In early February 1945 there were 198 Jewish people left in Dresden; before the Nazis came to power, there had been over 6,000. Even before the outbreak of war Dresden’s Jews had had to endure the calculated wrecking and destruction of an architectural treasure, an act of sacrilege that was to be replicated throughout the continent. The grand synagogue that stood by the river at the eastern end of Brühl’s Terrace, designed by gentile Gottfried Semper in the early nineteenth century, had been an ornament not merely to the Jewish population but to Dresden itself – the perfect architectural symbol for a community that was an organic part of the city’s life, and with its own unmistakable identity. In the nineteenth century the synagogue had even attracted the dedicated anti-Semite Richard Wagner, who walked around it with avid curiosity.1 Then, on 9 November 1938, came the terror orchestrated by the Gauleiter and his deputies that saw it burned to the ground: Kristallnacht. By February 1945 the site was long empty, as though a tooth had been extracted, leaving behind only some stubborn fragments of wall.
The synagogue’s genesis lay in the nineteenth-century city’s cosmopolitanism. Semper, who had already received the commission to build Dresden’s grand opera house in the late 1830s, had been asked, for a modest additional sum, to build a synagogue on the edge of the Altstadt that would somehow blend in with the nearby baroque splendour of the Frauenkirche and other grand structures. But blending does not mean replicating, and the result was a brilliant addition to Dresden’s already eclectic skyline. The exterior exhibited Byzantine influences: an octagonal tower, punctuated with windows, rose from the main rectangular body of the structure and at its western end stood two more slender towers topped with domes. Those domes spoke to the much larger effort of the Frauenkirche that rose over the streets close by, but they also strongly suggested an Eastern influence, an impression that was intensified inside the synagogue by distinctive and elegant curves and arches reminiscent of Moorish Spain or North Africa.2 In addition, Semper had designed the synagogue so that pan-directional shafts of light would illuminate every corner.
The reason the synagogue had been designed by a gentile and not a Jew was, as historian Helen Rosenau suggested, because at that point in the mid nineteenth century, Jews were still finding it very difficult to enter certain trade guilds. Also, commissions of this nature were quite frequently offered to high-placed social contacts.3 That aside, Semper’s synagogue was a monument to all the possibilities of assimilation and, indeed, cross-cultural respect. This was not a building carefully hidden in a medieval ghetto: it took a proud and prominent position along the city’s most fashionable promenading area. Until 1938 it was an integral element in that curving and sophisticated riverscape.
On the evening of 9 November 1938 the synagogue – as well as a huge number of shops and businesses that stretched right the way down Prager Strasse – became targets. Earlier in the day a low-ranking Nazi diplomatic official died, having been gunned down in Paris by a Polish Jew horrified by the treatment of his family back in Germany. Hitler’s response was both incandescent and obscenely calculated: the word was spread through the SS in every German city. That night they would strike back. And in Dresden, young men stood in the square in front of the Rathaus (town hall), just round the corner from the synagogue, cajoling and whipping up the passions of passers-by who now were becoming a crowd. Nothing was left to the vagaries of spontaneity: a little earlier, SS men had stormed into the synagogue and sprayed all around with petrol, preparing it for conflagration; this done, they moved outside once more, awaiting the quiet signal.
In that square, in the darkness of that autumn evening, the men stood before metal braziers standing on cobbles, small flames leaping noiselessly, unruly shadows cast. As if by some twitch of morphic resonance, the violence began. Armed with staves and clubs, the men and their supporters set off towards the railway station, past the rich illuminations of the shop windows. They knew in advance which shops were Jewish owned. The different notes of shattering glass were a counterpoint to the guttural, ugly language of the shouting. The terror that was inspired in the shopkeepers and shop workers who were beaten up, arrested and dragged to cold imprisonment can only be imagined. And while this went on, another cohort of young men went back to the synagogue and set the fires roaring high.
Other citizens were not inert. Dresden’s fire brigade received the call and were there commendably soon as the flames within the synagogue took a more adamant hold, the grey smoke rising higher into the murky autumn sky. Yet the firemen were not allowed to pass the ranks of SS men; they could only watch as, with a roar from within the building, its windows burst into the street. Eventually, they were allowed to intervene, but only to save the immediately adjoining structures. These were evacuated, though the cruelty some Jewish inhabitants faced outside in that cold air was just as frightening. They were surrounded by jeering, taunting young men and forced to watch as the walls of the synagogue began to collapse.4 Other citizens looked on with horror, men and women who dared not move or decry the SS actions. Even by 1938, shows of defiance could result in imprisonment and beating.
Present at the fire was Dresden’s Burgermeister, Dr Rudolf Kluge, who used the occasion to make a pronouncement. ‘The symbol of the hereditary racial enemy,’ he declared, ‘has finally been extinguished.’5 He was saying this of a building that had always been part of the landscape of his life; had he always gazed upon it, and the worshippers within, with such hatred? That night, over a hundred Jews around the city were murdered as their shops and businesses were shattered, ransacked and ruined; hundreds more were arrested and taken to the cells, to be subjected to stony-faced violence.
With the synagogue near collapse some hours later, its fabric cracking and creaking, the firemen were permitted to douse flames that might yet spread. Among them was a young man called Alfred Neugebauer, who had originally trained as a lithographer and who had a powerful interest in history and archaeology. The twin domes of the Semper Synagogue had been topped with polished metal Stars of David, each measuring some two feet across. One of these was retrieved and taken back to the fire station, where Neugebauer, experiencing a sudden rush of urgency, knew it had to be preserved and saved. He concealed it beneath a blanket and then took it home on his bicycle at the end of his shift. This was a dangerous act; the discovery of the symbol in any house search would have had Neugebauer marked out as a dissident. He hid it well, though, and as war came and he moved into various areas of civic defence, the six-pointed star stayed where it was and survived the conflict.6
As for the rest of the synagogue, Dr Kluge’s office declared that the glowingly hot remains be dynamited and removed, the entire site razed under the pretext of public safety. The malice of the burning was compounded by the demand that the Jewish community pay for the work. There is a point when official callousness – enacting orders from higher above – transforms into malevolence. In the case of Dr Kluge, it was the way in which he ordered that a film unit should be present at the site of the ruined synagogue to capture the moments when the dynamite shattered the last of its foundations.7 Anyone with the slightest moral qualm about this persecution might have taken care that it would not be preserved in such a way that the entire world might one day come to see. And so Dr Kluge’s anti-Semitism was proved not merely authentic, but also completely sociopathic.
Yet in a wider sense, the story of what happened to the synagogue also perhaps helps to illuminate one of the enduringly terrible questions about Dresden – the mystery of how such violent hatred against Jews could possibly have festered in a city that had stood above all for art, and the intellect, and the commingling of cultures.
The opening of the Semper Synagogue in 1840 was confirmation that Jews were central to Dresden society. By the 1920s, when Dresden was a city of new electric trams, large banks, wealthy villas and adventurous shops and restaurants, the expanded Jewish population was very much at ease, its people moving among all the professions as well as the arts. More than this, the city had proved a safe haven for Jews from other, more aggressive parts of the country. Experienced dentist Erich Isakowitz came to Dresden with his young family in the early 1920s, having moved from a town in eastern Prussia where anti-Semitism had been on the rise.8 Dresden by contrast offered a range of new friendships (and indeed a whole new range of clients for Isakowitz’s dental surgery, the technology of which was thankfully becoming a little more sophisticated by the 1920s, at least in terms of pain relief and dentures that did not shatter). Aside from anything else, here in this city was to be found an abundance of intelligence: the teachers, professors and students at the very good university, the artists and writers who had been congregating here since the turn of the century, the bankers and the insurance brokers and the stockbrokers who dived deep into the city’s cultural riches.
Whether at the cinema, the theatre, or any of the hundreds of cafes that served Dresdeners, there was little outward sense that the Jews were regarded as separate, or ‘other’; Jewish children – such as Erich Isakowitz’s daughter – attended the same schools as gentiles.9 The Isakowitz family lived in a pleasant apartment block a little to the south of the grand railway station. Their home had central heating, telephone, quarters for a maid and a leafy conservatory, warm in winter winds.10 Isakowitz had many patients for his dental practice, among whom was Eva Klemperer, the wife of university lecturer Victor. The stories of Klemperer and Erich Isakowitz point to a recurring philosophical and religious fault line in Germany: both men had served bravely in the First World War and both had risked their lives for their country. There was never any suggestion that this should be otherwise. So how was it that there could still be any questions in Dresden social circles about assimilation? (Indeed, in the case of Klemperer, who had actually converted to Protestantism for a time as a young man – and then again later, undergoing baptism as he embarked upon his academic career – the question gains extra resonance.)
The term assimilation, as used by gentiles, always suggested that Germans who held the Jewish faith were alien. Yet they had been born, brought up and educated in Germany and served in its armed forces. In Klemperer’s accounts of gatherings in the 1930s, as it became ever clearer that Hitler was not some fleeting, temporary aberration but a fearsome phenomenon, there were agonized conversations among Dresden’s gentiles and Jews alike about assimilation and non-acceptance, and about the desire (or, more realistically, fear-filled urgency) to emigrate to Palestine.11
All of this was something that Victor Klemperer tried to deny. He knew himself to be German; the Nazis were the ones who were ‘un-German’, to use his term. Indeed, right from his birth in Poland in 1881, and subsequent upbringing in Berlin, Klemperer’s life had been flavoured by his enthusiastic and affectionate sense of his own German-ness. He had in his study a sabre that he had used in the First World War; Klemperer had afterwards been awarded the Cross of Merit for his volunteered services in the conflict. More specifically, Klemperer identified very strongly as a Prussian; the world and the politics that he most admired were made incarnate in Bismarck.
But he had always been alert to the world around him; immediately after the First World War, Klemperer very much disliked all colours of the new, aggressive radical politics, far left as well as far right. It was frantic, unstable, gravitating down towards violence. And with it came for the first time a prominent and noticeable new strain of anti-Semitism in this wild public discourse. The razor-slash atmosphere of street politics, combined with all the vicious economic blows and financial insecurity, was already fomenting loathing of moneyed Jewry before the Nazis made it their cold-eyed focus.
It was after the First World War that Klemperer had chosen to settle in Dresden with his non-Jewish wife Eva, who was an accomplished musicologist. There was already a more genteel form of anti-Semitism that had been embedded in the fabric of German society for some time. The reason Klemperer had converted to Christianity as a young man had nothing to do with his beliefs – he was not religious in any way – but was that certain professions and academic roles in German institutions were, during the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm, quietly, informally barred to those of the Jewish faith. In addition to this, Klemperer’s strong sense of his Germanic identity was allied to a feeling that Protestantism was its most natural cultural expression.
Klemperer found secure tenure at the Technical University in Dresden. His field was philology and the Romance languages, as well as German studies. Amid the chaos of the 1920s – the hyperinflation, the national humiliation both of reparations and of the French occupation of the Ruhr and the resultant foaming, highly aggressive extremists on all political fronts – Klemperer and his wife none the less found their own sort of stability.
Hitler’s ascendancy to the chancellorship in 1933 might just have been foretold, but the speed at which virulent, spitting Jew-hatred became embedded in day-to-day German culture could not. What began was a breathtakingly fast process of ‘othering’, enacted in cities right across the country but somehow with even more awful velocity in Dresden. April 1933 brought the start of the boycott movement, the government-sponsored campaign to persuade non-Jews to turn away from all Jewish businesses. As well as the terrible economic price, there were a thousand painful emotional wounds as well, Dresden fashion retailers and jewellers watching as previously loyal and friendly customers simply disappeared.
The venom coursed further through the civic veins: academics were forced to swear professions of loyalty to Hitler in public. This oath-taking began in schools but very shortly the order went out in the universities. Signed documents were not enough; these declarations of absolute obedience to the new government had to be heard and witnessed. Non-Jewish academics may have consoled themselves with the idea that all political regimes are transient, and that Hitler’s party might be more transient than most. That illusory consolation would itself have been fleeting. Soon came the Nuremberg Laws, barring Jews both from a wide range of professions and from academic tenure.
No matter that he had been baptized a Christian in 1912, this was the case for Victor Klemperer. His removal from the university did not happen immediately; unlike his Jewish colleagues, he was granted some extra time because he was a war veteran. But when it became plain that his job was no longer open to him, there were further malicious blows. Not only was he not allowed to teach; he was also denied access to the university library. Now he could no longer even study for his own satisfaction or pleasure. Books that he yearned to read were now beyond his reach.12 He had his academic pension to live on; but as the 1930s ground on, these funds began to diminish dramatically, until they vanished altogether. This was merely the start of the extraordinary ordeal that he and Eva were to be condemned to suffer.
By the mid 1930s many of Dresden’s Jewish citizens started thinking more seriously about emigration. This was hardly a move to be made lightly, to abandon one’s home in the hope of becoming at best ‘a guest’ (as the author Stefan Zweig put it)13 in a foreign land. How could safety and security be guaranteed abroad?
The Aryanization of the German banks in 1935 – effectively straightforward theft by the government – compounded the growing sense of dread; even by then there were whispers and rumours about the new camps that had been established outside small German towns, suggestions that to be sent to such places meant that one would never return. The first inmates of these camps were largely political prisoners, communists and radical left-wingers violently opposed to Nazi ideology. Many were beaten with whips and truncheons. Some were found dead by concerned visiting lawyers such as Josef Hartinger, their bodies covered with wounds.14 And many of them were Jewish.
In this rising miasma of anxiety, a number of Dresden Jews began making inquiries. As some were looking towards Palestine, which seemed a not wholly congenial prospect, others turned to Canada, to South Africa, to Argentina. In the case of the Isakowitz family, the preference was England. But by this stage it was not permitted for Jews simply to leave Germany; they had to pay a considerable ransom to the Nazi Party in order to do so. The more belongings and valuables any family had packed ready to be sent, the higher the proportion of that perceived wealth the Nazis were set on expropriating. Fortunately, and only after making considerable sacrifices, the Isakowitz family managed to leave, travelling to London and finding a semblance of security in Hampstead Garden Suburb.15
For the Jews who remained in Dresden, the sense of humiliation and threat continued to escalate with terrible effect. Professor Klemperer, already deprived of the work that he loved, suffered further hurt when the thuggish officers of the Gestapo snatched his typewriter from him. The Klemperers were no longer allowed to employ their cleaning lady; the new laws stated that Jews were forbidden to have Aryans working for them.
Added to this were surprising and distressing outbreaks of anti-Semitism from the most ordinary people. Klemperer recalled one day in the late 1930s when he visited the pharmacy to have a prescription made up. The young lady behind the counter simply pretended that he was not there. Another customer came into the shop; the girl beckoned him forward to the counter. The customer gestured towards Klemperer and told her that this gentleman was first in line. The assistant would not be contradicted; she would serve the other customer first.16
The expulsion of the Jews from their professions was excruciating, and not just because livings were lost. It was also the ruthless way in which entire proud identities were snatched away. As Stefan Zweig observed elsewhere, the deepest desire of European Jews in the first part of the twentieth century was not to acquire wealth – wealth was merely a means of getting a secure foothold in gentile society – but instead to become intellectuals. No one deep down wanted to be a merchant, but a great many dreamed of studying for a doctorate.17 The old anti-Semitic stereotype of the acquisitive Jew piling up gold was hated by the Jewish community; conversely, intellectual endeavour in any sphere meant that Jews were not merely assimilated into society, but became an absolutely integral ingredient in its cultural life, stretching from writing to the performing arts to science.
This had as profound an impact in Dresden as it did in Vienna; the Jewish community had loved being so central to a city that thrived and flourished on a wide range of rich traditions. And the Nazis knew precisely what they were doing when they forbade the Jews from continuing in any intellectual pursuit – a calculated form of internal cultural exile aimed at the most sensitive of nerves. From there, the further stages of dehumanization were easily set in train.
In 1938 Jewish citizens of Polish heritage became the focus of Dresden’s Nazis: as in other cities, they were to be removed from their homes and forcibly deported to Poland – a land where they had no home. And so it was that many Dresden Jews found themselves torn from the city they loved before being kept by the bewildered Polish authorities in holding camps: a frightening twilight existence in which statehood, citizenship and human rights were denied.
In the year that Germany went to war with Britain, Dresden’s remaining Jews were evicted from their homes. In the vast majority of cases, these were quite simply stolen by the authorities. The Klemperers, who lived in a modest, pleasant villa in the suburb of Dölzschen, felt this new oppression with dagger-like keenness. A little before this, they had had their phone line removed; Jews were now forbidden to communicate telephonically. Added to this had been a new by-law of exquisitely calibrated malice: Jews were no longer allowed to keep household pets. The Klemperers loved their cat; now they were obliged to have it destroyed.18
Those who had been torn from their family homes were moved to apartment buildings known as Judenhäuser; these buildings were horribly inferior to their previous accommodation: cramped, dimly lit and with unreliable gas supplies. Nazi officers could and did enter freely at all hours. On one occasion Klemperer was slapped around the face, and his wife was spat at.
The Klemperers’ car was impounded. As the war deepened, travel restrictions extended to public transport: Jews were no longer allowed to ride on Dresden’s trams. In addition to this came the order that all Jews must wear prominently a yellow star. On the streets of Dresden these had the most terrible lustre, not only making the dread and vulnerability all the heavier but also forcing friendly neighbours and ex-colleagues to gaze at a sign of humiliation they did not want to see. There were other degradations to come.
There seemed to be an almost childlike spite in the Dresden decree of 1942 that Jews were now forbidden to buy either flowers or ice cream. The latter by-law seemed aimed squarely at the few Jewish children who remained, an act of cruelty so calculated as to suggest something hotter, more lava-like, than sociopathy. It came on top of the edicts that Jews were no longer permitted on Brühl’s Terrace, the promenade overlooking the Elbe, and there were certain paths in the Great Garden park that were also now declared to be off-limits.19 The last time Jews had been banned from the riverside terrace was 200 years previously.
Professor Klemperer was trying to fathom this regime and all of its malevolence and to square it with his own love of Germany, which resonated with the deep conservatism of Bismarck and Kaiser Wilhelm. The Nazis and Hitler, by contrast, he saw as revolutionaries; they were, he thought, an incarnation of Romanticism, a movement that was all about the unstoppable tides of passion and feeling. Nazism was its darkest flowering, exulting in ‘the de-throning of reason’, ‘the animalisation of mankind’ and the ‘glorification of the power idea, the predator, the blond beast’.20
But even as the war intensified, Klemperer was also interested to note that among Dresden’s citizens, adherence to Nazism was by no means universal. Certainly he was followed and taunted and spat at by some boys in the Hitler Youth, but balancing that were innumerable small but vital acts of kindness from strangers: people commenting how distressed they were by the yellow stars; shopkeepers sneaking across small extra rations (the Jews were barely above starvation levels of subsistence). Then there were the much greater acts of kindness, the non-Jewish family friends who stayed loyal. There was Annemarie Köhler, who vitally provided a hiding place in her own home for Klemperer’s written diaries: had they been found, the consequences would have been lethal.
Then there was the attorney Helmut Richter, who – astoundingly, in the circumstances – managed to save Klemperer’s beloved house in Dölzschen. Richter used his legal prowess to raise a new mortgage on Klemperer’s home. This meant that, even though the professor was forbidden to live in it, the deeds were still at least in his name. The house was leased to a Nazi; naturally, no rent was paid to Klemperer, but the fact that the property was still the professor’s was truly remarkable. Yet even the most covert of actions had consequences. Attorney Richter had joined the Nazi Party years before, but by the start of the war in 1939 he had turned away from it in disgust. By 1943 Richter’s antipathy, which manifested itself further than in simply rescuing his friend’s house, could no longer be ignored by the Dresden authorities. He was arrested and sent to Buchenwald concentration camp and his death.21
Klemperer could see that, even though their persecution had echoes of medieval pogroms, the Nazis ‘arrived not in the garb of the past, but in that of the most extreme modernity’.22 This modernity needed labour, and he was among those forced into working for Zeiss Ikon until exempted on grounds of age. A special camp for some of the other workers was built a little north of the city, at Hellerberge. There is a spool of film, a recording, quite beyond shame, of the people arriving there. The men and women were stripped; and then, naked, they were ‘decontaminated’ and ‘deloused’. These details stayed out of the camera’s frame, but there is a surviving shot of a vast furnace being fed, the inference from which apparently was that these barracks would be very well heated. One cannot help but wonder if this shot was included deliberately: a knowing note of premonition.23
From here, after months of labour, Jewish citizens found themselves suddenly facing transportation, a journey to the east in conditions of pure horror. Each and every Jewish citizen was on a municipal list. From this list were selected the names of those to be sent to Riga, to Theresienstadt. As with the persecution of the Jews throughout Nazi Europe, the implacable bureaucracy of death went beyond any kind of reason. In the space of just one generation, the city was participating, and not unwillingly, in a programme of methodical genocide. Yet in the early days of 1945, Victor Klemperer was still recording flashes of generosity from gentiles. It is a remarkable thing: like a flower crushed beneath a rock that still instinctively feels for the sunlight.
The moral stain had expanded outwards. Usually in times of war, art is conscripted to the struggle, yet in the case of Dresden it had by 1945 been suffocated. As with the psychotic persecution of the Jews, there seemed something quite extraordinary about a city whose soul had been defined by rich culture and creativity now forcibly suppressing and distorting that genius.