“Perhaps we must really understand at last that the fabric of our civilisation has itself been woven out of fire and smoke.” (W.G. Sebald) It all begins at a height of 12,000 feet: a stream of US bombers half a mile wide and eighteen miles long approaches a German city. Below it shortly afterwards there are falling bombs, the parachutes of a bomber crew, low-flying aircrafts and towers with anti-aircraft guns. At the very bottom are houses and streets in which floundering human beings are “barbecued” in boiling tarmac. Air raid shelters, cellars, chaos, scenes of inconceivable horror. A mother searches for her son, who has already been killed helping the anti-aircraft gunners; a young woman is buried alive with an unknown man who then rapes her in the rubble. Gert Ledig’s novel VERGELTUNG (“Payback”) takes a cold and unsentimental look at the destructive power of an allied air raid in July 1944. The city that is described here remains nameless – but it could be Cologne. After the night of 30 to 31 May 1942, the Cathedral was the only building left standing in a vast landscape of ruins. The book was published in 1956, by which time Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass were already depicting the reality of post-war West Germany. It was soon forgotten. Even today, the trauma of the aerial bombardment has remained largely ignored, while the hastily assembled post-war architecture of our city centres offers silent testimony of those past horrors. Director Sebastian Baumgarten stages Ledig’s challenge to war-mongering phrases about “fatherland, heroism, tradition, faith and honour” as a world premiere for Schauspiel Köln.