From Sebald's The Natural History of Destruction

Central to Kluge’s detailed description of the social organization of disaster, which is preprogrammed by the ever-recurrent and ever-intensifying errors of history, is the idea that a proper understanding of the catastrophes we are always setting off is the first prerequisite for the social organization of happiness. However, it is difficult to dismiss the idea that the systematic destruction Kluge sees arising from the development of the means and modes of industrial production hardly seems to justify the principle of hope. The construction of the strategy of air war in all its monstrous complexity, the transformation of bomber crews into professionals, “trained administrators of war in the air,”84 the question of how to overcome the psychological problem of keeping them interested in their tasks despite the abstract nature of their function, the problems of conducting an orderly cycle of operations that involve “200 medium-sized industrial plants”85 flying towards a city, and of the technology ensuring that the bombs would cause large-scale fires and firestorms—all these factors, which Kluge studies from the organizers’ viewpoint, show that so much intelligence, capital, and labor went into the planning of destruction that, under the pressure of all the accumulated potential, it had to happen in the end.