In his classic study of aerial bombing, On the Natural History of Destruction, W. G. Sebald denounced the failure of postwar German literature to address the trauma caused by the bombing of German cities toward the end of the Second World War. The lack of descriptions of the air raids was particularly disturbing to Sebald, who believed that only artistic representation can convey the terror of the firestorms in great cities laid to waste in a matter of hours. To be sure, there is no lack of graphic material showing the ruins of Hamburg, Cologne, or Dresden, and a Trümmerliteratur and Trümmerfilme appeared from the end of the war to around 1950. But these images were the laconic witnesses of a demoralized society on which the Nazi period still cast a shadow. Sebald missed a resolute engagement with the experience of the destruction itself, which, he claimed, had vanished from public discussion due to the presence of “an almost perfectly functioning mechanism of repression” (12). He was convinced that “there was a tacit agreement, equally binding on everyone, that the true state of material and moral ruin in which the country found itself was not to be described” (10). He regretted the German authors’ inability to transform the immediate experience of the bombing into a reflective moral truth capable of being assimilated by the collective memory of Germans.

Various critics have challenged the notion of a fatalistic silence surrounding the bombings. Joachim Güntner, writing for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on 7 December 2002, denied the existence of a literary taboo, although the audience for this subject was never large (“Der Bombenkrieg findet zur Sprache,” cit. Vees-Gulani 337). Others uphold the notion of a taboo but criticize Sebald's psychological approach as inadequate and supplement it with a political theory of repression. Where Sebald, apropos the work of Alexander Kluge, detected a paralyzing fatalism that looks onto the technological conditions of the destruction as a falling out from autonomous history “and back into the history of nature” (67), Wilfried Wilms considered that “a taboo on remembering is not only a private psychological affair, but also a political one” (181). For Sebald, fear of being accused of revisionism weighed on the German writers, who found it very difficult to present Germans as victims.