Dresden (3 page)

The next morning aircrew from the 796 Lancaster bombers that flew to Dresden have almost all landed safely back at their bases in England. The young fliers are debriefed and then released to enjoy hearty breakfasts. Used to horrendous losses over Germany during the previous three years, they have reason to celebrate a mission that was, for them, a bloodless affair.

Not so for Dresden. Overnight, those same aircrew dropped more than twenty-six hundred tons of high explosives and incendiary devices on the target city, utterly destroying thirteen square miles of its historic center, including incalculable quantities of treasure and works of art, and dozens of the finest buildings in Europe. At least twenty-five thousand inhabitants are dead, and possibly many more: blown apart, incinerated, or suffocated by the effects of the firestorm. Bodies will be piled up in one of the main squares. They will be placed on huge slatted shutters, salvaged from the display windows of one of the city's department stores, then burned in the thousands to stop the spread of disease.

Victor Klemperer and his wife, two out of a relatively small group of human beings for whom the horrors of mass destruction represent not a
cataclysm but a miracle of deliverance, have taken advantage of the chaos. The professor has torn the telltale yellow star from his coat, and they are on their way to safety and freedom. But that is another part of the story, and certainly a different side of the moral equation…

The day is Ash Wednesday, February 14, 1945. It is eighty-four days before the end of the Second World War in Europe. Almost a lifetime later, the name of Dresden continues to echo uneasily in our collective memory, and controversy about the city's destruction has not ceased to rage.

“THE ENGLISH WERE TREASURED.
I think it was only after the raid that there was a hatred of the English in Dresden, not before.”

Pastor Karl-Ludwig Hoch, Lutheran man of God, architectural historian, and community leader, is in his early seventies now. A profoundly spiritual man, he is saved from otherworldliness by a wry, almost cynical sense of humor. His patrician features are folded in a sad smile as he describes his fellow citizens' lost love affair with England.

“People just knew that the British and the Americans loved Dresden so much…St. John's was the English church on the Wiener Platz, and the American church was All Saints.”

In the garden of the Hoch family's suburban waterside villa is a stone monument, from which it is possible to look downriver and view the skyline of Dresden two or three miles distant. It was built by some long-ago Francophile to commemorate the afternoon when Napoleon, on headlong retreat from Moscow and considering where to make a stand, was led to that same height, at that same spot, so that he too could examine Dresden from a distance. The year was 1813. Saxony was one of the few allies Napoleon had left. The French emperor was thinking of having a battle on its territory. In the event, he liked the idea so much, he had several. The Saxons, as the pastor often points out, have never been especially clever in their choice of friends.

In 1945 Pastor Hoch's family were spared the total destruction visited upon the inner city. Isolated stray bombs scarred their leafy neighborhood, but the Hochs and their lodgers and neighbors just took refuge in the shelter in the garden until the raid was over. Then—
when the roar of aircraft engines had faded—they emerged, to be presented with a grandstand view of their native city, two miles or so distant, being devoured by flame. A woman who lived up the hill, a fervent Nazi, spotted them out on their balcony and called out, “So, Frau Hoch! Was Goebbels right or not? Are the English criminals or not?”

Josef Goebbels. In many ways, the legend of the destruction of Dresden was the dark, agile Nazi propaganda minister's last and grimmest creation. For Goebbels the city's near-annihilation was both a genuinely felt horror and a cynical opportunity.

Most Germans had realized at the time of the fall of Stalingrad that talk of victory was hollow. By the winter of 1944–45, even Nazi fanatics realized that to all practical intents the war was lost. Ever resourceful, Goebbels now made a characteristically bold and cunning decision: Instead of putting a positive gloss on the German position, he would hammer home the horrors in store if the Third Reich was defeated. The Bolshevik hordes pressing from the east, raping and looting as they advanced into the neat, untouched towns of East Prussia and Silesia; the treacherous, hypocritical Anglo-Americans with their pitiless bomber fleets and their cosmopolitan (read Jewish) contempt for Germany's unique cultural heritage. These were the threats to German—and European—civilization.

The only answer was to nobly resist these enemies, totally and to the end—and wait for the miracle that might come any day from the new wonder weapons that Germany's scientists and engineers would soon bring to devastating application, or from the growing cracks in the impossible, artificial alliance between communism and capitalism. Meanwhile, the worse the crimes that could be laid at the door of the Reich's enemies, the more powerful the spell this twilight masterpiece of Goebbels's black art would cast. Failing the élan of everlasting victory, Germany must summon up the courage of temporary despair.

Therefore no attempts were made to minimize the atrocities being committed by the advancing Russians. On the contrary, unsparing accounts of the horrors that German forces had discovered during brief reoccupations of East Prussian towns during the ebb and flow of battle were broadcast and rebroadcast on the radio. Refugees still in shock were interviewed, and horrifying atrocity articles appeared in the thin newssheets that had now replaced the Reich's once-voluminous press. The newsreels showed devastation and ruin—and the brave determi
nation of those still eager to resist the enemy. It was a grim route to final victory,
Endsieg
, but (so the propaganda implied) that route remained open despite all the setbacks.

So, in the early days of 1945, Dresden waited; but for most of the city's people, the arrival they feared was not that of Allied air forces, but of the Soviet Red Army. A hundred and more miles to the east, the capital of the neighboring province of Silesia, Breslau, had been all but encircled by the Russians. From the air base at Klotzsche just north of Dresden the Luftwaffe was running an airborne supply shuttle to the beleaguered Silesian metropolis. The eastern defenses of the Reich were threatening to crack, and after Breslau the next major German city in their path was Dresden.

Camera in hand, on February 13, 1945, Karl-Ludwig Hoch met his brother, and together they took a number 11 tram to Postplatz, in the heart of the Altstadt, the old town. Their plan was to snap photographs of the proud city of Dresden to remember it by. This was because their mother had said that, as an aristocratic family, they might soon have to flee the Communist advance, and so might never see Dresden again. The weather was wintry-mild under slight cloud. The brothers wandered through familiar streets and alleys, passing landmarks they had seen most days of their lives. They returned to their suburban home late that same afternoon, as the twilight crept over the valley of the Elbe, not knowing that they had just seen Dresden for the last time in its historic form, or that many, if not most, of the fellow citizens they had mingled with in the familiar streets would be killed during the night. The Hoch brothers had, to all intents and purposes, seen the dead, walking.

But just for now, during these final hours, Dresden remained itself. Frightened, thronged with refugees despite efforts to speed them on to the west, and aware of the possibility of coming suffering, but still itself. The “Florence on the Elbe” that for two hundred and more years had attracted artists and aesthetes and lovers of culture, not just from Germany but from all over Europe, Britain, and the Americas. And which, everyone agreed, would undoubtedly survive to dazzle future generations even if Hitler's Reich was liquidated during the months to come.

There were some who comforted themselves with the supposition that the Allies were preserving Dresden for the future, that they had
earmarked it as their administrative capital after the war. The fine buildings, the Baroque palaces and Art Nouveau apartment houses, the pleasant landscapes and the roomy villas. All these things, so peculiar to Dresden with its rich past and continuing tradition of enlightened architectural planning, spoke in favor of this theory. And there were other rumors whispered around the city during those days. Churchill had a favorite aunt who lived in Dresden. He had spared the city for her sake. And the English, the English had a special love for Dresden. But then that was where we started…

Better to start again, perhaps. Not with the doomed architectural jewel, but with the simple settlement in the floodplain of a river valley that the city had been long ago. The village known unromantically to the Slavs who originally lived there as Drezdzány: “forest dwellers in the swamp.”

 

MARSHY, BUT WELL-SHELTERED
by hills to the north and south of the river Elbe, Drezdzány represented the first easily navigable river crossing as the great central European waterway snaked down through gorges from its origins in the great Bohemian forest and flattened out for the long run northwestward to the sea. Even today the determining geography is absolutely clear: within a few miles' travel, progressing downstream, we move from rocky sandstone overhangs with spectacular views of water far below to wide water meadows and balmy, fertile lowland.

And fertility was what the Saxon migrants were seeking as they moved east into the Slav lands. Defeated and subjugated by the Christian king of the Franks, later to be crowned as the Emperor Charlemagne, Saxon tribes who had been pagan just a few decades before built strongholds, and within those strongholds, churches. Christianity quickly became their badge in the struggle against the still godless Slavs. Their restless energy made the Saxons rich and successful.

In the eleventh century a Saxon count of the Marches, or margrave, took up residence on a great hill dominating the Elbe and fortified himself thoroughly there, as a base for colonization. He called the place Meissen and himself count of the same—a corruption of the Slavic kingdom of Misni, which had previously existed here. This was the Wild East, the Germans' ever-expanding frontier.

A final Slavic revolt in 1147 provoked the calling of a Crusade under the auspices of the emperor himself. The massed armies of Germanic Christendom suppressed the natives with a fury as bloody as it was righteous. Thereafter the colonists encountered little opposition, at least in the area around the Elbe and Oder. The land was productive. It proved to be rich also in minerals. The Germans developed mining techniques that were more advanced than anywhere else on mainland Europe, laying the basis for future wealth. As in Africa, Asia, and the Americas in later centuries, some place names were introduced by the invaders, some adopted from native forms. As in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, trade and conquest went hand in rapacious hand.

The first mention of Drezdzány as a Germany colony-town comes in records of the counts of Meissen dating from 1216. The German settlement, on the south bank of the river, became the “old town” (Altstadt), and the Slavic areas across the Elbe—though older—the “new town” (Neustadt), presumably because it was still awaiting the pleasure of Germanization. In 1270 the place now becoming known as Dresden entered History with a big “H.” Count Henry the Illustrious of Meissen moved his seat twelve miles upriver to Dresden. The site was pleasant, mild in winter and not too hot in summer, and was already becoming well known for its vines, orchards, and market gardens. Not as spectacular as the rocky crag of Meissen but, shall we say, more civilized.

Dresden didn't stay a Marcher lord's capital for long. After the death of Henry the Illustrious, following the vagaries of princely DNA, it passed in quick succession to the rulers of nearby Bohemia and Brandenburg, before passing back to the Meissen jurisdiction just before the Black Death swept through Europe. It would now remain continuously in the possession of members of Meissen's ruling family—the Wettin dynasty—for six hundred years.

The spread of German influence to the east and the south ran into limits as the fifteenth century took its course. The Czechs of Bohemia, smart Slavs with their own sturdy social hierarchy, not forgetting industrial and mineral resources that rivaled those of their neighbors, had already started to chafe at the continuing influx of German immigrants, especially in Prague and the mineral-rich Sudeten mountains. Bohemia's kings might encourage the settlement of hardworking outsiders in their towns and villages—rulers have a tendency to think in terms of tax and
skills bases—but the old-established natives were not so favorably impressed. Mutual massacres followed, in which Germans were terrorized and forcibly expelled from their strongholds in the towns and, in return, troublesome Czechs tossed down mineshafts—the usual bloodstained small change of ethnic conflict. Decades of war between Germans and Czechs, Catholics and Hussites, finally ended in uneasy peace. Dresden lies less than thirty miles north of the Bohemian borderlands where the Elbe rises and where this agonizing ethnic drama was being played out. In 1429 a Czech army reached the gates of Dresden and laid waste to the suburbs.

Nevertheless, around the turn of the sixteenth century, Dresden acquired the status that it would never again lose: capital of Saxony. The Wettin dynasty split the Saxon lands between two competing sons. The richer part, including Dresden, was given to Albert, thence-forward prince elector (
Kurfürst
)—acknowledged master of eastern Saxony and member of the committee of princes that chose each Holy Roman ruler—not just a kingmaker but an emperor maker. There was a fire, which destroyed substantial parts of the town, not for the first or last time. As a result, architects were instructed to build in less readily combustible stone—in most cases the local sandstone—a feature that became characteristic of Dresden's architecture.

Through the sixteenth century Dresden developed into an artistic capital as well as a political one. Martin Luther threw out his Protestant challenge to the pope, and the elector of Saxony became his chief protector. Soon Saxony was predominantly Lutheran and the leading Protestant power in Germany. With religious divisions making Europe in general, and Germany in particular, a more dangerous place, the elector built an elegant
Schloss
on the Elbe and surrounded it with substantial fortifications. Despite all the splendor and pride, during all that time the city retained the faint, beleaguered aura of a frontier encampment. Soon it was time for a new dispute over who ruled Bohemia and by what religious law. The old, still smoldering enmity lit the fuse that started the Thirty Years' War.

Europe was ravaged by marauding armies on a scale not seen since the fall of the Roman Empire. When peace came in 1648, Bohemia lost its remnants of independence, and both Catholicism and Germandom were strengthened there. Nevertheless, the Czech lands were left with a mix of Slav majority and German minority that would
always be combustible. On the positive side, the reputation of Dresden as a military stronghold had led to a rapid influx of anxious country folk seeking to escape the rampaging armies. Most of Europe might be exhausted and depopulated, but the Saxon capital had grown into a community of twenty-one thousand souls. By the standards of the time, it was a very substantial city.

Yet Dresden is, as we approach the end of the seventeenth century, still a provincial center. A
Residenzstadt
or residence town where an important but nevertheless, in European terms, middle-ranking regional magnate holds court. Literally. Almost every advantage the people of Dresden enjoy—jobs, industries, trade, arts, and amusements—is conditional on the elector of Saxony continuing to choose this place to live in. It is a factor that will shape, perhaps unconsciously, many attitudes in the city even when it has outgrown that status as royal residence and found itself transformed into a teeming modern metropolis.