For decades, historians from all over the world have studied the strategic bombing campaign during the Second World War, leading to a rich historiography on the strategic premise, military effects, and moral legitimacy of the modern bombing war. Though in many ways this is an international academic debate, there are good reasons to look more closely into the work of German historians. In many ways Germany experienced the effects of the modern bombing war more severely than other European countries. Moreover, with approximately 380,000 civilian victims, the Luftkrieg (‘air war’) or Bombenkrieg (‘bombing war’) as it became known in Germany was one of the most direct horrors of war with which Germans were confronted in their own country.

The attacks brought loss, suffering and trauma for those who experienced the long nights in the air shelters, who lost friends, families and homes and who witnessed the horrific images of mass death and burning cities. In addition to the mass expulsions from parts of Eastern Europe, especially Silesia, Sudetenland, and Eastern Prussia, and the large-scale rape of German women by Soviet soldiers, the bombing of German cities brought the atrocities of total warfare to the German ‘home front’, leaving a lasting impression.

Especially since the late 1990s, not only the air war itself but also the question of whether the German victims of the air war had been commemorated in an appropriate way has become the subject of an extensive discussion. Locating the place of the air war in German collective memory has been the topic of academic publications, commemoration ceremonies, press articles, and TV documentaries. The increased interest in the air war followed the publication of two controversial books. In 1999, German writer and literary critic Winfried Sebald stated in his essay Luftkrieg und Literatur that there was a complete ‘lack of memory’ about the air war in Germany. According to Sebald, the memory of the horrors of the air war had become a ‘taboo’ because Germans had been primarily concerned with the restoration of their destroyed land and reputation. Therefore they did not confront the deep trauma of the bombing experience that had had such a devastating impact. The air war, in Sebald's words, ‘hardly left a painful trace in German collective consciousness’ and was ignored by literary writers as well as by historians.