Nanni Schuster, 1945. Photo enclosed in a letter she gave Mischka as he left Dresden after the bombing.
MISCHKA left two accounts of the Dresden bombing. One was in his diary, which he wrote up two months later, in April 1945, the other written for me as a musing half a century later. The similarity is remarkable, all the more as I am almost sure that Mischka had not reread the diary and indeed had forgotten about its existence (I found it in a box of his mother’s papers after he died). In this chapter, I will let Mischka speak for himself as much as possible, interspersing the two accounts. (To distinguish them, the musing is presented in a sanserif font, and the diary in a serif font.) The musing is as he wrote it, with only typos and some idiosyncrasies of spelling corrected:
Around February I had decided that the time approached when I will have to leave Dresden. The Russians made steady advances, and who knows when and where the Allies would be. Also, any occupation would be associated with at least artillery, more likely also with air and tank assaults. We had talked with my mother about what to do and had decided to ‘evacuate’ to Flensburg, border town to Denmark.
No, or at most very little, war activities should happen there. In preparation I decided to give a goodbye party. Indeed I invited some 6 or 7 acquaintances, students all, to my place. As a treat I made kissel [a Russian fruit jelly], I forget with which fruits as the base. So, we were eating that stuff, when suddenly, without any warning or reason the door, which was closed, keeled into the room, it seemed quite slowly, but inexorably, and remained on the floor in a horizontal position. That interrupted the party, and in fact ended it; we walked down into the basement, where there already were the neighbors, with distraught expressions on their faces, standing around and not talking, but listening—which we also commenced to do, and indeed some noise of explosions, distant, could be heard. Then nothing further seemed to happen; so I went to the basement entrance and looked out, and saw 2 Mosquitoes (British 2-motor fighter-bombers, made of wood) passing overhead, but doing nothing. After they left, nothing. A lull took over.
With the finality of that interruption the party disbanded, and everybody started out for their homes. Having invited the Karl May girl, I felt responsible for her safe return home, which was diagonally across town, in the town section der Weisser Hirsch.
Misha must have told me why he called her the ‘Karl May girl’, but I have forgotten. Most likely she was an admirer of the German writer of that name whose now forgotten novels, set in the American West, were immensely popular with German adolescents of Misha’s generation.
So we start out, pass the Technische Hochschule [technical university], and reach the quite wide street leading to the Hauptbahnhof [main railway station]. But it looks ominous: flames emerging from windows on both sides of the street, the region around the Hauptbahnhof at the end of this street unclear. I decide to get an overview before continuing; behind the TH there are fields on the side of a hill; at the summit there used to be anti-aircraft guns, but just very recently departed. Indeed a clear overview: throughout the town here and there fires breaking through roofs; no direction seems clear. While contemplating the situation airplane noise becomes noticeable, and indeed as if the devil pokes: here and there in town immense fires erupt, sparks, flames, and everything: the explosives air raid commences. The sight is mesmerizing; I stand there hypnotized, a 20th century Nero. Soon incendiary bombs begin falling around us, then also explosive. Not far away one hits; I drag the girl along and drop into the bomb crater; that will provide protection against everything except for a direct hit. The girl starts to cry: I feel only immense tension, expectation, not fear. One hears the whistling of the falling incendiaries, ending with a thud when they hit ground, and the howling of falling bombs which end in an explosion. Is that whistling going to hit? How far—if at all—will the bomb fall?
The party was in Mischka’s lodgings at Planettastrasse on the hill across the river from the central city. (The street, now Elisabethstrasse, was renamed in Nazi times for Otto Planetta, a Nazi hero for his murder of Austrian Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss in Vienna in 1934.) So if Mischka hadn’t taken the Karl May girl home, he would have escaped direct danger. In the diary, the girl is virtually absent from the account, mentioned only occasionally as ‘A.’ It is as if Mischka were alone, with absolute responsibility for making the right decisions. On 13 April 1945, his first description of the fire, as seen from the heights before the bombing was renewed, is awed:
I decided to go to the tower on the hill in order to get an overview of the strategic position. But from there the sight that presented itself was even more grisly and yet more splendid: fire everywhere. Accompanied, too—in spite of the distance of c. 0.8–1 km—by the appropriate music: the cracking of burning rafters, the roar of the flames, and now and then crashes as roofs fell in. Added to that there was also a wind, which, fanned by the fire, blew into it and only increased its fury. And to round it all off, a frightened dog, having probably been scared from the house by the onslaught, arrived on the scene and began howling in long, drawn-out tones.
‘The picture was really gruesome,’ he summed up, ‘even gruesomely beautiful, but not horrifying’—or not yet. When the bombing started again,
we lay down, there and then, on the spot. And then came the horror. Even if not yet in the highest degree and not in direct effect but just the very idea of it. Highly explosive fire- and fuel-bombs were being thrown higgledy-piggeldy over the areas that were not yet alight, and on those that were already burning. There was a confusion of firebombs and explosive bombs being dropped, on to places that were not yet on fire or already burning. More fire-bombs had been thrown during the first attack; now the fires were being thrown together by the bombs, as if they were being stirred by giant pokers. And down there, within striking distance, the Technische Hochschule was burning; at the Elektrotechnische Institut the flames were already leaping out of the windows of the top storey. And the whole time the bombs were whistling and the fire-bomb canisters wailing; they shatter in the air with a loud bang and dissolve into an umbrella of individual rods of falling fire.
Here Mischka’s account diverges briefly into an analysis of his own responses—‘Interesting, the reaction of the nervous system: there was a sense of high tension, but surprisingly, no trace of anxiety or fear’—before continuing with the external scene:
And all the time, more new combinations kept coming, and it whooshed and howled uninterruptedly, at first directly above us, and then further afield; actually, individual explosions could no longer be differentiated. And when you looked toward the city, mushrooms of smoke and flames just kept rising from the fire, and then after a while there was a more forceful explosion. These were the heavier chunks, like the ones that had already come down in our neighbourhood. One can’t really call them ‘mushrooms’, it looks more like a tree, with the undulation …
At this point, the diary breaks off abruptly and resumes some days later, on 18 April 1945. (He was in Hamburg by this time, sitting in the Café Condi, which means that he must have been coming down with diphtheria, although his prose gives no sign of this.)
One can’t really call them ‘mushrooms’. It looked more like a medieval watchtower, made up of a slowly growing and undulating melee of smoke and flames—after a while most of it has risen up into a sea of smoke and fire. And still it went on, non-stop. It seemed as though the force had hardly been alleviated, or at least had scarcely relocated to more distant parts of the city, when once again new combinations began to whir and the bombs began to hiss. The hissing was the most terrible, because of the uncertainty. And over all of this there was still a festive illumination, the luminescent parachutes; they hung like grapes in the air and came down very slowly. It was as bright as day from the fire and the ‘Christmas trees’. But how the meaning of those words has changed! Almost symbolic. And it kept on hissing. Now it was already burning over in Kaitz [a suburb of Dresden to the south]. Just where we were, it was not burning because it was a field. More fire bombs now, fewer explosive fuel-bombs, because they were unloading those in areas that were already alight. And then suddenly it became quieter. It was still whistling at the other end of the city, but then it stopped there too. Then a couple of individual planes buzzed away over us, and everything went completely silent. Overhead, that is. Underneath, the fires roared and crackled; now and again houses tumbled down, sometimes a short time-fuse would explode, but otherwise all was calm. We stood up slowly, somewhat mistrustful of these unusual circumstances. The lower floor of the Elektronische Institut was burning now. Behind that, other buildings of the Technische Hochschule were also alight, and the annex to the High Voltage hall at the front. Only Chemistry remained untouched.
The 1996 account continues the story:
That whole thing took about an hour. It suddenly ended. I got out of the crater; there was the town; now an uninterrupted sea of flames. No way to get through. Also it began to rain. So I took the girl to the abandoned battery, found an open bunker, went in and lay down on the floor. Soon some survivors of the vicinity started to drift in, bewildered, and the bunker filled up, but not to overcrowding.
The diary has a lot more to say, in a tone of outrage, about the behaviour of those survivors:
Now the first bomb victims appeared. And what did they talk about? About their things. There was a daughter with her mother. They had been protected and had made their way out into the open through a neighbour’s cellar and a shop. They were talking: ‘Oh, my gloves! I’ve always had them with me before!’ and so on. ‘Mummy, I don’t have my diamond ring with me!’ (Mother): ‘Just don’t tell your father! I’ll give you one of mine. I’ve still got enough.’ And then on and on about the stockings and the rest. In the midst of this, but quite rarely: ‘I wonder where Daddy is? He was at work of course. How I worry about him!!’ and then back to stockings. Since then for weeks on end all I heard in Dresden was about stockings, underwear, dresses, hats and so on; I can’t remember any other topics in connection with the raid. At most, someone would explain that he had been protected. Otherwise they all tried to outdo each other in listing their losses, but only their losses of underwear! From which one has to conclude that those who had lived through worse things were either no longer living or silent. Horror had closed their mouths.
The next part, the morning after the raid, is the worst in both tellings. The musing recalls the scene that greeted them:
Then the morning lights came on and I surveyed the situation. The flames had disappeared, the fuel had been consumed. So I thought the best way would be to go through town; that would be much shorter than going around it. We start. The beginning was easy. Up to the Hauptbahnhof, on that wide street, we could simply walk. Some houses were semi-collapsed, with debris covering the sidewalk, and to some extent the street, but one could pass by. After the Hauptbahnhof, in the old part of town, the streets are narrower, and rubble begins now and then to cover the whole street. As the street continues to narrow, the rubble gets deeper, and one has to climb over it. Progress gets excruciatingly slow. If there should be now another raid— I dismiss that thought, suppress that thought is more correct. Climbing gets slower and slower—the pile of bricks is unstable; then there is visible the hair, the back of a human head, then again a leg sticks out, then again the bricks slide under the weight of a step, progress is almost imperceptible, no air raid, some further debris of the non-brick type, still no air raid—about here I notice that my receiver of impressions makes a click: it switches to semi-nightwalking [sleep-walking], no impressions, just climb, girl is crying, just drag her along, climb, the street could be traversed in 4 or 5 minutes, it must soon end, but the absence of buildings precludes knowledge of where we are, and indeed, the height of the brick mountain seems to diminish, some patches of pavement appear, the patches become larger and tend to merge, and then we see that we are out of the narrow street, even some buildings are still standing. Even a stretch of sidewalk is clear of bricks. Instead, there is a row of corpses, evidently extracted from the basement of the still standing building, uninjured, simply dead. Must have suffocated, as I now know, but then I simply saw that row, with no reaction. From then on streets are wide, no problem walking, damage to buildings decreases—we have left the old town, the Altstadt. By now all buildings are standing, seemingly undamaged, and then there is this 5 year old boy, next to the fence, lying face down, fresh as if asleep.
The diary story continues on 20 April with their renewed attempt to break through the next morning:
The streets were already full. People were moving about so strangely: for the most part they wandered slowly back and forth, seeming without any plan or goal, as if in a daze, almost like sleepwalkers. Only on the arterial roads was there a more uniform direction emerging: out of here! So we tried to get through. Nobody around had any information about how to get through. Everyone told us: ‘No, you can’t get through here! Try further along, over there’ or ‘Try back there!’ Nobody knew what things were like in the city. We tried to get through at roughly the same distance as the Technische Hochschule sports ground from Zelleschet Way. But the smoke and the dust were so thick there that we couldn’t get through. So we went to the next cross street and tried there, but that was just as bad … That’s where I saw the first casualties, that is, the ones that could still walk, but whose eyes had suffered from the smoke and fire. First-aid men were looking after them; it was actually the site of a burned field hospital. This sight didn’t encourage me in the least. But the futile search for a way through combined with the events of the previous night were gradually beginning to eat away at the nervous system; we had to start holding hands in order not to turn around, although so far the places we were in had only been fire-bombed. Finally we came to a wider street, where the No. 5 and 15 trams use to go up to Monerif [?]. This was where the fuel-bombed area began; clearly this made a much stronger impression.
The Karl May girl (‘A.’) makes a few rare, brief appearances in the diary story at this point:
A. was already losing her courage and wanted to turn back. I wasn’t happy about that; wanted to go further; I wanted at least to get through the Grosse Garten and inspect the district there. We kept going. But now the brute, knockout force of these impressions was building powerfully in its intensity. For here the bombs had fallen thicker and thicker. Whereas at first there had been only houses that were partly destroyed, here at the railway terminal and in Grosse Garten Street, every house had got a direct hit and had been burned out; most of them were still burning. And on top of that the smell of smoke and fire. The latter in particular has a splendid effect on the nerves. Subconsciously, the strongest impression of all was made by the people who were presumably still under the rubble. And then slowly one became conscious of the fact that a further attack was possible, and of our absolute helplessness against it if that happened. But I still pressed on, as I hoped at least there would be some breathable air in the Grosse Garten, and then there would not be far to go. But the Garten looked different. This was the zone where the bombs had rained down at their thickest. Instead of the path I had unconsciously anticipated, there lay obstacles in the form of a tangled undergrowth of broken branches and trees, as well as craters. And now there came something that put paid to my moral bravado: the first corpses of the day. I had seen corpses before, after the battle in Riga in 1941, but these looked different. And coming on top of everything else, it was enough to make my courage collapse. Fear caught hold of me. Simple fear, fear of what had now become immediate horror, together with thoughts of a possible new attack. Out! Just get out of here! A. hadn’t seen the dead bodies, but she fully agreed. I had lost all hope that the inhabitants of any place around had remained alive.
The chronology goes a bit haywire at this point, as Mischka digresses into fears about specific friends, including his new girlfriend Nanni, who later turned out to have survived.
This whole diary entry is unparagraphed in the original, written in small handwriting to cram in more, with the tension rising until it is almost coming out as a scream:
We started out again. And now came the horror, compared with which the previous morning was child’s play. Through that, however, I had already been pre-schooled, and I knew that one only needed to notice, that is see, enough of something not to stumble over it … The main railway station. A row of charred bodies. I knew that my mother had actually had the intention to come to Dresden, and there was the possibility that she had come in just at the decisive moment; I made myself look over these rows, but didn’t see the fur coat in question. Then we came to Prager Street, that is, the place where she had been earlier. Now it was just a heap of rubble.
Again, the diary account breaks off abruptly, to be continued without a break in the narrative on 22 March 1945:
You couldn’t walk through it, you had to climb over stones and charred beams. Here and there, a sometimes charred, sometimes horribly lifelike body part was peeping out from the rubble. And you couldn’t run away, you had to go forwards quite slowly. The only way not to pass out is, quite consciously, to let nothing affect you, not to think, just to press on, to turn all your thoughts towards where you are stepping, where you are going to climb over, to watch that you don’t tread on a wobbly stone and get your foot stuck. The stones are still hot, and the steam is still rising everywhere. Otherwise, all around is silent, deathly silent; now and then, out of the stillness comes a sudden explosion somewhere, or a wall caves in; the only noise that accompanies you is the sound of your own footsteps, and even that is dead, losing itself without echo in the rubble. Keep going. Don’t think about anything, don’t see anything. Don’t think about how it had looked just the evening before, how the art dealer had been here, the street corner or the cinema there … Keep going.
Finally, finally, the Ring Road appears. It is so wide that a path free of rubble remains down the centre. Here soldiers are carrying the bodies that are lying around and putting them all together in one place. No, not into one place, but on to the street that runs from Georg Square to the Elbe, where the No. 1 and No. 16 [trams] used to go to the main railway station. There is already a continuous row of bodies down to the bridge. A few people are going slowly along the row, looking at each one. There are not many. And there is the bridge. Hopefully at least the air will be more breathable. No, not really. There is only a gentle breeze blowing, and it brings with it dust and the smell of fire … We’re walking along the Elbe in the direction of Waldschloesschen. Gradually, gradually, it is getting better. There are still dead bodies lying all around, and the bank is strewn with bomb craters, but the air is becoming cleaner. Now the craters are becoming rarer, and at Waldschloesschen everything is almost unscathed; not even all the windows of the houses are broken.
The 1996 version includes (as the diary does not) their arrival at the home of the Karl May girl:
By the time we reach the house of the Karl May girl it is afternoon; the house is essentially undamaged; we get fed and I fall asleep on a freshly made clean bed.
Next morning we had breakfast, the somewhat shellshocked family—mother and daughter, father [being], as essentially all males [were], absent, and myself. At a point where daughter is absent, the mother mentions that she has confidence in me and would trust me with her daughter. I don’t know what to say, and accept her confidence. The time comes for me to leave; the mother asks whether I need something; I ask to be lent a suitcase, which is granted. I leave.
As Mischka told me this story orally, it was like a fairytale in which the hero is rewarded for his valiant deeds by being offered the hand of a beautiful princess but must continue on his quest—except that he didn’t want her hand, had escorted her out of a sense of duty, and seems to have found her more irritating than a proper object of chivalry should be.
The journey home across the city, suitcase in hand, was not without incident, as the musing recalls:
I retrace the path of yesterday, circumnavigating the Altstadt. As I reach the TH an air raid is sounded. I run to that field a few hundred m[etres] ahead. As I reach it I hear the noise of falling hardware, drop the suitcase and run toward the middle of the field to get away from the trees—the sleeping boy of yesterday must have been killed by a falling tree limb. I drop to the ground; a number of small bombs detonate; some clumps of soil thrown into the air fall around and on me, I run towards the closest crater, but that is the end of the raid. I go back to pick up the suitcase, and there it is, on the rim of a crater, with a dent but not a hole. It remains usable.
The diary tells this story too, reiterating a point of personal scientific observation made several times in his narrative, that ‘no fear or other embarrassing feeling was discernible’. By this time, Mischka had had enough of writing down the story, but he had one more remarkable sight to record:
What I saw, I don’t want to go into further; it would be too much and there isn’t enough space to tell it all. Just one thing, a more idyllic sight: across the street, in between the people—and without worrying about them, or about the cars bouncing over the holes in the bitumen—slowly walks a young giraffe. Without haste, her head held high, she disappears into the undergrowth in the Grosse Garten.
‘Ausgebombt, gesund’ (bombed out, unhurt) was the laconic message Mischka sent his mother in Aussig. ‘Write post restante to the address you know in Flensburg. You go too!’ This is one of the occasions when German efficiency astonishes: the medium was an ‘express message’ sent by telegram, explicitly marked as a notification of survival and thus probably free; and it arrived.
It was actually almost a month before he set out. First there was a romantic interlude with a young German woman, Marianne (Nanni) Schuster, whom he had met sometime the previous autumn, probably at the university. Nanni came from Chemnitz in Saxony, and Mischka had evidently visited, or at least tried to visit, her family there, but they seem to have been friends rather than lovers until early in the new year. In the diary account of the bombing, his despairing feeling that nobody could have survived didn’t last long ‘because I was pleased, but not at all surprised to find a letter from MS waiting for me at home’. She had sat out the raid in the basement of her house, which, although ‘located about 1 km from where the [dead] sleeping boy was’, lay in the direction away from the Altstadt and had come through intact. The afternoon of his return from dropping off the Karl May girl, Nanni came over to Planettastrasse. The musing records that they decided to set off together to her family home, about 80 kilometres to the west:
Packing just some minimum into the briefcase, … off we went, to the West, essentially going from station to station to find a still functioning one. Indeed we got to such by the evening; a train was expected the next morning. We were sent to the chateaux of the local whatever, who provided a barn or such for refugees passing through town. There was straw on the floor, and a naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. We, together with the 50 or so other refugees put ourselves down, in the manner Vonnegut, in his book on the Dresden bombing, described as ‘like stacked spoons’—even though it was only a family—in our case, two—at a time … Next morning indeed a train appeared and later that day we arrived in Chemnitz; they lived far from the town, out of harm’s way; the father, being a village doctor, had not been called up.
Mischka had left a message for his mother outside his Dresden lodgings—a piece of cardboard attached to a stick, as was the custom that had evolved during the war. His mother duly came up from Tetschen-Bodenbach to look for him, and in fact didn’t see his message, but the neighbours told her he was all right. As promised in his stick-message, Mischka made his way to Tetschen-Bodenbach within a week (taking a roundabout route from Chemnitz, since you couldn’t get through Dresden). In the next week, he went back and forth between Chemnitz and Tetschen-Bodenbach a few times, and he and Nanni made an excursion back to Dresden as well, going on their bicycles to pick up some of her things that had been left behind. All of this probably had its idyllic aspect for Mischka and Nanni—in a letter written two years later, when they were already divided by being in different occupation zones, Nanni referred to 13 February 1945, ‘Dresden’s death-day’, as ‘our birthday’—but horror was not far away. During the bicycle trip, they passed the main railway station, ‘where the corpses were—still!—being extracted from the underground shelter’. In his diary, Mischka recorded that he ‘had learnt to think over these things coolly and without getting upset, not letting them have an impact on me’, but this was patently not the case. Of his later visits, he wrote:
I have seen the horrors and their traces. Now I am probably already immune. And at the same time not immune. But the horror remains in Dresden, it is still there. One month after the attack I stood at the main station: one track and platform were sufficiently repaired for the commuter train Pirma-Meissen to be running again. Prager Street had been cleared down the centre to allow the traffic through. Men were already working on further repairs of the main station. And yet: the horror of the city that had once been was still alive, and had everybody in its power. About 300 people were standing there, waiting for the train to Pirma. They weren’t waiting for the train the way you usually wait, relaxed, impatient or frustrated, but with fear deep inside: will it come or not? Usually a crowd feels safe where an individual might break down; here even that didn’t help …
On top of everything else, Mischka had fallen in love. Now there was the question of whether his future was with, or without, Nanni. A diary entry for 27 February 1945, written in an extremely stilted and convoluted style, probably to prevent too much expression of distress, indicates that Mischka had asked Nanni to come with him to Flensburg (which presumably meant marrying him) but she hadn’t been ready for the drastic step of leaving her home and family for the unknown. ‘I played for a while with the thought to turn aside from my own path and to try to continue on not alone,’ Mischka wrote. But there is in fact no indication that he ever considered not leaving for Flensburg; the ‘turning aside from my own path’ probably meant adding a personal commitment that might compromise his commitment to physics. But Nanni (‘the case in question’ in Mischka’s agonised circumlocutions) ‘disappointed me … because she is staying at home, or, more exactly, because she has given up the struggle without actually really having begun it’. He had ‘hoped that another result was possible’, and even his mother, who had managed to make Nanni’s acquaintance at this period, had been encouraging. But Nanni thought it was too much for her to handle, and perhaps, he concluded, this was the best thing for her. To sum up, naturally in quotation marks (I don’t know from what piece of German romantic poetry): ‘Du bist doch mein schoenstes Erlebnisgewesen’ (‘You were my most beautiful experience’).
On 12 March 1945, almost a month after the bombing, Mischka finally set off from Chemnitz to Flensburg. On the train, he opened the letter Nanni had given him on parting and found her photograph (he kept it in his diary, so it is now in my possession, and I have put it at the head of this chapter; a sweet, serious young woman, not spineless—but not a risk-taker either). ‘What a strong impression a picture can make!’ he wrote in his diary as he sat in the train. Opening the envelope and seeing her face, ‘I got something like a blow to the chest.’ The next day, he tried to make sense of the Nanni affair in his diary entry, comparing it with an earlier parting in Riga in September 1943, but got distracted by the thought that ‘between 9.43 and 3.45, a year and a half has passed’, including things that were ‘quite alarmingly awful’. But ‘perhaps that is going to change’. Half a century later, skipping over the parting from Nanni (whom he calls ‘Blue-eyes’ in this text), he concluded his Dresden musing with a bit of mathematician’s number-play about his date of departure, which doesn’t mean he wasn’t in earnest: ‘In my memory on the date 12345 begins a new chapter.’