Dresden (6 page)

BEFORE
1914
Dresden had a host of attractive features, especially for those who enjoyed comfortable incomes, but it was no light-opera idyll. “Many households had to exploit every imaginable source of income,” according to a recent history of the city, “including child labor, second jobs, and subletting rooms. Especially bad for thousands of citizens were the unacceptable, often unhygienic and crowded living conditions.” Here the historian is describing the picturesque, much-praised Dresden Altstadt.

There was widespread unemployment and labor unrest, most famously the 1903 cigarette workers' strike. Between 1903 and 1909, a total of 185 separate labor disputes affected 1,400 factories, along with twenty-two lockouts in another 250 factories. By 1907 there were sixty thousand trade union members in Dresden. The Marxist Social Democratic Party took the majority of Saxony's Reichstag seats and the state became known as the “Red Kingdom.”

By the same token, Dresden might provide a haven for the arts and culture, but not all of what nourished this richness was attractive or even palatable. The young Richard Wagner had been living in Dresden for some years when he was appointed conductor of the Royal Opera there in 1843.
Rienzi
and
The Flying Dutchman
were both premiered there.
Tannhäuser
and
Lohengrin
were written there. He started to map out what was later to become the
Song of the Nibelungen
there. At that stage of his life a convinced democrat, Wagner made the mistake of throwing in his lot with the revolutionaries during the events of 1848–49. Even though his seditious activities had been confined to watch duty on the tower of the old Kreuzkirche,
after the old regime was restored with the aid of Prussian bayonets, he became a fugitive from Dresden with a warrant out for his arrest. An amnesty was not officially granted until 1861, when Wagner was already becoming the most famous composer of his age. And of course, also a notorious, poisonous anti-Semite.

Along with the rise of the left, Dresden also witnessed a less conspicuous but no less portentous rise of the far right. Dresden's long-serving (1895–1915) high burgomaster, Gustav Otto Beutler, was himself a decided sympathizer with “national” causes. Such organizations as the (anti-Polish) Society for the Eastern Marches, the Navy League (Flottenverein), and the vigorously, rabidly racist and social Darwinist Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband) were exceptionally strong in the city. The Pan-German League especially included “astonishing numbers of dignitaries from the middle and upper classes of the population, among them several Reichstag and State Parliament (Landtag) deputies and numerous city officials and councilors.”

In the minds of many Dresdeners, their city remained what it had been hundreds of years earlier: a fortress on the Slavic frontier. In a continuing echo of ancient conflicts, successful boycotts of foreign—especially Czech—products were organized. Rules forbidding the city authorities from employing itinerant Polish and Czech workers were introduced, and the Association of German Students in Dresden proudly declared itself “Jew free” in 1900.

A huge new group of salaried clerks and retail assistants, who felt themselves superior to the proletariat but as wage earners were socially excluded from the old, self-employed and professional middle class, came into being in Dresden, as in other cities of the Reich. This class compensated for its uncertain economic and social status by embracing the new politics of power and national aggrandizement with extra enthusiasm. Between 1898 and 1907 a conspicuously large number of congresses and conferences of far-right organizations took place in Dresden, often subsidized by the city authorities and with High Burgomaster Beutler acting as greeter and keynote speaker.

Before 1914 Dresden's superficial social mode was artistic and relaxed, but much of its politics was authoritarian, with ancient intolerances seething hidden beneath the city's perfect, well-cared-for skin. All this would become even more apparent when the old rulers went and the hard times came.

 

BY
1914
the Saxon royal family had been on the throne for 825 years. In 1889, on the Wettins' eight hundredth anniversary, there had been grandiose, colorful celebrations in Dresden and all over Saxony. Now they had four years and a few months left. The present king of Saxony would be its last.

In July 1914, Frederick Augustus III and his family were on a climbing vacation in the Austrian Alps when a telegram arrived, warning of a European crisis. By the beginning of August 1914, Germany and its ally Austria were at war with Britain, France, and Russia.

Dresden suffered, like the rest of Germany, from shortages and hunger, caused by the ruthless British naval blockade—which killed, it is said, many more German civilians than the Allied bombing campaign in the Second World War. With its great palaces and lavish public buildings, the capital became a city of hospitals and convalescent homes. And at least 120,000 of Saxony's young men, out of a total population of around five million, died in the trenches for kaiser, king, and fatherland. Of Dresden's half a million inhabitants, around fourteen thousand were killed—proportionately above the state's average—with many more permanently disabled or psychologically damaged.

If we are to believe his son's account, King Frederick Augustus was among those in Germany who floated the idea of a compromise peace with Britain and France late in the war. Perhaps he realized that this slaughter was destroying not just the German army but also the country's entire social and political system, with monarchs such as himself at its apex. Unfortunately, by 1917 Germany was little more than a military dictatorship. Generals Ludendorff and Hindenburg—both figures who were to play key roles in the rise of the ex-corporal Adolf Hitler—exercised decisive power. Except for Kaiser Wilhelm II, Germany's individual monarchs counted for almost as little as the politicians in the Reichstag, with their concerned speeches and peace resolutions.

Toward the end of 1918, with the German army in inexorable retreat and food shortages reaching crisis level, there were leftist-led protests and mutinies in Leipzig and Dresden, in common with other large German cities. The diehard right, also radicalized by the war, responded accordingly. As late as November 2, 1918, there was a
grand rally of the self-styled People's Committee for National Defense (Volksausschuss für Nationale Verteidigung) in Dresden, which united all the patriotic, racist, and conservative groups. Bloodcurdling calls were made for “total war.”

The calls went unheard. In the second week of November revolution broke out in Dresden. The post office and telegraph offices, the police headquarters, and the main government buildings were occupied by armed left-wing insurgents, many of them soldiers and led by rebellious airmen from the Grossenhain airfield. They were in touch with revolutionary soldiers and sailors elsewhere in Germany via the new communications phenomenon, radio. The red flag was hoisted on the royal
Schloss
. A hastily assembled Council of Workers and Soldiers crammed into the landmark big top of the famous Circus Sarrasani on the banks of the Elbe. The delegates declared the king deposed.

The conservative-nationalist elements, which had talked boldly just a week or so earlier of repression and national salvation, seemed to melt away. The king fled by boat to the royal pleasure palace at Moritzburg, an hour or so from Dresden, then on to the castle of a relative farther east.

On November 13, 1918, Frederick Augustus III Wettin, the last king of Saxony, officially abdicated, ending 829 years of rule by a single dynasty. A few days later he crossed the border into Prussian Silesia, where he settled at Sibyllenort, one of his family's ancestral estates. There he lived quietly as a private citizen until his death in 1932, respected even by many of those who had overthrown him. His former subjects still recount a well-known—though probably apocryphal—story that Frederick Augustus remarked wryly in Saxon dialect as he left his capital for the last time: “
Also, Kinder, dann machd eiern Drägg alleene!
” So, children, make your muck alone!

The “children,” excited as they might be to find themselves in charge at last, were not to experience the time after 1918 as a happy one. The mix of revolutionary idealists and nervously hopeful democrats who had declared the “Social Republic of Saxony” had only short-term aims in common. In the longer term, they were ill-suited for cooperation.

As for the far right in Dresden, it was not dead but lying low, waiting for the tide to turn.

 

AFTER THE
1918
REVOLUTION
there was a joke in circulation that went like this: If you told German workers to seize the railway station, they would, of course do so—but first they would obediently get in line to buy platform tickets. Considering the enormity of events in Germany and Saxony in the last months of 1918 and the beginning of 1919—national defeat, the overthrow of dynasties, rioters on the streets, radical political change—the process was relatively orderly and bloodless compared with other times and places in history.

Not that there were no casualties. In May 1919, after the moderate socialists had won the elections, a war veterans' demonstration against rising prices and lack of state help got out of hand in Dresden. Neuring, the Social Democrat minister of war in Saxony, was dragged from his office by rioters and tossed off the historic Augustus Bridge into the river Elbe. When the unfortunate politician tried to swim to the bank, an unidentified marksman from among the veterans gathered on the bridge shot and killed him as he floundered in the water. Within days martial law was declared, and with the aid of the army the remaining “workers' councils” in Dresden and Leipzig were dissolved.

Saxony was now supposedly a model parliamentary regime, founded on the moderate social democracy that for many years dominated politics there. All the same, conflict between extreme left and extreme right was as bitter as elsewhere in Germany, perhaps more so. The Saxon middle classes, humiliated by the Versailles Treaty, with their savings wiped out by hyperinflation, resentful of the new workers' rights enshrined in law after 1918, fretting for their lost privileges, and worried about their children's future, were alienated from the new status quo. Most longed for the old days of order and authority, of kings and generals and professors who knew how to rule and workers who knew their place. This was nowhere more true than in Dresden, where so many conservative-minded lawyers, civil servants, and education professionals were concentrated. To overcome the hostility of this key group, democracy needed stability. That was precisely what it did not get.

There was a short period of relative prosperity in the mid-1920s. Tourism in Dresden revived a little. No longer the wealthy indepen
dent travelers of the prewar period, or the long-stay foreign
rentiers
, but new trippers, who came in by train and made quick group tours of the city and its surrounding countryside in the new motor buses. It was a healthy contribution to the city's economy, but not the continuous subsidy that Dresden had been used to before 1914, when there had been a permanent, wealthy expatriate community numbering many thousands.

The artistic and architectural heritage of Dresden was still a great draw. In the 1920s Dresden even flourished briefly as a haven for the avant-garde. Before 1914 the Brücke (Bridge) group of artists, based in Dresden, had blazed a trail for the Expressionist movement. After the war many young artists, who had been through the hell of the trenches, were not satisfied with anything less than what they saw as absolute artistic truth. Searing paintings from this period include Otto Dix's
The War Cripple
and
Prager Strasse
(which featured war wounded begging on Dresden's most exclusive shopping street), and
The Unemployed Man
by Otto Griebel. The Austrian Oskar Kokoschka was professor at the Dresden Academy from 1919 to 1924, though he eventually left, finding Dresden “suffocating.”

Toward the end of the 1920s many stalwarts of the avant-garde left for Berlin or Paris. Dresden remained provincial at heart, they decided. People flocked there to see old, beautiful things and an aesthetically comforting vision of history, not to endure too much reality.

Dresden lived to a great extent in the past, which was where its visitors and citizens alike were most comfortable. It was no accident that two of the earliest acts of Dresden's Nazis after taking power were these: the dismissal of Otto Dix from his teaching post at the academy, and the demolition of the modernistic, glass-and-steel Kugelhaus (the Globe House), built for the Health and Hygiene Exhibition in 1928 and loathed by the city's numerous artistic conservatives.

 

AFTER THE FIRST WORLD WAR,
Dresden's manufacturing industries were saved by the fact that they were, by and large, of the more modern sort: cameras and optical instruments, typewriters, sewing machines, cigarettes, and toward the end of the 1920s, radios. In other parts of Saxony, traditional industries predominated, and they proved brutally vulnerable to foreign competition: Textiles, toys, bicycles, musical
instruments (which also suffered from the advent of radio and cinema) all declined. During the temporary revival in world trade, the Saxon capital benefited more than the countryside.

But then came the slump. Dresden slid into the same economic quicksand as the rest of the world. The number of wholly dependent welfare recipients in the city increased from fewer than twenty-eight thousand in 1927 to almost seventy-four thousand in 1932. In Saxony, unemployment rates were the highest in Germany. The Social Democrats remained the largest party but continued their slow decline. In 1930 elections brought increases in both the Communist and the Nazi vote. Parliament was paralyzed.