This essay examines the period between the publication of The Rings of Saturn (1995) and Austerlitz (2001). During this six-year time span, the concept of the ‘natural history of destruction’, Sebald’s negative philosophy of history, gains more and more prominence in his writings. This especially applies to the unfinished Corsica Project and in his Zurich Lectures on air war and German literature (resulting in: On the Natural History of Destruction). The Corsica Project examines various forms of human aggression: hunting, blood revenge, deforestation, and pyromania. The origin of these forms of aggression against nature are attributed to nature itself, thus forming part of an all-encompassing natural history of destruction. The destructive instinct of human beings is presented as an innate, natural characteristic and thus as beyond personal moral responsibility. In On the Natural History of Destruction, this pessimistic idea is applied to contemporary history, with the phenomenon of firestorms in the bombing raids of World War II becoming emblems of the natural history of destruction.

The canon of British First World War poetry seems well established and beyond dispute with a set of key ‘representative’ poets referenced continuously. Yet these poets have been selected and promoted over the decades for various reasons. Moreover, how representative were they of the British experience and reaction to the events 1914–1918? Using a quantitative study of the poets and poems appearing in anthologies during and after the war, this essay reconsiders the true canon of the British poetical response to the war charting the rise (and fall) of certain poets and why this might be so. It also considers the hidden canon of poetry that focuses on other theatres of war, at sea and in the air.

This chapter re-examines the relationship in wartime Nazi Germany between private views and more widely voiced opinions and rumours that circulated informally and were picked up by the regime's monitoring agencies. It argues that views increasingly commonly voiced in wartime concerning Allied air raids and the regime’s murder of the Jews constituted a form of wartime ‘public opinion’ that influenced the regime’s calculations about propaganda strategy. In examining the intersections between publicly and privately expressed views, the chapter argues, firstly, that private moral thinking was strongly influenced by publicly formulated arguments about Germany’s defence and national survival, and, secondly, that private moral sentiments coloured widely expressed responses to the regime’s attempts to manage public opinion.

This chapter critiques the way in which historians of National Socialism have dealt with the topic of private life, highlights recent new developments in the historiography that can be built on, and shows how concepts of privacy and the private drawn from sociology and political theory can usefully be applied and tested in relation to developments under the Nazi dictatorship.