses flights of rhetoric and melodrama that detract from the work’s overall austerity.

Nossack was not actually in Hamburg when the bombing began – that is why he lived to write about it. By pure chance, he and his wife had left the city a few days earlier for a vacation in a rural suburb. It is from that vantage point that he witnesses the raid, which began, as he recalls, with a strange sound:

One didn’t dare to inhale for fear of breathing it in. It was the sound of eighteen hundred [sic] airplanes approaching Hamburg from the south at an unimaginable height. We had already experienced two hundred or even more air raids, among them some very heavy ones, but this was something completely new. And yet there was an immediate recognition: this was what everyone had been waiting for, what had hung for months like a shadow over everything we did, making us weary. It was the end.

This passage suggests the existentialist tenor of Nossack’s account. The destruction of the city is a revelation of ultimate realities – above all, of man’s essential homelessness, which is exposed and reinforced by his actual homelessness. Visiting the ruins of the city, Nossack writes, “What surrounded us did not remind us in any way of what was lost. It had nothing to do with it. It was something else, it was strangeness itself, it was the essentially not possible.” And this experience of “strangeness itself” leaves the Hamburg refugees cut off from ordinary humanity, in a way typical of existentialist heroes in philosophy and fiction:

But the visage of man in those days – who would dare to forget it. The eyes had grown larger and transparent, as they appear in icons. The cold, meanly divisive window glass was shattered, and through the wide openings the infinite behind man wafted unhindered into the endlessness before him and hallowed his countenance for the passage of what is beyond time. Let us cast this visage as a constellation into the sky.

There is something darkly glamorous about such victim hood, and also something very literary – one wonders how many Hamburgers would have spoken about their suffering in this way. It can even seem that Nossack’s existentialist vision is a defense mechanism, a way of dealing with sheer misery, despair, and helplessness. If the ordeal of Hamburg can be made to signify something higher, a metaphysical testing or fateful passage, then it is in some measure redeemed. And it is redeemed, too, from history: Nossack says very little about the war itself, or the reasons why Hamburg paid such a terrible price. “Now was no longer the time for such petty distinctions as that between friend and foe,” he writes loftily.

For this reason, “The End,” though it is a unique document and an interesting literary composition, offers little insight into the moral questions raised by the Allied bombing. That Germany is now bringing her wartime suffering to public discussion is, essentially, a positive development, in the sense that historical honesty is always preferable to myth and amnesia. But any recollection of Hamburg and Dresden is incomplete without the recollection of Warsaw, Rotterdam, Coventry, and Belgrade, not to mention Leningrad, Lidice, and Auschwitz. As the narrator Zeitblom declares in Thomas Mann’s wartime masterpiece, “Doctor Faustus”: “We have experienced the destruction of our noble cities from the air, a destruction that would cry to heaven if we who suffer were not ourselves laden with guilt. As it is, the cry is smothered in our throats; like King Claudius’s prayer, it can ‘never to heaven go.'”