Dresden (47 page)

Within weeks Churchill was out of power and a Labor government had been elected. The first honors awards to come up were those in the 1946 New Year's list, where Harris's name was tellingly absent. This has been put down to postwar revulsion against Bomber
Command. The public had undoubtedly been affected by the shocking newsreels that had come out of occupied Germany, showing the devastation and suffering inflicted on the wartime enemy. Even airmen who had now gone in at ground level were forced to admit a certain involuntary frisson of horror

Typically, when taxed by Churchill about Harris's omission from the honors list, the dour Labor prime minister, Clement Attlee, retorted tersely that such lists had to be limited and that Harris's promotion to full marshal of the Royal Air Force on January 1 was “not an inadequate recognition of his service.”

Sir Arthur Harris spent his remaining time in the RAF mainly touring Allied and friendly countries as they celebrated the end of the war—including trips as an honored guest in America, Norway (where he was granted a twelve-Spitfire Norwegian air force escort), Sweden, and even Brazil. He was not invited to the grand Allied victory parade in Berlin. Toward the end of August, his impending retirement from the RAF was announced. His successor at Bomber Command would be Vice Marshal Bottomley. Harris was fifty-three years old.

Harris would write his war memoirs with what many considered indecent haste, drawing on the dispatches that he had delivered to the Air Ministry in the autumn of 1945. The latter were, however, not to be published until the 1990s. The official statistics contained in the dispatches were not allowed to be mentioned in his memoirs, which were published in 1947, earning Harris around 10,000 pounds—a very considerable sum at that time. But then the man who had led Bomber Command at its destructive height was not, unlike many of his critics, a rich man.

This all-but-retirement coincided with the end of the war with Japan and the end of the brief supremacy of saturation bombing. Harris had noted earlier that same year that the age of the bomber was almost certainly over. He confided to Churchill just a few days after the devastating attack on Dresden that he saw the bomber's reign as a brief, passing phase, just as that of the battleship had been at the turn of the twentieth century. Rockets, he told the prime minister, were the weapons of the future. Well, there was certainly no need to train rockets and feed them, or keep up their morale, or prevent them from asking questions about what they were doing. Then, in August, came the
atom bomb. The American air forces' massive firebombing raids on Tokyo and other centers of population and industry had brought Japan to the brink of defeat. Atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki tipped the single remaining Axis power into surrender. Where just months earlier it had taken hundreds of bombers to reduce a town or city to rubble, now it took just one.

The now-retired AOC of Bomber Command left for South Africa on February 14, 1946, the day after the anniversary of the bombing of Dresden.

The air marshal was to return frequently, and was an honored guest at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. He then worked in America for a while, but for the last quarter-century of his life he settled back in England, in a pleasant riverside residence, the Ferry House at Goring-on-Thames, in Oxfordshire. Fate gave him a postal address easily confused with the late commander of the Luftwaffe.

From this comfortable base, Sir Arthur Harris (Bart) attended Bomber Command reunions, was feted by his former aircrew (the “old lags”), worked on an authorized biography with a former staff officer at High Wycombe, Dudley Saward, and died at the ripe age of ninety-one in 1984.

Sir Arthur was an especially keen and generous supporter of the Boy Scout movement. He mellowed a little, some say, and even conceded that with hindsight the “oil plan” might not have been such a crazy idea, but he never apologized for anything.

 

ON WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY
13, 1946,
the day before Sir Arthur Harris left for South Africa, the first anniversary ceremonies were held at Dresden.

The twenty memorial ceremonies of various kinds that took place were under the strict guidance of Major Broder of the Soviet Military Administration. A note by one of the major's assistants to Walter Weidauer, the acting Communist mayor of Dresden, imperiously explained Broder's stipulations:

There was to be no critical mention of the role of the western Allies in the bombing. The official line was that the Nazis, and more specifically Mutschmann, were responsible for everything terrible that had happened to Germany and to Dresden. An article in the Soviet-produced German-language “Daily Newspaper for the German Population” entitled “The Scum of Humanity,” singled out the Saxon gauleiter in the most damning terms:

There were no official commemorative gatherings during the two years that followed, although when each February 13 came around the Communist-controlled press issued similar statements. The emphasis was on looking forward, on rebuilding, rather than brooding on the catastrophic results of the Hitler regime. One newspaper declared in 1947: “Today it is our sole vow to do all we can to rebuild our Dresden within a peaceful, truly democratic and united Germany.”

Two years later the same newspaper named a figure of around thirty-two thousand dead—thirteen thousand buried, five thousand incinerated on the Altmarkt, and fourteen thousand still buried under the ruins. The last projection was to prove false. As for the commission that was supposed to have investigated the matter in 1946 and decided on thirty-five thousand dead, there is—as officials of the present-day City Museum assert—no record of any such commission in the city archives. All the same, there seems little question that no serious political advantage was taken of Dresden's terrible fate for the first four years after the end of the war.

Then in 1948–49 came the Berlin airlift and the definitive splitting of Germany, the Communist coup in neighboring Czechoslovakia
(its border just thirty miles from Dresden), and the final descent of the Iron Curtain across the heart of Europe. Soon the Soviet Union had tested its first atomic bomb. The cold war was truly under way, and within a very short time Dresden became one of the most well-placed pawns on its virtual propaganda chessboard. The tone in the commentary of the Communist-controlled press changed dramatically:

That in mid-February 1945 the German army had ceased to exist as a serious opponent for the Allies might have surprised the fanatical German General Schörner, who at that time still had a million men under his command in Army Group Center, with Dresden at their backs and antitank ditches and traps under construction. Equally entitled to claim misrepresentation would have been the 79,000 Russian soldiers who were to die and the more than a quarter of a million who would be wounded in the taking of Berlin ten weeks later—not forgetting the 125,000 Berliners who perished in the street-fighting; or the troops of the western Allies who took three weeks to cross the Rhine in serious numbers in March; or the crews of the four hundred British bombers and scarcely fewer American bombers lost between then and the end of the war.

The distortions increased as the years went on. In 1950 an official committee was formed in East Berlin. Its task was to organize meetings all over the recently founded German Democratic Republic (GDR) to commemorate the 1945 raid on Dresden. The aim now was to oppose “the American war-mongers.”

Wild statements and even wilder figures started to be bandied about—and this time the Communist authorities issued no corrections. In Freiberg, west of Dresden, it was declared:

It was reported in the tame press that one hundred thousand Dresdeners had attended the demonstrations in their home city. The number of air raid victims was now given as forty-five thousand. A leading official of the East German Information Ministry declared that the bombing of Dresden had occurred because “Wall Street wanted to make it impossible for the Soviet Union, its supposed ally, to help the German people after the end of the war.”

In June 1950 the Korean War broke out. On February 13, 1951, massive meetings called to commemorate the firestorm anniversary throughout the GDR were told that the current U. S. leader, Harry Truman, had ordered the bombing of Dresden (he had been vice president at the time). Two years later in 1953, when Eisenhower had succeeded Truman in the White House, they were told (by Walter Weidauer) that it was Eisenhower who had been personally responsible. No distortion was too extreme. It was claimed that the attack had been launched “without the knowledge and against the will of the Soviet military leadership.” The phrase “Anglo-American Air Gangsters”—Goebbels's invention—started to be used by high East German officials, as did “terror attack.” In 1954 the death toll was officially quoted as “hundreds of thousands.”

The stories that emerged from the catastrophe were persistent, accepted by many if not all Dresdeners. Some, like the tale that Gauleiter Mutschmann had been informed in advance of the air raid, and that his underlings had been glimpsed removing priceless carpets and furniture from his villa the day before, could be found in almost every bombed German city, with only the name of the Gauleiter changed. In Dresden's case, though, there were extra twists, which lent a frisson of privilege, of specialness, to the city's justified tale of suffering, including accusations that a German-American camera
manufacturer, Charles A. Noble, had guided the bombers to their targets in Dresden, and a story that the Americans had come within an ace of testing the atomic bomb on Dresden.
*

The general line by the mid-1950s was clear: The British and the Americans had bombed Dresden partly out of brutal spite but also as part of a campaign to destroy the areas of Germany that were designated as part of a future Soviet Zone. This line would remain roughly the same, while casualty figures seesawed up and down, along with the temperature of the cold war, until the 1980s.

BEFORE
1914,
even before 1939, the world had flocked to Dresden.

During the brief, violent flowering of Hitler's Greater German Reich, Dresden found itself at the geographic heart of that dream of a forcibly Germanized Mitteleuropa. Enthusiastic plans for the city's expansion were made on that basis. Then a fine city, which had thought itself safe, was devastated beyond imagination. A cultural icon found itself under Russian occupation, no longer at the heart of the great central European cultural and economic community but reduced to the status of a provincial city in a remote corner of a small, defeated satellite country.

The main preoccupation just after war—as elsewhere in Europe but especially in Germany's shattered cities—was bare survival. A roof over one's head. Enough to eat. Dresden's population in August 1945 was down to 360,000, roughly half the peacetime total. A job, any sort of job, that brought in some kind of salary was precious. Things were all the more urgent and difficult if menfolk remained prisoners of war for many years. This last was especially likely for those taken captive by the Russians, who used them as labor for postwar reconstruction in the Soviet Union. But what of reconstruction in Dresden? The first task was to clear ways through the rubble, and then clear the rubble itself. Most main thoroughfares were re-opened in the second half of 1945. Now came the gigantic task of clearing a vast, devastated wilderness that covered eight square miles.

Dresden, like other German cities, created in those grim first postwar years a new breed of hero—or more accurately, because of the man shortage, heroine—the
Trümmerfrau
(rubble woman). These were
the women who cleared the worst of the bombed-out shells, dug out the rubble, separated it, and dressed the stones if possible for reuse. The rubble was sent out of the city, first on carts, reminiscent of the same process after the near destruction of Dresden by the Prussians in 1760, and then on a system of narrow-gauge railways, the famous
Trümmerbahnen,
whose tracks began to be laid in 1946.

The first of a number of great mechanized sorting centers was established in the ruins of the Johannstadt, on what had formerly been the leafy expanses of the Dürerplatz. There the rubble would be graded into fine or coarse rubble, or reusable sandstone, and sorted by size. Reusable stone and reusable bricks would be kept back, and the unusable material transported, again by narrow-gauge railway, to various tipping points on the outskirts of the city, where it would be buried. Similar sorting centers were later established elsewhere.

A great long pit, between a mile and quarter and a mile and a half long, and a hundred yards across, curved around between the riverside drive of the Käthe-Kollwitz-Ufer (formerly Hindenburgufer) and the Elbe. It took most of the rubble from the central and eastern ruins of the Altstadt, while that from the west went to make up an artificial mountain of rubble in the Ostragehege, north of Friedrichstadt and close to the original RAF aiming point. Another artificial hill of debris at Dobritz received all that remained and could not be reused from the suburbs of Johannstadt and Striesen. It was hard work, and rations in the early years were meager. A high accident rate in the workings was attributed to widespread physical weakness.

Postwar estimates reckoned 32–40 cubic meters of rubble for each of the 627,000 inhabitants of prewar Dresden (1939)—compared with 16 cubic meters per Berliner, and 21.65 cubic meters for residents of Frankfurt-on-Main. Out of a total of 220,000 dwellings before the war, 90,000 lay in ruins. Only 21 percent of all the dwellings within the city limits remained wholly undamaged. Herbert Conert, one of the prewar planning directors who had been kept on by the new rulers, thought that rebuilding Dresden would take “at least seventy years.”

The priority for the new Communist authorities was, Where should the people of Dresden live? As well as the historic Altstadt, entire inner suburbs had been destroyed: Johannstadt, Striesen, a great deal of the Südvorstadt, most of Strehlen, the Seevorstadt, and a
great deal of the Neustadt. These were not, as it happened, the strongly working-class areas of Dresden. Those areas lay to the west, north, and northwest of the city—districts such as the western part of Friedrichstadt, Pieschen, Mickten, Trachau, and Cotta. What some have seen as unfairness on the part of the Allies—should not these areas of industrial development and workers' housing have been the very ones to be bombed?—may be true in one way, but the geography of the firestorm does contain one grim coincidence. The areas most thoroughly destroyed in the Allied air raids were also the areas where in the last free elections before the Nazis took power, Hitler's party had received its highest proportions of Dresden's vote: Johannstadt, Seevorstadt, Pirnaische Vorstadt, inner Neustadt, Südvorstadt, west Striesen, and Strehlen (the inner Altstadt hovered on the brink of the highest tercile of Nazi-voting districts).

Among architects and planners, there was much talk, in the immediate postwar period, of finding a “balance” between tradition and modernity in the rebuilding of Dresden. The new Communist rulers had other ideas.

Admirable as the great rubble-clearing exercise might have appeared—and to a great extent was—it served the new regime in more ways than the most obvious. Just as this massive state-run effort got under way, the authorities announced that the preservation and possible rebuilding of privately owned property (including many of the buildings around the Altmarkt that had been declared salvageable and scores of partly damaged Baroque town houses) and of religious buildings (including the eminently restorable seven-hundred-year-old Sophienkirche whose twin spires rose proudly between the bustling Postplatz and the Zwinger pleasure gardens) would have to be paid for from the resources of private owners and the churches respectively.

As for the rubble-clearing exercise itself, this was pushed ahead without much regard to whether the areas concerned could possibly be rebuilt. The excuse was that there would be shortages of new building materials for the foreseeable future, and so recycling was the only option. It was also a fact that the Russians were demanding large quantities of building materials and recovered metals to be sent back to the Soviet Union, including even the melted-down bronze from the statues that had ornamented Dresden's many parks and street fountains.

The shells and facades of medium and seriously damaged buildings began to be dynamited soon after the end of the war, for safety reasons. This was often enough legitimate—many Dresdeners who were in the city at the time will tell stories of pedestrians being crushed by ruins that suddenly tumbled into the street, or of near escapes from such a fate—but the rate of such preemptive destruction soon reached levels that led to protests from the city's architectural and historical advisers. There was not, however, much that they could do. Dresdeners trying to save what could be saved of their beloved city were forced to stand by helplessly as potentially restorable historic buildings were either blown up (without even the chance to capture them in photographs) or made unstable (therefore dangerous, and therefore liable to be demolished) by the careless use of explosives on neighboring ruins.

This by no means benign neglect on the part of the Communist authorities was only to some extent the result of postwar lack of resources. The new regime's policy soon became clear. A small number of high-profile architectural gems—the royal castle, the Hofkirche, the opera house, the Albertinum, and others close to the Elbe, were to be rebuilt in the long term. The rest of the center of Dresden was to be given over to the “democratic home building” program beloved of Walter Weidauer and the rest of the comrades.

The result was, finally, the destruction through neglect of what was left of bourgeois Dresden. The big royal palaces, ironically, were preserved—the centers of “parasitism”—but what was left of the many square miles of fine housing and public architecture that had been, in many ways, the city's true glory, was allowed to disappear. Dresden would become, as the official party line expressed it, “a socialist city.” From the center to the outskirts, Dresden became a city of broad highways, flanked by row after row of rectangular, uniform cement-block apartment houses (Plattenbauten—slab buildings—as the East German slang word expresses it). This was the “socialist city.”

By final official Ukase of 1962, the Frauenkirche was left as a ruin, to remind everyone of the evils of war (though also perhaps because the rebuilding would have been ruinously expensive). Otherwise, by the 1980s, the Elbe skyline had largely been restored. The State Theater, the Brühl Terrace with the Academy of Arts, the opera house, the Albertinum, the New Town Hall, the Hofkirche had been
rebuilt and—last of all, for some in the party had opposed its restoration on ideological grounds—the massive work of re-creating the Saxon royal
Schloss
had begun. It is still not quite finished.

As for the dreary rest of the inner city and its near suburbs, nothing much had changed since Kurt Vonnegut revisited Dresden in 1965. Here was a man who feasted his eyes on old Dresden in 1945, during the last weeks before its destruction. “Oz,” he had observed simply—like the fairy-tale residence of the wizard in the L. Frank Baum fable and the Judy Garland film. Twenty years later, the author of
Slaughterhouse-Five
described what had once been the renowned “German Florence” as looking like Dayton, Ohio.

The Elbe was still unchangingly beautiful; the outer reaches of the city, with their nineteenth century villas, were more or less undamaged, though subjected to long-term neglect. The wider physical setting of Dresden remained unmatched in its attractions.

All the same, little survived of what had once made this a pearl among cities, except its people. The easy harmony of scale and proportion—humanism realized in warm, vulnerable sandstone—was mostly gone, replaced by Stalinist gigantism and post-Stalinist communal living.

Part of the improvement that Weidauer and the other apparatchiks claimed was, to an extent, justified. Their assertion that this “modern” kind of housing was, for most ordinary Dresdeners, an improvement on the picturesque rookeries that had once seethed damply behind the elegant facades of the Altstadt, contained truth, but it ignored much of what makes life worth living. Compare the postwar planners in London, who tore down the neighborly slums of the East End and replaced them with tower blocks that brought hygienic living and efficient use of space, but in the wake of these benefits also isolation, petty crime, and social breakdown.

Despite the rhapsodizing in Weidauer's and Seydewitz's books about its lost beauty, the Communist planners after 1945 distrusted old Dresden—for much the same reason that radical Nazis such as Ley declared their crazed, defiant “good riddance” when it was destroyed. To the Nazis, old Dresden represented a tolerance and decency they despised; to the Communists, a “bourgeois” individualism and attachment to style that had no part in the productive proletarian future.

Squeezed into the bottom southeast corner of the walled-off
GDR, the lie of the land around Dresden also meant that the city was one of the few areas of East Germany that could not receive Western television. Most East Germans were loyal citizens of the “Workers' and Peasants' State” by day, but by night avid watchers of West German entertainment shows, dramas, and—ominously for the regime—news programs. Not so in the case of Dresden, sunk unreachably in the deep bowl of the Elbe valley, where signals from Western stations could not penetrate. The area was mockingly dubbed the “Valley of the Clueless” (Tal der Ahnungslosen) because its people always seemed the last to know what was happening in the outside world. Dresdeners could, of course, receive Western radio—but the joke had some point. If every picture tells a story, no pictures meant serious gaps in the city's common narrative.

During the forty-five years between the end of the war and the fall of the Berlin Wall, Dresden became isolated. Already terribly traumatized by the events of February 1945, the people of the city threw themselves into building homes to replace the tens of thousands lost, and into creating some semblance of a revived culture. But beneath the surface of the happy, shining new socialist city, unexpressed pain festered; rumors and fantasies bred in the cramped darkness of Dresden's collective memory.