Essay: On the Natural History of Destruction

Overview

W. G. Sebald’s 1999 essay On the Natural History of Destruction confronts the strange absence, evasion, and distortion surrounding the Allied aerial bombing of German cities and the ensuing firestorms that killed hundreds of thousands and erased large parts of the urban fabric. Originating in lectures, the piece interweaves historical observation with a meditation on literature’s failure to register the event’s scale and moral complexity. The title’s key phrase reframes human-made catastrophe as if it were a process of nature, asking how acts of war were transformed, by language, memory, and imagery, into something impersonal and fate-like, and how that transformation disabled both mourning and understanding.

The missing literature of the air war

Sebald’s starting point is empirical: the air war was vast, systematic, and decisive, yet sustained literary representations are sparse. When present, they often resort to euphemism, technical jargon, or sentimental cliché. He traces this absence to an entanglement of shame and self-protection: Germans were perpetrators of an unprecedented crime, yet they also became mass victims. To tell the story of their suffering risked sliding into self-pity or false equivalence; to ignore it cut off access to the psychic reality of defeat. The cultural field defaulted to silence, deferral, or a narrow “rubble literature” that rapidly pivoted to narratives of renewal.

Naturalization and amnesia

A central thread is the critique of “natural history” as rhetorical mechanism. Official reports and postwar prose repeatedly describe firestorms and citywide conflagrations in terms of weather, tides, and elemental forces, as if hurricanes had passed through rather than bombers. This shift from agency to force anesthetizes moral judgment, distances perpetrators from effects, and allows survivors to interpret devastation as destiny. The postwar “zero hour” and Wirtschaftswunder further converted ruins into raw material for a forward-looking myth of reconstruction. Sebald examines how this myth, coupled with visual conventions, photographs of skeletal streets presented without context, made the catastrophe legible as scenery rather than history.

Exemplary and failed responses

Against the general pattern, Sebald highlights rare works that face the catastrophe with sobriety and exactitude. He commends Hans Erich Nossack’s immediate postwar account The End for its lucid witness to Hamburg’s annihilation and the moral disorientation that followed. He values Alexander Kluge’s granular reconstruction of an air raid for restoring human scale to abstract totals. He also notes how Gert Ledig’s stark novel of an attack, once neglected, demonstrates the possibility of a prose equal to the event’s extremity. In contrast, he faults prominent figures who stylized their biographies and muted complicity, and he dissects official histories that convert the air war into technical problem-solving, replacing civilian experience with tonnage and trajectories.

Ethical stakes and method

Sebald proceeds archivally, sifting pamphlets, memoirs, and images, but his method is ethical rather than merely documentary. He argues for a literature that neither exculpates nor competes in victimhood, that keeps distinct the asymmetries of guilt while refusing to discard what happened to those in the cities. Without such reckoning, trauma hardens into kitsch, opportunistic politics, or a sterile cult of ruins. The demand he poses is for a “moral optics”: sentences that hold fast to particulars, the heat, the ash, the disintegration of civic life, while refusing consolatory spectacle. Only then can the air war re-enter historical consciousness, not as a faceless natural event, but as a human act whose consequences remain legible, mournable, and instructive.