1 Gerhard Ackermann, interviewed in the popular German newspaper Bild, 1 January 2018, a piece focusing slightly more upon his lifelong addiction to cinema-going rather than upon Dresden.
2 Corey Ross, ‘Mass Culture and Divided Audiences: Cinema and Social Change in Inter-War Germany’, Past & Present, no. 193 (November 2006).
3 Ibid.
4 Interview with Churchill’s interpreter Hugh Lunghi for National Security Archive, 1 July 1996.
5 Ibid.
6 Jörg Arnold, The Allied Air War and Urban Memory (Cambridge University Press, 2011).
7 Dresden City Archives, series 6.4.53.1 (hereafter DCA), file 500.
8 DCA, file 477.
9 Tami Davis Biddle, ‘Dresden 1945: Reality, History and Memory’, Journal of Military History, vol. 72, no. 2 (2008).
10 DCA, file 107.
11 Victor Klemperer, To the Bitter End: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer 1942–45, trans. Martin Chalmers (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999).
12 DCA, file 500.
13 Ibid.
14 Klemperer, To the Bitter End.
15 DCA, file 107.
16 An article in the arts journal The Burlington Magazine in April 2007 described the station as being one of Europe’s most ‘ethereal’.
17 See www.das-neue-dresden.de/kaufhaus-alsberg for an article on the architectural history, as well as the expropriation by the Nazis.
18 There is a haunting portrait of Elsa Frölich, and her daughter Sunni, drawn by fellow communist Lea Grundig in the mid 1930s; both Frölich and Grundig would flourish under the post-war regime.
19 DCA, file 475. Pleasingly, the brewery’s tunnels have recently been repurposed by Dresden University physicists for atom-colliding experiments.
20 The dairy today has a dedicated website (www.pfunds.de) and is still one of Dresden’s most pleasing and unexpected aesthetic spectacles.
21 Today the site is a stately and rather old-fashioned hotel; see www.schloss-eckberg.de.