There was another sort of music in Dresden: the low hum of electrical generators and scientific equipment. Just half a mile south of the central railway station there were laboratories where men were conducting a wide variety of experiments with cathode rays and thermionic valves. Some had been there for decades, working towards creating extraordinary advances in everything from communications to electric transmission. They might have thought that they stood outside the bloody revolution, yet they too were forced to participate. The strain of staying focused on pure ideas and research while knowing that there were innovations to be made that would contribute towards the terrible ongoing conflict must have been great.
The ugly central buildings of the university with their red roofs and bulbous towers might have lacked the aesthetic appeal of Oxford or Heidelberg, but there was a pragmatism and adventurousness here which had made the institution an attractive prospect for engineers, mathematicians and physicists alike. It had certainly drawn the handsome young Heinrich Barkhausen, a prodigy in the field of electric technology in the earlier years of the century. Born in Bremen in 1881 (at around the time when his countryman Friedrich Siemens was travelling Europe giving lectures about the forthcoming wonders of mass electric lighting), Barkhausen showed an immense interest in all branches of the natural sciences.1 He studied at institutions around the country, but at the startlingly young age of twenty-nine he was offered a professorship at Dresden’s Technical University.
Barkhausen’s continuing work, both before and after the Great War, led to some very significant breakthroughs that would later prove to have tremendous military application. Among these was a way of boosting higher frequency signals, which changed UHF radio use, but his was also an esoteric field of magnetism and resonance; the complex relationship between different natural force fields and sound, and the ways that both might be manipulated. Professor Barkhausen commanded the realm of Schwachstromtechnik: electrical communication engineering.2 He had given his name to a discovery involving electromagnetics and acoustics: the Barkhausen Effect.
Such a man, it must be assumed, would have had little room spare in his mental landscape for any form of political ideology; his life was filled with dials, diodes, tuners, vacuum tubes, glass cylinders containing delicate instrumentation. But Professor Barkhausen and his colleagues were none the less drawn deeper into the maelstrom as soon as the Nazis came to power. As with all academics, they were forced to swear the oath of allegiance to Hitler, and when greeting superiors and colleagues or starting lectures they were required to give the Nazi salute. It was from this very same institute that Victor Klemperer had been dismissed, along with all his Jewish colleagues. Professor Barkhausen and all those who worked with him could see all too well what was happening on their campus.
By the 1930s, the technical electronic advances that Barkhausen had made were attracting intense interest from the military. He was working not just with UHF signals but also with microwaves, and these had the potential to unlock new possibilities for instantaneous communications across vast distances from theatres of war everywhere. In such an atmosphere, and at such a time, how could even the most abstracted of academics resist the pressure of totalitarianism? In 1938 Professor Barkhausen was sent to Japan for a period of joint research; with war just a year away, it is reasonable to presume that he and his counterparts in Japan would be engaged in technological work that would be harnessed militarily by their respective states.
Barkhausen watched from the Far East as the Axis powers challenged the world. The war progressed, and the professor found himself transferred once more, this time to work in Romania. But by 1944 Professor Barkhausen was back in his old Dresden home, and back in his familiar laboratory. He had walked the tightrope with success; the Nazis had not turned against him. And even in a near-empty university there were ever-more pressing lines of electronic research to pursue, including the quest to perfect voice synthesis (enabling a form of electrical encryption and interception proofing when messages were transmitted). Barkhausen had also found an extremely promising young protégé for his physics department, an insouciant youth from the Latvian capital Riga called Mischka Danos.3
Twenty-one-year-old Danos had seen in German-controlled Latvia the true depths of Nazi depravity. One winter’s day he had taken himself off into the hills near Riga for some skiing. Some impulse made him avoid the more commonly used trails, and he moved through an empty landscape of snow and trees. But as he came to a hill, he was startled by a long procession of people, men, women and children, in dark clothing, climbing the incline. There was some form of spectacle unfolding at the top. Rapt with curiosity, the young man quietly ascended the hill. A silent line of people was standing around an enormous crater dug out of the earth. The crater was filled with corpses, freshly murdered. The people of Riga and the suburbs around had come to see the mass graves of the local Jews. Danos turned and left quickly. According to his widow Sheila Fitzpatrick, something within him was shut very tight that day. A keen piano player, he was never able to feel the emotional depths in Beethoven again, or at least could not allow that firmly closed door to be reopened.4 So how then had Danos come to the decision to leave Latvia and instead go to study in the very heart of Germany in 1944?
One very good reason was to avoid conscription into the German military on the eastern front, for young Latvians were being drawn into the Wehrmacht in increasing numbers. But even in 1944 there was also a student-exchange programme between Latvia and Germany, part of an effort by the Nazi authorities to spread German intellectual influence throughout the Baltic states. Danos and his family were of Hungarian descent, and perhaps the young man would have had second thoughts if he had been fully aware of his background, for, although unaware of it at the time and raised as a German-speaking Catholic, the Danoses were Jewish. When he had stood looking down into that mass grave he had had no inkling that he shared the heritage of those within, but even without this event, the irony of a brilliant young Jewish intellectual clamouring to travel so far into the heart of the Reich having borne witness to mass slaughter seems almost too extraordinary to contemplate.
The young man’s reasoning was sharp. Danos, as Fitzpatrick explained, had always regarded the Nazi cult as a temporary aberration; by 1944, he and his mother were certain that it would be defeated, and soon.5 Moreover, it could not be allowed to occlude his love and respect for the deeper wellsprings of German culture. In another ironic twist, Dresden, offering relative anonymity, would have been very much safer for Danos than Riga; other families of Jewish heritage in Riga had been denounced to the authorities. There was every possibility of that happening to Mischka Danos; but not if he was far away, living in east Germany.
Danos and Barkhausen found an immediate rapport, and the student was quickly promoted to be the professor’s assistant. When the desperate searchlight of call-up caught the young man in its beam, Professor Barkhausen wrote to the authorities explaining that his assistant was engaged in vital war work at the university. And so it was that Danos – with his precocious expertise in electronics, radio technology and mathematical theory – became a fixture in those laboratories.
The university was surrounded by a number of grand houses, and some of these offered rooms for students; Danos lived in one that was both large and draughty. He soon made friends, but by February 1945 he was contemplating another move. His mother, a fashion designer, had left Riga for Prague, and Danos made frequent use of the Dresden-to-Prague express train to see her. But both could see how unstoppable the Soviet approach from the east was, and the prospect of life under Stalin seemed even grimmer than under the Nazis. Prospects in Dresden were little better. They foresaw Dresden being hit by artillery and soldiers wreaking bloody havoc in the streets. Their quiet plan was to pack up and travel far north, to Flensburg, on the border with Denmark. In those early days of February, Danos had secretly made up his mind to leave sometime closer to the end of the month and he was planning a discreet party for a few university friends which would be held in his room on the night of the 13th.
Professor Barkhausen well knew that he formed part of a grand Dresden tradition: the city’s spirit of inquiry and lively – and profitable – invention. Men of science across the years have not always been noted for sharp commercial acumen, and many inventors failed to collect the ease-giving riches that might have been theirs, but the inventors of Dresden had always been different: they understood market forces, as well as more natural phenomena, very well indeed. It is an irony of Nazi rule in the city that this gleeful talent for profit-spotting from the most ingenious inventions was temporarily squashed. Historically, the city’s lightning flashes of invention had always been closely allied with political power and influence. This history was also, of course, known to the Western powers, and was a factor when their strategists were selecting their bombing targets; Dresden had long been a byword for technical innovation as well as art.
This wild inventiveness, often the result of serendipity, had started in the early eighteenth century, with the scramble to reproduce the Chinese wonder of porcelain. For centuries, exquisite pieces from the Far East had been transported along the Silk Road and lusted after in the courts of European aristocrats, but no one in seventeenth-century Europe could either fathom or replicate a product that dated back hundreds of years, nor recreate the extraordinary translucency of the material or the delicacy of its decor. Porcelain was hugely valuable, hence its nickname ‘white gold’.6
In the early 1700s Augustus II, Elector of Saxony, was set upon acquisition of gold; his appetite for luxury and for what might be termed status objects was insatiable. This in turn led to an accidental chain of events that brought him a means of creating porcelain. Augustus had secured the services of – or, to put it another way, kidnapped and held under house arrest – a young man who had built a rackety career around the courts of Germany by claiming to be an alchemist. Even in a new age of Newtonian mathematical revelation, powerful men persisted in their belief that gold could be conjured from base matter.
The young man was Johann Friedrich Böttger.7 Augustus furnished him with a Dresden laboratory that also served as a prison, but Böttger persisted in escaping. Each time he was caught, the security was tightened. The patience of Augustus wore thin, and Böttger knew he would have to produce some kind of alchemical miracle. As he experimented with different soils, clays and minerals, he was obliged to create crucibles that were hard enough to resist the searing temperatures of molten gold; and ironically, in creating these red stoneware containers, he took a step to producing a much more tangible form of wealth.
Augustus had enlisted a local man of science, Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus, to help Böttger, and it was the older man who understood what might be achieved; far from the fantasy of conjured gold. Using local kaolin hewn from the hills, the men found that they could produce authentic white porcelain.
And swiftly thereafter followed the techniques of glazing, of painting, of the application of gold. The forms these new creations took established a fresh aesthetic while paying tribute to the Chinese source: tea and coffee sets decorated with Oriental scenes. There were also the leitmotifs that were to remain central for over 200 years: depictions of animals, flowers, pastoral vignettes. Figurines were crafted alongside the dinner services, vases and bowls.
The secret could not remain in one laboratory for long: soon porcelain was being produced across Europe. But the Dresden industry, moved a little downriver to Meissen, laid claim to particular quality. Each of its pieces carried the image of two crossed swords as a form of hallmark.8 And what was once exclusive to the aristocrats and the rich across the years became attainable for the middle classes. The Meissen aesthetic was instantly identifiable: the pure pale blues, sober dark reds, the pinks and the greens gleaming on tiny cups; boisterous figurines of elaborately dressed courting couples; harlequins pulling faces; noblemen on fine steeds. Here were watchcases with floral motifs, bright yellow flowers flashing against the light.
In those early days, Augustus (still waiting for supplies of magically manufactured gold) took to the new art with enthusiasm, and those who succeeded him commissioned extraordinarily delicate and detailed tea sets, the tiny cups and pots swirling with colour and mazy patterns. A certain element of coy sentimentality lay at the heart of Meissen’s rococo figurines: here were shepherds and shepherdesses and tiny white lambs, beautifully sculpted, evoking a pastoral innocence. This was why the Nazis were open about their love for porcelain: amid all their looting of art, the pieces senior party officials most coveted were antique Meissen.9 In Dresden, the von Klemperer family (not immediately related to Victor Klemperer) had a collection of some 800 pieces. In the earliest days of the Nazi regime, before the systematic thefts, senior party leaders had even offered to buy them.
The pastoral leitmotifs mesmerized Hitler; Meissen spoke to his adoration of rustic idylls. And as it was, the Nazi Party inspired a vast boost in production of all forms of porcelain. Figurines became the most popular Christmas presents; this was partly because Hitler and his deputies so frequently gave porcelain as a gift. Himmler was heard to murmur that finely decorated china was ‘one of the few things’ that gave him any real pleasure.10
In all of its florid decoration and candy colourings, Meissen might to some eyes have seemed kitsch. Broadly, though, these were objects of desire in homes far beyond the German borders. By the 1930s huge numbers of British households owned Dresden porcelain. Their collections were of course highly unlikely to include any of the specially commissioned Nazi figurines made not at Meissen but by the Munich-Allach porcelain company. There was one depicting a boy in Hitler Youth uniform, banging a drum, and staring up at the sky as though entranced by a vision: this item was mass produced, selling thousands upon thousands. Another hugely popular figurine, often handed out by Nazi Party officials, was of an SS storm trooper.
Hitler’s yearning for porcelain did not abate in the war years; even as late as 1944, pieces were being made specially for him. The Meissen manufacturing works had long been turned over to the production of teleprinters for the military, so a porcelain workshop was set up within Dachau concentration camp, further south.11 Prisoners with appropriate skills, living with the daily possibility of imminent death, were marshalled into the most bitter slave work: producing intricate works of beauty and life within the razor-wire fenced compound of grotesque slaughter.
By February 1945 the Nazis had removed much of the most valuable antique Meissen porcelain from Dresden. Packed carefully into padded boxes, these sumptuous dinner services, and lifelike figurines with coats of plum red and flesh of pale peach, were hidden in nearby mountain caves. (After the war, the Soviets would show an equally passionate if not furiously greedy desire for not only the finished porcelain but also the means of its production. Art intertwined with international exports, even for the communists.)
Dresden inventors through the centuries were canny about keeping a firm hold of the patent rights to their inspirations, divine or otherwise, and the period from the late nineteenth century to the inception of the Nazi Party saw a quite startling outbreak of innovation of all varieties.
This was the city that produced the first mouthwash, in 1895; the result of a heretofore unsuccessful former department store assistant called Karl August Lingner going into partnership with his old friend Richard Seifert, a chemist.12 Lingner had a fixation with health; and the idea for the mouthwash was not simply as a cure for dreadful-smelling breath. People at that time were swilling their mouths with anything from vinegar to brandy, but scientists had been examining the processes of tooth decay and Lingner and Seifert’s new idea of making the liquid antiseptic, destroying lurking germs, was sensational. The product was called Odol; it became a household item not only in Germany but across the continent and in Britain too. It very swiftly made Lingner very rich. He was soon able to purchase a preposterously grand Dresden property, the Villa Stockhausen, a nineteenth-century chateau, complete with terrace, colonnades, two towers and vineyards on the slopes rushing down to the Elbe. It still stands in the east of the city, on a hill that overlooks the Altstadt.
Lingner had obsessions that went beyond money. He was a public hygiene reformist; indeed the promotion of healthy living came to subsume his working life.13 Lingner applied such principles at his four-storey Dresden factory, where the working-class employees had access to showers and baths, their own modest homes lacking such facilities. They were also supplied with free milky coffee in their break periods, this to discourage the regrettable working-class enthusiasm for consuming alcohol while on duty. As with other Dresden employers, Lingner offered Christmas bonuses and the use of a company savings bank. Unlike them, he also encouraged workers to use a gymnasium in their lunch hours and after work.
The factory began making new lines and ranges: Pixavon shampoo, Kavon soap, Irex tooth powder. But Odol mouthwash became the essential bathroom item for Germany’s middle classes: the liquid, flavoured with peppermint and oils, became the nation’s most familiar taste and smell. The accumulating fortune from it enabled Lingner to look at the city of Dresden and turn its population into subjects for his hygiene anxieties. He proposed a disinfection facility clinic; those deemed to be carrying germs would be transported there in trucks while their belongings would be fumigated in a separate vehicle. Although this idea did not find general favour, Lingner did manage to institute a Centre for Dental Hygiene and also oversaw the opening of a children’s clinic in the poorer streets of Johannstadt.
Like so many at the time, in various European countries, Lingner’s notions of social hygiene slotted into broader ideas adjacent to eugenics and social Darwinism. He believed that races that did not seek to dominate would instead be doomed to submission.14 There was a concomitant anxiety that urban life could cause degeneration: physical and spiritual.
Lingner became one of Dresden’s most prominent grandees: his philanthropy ranged to staging spectacular night-time parades for King Friedrich August III, using hundreds of electric lights and teams of technicians. He also put together the Hygiene Exhibition of 1911, the city’s very first international exhibition and one that naturally echoed his chief obsession. It was extremely popular: about five and a half million people bought tickets in order to listen to lectures on the merits of different meats and vegetables, the horrors of alcohol abuse and the pernicious harms of tobacco. The exhibition was promoted with posters featuring a staring, stylized eye – the Hygiene Eye.15 The idea behind the image was that of a public watchfulness; the city’s all-seeing eye staring hard at dirt of all varieties. Among the attractions were microscopes set up with slides of bacteria – for many visitors, the first glimpse of microbial life. There was glassware and mazes of tubes filled with ruby-red liquid intended to demonstrate how blood circulated around the body.
And then there was The Glass Man. He became an aesthetic as well as educational sensation. Here was a male figure, his skin fashioned from glass, and visible beneath it a pale skull, blue veins, ribs and all of his internal organs. The Glass Man stood with his arms stretched high, as though in supplication or worship. The vivid colours of his viscera mesmerized the crowds. His purpose was to illustrate the mechanics of the digestive tract, and the ways different foods were absorbed. He stood above the audience on a podium, somewhere between a cadaver and a robot. The Glass Man was also a vision of a future in which men and women would themselves be transparent to medical science: pulsing hearts, coursing blood, the rhythms of peristalsis, and all with the aim of creating new, healthier generations of Germans.
Lingner’s views and concerns, shared by so many millions, were in part a reaction to the squalor that city life elsewhere had brought to the poor: not just the rackety sanitation, but also fears about promiscuity and sexual disease. Grimly, it was not coincidental that the clinical atmosphere of the time lent respectability to eugenics: just as scientists had begun to grasp inheritability, so too were conjured the dreams of engineering stronger children. Lingner did not inspire the Nazis, but his exhibition, later turned into a permanent Dresden Hygiene Museum, none the less was irresistibly attractive to them. He himself died in 1916; by the mid 1930s his legacy had been thoroughly appropriated.
The Hygiene Museum, attracting tens of thousands of visitors each year by the 1930s, was taken over by Dresden’s Nazi authorities, who gave it an emphatic new slant: racial hygiene. The public were to be educated about the importance of keeping bloodlines pure; and about the races that posed the greatest danger of infection. Hitler had been hypnotized from the early 1920s by the scientific possibilities of eugenics: sterilization became a Nazi keyword.
Another branch of scientific ingenuity, though, had made the city a more attractive bombing target. From the earliest years of the century, Dresden had established itself as a thriving centre for optical technology: everything from telescopes and microscopes to the smartest cameras. Here was an industry relying on skill and precision but also a certain aesthetic flair. The cameras that were produced here had sleek designs that made them ardently sought after all over Europe. But there was also a certain beauty to the industrial-scale optical instruments too. In 1926, still struggling in the economic aftershocks created by the hyperinflation of previous years, four large camera and optical firms decided, in desperation, on a merger: and that merger was to be world-beatingly successful. Zeiss Ikon was the company that rose out of those inflationary ashes. The cameras, with a smart logo, were for the time very innovative: the Ikoflex twin lens model, Contax rangefinders and the Ikonta folding cameras.16
The presiding genius of the company through the 1920s, until the advent of the Nazis, was Professor Emanuel Goldberg. Born in Moscow in 1881, and barred from various Russian academic institutions because of his faith – this was a fear-filled time of pogroms – Goldberg eventually emigrated to Germany confident that his intellectual appetite for the new science of photography and cinematography would be able to flourish. After huge academic success in Leipzig, Professor Goldberg came to Dresden in 1926 and was appointed the first managing director of Zeiss Ikon.17 By this stage, he had already developed what was in essence the first home-movie camera – the Kinamo, which for its time was a miracle of compactness. It was also a shrewd device in marketing terms: a middle-class must-have that German skiing and mountain-climbing enthusiasts took on their holidays. Here in some ways was an industry that, in its delicacy and precision, was a harmonious counterpoint to the painstaking exactitude of the city’s architecture, art and music.
Professor Goldberg also had an enthusiasm for micro-photography – the genesis of the microdot. He also postulated an early data-retrieval system, using photoelectrics. By 1931, such was his reputation that the International Congress of Photography was held in the city; he was awarded the Peligot Medal of the French Society for Photography and Cinematography.
When, in 1933, the Enabling Act brought the end of democracy, and when Dresden was very suddenly caught in the Nazi vice, Professor Goldberg might reasonably have imagined that his creative expertise would lift him above the malice of Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann. It did not. According to one account, the tactics the Nazis used to get rid of him were terribly simple: one day, they marched Professor Goldberg out of the Zeiss Ikon works, put him in a car and drove out of the city into the forest, where he was tied to a tree. After threatening him and his family, they freed one of his hands and made him sign a letter of resignation. Almost immediately, Professor Goldberg relocated his whole family to Paris.
Subsequently, Zeiss Ikon answered the urgent needs of a vastly expanding German military, not just the air force but precision optical engineering for the navy and for the army too. The factories were gradually cloaked with ever increasing secrecy, their optical products now clandestine means of aiding swift and brutal conquest. It says something for the suffocating darkness of the times that when, at the start of 1942, the city authorities announced there were to be further Jewish deportations (straight to the death camps in the east), the wartime management of Zeiss Ikon protested and asked that their Jewish slave workers be spared. This was hardly an act of mercy, more a cold-eyed calculation of the loss of skilled hands.18 The next day the Gestapo, determined not to be cheated of their prey, insisted that, none the less, 250 Jews would be deported at once.
Yet by the beginning of 1945 there were Jewish women working at Zeiss Ikon who had been co-opted from concentration camps: 700 of them from Flossenbürg, another 300 from Auschwitz and Ravensbrück. They were treated with the same icy cruelty as their predecessors had been, and their co-workers would have seen very clearly exactly how hungry they were, and how miserable their rations. A number of prisoners lived on site in dormitories on the top floor of the factory, and aside from all the general discomforts of wooden bunks, reeking, scratching blankets and freezing air, there were those who considered this a stroke of real luck compared to the other possibilities. How had this darkness become so normalized in a city once famed as the most civilized place in Germany?