In the hard winters, the ruins were settled with snow; the landscape made monochrome, bombed-out interiors now incongruously white. Even those structures that were part-covered were vulnerable to the infiltration of blizzards. The Kreuzkirche would not be rebuilt and restored until 1955, ten years after its main roof was smashed through; but the Kreuzchor under the cantor Rudolf Mauersberger was very much a feature of the new life of the city under the communists, his choir performing in other public spaces outside of the Altstadt.
As well as Mauersberger’s Dresdner Requiem, the choir gave renditions of a variety of new compositions, adapting leitmotifs from traditional folk music. One performance was watched and broadly enjoyed by Victor Klemperer, himself now restored to academic life – a professor once more, and reluctantly enmeshed in the stony procedures of the city’s new authorities.1 He was beguiled by the black-and-white uniforms of the Kreuzchor, and their stylized renditions, though he fleetingly thought of the boys as automatons.fn1
As for Victor and Eva Klemperer, the world that they moved through in those post-war years was alternately wondrous and crushing. Wondrous because of the daily experience of being treated with not just civility, but also respect; because of the new phase of Professor Klemperer’s career that saw him travelling to academic conferences around Europe and even to China; because of the monographs published, the talks given. Yet it was also crushing because Eva’s health was continually very poor, and because they were conscious in this new Dresden of all the city’s Jewish people who had been sent to their deaths. Their shadows were always there, together with the fear that the forces that killed them could yet be resurrected. In the early 1950s Eva died of a heart attack – she had gone for a nap and Klemperer found her, eyes open and face calm, when bringing her an evening drink. He was dazed with grief but, although he felt at the end of his own road, pushed on with his work, aching with loneliness. As the decade rolled by, he found a new wife, Hadwig. Klemperer lived until the beginning of 1960; he was seventy-eight when he died. His survival – and the survival of his extraordinary, detailed diaries of all those years of darkness – did much to help expose the full squalor of the Nazi cruelties.
Klemperer might have been unkind to describe uniformed Kreuzchor singers as automatons but certain people in those immediate post-war years certainly did resemble life-sized marionettes: the workers who were sent to clear the ruins. Some time after the bombing, special narrow-gauge railway lines were still being laid through the mountainous piles of rubble, in order to load up wagons with shattered debris and transport it away, preparing the ruined wilderness for fresh building. As well as the labourers assigned to clearing these fields of stone, unwitting passers-by were sometimes press-ganged by Soviet soldiers into putting in a shift as punishment if they were found not to be carrying all the correct documentation required of them. Yet the authorities wanted their renovation to be understood as the heroism of a new age. Posters were produced depicting broad-shouldered men and smiling women setting about reconstruction in a way that suggested that the wider society was also being rebuilt in a cleaner, healthier way.2
For one man, all this had been long dreamed of. Walter Ulbricht, a long-standing German communist with (to some ears) a distractingly high-pitched voice and (to some ears) an irritating ‘Saxon accent’,3 who had been in exile throughout Europe in the 1930s and resident in Moscow for the course of the war, had been swift to return to Germany as the Nazis imploded. Under him, the German Communist Party was forcibly merged with its rival, the Social Democrats, to become the Socialist Unity Party. All rules and protocols came from Moscow; the seizure of power, which had started with nods to the need for democracy, was sharp and unchallenged. In Dresden, as in other East German cities, rationing was so severe that bread was made partly with acorns; there was scarcely the energy to form furious political opposition to this new regime. Ulbricht was a committed totalitarian, and it was his portrait that was swiftly to dominate every classroom, every lecture hall, every Rathaus. His image replaced that of Hitler on all postage stamps. (Before replacements became available, Hitler’s image on each and every stamp had been simply drawn over by hand with a pen.)
In West Germany, there were ‘de-Nazification’ programmes that included civilians being shown photographs and films of the death camps. In the Soviet zone, encompassing the east of Berlin, Dresden, Weimar and Leipzig, among other cities, senior Soviet military officers and Soviet bureaucrats gravely set about re-educating the populace in different ways: former Nazi officials were quickly rounded up, interrogated and sent to prison camps in Russia. One level down, those citizens who had had particularly close ties with the Nazis, chiefly through work, were identified and in many cases denounced and driven from public life into a jobless purgatory.
For the rest of the civilian populace, the unsmiling efforts to change established thought started quickly. From theatre to factory shop floors, from the vulgar language used by working men in public bars to the rarefied discussions of academics, there were committees established to monitor and police attitudes, to inculcate respect among the middle classes for the working classes, to explain why expropriation of private industry was desirable, to convey and enforce the fundamental tenets of Marxism and dialectical materialism, and to censor books, newspaper articles, radio broadcasts and any works of art deemed insufficiently optimistic about the future under this new governance. (In terms of using vulgar language, middle-class professionals were gravely advised by Soviet officials not to follow the lead of the workers; instead of conveying unity, it might in fact smack of mockery, they thought.)4 There were committees for every area of life, in every workplace, in every residential district; sitting at tables under dim lights, the men and women who set the agendas were flinty and unforgiving of deviation from the approved discourse; jobs could be terminated instantly and without explanation; entire civic departments could find themselves replaced overnight. The main authorities were deliberately capricious and unpredictable; they ensured compliance through the anxiety of insecurity. Alongside old-established shops there emerged new state-run outlets; and cinema-goers were now shown Russian films with subtitles.
For the city’s children and students, this was when, educationally, they stopped facing west and instead turned to Moscow – and with some speed. The Russian language was added as a central pillar to the classroom curriculum as Dresden families understood that future employment opportunities – and chances of promotion – would be affected directly by this linguistic adaptability. The teaching of English, conversely, began to diminish; the vulgar tongue of the Americans, it might have been assumed, might itself only serve to introduce unwelcome ideas. Over the course of the coming generation, Russian became more common and familiar. There was also a subtle cultural shift in the 1950s and 1960s as families became accustomed to looking east for their holidays, taking long train journeys to the new resorts in Crimea and on the Black Sea coast.5
Free expression was essentially forbidden; it was not long before anyone in a bar wishing to tell a mildly anti-authoritarian joke would do so by first beckoning their friend outside, away from other ears. No one in the city had known real freedom since before 1933, although for those few still living who had been either persecuted or simply frozen out by the Nazi regime there were genuine, fresh opportunities here. From the hospitals to the art galleries there was quite simply a new and sharpened appetite for life; Dresdeners relished the restoration of the botanical gardens and the spring blossoming of the city’s remaining and still abundant trees. On top of this, there was nowhere else throughout Europe that Dresdeners could look to as having an easier time of it, save perhaps the American zone of occupied Germany, which was rumoured to enjoy abundant supplies of food. The British zone, like Britain itself, was subject to severe rationing and the Dresdeners who had not been bombed out at least still had the security of their homes. In a continent that in the immediate post-war years was seething with millions of refugees, including the Sudeten Germans violently expelled from Czechoslovakia, the city on the Elbe was at least stable under its new controllers.
By 1949 Germany was officially two countries as the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany came into being. Over the course of the following decade, a great many in the GDR would emigrate to West Germany; equally, though, there were a great many more who chose not to take that opportunity. One such was the eminent electronics expert Professor Heinrich Barkhausen, who had returned to Dresden a year after the bombing. Initially, he and other scientific colleagues at the still bomb-damaged university faced a regime that was not keen for the city to regain its speciality in engineering, but over the years that attitude thawed. Indeed, Professor Barkhausen, in addition to being awarded a GDR National Prize (an accolade his university colleague Professor Klemperer briefly yearned for), also had the honour of a new university building being named after him. Designed in the austere but bright rectilinear style of the 1950s – students cycling up and down the wide avenue before it – the Barkhausen Building was home to the Low Wattage Technology Department; it also pursued work in the fast-evolving field of transistors.6 Perhaps as a scientist, Barkhausen – who died in 1956 – had found it easier than most to absent himself from the endless ideological harassment; there were few debates about unsound attitudes in highly technical electronics diagrams and blueprints. The work could be seen straightforwardly as aiding the progress of the Eastern Bloc. More than this, Dresden managed to retain one of its more individual characteristics: as a centre of a wide range of precision manufacturing and technological innovation. As the years progressed, the city regained its reputation for such goods as finely made cameras; this in turn would come to attract visitors from less well-favoured regions of the bloc eager to buy some of this sophistication.
In terms of medicine, too, Dresden kept one of its most distinguished figures in those post-war years: Dr Albert Fromme, whose home had succumbed to the billowing flames that night, had simply without any fuss set up a new home within the Friedrichstadt hospital complex of which he was director. Rooms were found for himself and his family. Indeed, they were to stay there for several years, until he moved to a new property in a rather desirable leafy district overlooking the city close to the forests of Dresden Heath. He and his rebuilt hospital did some remarkable work, given the intense financial restrictions of the time, including a huge amount of research into cancer, on which he published a book in 1953.7 Given the sparse technology, the Friedrichstadt hospital had some surprising successes treating breast cancer using radiotherapy, patients surviving what not that long before had been terminal conditions. And as Dr Fromme worked on, well into his seventies, the otherwise severe authorities garlanded him with grateful honours: he was made the rector of Dresden’s first medical academy in 1954 and in the same year he was named Outstanding Scientist of the People.8
Dr Fromme also took an intense interest in the academies of science in other East German cities, from East Berlin to Leipzig. If he harboured doubts about the new regime, or opposition to the ideals of socialism, then he must have done so very discreetly; given, though, that he had refused to join the Nazi Party at a point when such a refusal could destroy a career, it is possible that Dr Fromme found a sympathetic resonance with the ideal of socialism, and indeed the universal provision of good health care for all. He retired only in the 1960s and in his frailty moved to join family in West Germany (the elderly were permitted to cross what had by then become a fiercely patrolled border).
Another survivor of both the bombing and the scourge of the Nazi regime had been welcomed back to the city following his evacuation. The artist and marionette maker Otto Griebel, with his wife and children, re-established themselves in 1946 and Griebel was appointed to teach at the Dresden College of Fine Arts.9 Where others experienced discomfort and unease at the distant yet extraordinarily pervasive Soviet rule, Griebel instead saw a natural justice restored to the world, and for himself the prospect once again of painting allied with socialist ideals. His peers now included artists such as Curt Querner, a long-time communist, and as the GDR consolidated its new identity, so the new rulers sought to point the artists in the ‘correct’ directions. The innovative modernism of the 1920s now had to be subdued into works that were flavoured with socialist realism; and there were strictures on suitable subjects. But in this environment, Griebel none the less felt liberation: his earlier depictions of working men, for instance, although stylized, still captured an essence of proletarian heroism. Added to this, he was enthusiastic about the idea of art being used to further spread and cement socialism. Paintings in the 1950s and the 1960s produced in Dresden offered prospects of agriculture and industry in tones of sombre green, brown, grey and ochre, and of course the 1945 firebombing remained a theme of inspiration.10 There were numerous debates about formalism; even the slightest brush stroke had political significance; and it was also important not to follow the new routes taken by American art, immersed as it was in capitalist imperialism. There was also an effort to ensure that art reached the workers. Like his scientific contemporaries, Griebel seemed remarkably successful at negotiating the rapids of an implacable regime: and he continued teaching into the 1960s. He passed away in 1972.
His son Matthias, aged eight at the time of the bombing, left school at fourteen in the 1950s specifically to learn about agriculture and to work on farms; later he became a farming adviser. Nothing could have been more impeccably socialist. And yet he had his own free-spirited artistic impulses that led him in the 1960s to become a cabaret performer.11 He toured small clubs around the GDR and was scrutinized closely by the hard-eyed Stasi secret police, who had a large base on the hills to the north overlooking the ruins of the old city. Other young people throughout the fifties and sixties received even closer attention: the GDR penal code, which placed careful emphasis on antisocial behaviour and attitudes, could result in lifelong prison sentences. The slightest slip when it came to approaches to the class struggle could entail secret denunciation, interrogation and the destruction of families. Even after the death of Stalin in 1953, life in Dresden became no less suffocating and repressive. The local Stasi state security headquarters had numerous cells and interrogation rooms, preserving thematic continuity with the previous regime. When the GDR finally collapsed it was estimated that between 12,000 and 15,000 prisoners – mostly critics of the regime, or those who had sought to escape from the east – had passed through this detention block, prior to being sent to prisons and camps.
Despite the pervasive observation, the weight of that constant threat, most people in Dresden sought simply to live their lives. And the city was rising around them once more. Even for those, like the artist Eva Schulze-Knabe, who had found a perverse enchantment in sunset evenings gazing at the ‘pink ruins’12 with the blue skies above, there was the additional fascination of seeing the construction of the new housing projects. In Johannstadt and Neustadt and Friedrichstadt, great lines of six- and seven-storey blocks of apartments were built, some with balconies. The style was regimented and sternly geometrical; equality as architecture, planned with technocratic attention to detail of small square lawns and playgrounds before the tall blocks, and truncated parades of shops and amenities. In this new age, it was intended that all residents – from factory workers to craftsmen to bank managers – would be served by the same facilities with a uniform aesthetic. There were wide avenues too; wide enough certainly for tanks to drive down.
Even in an atmosphere of the most carefully observed equality there were still some new apartments that were favoured, such as the large flats built at the sides of the Altmarkt, on ground that had been dust and weeds. These apartments, for officials, had many rooms and wonderful views over the other reconstruction works taking place. The grand department stores were rebuilt, though now they were state owned and there were continuing controversies over shortages, especially of textiles and clothing. Men’s suits were difficult to come by, and on one occasion the appearance in a state-run department store of five ladies’ trench coats ‘and a few coloured dust coats’ – as advertised in a local newspaper – caused scenes so agitated that they were reported in the foreign press. ‘Counters and show-stands were overturned’13 as women fought over these rarities.
Nor was the impulse to create such a dramatic departure from the past especially unusual; indeed, in an age when both superpowers were looking out into the depths of space – sending satellites, launching men among the stars – it seemed natural. What was once Prager Strasse was reconfigured by the 1960s into a modernist state-owned shopping plaza; a concrete canyon lined with vast rectangular apartment blocks, and the plaza itself carefully planned with fountains and flower beds and benches. Yet if this hint of futurism seemed at all jarring to older residents, it was hardly unique; this new style of urban space had soulmates dotted around western Europe, and especially in Britain, from Croydon to Dundee. More than this, there were admiring visitors to Dresden from the West: in 1965, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the bombing, young Observer journalist Neal Ascherson gazed around with some wonder. ‘Walking through the old city, one is soon lost among the gutted walls of what could have been palaces or cathedrals,’ he wrote. ‘The city opens into a fawn coloured plain of stone dust, upon which new and graceful blocks of flats have been scattered.’ The Altmarkt, meanwhile, had been reconstructed partly with ‘heavy, ornate, but not unpleasant blocks in the Stalinist style’.14
The old flavour of the city had not dissipated entirely, though. One of the more prominent and much-loved landmarks received restoration after having been examined closely for political suitability. The Zwinger Palace, which had housed the city’s art treasures, lay shattered throughout the 1940s and early 1950s; but there was a recognition even among the more hardline civic authorities that classical art was an important public need, the enjoyment of which must not be confined to middle-class intellectuals. Quite apart from the restoration of the galleries themselves was the initially stickier problem of the whereabouts of the Old Masters that Martin Mutschmann had had transported from the city long before the bombing.
Many of the collections had – rather like a great deal of technical and agricultural equipment – been taken to Russia after being unearthed from their shelters by the Soviet trophy hunters. Some were in the cellars of grand schlosser while others had with some velocity made their way to the west of Europe via silent dealers. There was some doubt as to whether the 1,200-odd paintings that were now in the hands of the Soviets would be retained in Moscow, but by the mid 1950s, amid careful publicity, the paintings were restored to their newly reconstructed galleries in the Zwinger Palace. In a city that was now notorious for the extent of its destruction – with one resident warning that citizens were becoming inured to the cult of ruins, like eighteenth-century poets – this was an important revitalizing moment: an acknowledgement that art in all its forms was the heart of the city. With the return of the Old Masters came the start of a wider artistic restoration: some 6,000 other pieces, from paintings to sculpture, were gradually returned to the city authorities.15 Whenever the odd painting turned up in a London auction house, the GDR government successfully lobbied to have it sent back.
Music had also been at the heart of the city; but the fate of the bombed and hollowed out Semper Opera House, just next door to the Zwinger Palace, was very much less assured. In 1947 one city official had suggested that it be rebuilt and repurposed, not only as a people’s opera house but as a people’s cinema as well. There were others, though, who were very keen to destroy what remained with dynamite, contending that the old opera house, with its grand boxes above the stalls, embodied an irredeemably bourgeois spirit. If opera was to return, surely it would be better housed in a structure that did not exacerbate class divides? The only argument that prevented the wholesale destruction of the remnants was the feeling that Dresdeners as a whole regarded the opera as being central to the identity and the history of the city; that to eliminate it would be in some way to erase the past, of which so much had already been traumatically removed. And so the ruins stayed, close to the flowing Elbe. And it was not until the mid 1980s, after years of lobbying, that restoration work at last began.
There was music elsewhere by the late 1960s: strong performances, world-class renditions, to be heard in the newly built Palace of Culture on the Altmarkt, overlooking the site where so many thousands of bodies had burned on pyres. The chief conductor of the Dresden Philharmonic, Kurt Masur, inaugurated the building with a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. As a venue, the hall, with its sleek lines, glass frontage, copper roof and elaborately vast wall mosaic depicting proud socialist moments in Germany, was a deliberate aesthetic break from the style of the old city, but it attracted visitors from around the country (it also contained a theatre space and a banqueting hall with a tip-up floor that could be transformed into a dance floor). This was the socialist ideal: high arts for the masses. The Dresden Philharmonic was invited to delight Western audiences too, satisfying those old bourgeois appetites. It was at night that the building looked most striking: the light glowing forth from the entrance and the glass-fronted mezzanine onto the Altmarkt and the Kreuzkirche. Just before its construction was complete, Kurt Vonnegut – now a novelist and having been awarded a Guggenheim grant to develop his writing – returned to Dresden for the first time since February 1945, when he had been ‘corpse mining’.
Vonnegut’s extraordinary Slaughterhouse-Five was coalescing in his thoughts at that point; the novel in which fictional Billy Pilgrim in 1960s America finds himself jumping time-tracks back and forth across his own life. Those tracks led ineluctably back to 13 February 1945; Pilgrim was a fictional character but Vonnegut deliberately placed him at the centre of his own experiences of the bombing, and the apocalyptic aftermath. Those parts of the novel were intended to be read as the literal truth. It was this work that not only cemented Vonnegut as a darkly comic and compelling literary voice but also regalvanized the furious ethical debates about what had been done to the city. When Vonnegut was back in Dresden in 1967, the sheer enormity of what had happened – the full scale of which he had not been able to grasp as a prisoner – hit him like lightning. The fiction that emerged was that of ashy, laconic anger. In the novel, Vonnegut had characters repeating that the death toll had been 135,000 – the smaller but still exaggerated figure that had been in the air since earlier that decade when the historian David Irving gave that number – an estimate supplied by former Dresden civic official Hanns Voigt – in his account of the bombing. And the figure itself was one of the elements that helped light the fuse on a terrible revisionist movement that insisted on equating the destruction of Dresden with the Holocaust; that its citizens were victims of a deliberate criminal atrocity too.
This view – even now rejected with some anguish by the Dresden authorities – was to become a growing problem for the city as the remembrance of 13 February became ever more established as an annual event throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Vonnegut could hardly have anticipated such consequences; the broader theme of Slaughterhouse-Five concerned not so much numbers as simply the obscenity of the inferno and the horrors of attempting to reconstruct life afterwards, be it in Dresden or Hiroshima. In 1969 the novel was published and became an instant classic, but it also fixed the idea among its many readers that more than any of the many bombed German cities, Dresden was unique and extraordinary in all of its losses.
Grey sky-scraping offices in concrete, uncertain supplies of hot water, communal tables at restaurants – this was Dresden in the years of detente. Yet by the 1980s the city had recovered enough of its old aesthetic life to attract visitors not just from Russia and the Eastern Bloc but from the West too; left-leaning tourists, not allergic to the idea of the USSR and its satellite states, crossing the Iron Curtain to savour a cultural landmark that had not been overtaken by the trappings of shiny materialism. In addition to this, as work finally began on the reconstruction of the Semper Opera House in 1985, Dresden gained a new resident in the form of Vladimir Putin. In the days when he was a young KGB officer, Putin, his first wife Lyudmila, and their two young children, spent four years in the city. His intelligence activities – intercepts, bugged phones – were said to be low key, and perhaps by comparison with the Stasi – the East German domestic security service that was infused in every corner of public and private life, combining blanket surveillance and violence – they were. The young couple rather loved the city; Putin was already fluent in German and he and his wife found the streets and the surrounding leafy countryside deeply congenial.16 They saved up for a car. Putin was said to have developed a fondness for the local Radeberger beer (the family lived in the east of Neustadt, near the north bank of the Elbe and not far from the Radeberger brewery).
In this sense, as a thirty-something KGB officer, Putin had a very much more pleasant life there than practically any of the citizens he passed on the streets. His one moment of serious alarm came in the autumn of 1989 with the breakdown of control across the German Democratic Republic that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Dresden, angry citizens were already turning their attentions to the Stasi main headquarters. Putin correctly divined that they would also be marching on the KGB villa, and it was he who went out alone to face the crowd, imploring them calmly, in German, not to proceed any further because there were snipers in position who would not hesitate to shoot them down. Putin succeeded in containing the situation and spent the next three days creating a vast fire of incriminating KGB documentation.
Through all these curious years – the half-muffled artistic heart of the city beating with ever greater strength and confidence against the background of an ever more oppressive and decrepit regime – there was one melancholy landmark that reminded all Dresdeners of 13 February 1945: the broken stumps of the Frauenkirche, in the wide, desolate space of the Neumarkt. In all those slow decades of reconstruction, this joyous baroque temple was never considered any kind of priority by the authorities; rather, its amputated remains stood as a permanent reminder of the wickedness of the imperialist Americans and British, and their unprovoked targeting of such beauty. By the early 1980s the site had become a locus for Dresden’s peace movement; just as in the West, where young people campaigned vociferously against nuclear arsenals, their peers in Dresden marched with equal zeal against all such weaponry. Sebastian Feydt – who is now pastor of the Frauenkirche – was there with his friends and banners. They also brought with them disabled German soldiers, without guns. Possibly the authorities permitted such demonstrations because the deployment of American medium-range nuclear missiles to West Germany was a source of constant Soviet insecurity, but that did not detract from the solemn sincerity of the young protestors, and their own fears for what seemed a hair-trigger future. With the annihilation of Dresden well within living memory, it did not require any great imagination to envisage the lightning flash and searing radioactive wind of nuclear detonation. There were already conspiracy theories that, during the war, the Allies had been planning to use Dresden as a testing ground for that very first atom bomb.
Meanwhile, though, Feydt’s grandmother, who had loved the Frauenkirche, was an optimist: she foresaw that at some point in the future it would be perfectly restored. Might she also have envisaged the astounding recreation of so much else in Dresden? Not just the perfect baroque detailing on restored buildings from the Zwingergarten to the Japanese Palace, but the restored villas, the replanted trees, even the careful renovations of what might have become louring examples of cheap Soviet architecture. At the centre of all this stands the Frauenkirche; for what was also achieved – and still very much stands today – was the abiding principle of reconciliation, of cooperation and shared endeavour between Germany and Britain, even as the passionate debates about the criminality of the bombers continued. Dresden at last found a way of containing and preserving its darkest night, in such a way that the entire world might see, and understand, and not recoil.