A great chain of people, arms linked, lining the square: overcoats, quilted jackets, hats, breath ghostly in the cold. It is the evening of 13 February. The sun has long set, and the deep note of the bell in the darkness produces stillness and reflection. The chime, repeated and repeated; everyone looking into the dark sky sees the same thing: the planes flying over. They are not there, but the relentlessly tolling bell somehow invokes a collective memory. Among all these people in the Altmarkt, standing near the Kreuzkirche, are visitors from overseas, from America to China. Everyone here, no matter where they have come from, knows what happened. This is the annual commemoration of the bombing.
The human chain is an idea partly in response to the ever-present attempts by others to hijack the anniversary: the far right-wingers who want Germans to be understood as martyrs to a war crime. There are extremists in every society, but Dresdeners appreciate that their city is an unusually sensitive shrine and that shrines can be desecrated if guards are dropped. It has taken many decades but Dresden can truly be said to be restored, both aesthetically and spiritually. And the dead are never forgotten.
Each year on this date there are other events, too: addresses by politicians outside the main council building; a rendition in the Kreuzkirche of Mauersberger’s Dresdner Requiem (the piece is about an hour long, is performed to a completely packed audience and is almost overpoweringly moving); then, later, at 9.45 p.m., at the moment when the air-raid sirens found their full throat in 1945, all the bells in the city start to ring. The noise is deeply unsettling; in that echoing discordancy, the different notes and tones bouncing off so many restored walls and streets, there is a taste of gathering fear; of fast-approaching horror. Stand by the Frauenkirche as these bells ring out and you see crowds of people in the great square before it, rooted to the spot, and again staring at the sky. All the bells of the city, in their clangour, are urging escape; they speak of a world of order being violently overturned. They ring out until 10.03 p.m.; the minute the bombs started falling. In the sudden gaping silence, candles are lit and placed on the cobbles of the square; hundreds of them, in a specially marked area. For some, this is a moment of prayer – even of communion with forebears who died that night; for others an extraordinary glimpse of the depth of feeling that courses through the veins of the city still.
But all of this makes Dresden sound morbid, when in fact quite the opposite is true. The city today is extraordinarily light, alive and blithe. And the curious thing is this: the restoration ought to appear ersatz, yet there is not one moment when anything seems less than wholly authentic, from the rebuilt streets of the Altstadt, to the amazing repurposing of the castle by the river (now a literally dazzling museum, filled with porcelain treasures, golden ornaments and richly jewelled swords). The opera house is – as it was throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – world renowned for artistic range and innovation. And once more, this is a city that art lovers swarm to in great numbers. As well as the array of Old Masters in the Zwinger galleries, there is now in the Albertinum museum a brilliant display of nineteenth- and twentieth-century works: Caspar David Friedrich’s most immersive and troubling landscapes a floor apart from the raw rigour of Otto Dix’s First World War canvases. And those post-war communist artists are honoured too; portraits and studies that now have their own layers of political as well as aesthetic depth. The overall sense is that the city has been able to knit time together, drawing the past closer to the present, repairing the great rent caused by Nazism and the February 1945 catastrophe.
It has not been easy to reach this point of reconciliation, though, and in the patient and infinitely loving restoration of the Frauenkirche are to be found all the interlocking strands of grief, loss, guilt and responsibility. Ever since the dome’s collapse there had been Dresdeners who yearned to see it rise again, but the GDR’s priorities lay firmly elsewhere and there was simply not the money either from the Lutheran Church or from the local authorities even to consider it. Both the Catholic cathedral by the castle, and the Kreuzkirche, found financial champions for repair, and these works were relatively straightforward; but to re-erect the eccentric baroque structure on Neumarkt would take real engineering ingenuity as well as money. In an age when houses urgently had to be built, such frivolity could not be countenanced. It was proposed at one point that the fractured remnants of walls, and the heap of rubble, should simply be swept away.
But they were not, and for four decades, this haunted landmark symbolized a city in a twilight state. When the GDR and the Soviet Union collapsed, and the reunification of Germany followed, this attitude changed, partly because now a wider world was taking an interest. By 1992 it was agreed: the Frauenkirche would be rebuilt – in every particular – exactly as it was when the original architect George Bähr planned his vision in 1726. It would be easy to assume that modern technology would make easy work of this mighty eighteenth-century undertaking, but in fact the project soon became an intense exercise in applied mathematics and geometry as architects and engineers sought to recreate the extraordinarily delicate feat of counterbalance and support that made the magnificent stone dome, and the church’s intricately galleried interior, possible. Here was a return to the principles of masonry; certainly computer modelling was useful but, in the end, this was a construction based on human ingenuity and care.
The work began: excavation of the rubble in order to use as many of the original eighteenth-century stones as possible; more sandstone quarried from the same source a few miles away; the rescue of one surviving bell and the recreation in workshops of others. And by this stage, as part of a determined effort in reconciliation, a British charity – the Dresden Trust – made its own wonderful contribution.
The idea had been sparked in part by a controversial event in London: the unveiling of a privately financed statue to Sir Arthur Harris in the Strand in 1992. The Queen Mother presided over the ceremony, but there were protestors who thought it was an outrage that such honour should be bestowed upon a man they regarded as a war criminal. The bitterness was sharp on both sides (and proved the start of a longer-running controversy concerning Bomber Command and the ways in which its aircrews should be remembered). Partly this was a conflict of culture, for it was the young left who voiced their opposition most stridently. Tangentially, the Harris statue subsequently being splashed with paint by activists was the catalyst for the Dresden Trust to start educating the younger generation about the bombing of the city and the wider conflict. One of the Trust’s ideas was inspired: an offer to recreate the golden orb and cross that had been at the top of the Frauenkirche dome. Academics from Germany and Manchester met to discuss the elaborate patterning and dimensions of this massive ornament. The contract to construct it went to silversmiths Grant Macdonald of London; and serendipitously, one of the skilled craftsmen drafted to work on this intense project – Alan Smith – revealed himself to be the son of one of the bomber pilots who had taken part in the Dresden raid.
As with the structure of the main building, there were an array of challenges that required a form of mental time travel in order to summon back this golden eighteenth-century masterpiece, standing some twenty feet in height, comprising intricate elements originally known as The Clouds of Heaven, Jacob’s Tears and The Rays of Glory, each descriptive of elaborate patterning in and around the base and the cross. When it was finished in 1999, the result was so beautiful that it was decided that it should tour Britain before being presented to Dresden. It also received patronage and acknowledgement of the proudest order when it was displayed to the royal family at Windsor Castle. The following year, amid grand ceremonies, the Duke of Kent accompanied it to Germany, where it was presented to the citizens of Dresden. Dr Alan Russell, one of the guiding lights of the Dresden Trust, which had secured so many charitable donations for this work, was certain that it would not only help with reconciliation but also serve as acknowledgement of British responsibility, a gesture that the British themselves might understand as a token of atonement.
The restoration of the church was complete by 2005, so perfect in every detail that it has in itself become a source of wonder for both tourists and pilgrims. Pastor Sebastian Feydt laughs that there are a few who find the interior a shade too colourful, the whites and the golds too bright, but that is how the church originally looked. Equally, the pale sandstone of the exterior is contrasted with 1930s photographs of the church that showed its outer walls blackened with soot. But time will attend to these differences. The stone will darken and, over the coming decades, the pale pinks and blues of the interior will naturally fade in intensity; and then the church will be exactly what it was.
Any work of restoration on such an amazingly intricate scale invites the unworthy thought that it can be no more than an elaborate simulacrum, that the new structure cannot philosophically be the same as the old, and so any attempt to make it so is simply an exercise in fine historical kitsch. But the visitor finds otherwise, for in absorbing the richness of the circular interior and climbing the narrow spiral stairs right up past the stone dome to the top of the church there is a sense of both solidity and deep pride that wholly removes any suggestion of inauthenticity. Then there is the view from that high exterior. Not every building in the reconstructed Altstadt streets conforms exactly to its forebear, but the shape of the roofs and the patterns of the streetscape themselves are faithful to those of the 1930s. The gaze is then drawn to the tranquil winding Elbe and the wooded hills beyond.
Before the Frauenkirche reconstruction there had been another move to rebuild a relationship with England. In 1959 Dresden was twinned with the city of Coventry, itself extensively rebuilt after the 1940 bombing attack that had burned out its medieval heart, destroyed its cathedral and melted iron to the point where molten rivulets of dissolved plumbing hissed down glowing walls. In Dresden, people – specifically older people – are solicitous about mentioning Coventry whenever the subject of air raids is raised; indeed, there are Dresdeners who think a very great deal more about Coventry than most people in England.
The debate in recent years has become more specifically about whether the bombing of Dresden was a war crime. From the work of the late W. G. Sebald, who wrote On the Natural History of Destruction, to the fissile thesis of Jörg Friedrich’s The Fire (that German civilians were indeed very much victims) to a philosophical work by A. C. Grayling, Among the Dead Cities, the ethics have been explored with some vigour, not to mention melancholy and anger. The phrase ‘war crime’ has a legal precision which has been examined by academic Donald Bloxham1 in this context: weighing up the condemnations of – and possible justifications for – area bombings and placing Dresden in the context of other atrocities committed by both Germans and British.
We might also, after seventy-five years, say this: ‘war crime’ above all implies intentionality and rational decision-making, and this raises another possibility. War creates its own nauseous gravity, and towards the end of a six-year conflict, with millions dead, all sides exhausted, could it be that these city bombings were not vengeful or consciously merciless, but ever more desperate reflexive attacks launched to make the other side simply stop? Just as it cannot be assumed that individuals always act with perfect rationality, so the same must be said for entire organizations acting with one will. Much as the Frauenkirche and its dome and its mighty stones were (and are) held in place by unseen counterbalancing geometric forces, so war might be viewed as analogous to the dislocation of society’s fine balance; that any conflict of such duration and scale will in the end create repercussions that start to chip away at the foundations of sanity itself, and in so doing reveal the inherent delicacy of civilization. The question after all this time is this: given the unalterable horror of 25,000 people being killed in one night, and given that the bombing was unquestionably an atrocity, intended or not, is there anything at all to be gained now in terms of solace or restitution by pursuing legally precise accusations?
For some Germans, there has possibly always been a greater sense of balance in the arguments. In his 1947 novel Doctor Faustus, concerning the life of a genius composer prior to and during the rise of Hitler, German author Thomas Mann’s narrator observes: ‘we have experienced the destruction of our noble cities from the air, a destruction that would cry to heaven if we who suffer were not ourselves laden with guilt. As it is, the cry is smothered in our throats: like King Claudius’s prayer, it can “never to heaven go”.’
There are many in Dresden now who are also careful to acknowledge the origins of the war, before making broader judgements on the bombing. But in any case, and in so many other ways, the city itself has made it plain that the key is remembrance, and that the bombing must be taken not as a singular event but rather as a universal symbol of the horror of all wars. Dresden has a beautifully designed military history museum, sitting north of the city on the gentle hill overlooking the distant spires. The structure – a former nineteenth-century military barracks – has a distinctive addition, or extension, shaped like vast geometric shrapnel, several storeys high, sticking into the front of the building. It was designed by Daniel Libeskind, and in the top floor of this ‘shrapnel’ extension, almost open to the sky, is a permanent exhibit dedicated to the bombing: nothing more than a series of stones and cobbles laid out upon the floor.
If you leave the museum and go back down the hill to the river and the Altstadt, you pass through cheerful nineteenth-century streets filled with students and trendy cafes and little craft shops, a diorama of diversity and youth and relaxation. Since reunification, Dresden has received a great deal of federal funding: the tram system is swish and fast, the museums and galleries are rich and illuminating, a new modernist synagogue complex stands by Brühl’s Terrace and the theatre and the opera attract artists from around the world. There are visitors in abundance; and in many other ways the city has wholly rediscovered and embraced its old cosmopolitan soul. Near the Palace of Culture and the Frauenkirche, the streets in the summer echo and resonate with music; the buskers here are of quite a different quality from those to be found in any other European city. Violinists play nineteenth-century classics; a cappella tenors give ad-lib excerpts from operas. There can be a giddy exultation in the amber glow of a warm sunset, and as exquisite notes are briefly conjoined with the jangling bells of the Hofkirche the sheer depth of noise conveys the sense of life more fully than anything else.
Even in the icy air of December, Dresden is full, glowing in the sort of Christmas kitsch that reflects childhood dreams. In the short afternoons, as the sky turns sapphire, then darker still, the wide space of the Altmarkt becomes a delightful wooden maze of log-cabin market stalls, selling mulled wine and assorted gifts, and the whole square is illuminated in rich reds and greens. At each turn of the hour, in the crisp, cold dark, the heavy bell of the Kreuzkirche rings out deeply. And you momentarily remember that you are never more than a few steps away from the past.