Ever since human beings have managed to overcome gravity and went up into the air, their “advancement” on civilization has been used to military and strategic advantage, with devastating effect. This fact is currently being brought back to Europe to such a level, which can only compare to some of the most iconic images of the First and Second World Wars. Yet, wars perversely drive innovation and reconstruction, as is only too well known. And it may be this, which in terms of a discontented civilization may be at the roots of survivalist amnesia and even historical denial in relation to our response to such imagery, moreover in spite of its all too evident omnipresence.

Thus, this paper intends to look at the phenomenon of an iconography of aerial destruction from a set of dual perspectives, ranging from “above” and “below” to abstraction and concretion, to fakeness and forensics or empathy and denial and their overall respective reception in artistic processing at a later date. Evidently, part of the argument will take into consideration W. G. Sebald’s now legendary and extensively debated Zurich lecture cycle, which appeared in 1999 under the title of Luftkrieg und Literatur (English edition: On the Natural History of Destruction), and in which the author addressed a hitherto neglected aspect of post-war mental and artistic processing. Sebald observed that despite the overwhelming factual evidence of the near to total destruction of a large number of important central European cities as a result of aerial bombing during World War II, the subject seems to have represented a near to total taboo in literature and public discourse. Few of his writings have incited a more impassioned debate than Luftkrieg und Literatur.

Are there notable differences to be observed between the literary and visual processing of aerial destruction? Does war photography – and aerial photography in particular – stand in an overall iconographic tradition whether envisioned or documentary? What are its potential sources and reference models? Is there a “classical tradition” of aerial destruction? Will this help us to understand the visual empowerment of images in the current conflict? A history of the image of aerial destruction may still need to be written.

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