Dresden: The Destruction and Rebirth of a City, by Sinclair McKay, translated by Zhang Zhuxin, New Classic Culture- Wenhui Publishing House, February 2022, 392 pp. 78.00 yuan
Shortly after the end of World War II, the famous American poet Robert Lowell, who had been arrested for participating in anti-war marches, published a collection of poems, Lord Weary's Castle (winner of the 1947 Pulitzer Prize), the second of which read: "... That year/solemn year of 1945 piled up countless losses on/we burned into a mountain of purification. It should be pointed out that the poet here angrily denounces not only the nuclear bombings carried out by the US military in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of that year, but also the "Luftangriffe auf Dresden" (Dresden Bombing) that shocked the world before that - on February 13-15, 1945, the British and American air forces launched four rounds of indiscriminate bombing of this undefended small city in eastern Germany, resulting in the destruction of most of the industrial and military infrastructure of the old city (even the basement was not spared). Some 25,000 people, mostly civilians, died in the airstrikes.
Bombing of Dresden
More than a decade later, Kurt Vonnegut, a survivor of the Dresden bombing, published the anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), detailing his harrowing experience as a prisoner of war and being forced to act as a "corpse mine miner" after the bombing. Against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, the novel quickly became a bestseller and was hailed as a "milestone in American postmodern literature." In 1977, in an interview with the Paris Review, the novelist recalled, "We lived in an underground slaughterhouse with a new and beautiful cement pig house. They put beds and straw mattresses in the pig house" – the name of the pig house is "Slaughterhouse Five" (the "meat storage room").
Vonnegut is one of the main figures in the British historian Sinclair Mckay's new book Dresden: The Destruction and Rebirth of a City. According to McKay, the schizophrenic Billy Peelgreen in Slaughterhouse Five is actually the "incarnation" of the novelist — the best chapter of the novel actually stems from the author's own experience: a Maori prisoner of war who was exhuming the body with Vonnegut was so disgusting that he vomited incessantly and eventually lost his life. In contrast, "fear of miasma, plague, and rats is more prevalent" – rodents are said to have "become obese" due to their abundance of food. This experience became a lifelong nightmare for the novelist Vonnegut, and he remembered that Dresden before the bombing was a European historical and cultural city "comparable to Paris".
With a thousand-year history, Dresden was once the capital of the Kingdom of Saxony. In 1697, Frederick August II, Elector of Saxony of the Holy Roman Empire (known as the "Mighty King"), was successfully elected King of Poland. The king, who admired Louis XIV, the "Sun King" and believed that "the king immortalizes himself through his architecture", began to build a large number of buildings, recruiting talents, and for decades built Dresden into a brilliant cultural capital – it is said that Shakespeare's tragedy Hamlet was first staged here, and then introduced to other German cities - the king himself was awarded the title of "Father of Art". In 1719, the king invited the famous musician Handel (1685-1759) to perform for the newly completed opera house, which marked the leading cultural and artistic standards of Dresden among European cities, thus becoming known as the "Florence on the Elbe".
In modern times, Dresden has remained a place of "pilgrimage" to which literati artists aspire (the name of vonnegut's novel, Pilgrim, implies this). The famous philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), the theoretical advocate of the "Wild Rush Movement," renamed his beloved Dresden "Florence of Germany" out of national pride. In 1813, Napoleon fought with the Sixth Army of the "French Alliance" in this place, and the famous composer and romantic writer E.T.A. Hoffmann (1776-1822) heard the rumbling of cannons at night, and a compassion for the fate of mankind was born, and his heroic opera Aurora is said to be based on this. In addition, cultural celebrities from other countries, such as the Novelist Washington Owen from the United States, who praised it as a "place of literary taste and historical wisdom", with a climate, environment and artistic atmosphere far more than Paris and Berlin, and hoped to draw inspiration from the long-standing German folktale – a product of Owen's masterpiece "Notes on Seeing and Hearing". For the same reason, in the 1860s and 1870s, Dostoevsky, the literary icon of Vonnegut and the author of Crime and Punishment, also lived and wrote literature here, admiring this cultural city.
Bernardo Bellotto: Looking down from under the August Bridge on the right bank of the Elbe towards Dresden
However, according to the diary of victor Klemperer, another of the book's witnesses, the Jewish writer Victor Klemperer, since the 1930s, with the rise of Nazi militarism, the tranquility of the town has been shattered, the cultural and artistic atmosphere has been lost, and instead, it is full of "noise and commotion"—the art capital in the heart of Nazi Germany, which has become "the cradle of the early National Socialist political movement".
At the instigation and intimidation of the fanatical Nazis and state leader Martin Muchemann, most of the city's male citizens were forced to join the "People's Stormtrooper" (created on the orders of the "Führer", as distinct from the regular Wehrmacht), and the boys had to join the "Hitler Youth". The huge Nazi symbol "Swastika" hangs on almost all public buildings in the city, and the Nazi party newspapers Freedom Struggle and The People's Observer are everywhere. Under the banner of Nazi "integration" (Gleichschaltung), the free ideas advocated by Germans ceased to exist, and culture and art were devastated. Muchemann, who adhered to the will of the "Führer", believed that all artistic creations must strictly follow the Nazi ideals, and modernist art (home) undoubtedly has a rebellious tendency and therefore needs to be strictly purged.
Under the purge order, jazz (known as "decadent music") was first banned, because its musical form was too casual and difficult to control, and it was very likely to evoke the anarchist ideology and emotions of the people. The second to be seized was the drama – including puppet theatre: the famous Dresden painter and playwright Otto Griebel used puppet shows to satirize the authorities, which the public liked. The Nazis then established the Imperial Puppet Theatre Institute and ordered that any subsequent play must undergo a "pre-screening" before being staged. Similarly, the famous Dresden-born writer Erich K stner was not welcomed— his erotic political satire Fabian deliberately played up lascivious sex scenes from Berlin's high society—and the Nazi authorities, enraged, ordered his work to be publicly burned.
Hitler inspected Dresden
In 1933, the first exhibition "Art of The Fallen" was held in Dresden, and Hitler himself was present. The "Fuehrer" himself has always regarded himself as elegant - in his early years, he twice applied to the Vienna Academy of Arts, but he was rejected, leaving a lifelong regret, but his obsession with art was consistent. He chose Dresden because his most admired composer, Wagner, premiered here a work of great importance in the history of music, Tannh user. In addition, the "Operation Logue" in the Blitzkrieg is also taken from the first "Das Rheingold" (Rheingold) of the Wagner quadruster Der Ring des Nibelungen ( Der Ring of the Nibelungen ) , in which the Vulcan is named Logue.
Hitler visits the Fallen Art Exhibition
In addition to Wagner, Richard Georg Strauss, the world-famous composer who lived in Dresden, was also a favorite of Hitler— the latter particularly appreciating romantic operas such as Don Juan, Salome, and Ölekrat. In 1933, Hitler ordered Strauss to be the director of the National Music Bureau (he was not consulted beforehand) to show his "favor", but the artist did not appreciate it. Two years later, his collaboration with Jewish writer Stephen Zweig on the opera Die Schweigame Frau upset the authorities and he resigned. After the bombing of Dresden, the State Opera house was destroyed in the war, and Strauss was devastated and insane.
In fact, the "Fuehrer's" preference for art was only vassalage, and for him no corner of life could be separated from the control of the Nazi regime, so that within the empire, everything was subordinated to and served politics – and art was no exception. In order to implement the will of the "Fuehrer", under the personal planning of the Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels, not only were the "degenerate art" of "reactionary" and "vulgar" banned, but all words and deeds contrary to nazi militarist ideas were ruthlessly suppressed. Walking on the streets of the old city, anyone who refuses to perform a Nazi salute to officials will be immediately arrested. In schools, anyone who resisted the ideological education imposed by the Nazis would be kicked out of the education system. Academics were forced to publicly swear allegiance to the "Fuehrer" – a swearing-in ceremony that began in primary and secondary schools but soon spread to universities and research institutions. The authorities believed that it was not enough for intellectuals to sign documents, but also that the public should hear and see with their own eyes the declaration of absolute obedience to the Nazi regime, without the slightest doubt. According to Klemperel's diary, Dr. Margaret Blank, who had practiced medicine in the countryside, was skeptical about Germany's eventual victory while treating the child of an officer. After being denounced, the doctor was sentenced to death.
Dresden not only played an "exemplary" role in the propaganda of Nazi ideology, but it was even more heinous in the practice of sterilization policies aimed at special groups of people (Jews, the disabled). Under the influence of "pseudoscience" trends such as eugenics and social Darwinism, the Nazis implemented a policy of depopulation in disguise – according to statistics, in 1935 alone, when the Nazis officially came to power, within a year, Dresden underwent eight thousand two hundred and nineteen sterilizations, far more than Berlin (6,550 times). Those who dared to speak out and express ethical concerns in this incident were all "protective arrests." By the time of the bombing of 1945, there were only one hundred and ninety-eight Jews left in Dresden, and before the Nazis came to power, there were more than six thousand Jews here.
In November 1938, the Dresden Synagogue was burned to the ground during kristallnacht, a well-planned terrorist activity by state leaders– Kristallnacht (or "Night of Broken Glass" was the beginning of the Organized Massacre of Jews by the SS. The windows of many Jewish shops were broken that night, and the broken glass resembled crystals in the moonlight, hence the name. After the synagogue was burned down, the Jews of Dresden were terrified and seemed to have no other way but to flee. Even more frightening, in 1942 Dresden issued a decree prohibiting Jews from buying flowers and ice cream, targeting jewish children left behind – a precise and cruel approach that undoubtedly proved "the more crazy and fanatical nature of Nazism than antisocial pathology".
Thus, as the British historian Frederick Taylor put it: "The destruction of Dresden is epic and tragic." This city, which symbolizes the best of German Baroque architecture, was once stunningly beautiful. During the Nazis, it was reduced to a hell for Germany. In this sense, the bombing of Dresden was an absolutely disciplinary tragedy in terms of the horrors of war in the twentieth century. ”
Of course, the Coalition General Staff chose to bomb Dresden not just out of moral punishment. According to British Air Force General C. M. Glearson (C. M. Grierson) stated in a Paris press release that "Dresden is a concentration of a large amount of military production, an intact administrative center, and a key transportation point to the east" – and it is true: as a hub of several main railway lines such as Berlin-Prague-Vienna, trains full of tanks, artillery, soldiers, and miles of trucks pass through Dresden every day; one hundred and twenty-seven factories located here, including several aircraft parts factories, A gas factory and a military optical equipment factory — and fifty thousand skilled workers — supplied the German army with a steady stream of war supplies. As British Admiral Lord Tiverton put it in his speech: "The girls who load shells in the factories are part of the war machine, just as the soldiers who shoot on the battlefield." The above argument undoubtedly provided sufficient reasons for this bombing: that is, it could cut off the German communication and material transfer, cooperate with the Soviet army's westward advance, and completely destroy the confidence of the Germans.
In addition, the Allies' move also has a sense of revenge. Previously, the German army launched a crazy air raid on Britain, and historical attractions such as Exeter, Bath, and York were slaughtered, and the capital London suffered the heaviest losses, even Canterbury Cathedral was not spared. Thus, as early as 1942, when the Lubeck air raids took place, the famous German writer Thomas Mann, who was already in exile in the United States at the time, gave a speech to his fellow Germans through the BBC (although the Nazis forbade any citizen to listen to unauthorized radio programs and violators were punished by death, many still took the risk of listening privately) - "Does Germany think that it will never have to pay for its barbarism and evil deeds?"— "Does Germany think that it will never have to pay for its barbarism and evil deeds?". Mann warned that "after a while, there will be no more intact houses in Germany."
After four rounds of air raids, Dresden, which bore nearly four thousand tons of bombs, became a real hell on earth. According to survivors: "There were people on fire everywhere, smoke from the ground made it difficult to breathe, and dead people and corpses trampled on each other. The scorched remains of the human body shrank to the size of a child, the severed limbs and arms were everywhere, and the carriages filled with people were burning. The hot wind from the firestorm sucks the newly escaped people into the burning house. "As Sinclair McKay analyzes in his book, although the bombing was not the highest number of bombs dropped, the good weather (high visibility), the wooden houses, the interconnected basements of the buildings, and the lack of prior preparations— the Dresden ground forces were weak, lacking both anti-aircraft machine guns and search systems, and the Luftwaffe at this time was unable to take off to meet the battle due to the lack of pilots and fuel - the above factors superimposed, resulting in the devastation of the bombing, The thousand-year-old city was reduced to rubble in an instant, just as Thomas Mann had predicted. Take, for example, the famous Frauenkirche , a church built in the mid-eighteenth century as a typical Baroque work of art that has long been regarded as an important historical heritage of the Kingdom of Saxony. During the bombing, it was almost completely destroyed, leaving only a crumbling statue of Martin Luther, from which the painter Wilhelm Lachnit painted Der Tod von Dresden (1945), full of sadness. The German playwright Gerhart Johann Robert Hauptmann, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote a line of poetry on the spot: "People who forget how to cry, in the face of Dresden, they find their tears again." In the eyes of the poet, such a tragic scene is obviously beyond the scope of human language expression.
The most famous photograph of the destruction was taken by Richard Peter. Instead of a stone statue of an angel, the painting is a sculpture of goodness on the roof of Dresden's town hall, which overlooks unimaginable destruction in the southern part of the old town.
Ruins of Dresden
During the Cold War, despite the controversy surrounding the bombing of Dresden – which right-wing historians called the "Bomben-holocaust" carried out by the Anglo-American coalition "under cold calculations" as an expression of outrage against "NATO imperialism", while historians on the left struggled to justify it from a strategic standpoint – the reconstruction of this historic city was the consensus of both sides. Half a century later, the Berlin Wall fell, Germany was unified, and Dresden accelerated its reconstruction. The reconstruction centered on the "Church of Our Lady" and included classic buildings such as Zwinger Palace and the Semperoper. It is worth mentioning that most of the above reconstruction costs come from donations from the United States and Britain, including many Jews- and the British city of Coventry (a "sister city" with dresden after the war) that was hit by German air raids during World War II also generously contributed to the reconstruction work. In 2005, the "Church of Our Lady" was successfully restored, which also marked the formal reconciliation of Germany with the British and American wares in World War II, and the then German Federal President Horst K hler said in his speech: "If anyone loses faith in peace, come and see the rebuilt Church of Our Lady!" ”
The reconstructed Church of Our Lady
The eighteenth-century "war maniac", King Frederick the Great of Prussia, warned his descendants not to start a war lightly, because once the war began, no one could predict how it would end. In fact, from ancient times to the present, there has never been an absolute winner in any war. As Vonnegut said in an interview with the Paris Review, "There is only one man who profits from war: I." I earned three dollars from everyone who was killed. I think". This is his trademark "black humor."
Dresden today