By the castle wall, and in the shadow of the Catholic cathedral, winter twilight can occasionally bring an arresting effect. If you glance around, it is possible, just for a fleeting moment, that you will find yourself alone. And here in this triangle of cobbled paving and sculptured stone – the Schlossplatz, overlooked by the grand archway leading through to the castle courtyard, the church spire high and sharp against the amethyst sky – time can smoothly slip its moorings.
If you are knowledgeable about the history of art, you might imagine yourself in the early nineteenth century, a figure frozen in a painting by the Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich, who lived in Dresden and depicted its steeples and domes, suffused in a lemon sunlight. You might allow yourself to roam yet further back: inhabiting a richly detailed Bellotto landscape. He too was drawn to the architectural elegance – the wide market squares and beautifully proportioned houses and civic buildings – of the city in the eighteenth century. Stand there long enough and there will be the music that those artists heard too: the bells of the cathedral. They strike, with some urgency, and clamour, and with a deeper, resonant note that sounds like anger.
And it is in this near-discordancy that the more recent, terrible past is also summoned, unbidden; many who stand or walk here now, cannot help imagining, even for a moment, the bass drone of the aeroplanes overhead; the sky bright with green and red marker flares; and then roaring flames in the gutted cathedral rising ever higher.
Such visions are not confined to this one spot. Just a few yards from this square is the elegant terrace that overlooks the River Elbe and its curiously wide banks. Now, as then, this stone walkway stretches along to the Academy of Arts with its glittering glass dome. Just as with the Catholic cathedral, any stroll along here somehow takes place in two different time streams; you are there, in the present, gazing along the curving valley of the Elbe; and at the same time, you are seeing, against the clear cold night sky, the hundreds of bombers swooping in from the west. You envisage the terrified crowd of people around you, trying to escape the furnace flare heat, making as if by instinct for the river. This is the macabre truth of Dresden: every vision of beauty carries a split-second awareness of the most terrible violence. All visitors to this city will have felt that momentary dislocation. Unease would be the wrong word; the sensation is not ghostly. But there is a sharp cruelty about the juxtaposition of the fairy-tale architecture and the knowledge of what lies beneath it. And of course illusion is built upon illusion: for much of the fairy-tale architecture we see today was previously obliterated in the cataclysm.
It should not be possible to see the city that expressionist artist Conrad Felixmüller sketched so wittily in the 1920s; to gaze upon the stone and glass that Margot Hille – seventeen-year-old apprentice brewery worker in the west of the city – would have seen on her way home from work throughout the war in the mid 1940s; or to see the comfortable bourgeois world that Dr Albert Fromme and the Isakowitzes and Georg and Marielein Erler moved through at the beginning of the century – the smart restaurants, the opera house, the exquisite galleries. It should not be possible to see any of these things because in just one night, on 13 February 1945, just weeks before that war ended, 796 bomber planes flew over that square, and that city, and in the words of one young witness, ‘opened the gates of hell’. In the course of that single, infernal night, an estimated 25,000 people were killed.
Dresden has been rebuilt, slowly, and not without difficulties and conflicts. The minutely detailed restorations have been married with sensitive modern landscaping, so that the new buildings on the market squares are not immediately obvious. But the curious thing is that despite the miraculous reconstruction, we can still somehow see the ruins.
In the case of the eighteenth-century baroque church the Frauenkirche, which overlooks the New Market square, this is deliberate: you are meant to see how the pale stone of the restoration rising high into the sky contrasts with the blackened original masonry, the shattered stumps of which were almost all of what was left after the pilots of Bomber Command – and then, the following day, the US Eighth Air Force – flew over.
The city stands now as a sort of totem to the obscenity of total war: like Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Dresden is a name associated with annihilation. The fact that the city lay deep in the heart of Nazi Germany, and indeed had been an enthusiastic early adopter of the foulest National Socialist politics, added knots of extraordinary moral difficulty.
Across the decades, the stark morality (and immorality) of both the city and the act of destroying it with fire have been debated and analysed, with varying degrees of anger, remorse, pain and trauma. Such arguments are still very much part of the landscape. In Dresden, the past is in the present, and all have to tread carefully through these layers of time and memory.
An additional knot of difficulty lies in the city’s more recent past: after the war, Dresden was subsumed into the German Democratic Republic, under the control of the Soviet Union. The Soviets took command of history, in the most literal sense; and the Soviets built new structures in the centre of the city that were supposed to reach out to the future. In the wave of continent-wide celebration that greeted German reunification in 1990, there were – and still are – a few who very sincerely regretted the collapse of the East German government.
One of Dresden’s more celebrated citizens – Victor Klemperer, an academic who was one of the very few Jewish inhabitants left after most others had been deported to death camps – remarked after the war that the city was ‘a jewel box’; and that was one of the chief reasons the firestorm commanded so much attention. It is certainly the case that other German cities and towns proportionally suffered more; Pforzheim, in the west, was attacked a few weeks after Dresden and the percentage of the population who were killed in the space of just a few minutes was higher than even the extraordinary number of fatalities in Dresden.
And there had been other firestorms too: in 1943, the wooden-based houses and apartments of Hamburg had tons of incendiaries showered from above; the fires had started, windows shattering, roofs buckling. And pilots above in the orange skies had watched with wonder as flames joined with flames across narrow streets, and joined into an ever larger cauldron of fire that began to bend the elements: air was sucked away, hurricane-force winds of searing heat blew upwards to the sky, and those people who had not simply been burned or baked to death found themselves instead suffocated, their lungs sharp with fire with every increasingly futile breath.
There was Cologne; Frankfurt; Bremen; Mannheim; Lubeck; other cities too. In a great many of them, quite apart from the impossible-to-imagine death tolls, there were the architectural losses: the palaces, opera houses and churches that had formed some notional symbol of European civilization.
Unlike many other cities in the west of the country, though, Dresden – close to the Polish and Czech borders, and about a hundred miles from Prague – already had a strong place in the international imagination. It had long been famous for its exquisite art collections, for its colourful Saxon history, and also for the inviting nature of the landscape that surrounded its beautiful baroque churches, cathedrals and pretty lanes. Then – as now – the city seemed to exist a step apart, deep in the valley of the River Elbe, ringed by gentle hills rising in the distance to picturesque forested mountains. In the early nineteenth century, philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder described Dresden as the ‘German Florence’, drawing admiring parallels between the two cities; and this in turn led to the more widely used ‘Florence on the Elbe’.
But the city was also famous because it was not quaint. Dresden had never been simply a jewel box; it had also acquired pleasurable notoriety for the crackling vigour of its artistic life: the wildly innovative painters, the composers, the writers. Here were some of the earliest modernists; visionary architects with new ideas for perfect communities were drawn to the city too. Added to this, music seemed part of the chemical composition of these streets. It still does today: in the old city in the evenings, you will hear classical buskers and the echoes of cathedral choirs. Those echoes were heard many decades before.
So the story of Dresden – of its destruction and resurrection – presents an almost Shakespearean array of terrible ethical questions. By acknowledging the suffering of all those many thousands of people that night – children, women, refugees, the elderly – and in the years afterwards, do we diminish the hideous crimes that had been committed all around them since the rise of the Nazi Party? By digging deeper into individual stories, are we at risk of fetishizing one notably beautiful place when villages, towns and cities across Europe were even more barbarically served?
Then there is the matter of how we view the hundreds of pilots that flew over, and dropped their fiery bombs on their target: these young men, exhausted, empty, freezing and profoundly afraid at the bitter end of a long conflict in which they had seen so many of their friends blasted out of the sky, were simply doing what they were told by their commanders. The crews of those planes – British, American, Canadian, Australian, among others – piloted, plotted courses, aimed guns at enemy fighters, lay on their stomachs over the bomb bays, talked to each other over intercoms, and clutched their superstitious mascots – be they cloth caps, special socks, or even a girlfriend’s brassiere – close. A bra had more talismanic power than a crucifix. These men looked down through the darkness upon fires thousands of feet below, and threw yet more incendiaries into them, knowing that, at any moment, they too could be engulfed in flame and burned alive. How were these young men ever to defend themselves against the later accusations that they – and RAF Air Chief Marshal Arthur Harris, whom they nicknamed ‘Butcher’ – had participated in a war crime?
Even though this is in part a story about military power, we cannot necessarily think about it purely in terms of military history. Rather, we should try to further fathom the cataclysm by seeing it as much as possible through the eyes of those who were there, on the ground and in the air; those who were in command, and those who had no agency. For this is a tragedy that rippled out far beyond the war. With all the thousands of lives that were extinguished on that one night, there was also the crushing of culture and memory. And the horror of that night is still an electrically live political issue: the greatest care has to be taken not to give accidental support or succour to those who seek to exploit the distant dead today. Remembrance itself is a battlefield; there are those on the far right, in east Germany, and elsewhere, who continually seek to exploit the idea that native civilians in Nazi Germany were victims of atrocities too. Their arguments are compounded with outlandish conspiracy theories surrounding the reason for the bombing. Against them are those citizens who understand that these people cannot be allowed to hijack the events of that night for their own ends. That the past must be protected.
And perhaps one way to do that is simply to listen to the voices of those who were there. To explore the lives of those who were born in Dresden long before the darkness stole over it; and their children, born into that darkness; those who suffered the illimitable terror of that night; and those who had to find a way of rebuilding ordinary life in the dislocated years that followed.
There has been a very moving collaboration between the authorities in the modern city and volunteers working for an organization in Britain which has been focusing on helping Dresden in its reconstruction. The Dresden Trust has worked especially closely upon the painstaking rebuilding of the Frauenkirche.
The city and the Trust have made much of the symbiotic relationship between Dresden and Coventry, in the English midlands – the latter having been attacked and reduced to molten lead and red-hot stone and brick by the Luftwaffe in November 1940. The twinning of the cities is about the understanding that no such thing must ever be allowed to happen again.
But it is also important to see that the story of Dresden is about life, as well as death; it is about the infinite adaptability of the human spirit in the most extraordinary circumstances.
And now that these events pass from living memory, and we can see them with a clearer gaze less occluded by claims, counterclaims and propaganda, there is also an opportunity here for another sort of restoration: a remembrance of the Dresdeners and the texture of their everyday lives.
In recent years, the city’s archives have been engaged in a remarkable effort to elicit as many testimonies and eyewitness accounts as they can. In an inspiring project of communal history, voices have been captured, memories resurrecting many who were lost. These were – are – the stories of a diverse range of citizens, of all ages, committed to paper at different times. There are accounts from those who were children at the time, as well as the diaries and letters and fragments left behind by older people who lived through the cataclysm and recorded the horror. From the quiet authority of Dresden’s chief medical figure to the air-raid wardens; from the city’s remorselessly persecuted Jews to the gentile Dresdeners who in shame tried to help; from the recollections of teenagers and schoolchildren to the extraordinary experiences of some of the older residents, the archives carry a kaleidoscopic portrait not just of one night but of an extraordinary historical moment in the life of an extraordinary city. There are a multitude of voices waiting to be heard, many for the first time.
And it is now time to see underneath those ruins and restorations to recreate the flavour of what was once – before the obscenity of Nazism – an unusually innovative and creative city. To walk long-vanished streets, and see them as the Dresdeners saw them. The story is not just one of astounding destruction; but also about how fragmented lives were somehow regenerated afterwards.