Books on modern German history occasionally stir public controversy in a manner that has become almost decennially predictable. In the 1960s Fritz Fischer sparked a debate about Germany’s sole responsibility for the first world war. Twenty years later, there was much fluttering in academic dovecotes over the causal relationship between and the comparability of Soviet mass murders and the Nazi Holocaust. In the mid-1990s, Daniel Goldhagen’s provocative claim that the German people shared the exterminatory mind-set of ordinary Jew-killing policemen ensured that his Hitler’s Willing Executioners became a bestseller in that country. Now, in the early 21st century, we have Jörg Friedrich’s impassioned, vivid and utterly unbalanced account of the cultural, physical and psychological impact upon the German people of an Anglo-American bombing campaign that achieved its full grim momentum at a time when Germany was virtually bereft of air defences.

Every leading history book has a wider context. The Fire is one of several recent efforts by the German progressive left to appropriate subjects, including the maritime evacuation of Germans from East Prussia and rapes by the Red Army, that were long the exclusive domain of the Conservative right and such wayward figures as David Irving, whose books are prominent in Friedrich’s bibliography. In tones that until recently were taboo for self-consciously anti-patriotic leftist historians, Friedrich lovingly describes, to the point of satiety, the rich historical treasures (incunabula, missals, organs and the like) of every little urban gem that the RAF and USAAF deliberately incinerated and pulverised, for, en passant, he convincingly queries the alleged “precision” of American airforce operations.

His book revives the tu quoque (you likewise) arguments first aired by defence counsel for Admiral Dönitz at Nuremberg, who had charges of waging unrestricted submarine warfare dropped by pointing out that US Admiral Nimitz had done the same. None too subtly, Friedrich drags the vocabulary of the Final Solution (from “annihilation” to “crematoria”) into his narrative of the impact of the Allied air war. The effects of this are more jarring in the German original than in translation, where the word Vernichtung has stronger associations than the English “annihilation”.

Some of the comparisons seem dubious. German civilians suffocated in cellars from which oxygen was sucked out by fires raging above; Jews were abducted from their homes in other countries and then deliberately poisoned at the rate of 10,000 a day with potassium cyanide pumped into sealed chambers. Most controversially, from a British perspective, Friedrich places the blame for strategic bombing squarely on Winston Churchill, who, belatedly sobered by the catastrophic reality he had sanctioned, cunningly reinterpreted his own policy as an unfortunate characteristic of Bomber Command’s chieftain Arthur “Bomber” Harris.

The comedian Harry Enfield once did an amusing sketch involving an earnest German student indignantly reminding a bewildered British audience of the crimes his countrymen had inflicted upon London. By contrast, on page 188, Friedrich startles the reader by claiming that the Nazis “took all of Germany and Europe hostage”. Remarks such as this have suggested that Friedrich’s book is part of a stealthy cultural shift from over-demonstrative self-flagellation to whining victimhood, whose effect is to relativise German responsibility for the outbreak of war, the Wehrmacht’s deliberate violation of the laws of war, and the criminally dystopian project of the Holocaust. Finally, since the German edition appeared in November 2002, Friedrich’s book became part of the justification for Germany’s use of its ghastly historic past to avoid supporting its Nato allies in Afghanistan or Iraq and its wobbly geopolitical position somewhat emotionally closer to Putin’s Russia than Bush’s America.

Notwithstanding the fact that every technical feature of Auschwitz was premeditated by engineers and technical draftsmen, it seems to surprise Friedrich that the Allies brought all their ingenuity to bear on how to combust ancient cities, up to and including delayed-action high explosives to take care of the attending fire crews. Atrocious weather conditions in northern Europe and the inaccuracy of bombing technologies conduced to area or carpet bombing, as did the more imprecise objective of undermining enemy morale through what was called “de-housing”. Much of the destruction (and the enormous casualties borne by British and American air crew) was also designed to placate Stalin, who suspected that the delayed western front was a deliberate ploy enabling the Wehrmacht to destroy the Red Army. If the subsequent escalation into bludgeoning brutality has been told many times before, Friedrich does give a graphic sense of what it was like to be on the receiving end of Allied raids, although the relentless nature of his descriptions of charred human bits and pieces being lugged around in pots and sacks tends to a certain macabre tedium. Obviously, any decent person finds war obscene, but so was the Nazi aggression that solely triggered it, and that could not be halted by any other means. Neglect of that crucial area means that this self-pitying “encyclopedia of pain” left this reader completely cold although not unmoved for the victims deployed in Friedrich’s account.

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