Hamlet was first performed in Dresden just ten years after William Shakespeare died. In 1626, a troupe of ‘English comedians’ staged what is now thought to be a shortened version of the tragedy.1 There have even been suggestions that this production for Saxony’s royal court involved the use of elaborate marionettes, the effigies miming the play within the play.
That detail would have greatly appealed to the twentieth-century Dresden modernist Otto Griebel. Among Griebel’s brilliantly varied interests in the 1920s and 1930s was Dresden’s continued tradition of marionette plays; he was gripped by the possibilities of mocking allegory that they offered. This in turn earned him the hostile attention of the authorities. By February 1945, as a forty-nine-year-old father of five who had been torn away from Dresden by the hurricane of war that had flung him to a corner of eastern Europe in reluctant military service as a draughtsman, Otto Griebel was now free and back with his family and what remained of his work in the darkened city. Although no special shelters had been built for the city’s living population, some time back proper shelters had been provided for Dresden’s many art treasures, among them Old Masters, including Rembrandts.
The elegant pensioner Georg Erler had his own private art collection in his smart home on Striesener Strasse, to the east of the city. He, like so many others, had long believed that Dresden would be spared. ‘The will to destroy the enemy seemed to stop before our beautiful city of art,’ he wrote.2 Yet he did fear another force: the Red Army. In the early weeks of 1945, Herr Erler and his wife Marielein had debated how best to safeguard their aesthetic treasures, which included large oil paintings of distinguished family members, ornamental Meissen china and a rather beautiful antique six-armed chandelier ‘made entirely of opalescent yellowish toned Bohemian glass’.3 Mirroring the city’s authorities, which had carefully packed the contents of the galleries and the castle and transported them to closely monitored networks of caves in the hills, the Erlers arranged to take their own art out of Dresden, making several trips across country to deposit it with relatives in the smaller town of Lüneburg.
Art can sometimes be symptomatic, as well as reflective or interpretive; whether tranquil or feverish, it can capture the temperature of a time. So much 1920s German art was raw and stark and brutal but, curiously, neither the talented Otto Griebel nor his radically innovative artistic contemporaries in Dresden seem to have detected the latent malevolence in Germany through the traumatized post-war period from 1918 onwards. Griebel’s story – the way he was thrown so violently back and forth during those years – partly mirrors the story of art in Dresden down the centuries.
Theatre and art remained at the heart of the city even through the severely distorting times of hysterical censorship. The Nazis were not the first power in the city to try to bend the visions of art to their will. And nor were they the last. Yet over time, that freedom stubbornly reasserted itself. The city – chiefly during the eighteenth-century reign of Augustus the Strong – had accumulated the most astonishing range of artistic treasures: lustrous nativity portraits, extraordinary porcelain, the rich flashing reds and blues of rubies and sapphires embedded in sword hilts.4 The range of the paintings – some executed in the city itself, others bought up from Amsterdam to Venice – spoke to sensibilities that were authentically and grandly pan-European. Here were portraits and annunciation scenes by Titian; madly populated landscapes from Jan Brueghel the Elder.5
And there were great artists who saw that Dresden itself was an ornament to be captured in its delicate beauty, and so, even by the harrowed days of 1945, Dresdeners still somehow understood themselves, through these works, to belong to an aesthetic world that stretched far beyond the rocky plains and the haunted forests of Saxony. Through the ages these artists had contrived to make the soul of Dresden genuinely cosmopolitan.
The Venetian Bernardo Bellotto, who had painted both Venice and London and bathed them in a blue/gold sun, came to live in the city in the mid eighteenth century. Here, his landscapes were imbued with a silvery light: crisper, clearer and serving to draw closer attention to exquisite architectural detail. In a sense, he was transmitting the glory of others, for his eye captured in almost hyper-realist detail the stonework of the Catholic cathedral, the soft curving contours of the Frauenkirche dome. This was painting not just as a means of evoking aesthetic delight: it was a deliberate act of remembrance, a means of preserving that which could at any time be destroyed; war had come to Dresden before.6 Centuries before that deathly grey February, painters had sensed the city’s vulnerability.
Bellotto’s most famous study of the city was to be linked strongly to the days and weeks around February 1945. ‘Dresden from the Right Bank of the Elbe’, the artist’s position on the north-west bank of the river looking south-east towards that skyline, was executed in 1748 but could have been painted at any point since. The light is apple-bright, and this perfectly proportioned and detailed study of that curving river bend and all the proud churches and houses and academies along it was after the war to serve as an invaluable reference point.
Similarly, Johan Christian Dahl’s ‘View of Dresden at Full Moon’, painted around 1838, is a poignant vision of a city that would have been equally familiar to both Bellotto and Victor Klemperer, depicted in a new and evocative way: in the rich blue of the night.7 The light here is soft silver, with the dome of the Frauenkirche and the sharp spire of the Catholic cathedral in deep silhouette. Dahl, a Norwegian, had moved to the city in the early years of the nineteenth century and had formed a close friendship with the man who is now acknowledged as the city’s pre-eminent artist: Caspar David Friedrich. It is in Friedrich’s work that we see perhaps a little of Dresden’s more numinous qualities, something a shade detached from the everyday, looking into distances and seeing worlds that are strange yet familiar. Friedrich had been born in Pomerania, but after precocious artistic success, he set up home in the kingdom of Saxony. Here was a Dresden artist steeped in Romanticism, most famous now for the lone wanderer on top of a mountain crag staring out over ‘the sea of fog’ and other lonely peaks. Here too were landscapes without people: vast ravines, blasted trees – and through the ruby mists of sunset, faraway spires rising into rich red skies; all the terror and the seduction of the sublime.
There were even more unsettling Friedrich images: the snow-patched ruins of an abbey; the iron gates before a cemetery. Dresden hills and meadows were depicted in eerie twilit tones.8 These were paintings that appeared to have been summoned from dreams, and to later generations they also seemed freighted with all the troubling symbolism of the unconscious mind and, specifically, the German soul. The works of Friedrich were much admired by the Nazis, and it was not until the 1970s that this taint was dispelled. The attraction might have been partly this: in those faraway mists there rose towers and spires suggestive of a faith that seemed not wholly Christian – at least, not in its Catholic iteration. When you are up on the hills of Dresden on a foggy autumnal day, that arresting effect of impossibly sharp distant spires emerging from the clouds is there.
The sophistication of Dresden as a citadel of artistic thought and innovation, a zenith of European civilization, acquired more and more depth. And unlike other ornate cultural centres, it had a continuing attraction for young radical artists. The most famous of the groupings formed at the beginning of the twentieth century was Die Brücke (The Bridge). This was not the first German art movement to turn against established academies, or to attempt to form an idealized community, but Die Brücke was seriously avant-garde.
Here was a group that rejected what it saw as bourgeois realism in favour of compositions that evoked deep inner feelings and turbulence; the work that emerged was later termed German expressionism, and for several decades it became an extraordinarily influential and wide-ranging genre. There were canvases that pulsed with glowing, clashing colour, heads and bodies depicted against sharp, strange angles; there were also chilling woodcuts depicting gas masks and death’s heads, all executed with a tangible anger. This movement was to become the apotheosis of everything the Nazis loathed about modernism.
Die Brücke – which contained the seeds of a wider social and sexual revolution – had been founded in 1905 by two young architecture students enrolled at the Dresden Technical University: Fritz Bleyl and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. There was an early passion for folk art, the wood sculptures to be found in the forested lands around. This interest in a less urban, more communal existence also manifested itself in terms of ostentatious sexual abandon in those forests with the artists’ life models.
They were joined early on by Emil Nolde, his paintings luminously powerful.9 The spirit of the movement was disseminated across Germany, and across Europe too. In Dresden, innovation fed further inventiveness; expressionism became fused with furious social satire and the determination to portray proletarian realities. In those years before the outbreak of the First World War, the city was nurturing the artistic talents of students Conrad Felixmüller, Otto Dix and Otto Griebel.
Of these, it was Dix’s work that became immediately, viscerally, emblematic. In 1914, aged twenty-two, he had hurled himself like so many other young men into the First World War, carried along with the initial waves of exultation that marked the declaration of hostilities: the certainty that victory would be swift and honourable. And, of course, Dix, like his comrades, very quickly understood the squalid, mud-sucking, barbed-wire-torn truth. The young artist served bravely and was awarded the Iron Cross, but something new had entered his soul.
He returned to Dresden in 1919, and the art that he produced in the 1920s evoked physical shock. There was no more vague abstraction; instead, pitiless clarity. Der Krieg was a series of etchings depicting trench life and death. There was no heroism here; and no pity either. This world instead was simply one of unimaginable pain, visible in bulging eyes and filth, with all varieties of mud and death.10 ‘Stormtroopers Advancing Under Gas’ remains one of the most totemic images of the cycle: the masks skull-like in this weird landscape of hell. Dix suffered continual nightmares involving crawling through bombed-out houses and rubble; his dreaming self spent every night in a phantasmal Dresden which had been destroyed.11
The artist – whose work came to be understood as part of a fresh movement called Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity), depicting the dark social realities of Weimar life – was appointed a professor at the Dresden Academy of Art in 1927. One of his young peers – who had taught Dix about some of the technicalities of printing from woodblocks – was Conrad Felixmüller. Like Dix, Felixmüller had returned from the war an implacable radical.
This young man’s speciality was woodcuts: strong, urgent, blending an urban industrial realism with the stabbing geometry of expressionism. Felixmüller had served in a medical capacity during the Great War, and on his return to Dresden he threw himself into the roiling cauldron of revolutionary politics. The months after the war had seen authority temporarily upended in what became known as the ‘German Revolution’: councils and industries occupied by workers and soldiers. The Bolshevik seizure of Russia the previous year seemed as though it might be repeated here, but with each and every advance by socialists and communists, there were the opposing forces of the right, who found their most eloquently violent articulation in the Freikorps: roaming armed squads composed in part of former soldiers. In the aftershocks of war, the brutality was transposed to city streets.
Germany in defeat resembled the expressionist horror of the famous 1920 film Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari, in which a young man – a somnambulist – with no will of his own is impelled to murder. His wide staring eyes have a flicker of haunted pathos, but as he moves through a disturbing landscape of sharp, dagger-like forms, it is also clear that he is irredeemably lethal. Some of Conrad Felixmüller’s woodcuts carried a similar charge of expressionist menace: small rooms, lit by moonlight, where shadows are sharpened to threatening points.12
Also rising to prominence at that febrile time was Otto Griebel, an artist who had gone a step further than Felixmüller by joining the city’s Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council. Griebel was a keen promoter of the Dadaist movement, which had both mischief and deadly seriousness. This was art that extended to every sphere – painting to poetry performances – and it embraced the nonsensical and made satirical fetishes of everyday manufactured objects and advertising. It was intended as an assault on all notions of stability: how could there be such fixed meanings in a world that at any moment could be torn apart with pure horror? Griebel’s 1923 painting ‘The Naked Whore’ – depicting a topless blonde with a curious rictus smile in the act of lowering her drawers – was the most direct challenge imaginable to any of Dresden’s more delicate sensibilities.13
And there were still such sensibilities; more traditionalist, figurative artists there and in other cities who resented the relationship between the expressionists and the art establishment. In Dresden, the most influential figure in this establishment was the director of the Old Masters Picture Gallery, Hans Posse. He was also to become one of the city’s most horribly conflicted figures. Initially, from his lofty position, Posse championed this new shocking generation of artists. In 1926 he ensured that Dresden staged an International Art Fair: the works of local painters would hang alongside confrontational works from elsewhere.
Posse could not sense the subterranean pressures that were building, and when in 1933 he found himself facing an entirely new and hostile regime, his lack of a sure-footed response indicated to senior Nazi Party operatives that Posse did not share their views. Art was not some marginal activity; it lay at the very centre of the way the Nazis sought to transform German life. The term they used was Gleichschaltung, roughly meaning ‘coordination’. It meant that all artistic endeavour had to conform strictly to Nazi ideals. Partly, this was down to the anger of Hitler, himself rejected twice for a place at Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts. Hitler was exactly the sort of painter that Posse disdained. His art was stolidly representational – studies of grand civic buildings, farmhouses, courtyards, and the like – and in the eyes of a modernist looked preposterously twee and kitsch.
Conversely, Hitler’s hatred of modernism was something that he made very plain in his speeches. The German people did not want to have to consult pretentious guidebooks to decode what was happening in these nightmarish, distorted modernist paintings, or in the ‘sick brains’ of those who had produced them.14 Even on the edge of war, Hitler regarded himself as an artist first and a politician second, as he told the British ambassador.
And so Dresden was selected for the first wave of Nazi art-shaming. Artists such as Dix, Felixmüller and Griebel had their work seized by the authorities and displayed in the Dresden Rathaus in the autumn of 1933, the intention being that townsfolk would come and articulate their loathing for these immoral paintings.15 Without being named as such, this was the first exhibition of ‘degenerate art’; a foretaste of the more comprehensive exhibition to come in Munich in 1937, comprising a mix of Jewish painters, perceived anti-militarists and indeed any abstractionist.
For Otto Dix, this reverse was profoundly menacing on several levels: he was removed from his job and banned from exhibiting past works. A couple of years later, forced to change his artistic style completely in order to find buyers for his new work, Dix fell back on landscape painting: mountains, plains and, in a nod to a Dresden artist that he loathed, snowy landscapes of remote villages and lonely graveyards that deliberately echoed the work of Caspar David Friedrich.16 Dix had been reduced to the same kind of kitsch as Hitler.
Nor was life much easier for his sponsor, the gallery director Hans Posse; he too was removed from his post. But Posse was unaware that he and Hitler had a mutual friend, the art dealer Karl Haberstock, who identified and obtained looted works for the Führer, and who was likely to have mentioned the director to him. As a result, Hitler put Posse in charge of the entire Nazi art acquisition programme. Suddenly and unexpectedly this high-minded Dresden art expert was pulled deep into a swamp of criminal squalor. As the Nazi hierarchy grabbed and stole as much art as they could for themselves, Posse was there giving an illusion of respectability, buying fine German art that reflected all the values of the Third Reich.
There were still numinous realms that, despite their best efforts, the Nazis could never quite control. For, as well as painting, Dresden was also a city suffused with music, an art perhaps too sacred for the regime to defile. Its purest expression, in soul-piercing harmonies, was to be found in the Lutheran Church of the Holy Cross – the Kreuzkirche – in the Altstadt. The candle flames dancing in the darkness of the nave were a form of defiance in themselves; in previous years, such Catholic touches were not used, but it was important that the Nazis understood there was no room for their own additions. Other churches had seen iron crosses installed, fusing Christianity with Nazi militarism.
The Kreuzkirche had been famous for many decades – centuries, even – for its boys’ choir that had been formed in the thirteenth century. Now, in the murkiest and most desperate hours of the war, that crystalline song was still known across the continent and indeed across the Atlantic. Even at that stage, over five years into the conflict, choristers were still being enrolled at the Kreuzschule, a grand Gothic building that lay close to the church, and it was still only those with the very finest voices and instinct for musicality who were admitted. The school was a boarding establishment with long dormitories, and a valuable refuge from the saturation of Nazi imagery and ideology that had otherwise filled the veins and arteries of the city.
But the war had pressed most terribly on the cantor, the man who conducted and directed the choir. Like so many other people in Dresden, he had been forced to make the most hideous compromise in order to remain in his position. Rudolf Mauersberger – glaringly bald, with a distinctive, amiable face – had been appointed to this hugely prestigious institution some fourteen years back, in 1931; the choir was already greatly celebrated, but he was poised to take this musical phenomenon out into a wider world.17
In one sense, Hitler and the Nazis offered no threat: what could be more perfectly emblematic of German culture than this institution? And yet from 1933 onwards there were tensions, and it was possibly because he had seen so many others in the city removed from their posts that Rudolf Mauersberger joined the Nazi Party. This was the time when university professors were being forced into ‘confessing’ their loyalty to the Führer in special ceremonies, when schoolteachers were being ordered to abandon complex curriculums in favour of a return to simplistic basics of mathematics and grammar, when even minor public servants were obliged to greet Nazi officials with a stiff-armed salute and a ‘Heil Hitler!’
It was clear that Mauersberger loved his role as the choir’s cantor. Certainly, his work with the choir and his efforts to bring the boys before international audiences transcended the grim reality of Dresden’s gross Gauleiter and his new regime. In the mid 1930s, having taken the choir on a European tour, Mauersberger succeeded in arranging a trip to America, where the Kreuzchor performed before many appreciative audiences.18 If anything, this would have given the new Hitlerian regime a note of real legitimacy: the pure musical genius of the choir and the sensitive settings of religious classics would have reassured many Americans that the Nazis appreciated civilization after all.
The tension between the Nazis and the Church – and especially the Kreuzchor – lay in an ideological conflict between spiritual and secular worship. Nazism claimed complete ownership of mind and body, while the Church had a rather older and more legitimate claim to the soul.
Catholics had the Pope to turn to; Hitler and his lieutenants, no matter their own personal dismissal of religious faith, understood the strength of the bonds to Rome, and knew that they could not strike too hard against the distant authority of the Vatican over German believers. (It was different in subjugated Poland, where Catholic priests, refusing to bow to secular demands, were imprisoned and brutalized.)
For Protestantism, however, the case was not quite the same; in the absence of a central unifying episcopal authority, the Nazis had more room to influence and coerce. And in the case of the Lutheran Kreuzchor, there was the simple brute fact that membership of the Hitler Youth was compulsory for the young choristers. Uniforms were mandatory, and the Hitler Youth had their own particular musical genre, including marches such as ‘Vorwarts! Vorwarts!’ and an adaptation of an old hymn with the words ‘The rotten bones are trembling’.
There are some suggestions that Mauersberger was able to keep these and other Nazi favourites, including the party’s official anthem, the ‘Horst Wessel Song’, out of the Kreuzkirche. The paraphernalia of the Hitler Youth – the armbands, belts and daggers – were rather more difficult to discard. An unattributed story had it that around 1943 Mauersberger and his choristers were engaged to perform elsewhere in Germany. They would be taking the train to their destination. The authorities demanded that the boys of the choir travel in their full Hitler Youth regalia. But Mauersberger had planned ahead. He did not board the train at the central station but at the next stop along, Dresden Neustadt, bringing the boys’ school clothes – black jackets, white shirts with wide collars – with him so they could immediately change. He did not wish them to travel as Nazis, but as Kreuzchor singers.
Little more than a quarter of a mile away from the Kreuzkirche stood the city’s other great shrine to sacred music. The Frauenkirche, which was not only an aesthetic marvel, but an engineering one too with its large distinctive dome looming some 220 feet (67 metres) above the streets of the Altstadt, had been built in the 1730s under architect George Bähr, inspired by the Italian baroque style. With the installation of its organ, the church saw Johann Sebastian Bach come to perform in 1736. Like the Kreuzkirche, the Frauenkirche had acoustics that were almost ethereal: the melodies and harmonies and counterpoints rising up past galleries and into the unusual pink-and-blue painted warmth of the dome interior.19 Like its near neighbour, this was a Protestant church and the boys of the Kreuzschule would also perform there on special occasions, most recently a concert of Christmas carols and music with the city deep in the darkness of blackout in the winter of 1944.
Even in February 1945 this was a building that would still be recognized by Bach and by the great organ maker Silbermann: the gleam of dulled gold, the tortured altarpiece of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, and high above the brighter figures of saints among the rosy clouds of Heaven.
Sacred music was one thing: but the city was also famous internationally for opera – to many agnostics a form of religion in itself. And in this sphere, the Nazis, from Hitler downwards, had taken a very much more active interest. By February 1945 the Semper Opera House was no longer staging productions. The theatrical extravagance would not have been possible, still less appropriate, at that frayed point. The last show had been staged a few weeks previously at the end of 1944 – the comic opera Fra Diavolo, involving bandits, revolutionaries and an innkeeper’s daughter, and which starred Dresden Opera’s celebrated bass Kurt Böhme.20 But the history of the institution was still very alive to the citizens of Dresden. Indeed, that history reflected all the most turbulent periods of Dresden politics; not least when the opera was presided over by the young Richard Wagner in the 1840s.
It is curious now to contemplate the Dresden life of Hitler’s favourite composer, for while Wagner made musical history staging premieres of his work here – Rienzi, The Flying Dutchman and Tannhäuser – he was also briefly pulled into a swirl of radical left-wing and anarchist politics. The twin streams of great art and intense politics always characterized the city.
As a boy, Wagner had briefly attended the Kreuzschule; a few years later, in 1842, as a young composer with a fast-building reputation, he was back in Dresden as Royal Saxon Court conductor. While there were those sceptical of his musical innovations, a great many others were swept up in a form of rapture. His operas, pulsating out across the country, also reinforced the idea of Dresden as a flashing cultural jewel, and were a strong lure to high society and the more refined classes. Ironically, this came at a moment in Wagner’s political development (though his virulent anti-Semitism seems to have been a constant) when he was agitating for greater freedom for the individual, and indeed for the city of Dresden to have some semblance of representative democracy.
In the 1840s Saxony was still a kingdom under Frederick Augustus II. As well as writing articles for a local radical journal, Wagner became friends with the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who had arrived in the city in the late 1840s. Here were fresh, fiery ideas about collectivism and class conflict; Wagner was intoxicated. In 1849, in the aftershocks of continent-wide revolutionary outbreaks, there was a brief uprising in Dresden that saw young people manning barricades in the streets. Wagner was swept up in the action and was then banished from the city.21 Just over fifty years after that, the juvenile Adolf Hitler was attending a performance of Lohengrin in a hall in the Austrian city of Linz. By his own admission, the music overwhelmed him.22 Wagner had entered his soul.
By the 1930s Hitler was also enraptured by the work of a living composer who had moved to Dresden: Richard Strauss. Hitler had been a particular enthusiast for Strauss’s turn-of-the-century opera Salome; though he also fervently admired the later works Elektra and Der Rosenkavalier. Most particularly the Nazis adored Strauss’s lieder; these songs were, in contrast to the scale and scope of opera, intimate, composed for one instrument and one voice and often touching on elements of folk song, invoking maidens at spinning wheels or warriors returning to their farms after war.23 Hitler played them extensively at Berchtesgaden.
But the elderly Strauss, despite the rich tonality of his music, was a modernist, and he was emphatically anti-nationalist. He had worked extensively with the Jewish poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and in the 1930s he set out upon a new collaboration with an Austrian writer, also Jewish, who had been charming readers across the continent. In 1934 Stefan Zweig and Strauss worked together on a new opera entitled The Silent Woman.24 It was to receive its premiere at the Dresden Semper Opera House.
Both Strauss and Zweig knew that such a partnership was, even in the earliest days of the Hitler regime, forbidden. They also both knew that the names of Jews were no longer allowed on theatrical billboards. And yet Richard Strauss persisted in defiance. One reason – his strong loyalty to Zweig aside – was that he was to an extent already compromised and wished to establish some distance between himself and the Nazi hierarchy.
In 1933 Strauss had been appointed president of the Reich Chamber of Music – the department that would ensure that all music throughout the country would reflect the new regime and its ideals. He stated in letters to friends that this was not of his choosing; the position had been conferred upon him by Joseph Goebbels and there was the silent understanding that refusing it was out of the question. Here for the Nazis was a huge prize: a composer of worldwide fame and a vast following who, simply by being seen with Hitler, would help to confer both cultural respectability and indeed legitimacy upon the Nazis.
Strauss had private reasons for making such a terrible pact: his daughter-in-law was Jewish. He had to do everything that he could to protect her, and her extended family. This would become a constant struggle throughout the 1930s and 1940s, and any who were repelled by Strauss’s apparent cordial cooperation with the Nazis were perhaps unaware of the razor-edged nature of his life, his loved ones under the nominal protection of a Gauleiter but subject to the constant menacing attentions of the Gestapo.
His artistic collaborator Zweig understood though; even as the consequences of Strauss’s Dresden defiance were made clear. The Silent Woman’s run was ended by the Nazis after its second performance. Strauss was then removed as president of the Reich Chamber of Music after some letters he had written to Zweig about the stupidity and squalor of the Nazi regime had been intercepted by the Gestapo.
And though this did not mean that Strauss was completely excommunicated from Hitler’s regime – they still employed the respectable weight of his name on the musical score for the 1936 Berlin Olympics – the composer had lost his freedom to be so outspoken ever again. Zweig, meanwhile, saw how this darkness was going to spread across the continent. He and his wife emigrated to England not long after, and made a home in the city of Bath. They subsequently sailed for Brazil.25 The high culture of Europe had meant everything to Zweig; it had been his life. To see it so violated by the Nazis may have persuaded him that such a world could never be restored. He and his wife succumbed to despair: in 1942 they were both found dead from overdoses of barbiturates.
The Dresden opera house had seen other cruelties inflicted by the Nazis, including the swift dismissal of its chief conductor Fritz Busch. He himself was not Jewish but the reason for his sacking was his support for Jewish musicians and his refusal to pay any kind of respect to the Nazi regime. At the premiere of his production of Rigoletto, sponsored thugs in the audience started screaming a repeated slogan: ‘Out with Busch!’26 The performance was halted, and Busch understood that it would be impossible to remain in the land of his birth. He moved to England and took over as musical director of the Glyndebourne Festival Opera.
One popular mass art form that endured in Dresden despite constant hostile attention from the regime was the Sarrasani circus. This was a rather grander and more elegant affair than simply a large tent and attendant caravans; instead it was sited in a purpose-built circular 4,000-seat auditorium, designed by prominent architect Max Littmann, in a style not dissimilar to the opera house, in the Neustadt just north of the river. This had been its home since 1912; at around that time, the circus’s original impresario Hans Stosch – who had renamed himself Sarrasani – had started dressing in the style of a Maharajah to project the global spirit of his circus.27 His Italianate pseudonym had been inspired by a Balzac character, Sarrasine, who defied the wishes of his father, as Stosch had defied his.
There was a time when Stosch’s circus featured not merely spectacular animal acts and energetic clowns, but also incredibly skilled acrobats and jugglers drawn from China and Japan who made their homes in Dresden. But, like all other fields of art and entertainment, it had in the 1930s been bent to the will of the Nazis. First they had accused it of being a ‘Judenzirkus’ and its roster of international acts was hugely diminished.28 The intimidation continued, and seeking favour from the authorities, the circus had in the late 1930s staged special shows based on the Spanish Civil War and on uprisings in India against the English; in other words, it was forced into ideological conformity. By February 1945 the circus was being run by the late Stosch’s daughter-in-law Trude. Unlike the cinemas, it was allowed to stay open; Sarrasani – with its horses, elephants, dancing girls and now strictly Aryan acrobats – was popular with the soldiers moving through the city.
In England, meanwhile, the winter winds that scoured from the east sliced across the North Sea and through the small towns of Lincolnshire, where local cinema-goers escaped the chill in plush theatres and immersed themselves in other worlds. In the early weeks of 1945, British audiences were thrilling to the Hollywood noir intensity of Double Indemnity. Entertainment of this sort was beyond value to twenty-eight-year-old Flight Lieutenant Leslie Hay.29 His nickname ‘Will’, after the popular film comedian, was testament to this love. Unlike many of his RAF colleagues he was not a drinker, and so instead sought the silvery darkness to shut out all thoughts of his bombing missions. Hay had himself experienced the horror of being bombed; he was in London during the German Blitz of 1940 and on a few nights had been caught outside in the wet streets, forced to flatten himself against the cold pavement, keeping as low as possible as glass and brick exploded around him. Hay signed up for the RAF not out of any desire for revenge, as he was later at pains to point out, but simply because he understood how powerful a means of warfare this could be. He was married, and had been for several years; his young wife lived and worked in London while her husband’s squadron was based in Fulbeck, a tiny village amid the fecund farmland on the black Lincolnshire fens. At the end of each leave, when she kissed him goodbye at King’s Cross station, they gave each other meaningful looks; the constant, inescapable possibility of death was always there. Yet it was not so simple as that. As a pilot, Hay had a sensual love of flying; even as lightning-bright lines of flak were streaking past, he was intoxicated with the feel of his Avro Lancaster aeroplane, the sensation of swooping through the night.
There were some curious consolations on otherwise terrifying long-distance bombing raids. On one night, Hay’s route towards the German target took him and his crew over the vast moonlit glittering spectacle of Mont Blanc. On another occasion, quite apart from all the other dangers of enemy fire, he was mesmerized by the materialization of ghostly yellow halo-like rings around the plane’s propellers: this was St Elmo’s Fire, an electrical phenomenon.
He was not impervious to the effect that his dropped bombs were having upon target cities like Dusseldorf and Munich, nor to the unfathomable strain that it put upon him and his fellow airmen, even as they flew through defensive fire that seemed to him like a vast infernal firework display. But like so many of his generation who knew in later years how extraordinary their own survival had been, Hay sought to frame his memories with human optimism.
In January 1945, after a hazardously long mission into Czechoslovakia to bomb a synthetic-oil factory, both Hay and his wife had every expectation that he had almost reached the end of his tour of duty. He learned upon his return that his tour had been extended from thirty operations to thirty-six. Hay’s wife was horrified; he was merely stricken. Hay at that point was implacable about his duty; the cities that the Allies were targeting had no doubt been chosen with good reason and even the prettiest towns must surely have harboured wide ranges of clandestine munitions factories and laboratories for the development of secret weapons. Such raids were, to him, bleakly necessary. In a matter of days, Hay – among thousands of other airmen – was to be briefed about a mission to Dresden. It was a beautiful city, he knew, but had those famous decorative porcelain factories been turned to the development of terrible new missiles and rockets? In reality, the city’s war work was more to do with precision instrumentation; but Hay’s association of Dresden with intense scientific innovation was entirely correct.