Vergeltung

It deals with 70 minutes of a mid-night bomb attack by the United States Army Air Forces against an unnamed German city towards the end of World War II, during which a large number of civilians and military personnel are killed.

Ledig's first novel Die Stalinorgel ("The Stalin Organ"), which dealt with the battles of the Russian Front in the Leningrad region in the Soviet Union, had been an international success.

That changed in the late 1990s, shortly before the author's death, when the book encountered much more widespread acceptance, led by scholar-critics including Max Sebald, Marcel Reich-Ranicki[1] and Volker Hage.

The American pilot, named "Sergeant Jonathan Strenehen", having survived a crash landing, falls into the hands of some Germans and is gruesomely abused physically, contrary to the provisions of to the Geneva Convention which guarantee the "bodily integrity" of prisoners of war.

This occurs despite Strenehen having taken care to crash land his bomber on a public cemetery in order to spare the civilian population - something of which his German captors are unaware.

Another of the threads presents a young woman driven to an air-raid shelter by the bombs and later raped by an old German man, reacting under the exceptional circumstances, and who himself later commits suicide.

These concern an air defense position, a coordination command post, a huge concrete bunker along the lines of those that existed only in the largest cities such as Berlin and Vienna, and a transformer station for the municipal power supply.

Jonathan Strenehen, who is the mostly fully formed of the protagonists and whose fate is spelled out, it is generally left for the reader to decide which, if any, of the participants in the various storylines survive the bombing raid.

However, this novel provides no continuous action driven narrative, but comprises a succession of short episodes that pick-up on earlier plot-lines and progress them briefly before moving on.

To some extent narrative context is provided by the brief quasi-autobiographical sketches appearing in italic font at the start of each chapter, but these are nonetheless incomplete and fragmentary.

The rapid narrative pace is reminiscent of the postwar Trümmerliteratur[3] employed by Günter Eich in the lyric piece Inventur (poem) [de].

In the Rheinischer Merkur E. R. Dallontano found Ledig's depiction of rape, and the shattering of a taboo that this represented, "distasteful and obnoxious" ("widerwärtig") and a "mainspring of the author's gruseomeness" ("Triebfeder seiner Gruselei“).

This presentation coincided with a sustained push by the West German political establishment towards national rehabilitation, involving rearmament and the country's recent (in 1955) admission to NATO.

The implications of Ledig's work regarding the contentious issues surrounding West German rearmament and militarism more generally were not particularly welcome to the instinctively rather conservative class of literary critics then dominating the "national" press.

In Die Zeit Reinhard Baumgart [de] expressly commended Ledig's "almost hammered out sentences" ("knapp gehämmerten Sätze") and the "breathlessness of the language" ("Atemlosigkeit der Sprache").