Dresden: heart of a new culture war
Seventy-five years after the horrors of the Allied firebombings, Germany’s far Right is trying to revive Nazi myths, writes Oliver Moody.
It took only the length of an interval at the opera, the German poet Durs Grunbein once recalled – ‘‘as much time as it takes to buy a packet of cigarettes’’.
On a cold February night 75 years ago, a vanguard of Lancasters from Bomber Command released a rain of magnesium flares above Dresden, in eastern Germany, casting a harsh light over the city. Minutes later, another 254 Lancasters dropped 375 tonnes of fire bombs and 500 tonnes of high explosives, including two-tonne ‘‘blockbusters’’, each capable of obliterating a street.
As the firestorm continued, stoked over three nights by wave after wave of bombers, first British, then American, the glare from the burning city became visible from the air at a distance of 500 miles.
By the end of the bombardment up to 25,000 people were dead, lacerated by shrapnel, incinerated by tornados of fire, crushed or suffocated in the cellars where they had sought shelter.
The architectural pride of Germany, the ‘‘Florence of the Elbe’’, had been flayed to its skeleton by what Grunbein called ‘‘black snow in February’’.
Today Dresden will mourn its dead for the 75th time. German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier will link arms with the Duke of Kent and the Bishop of Coventry in a human chain of thousands stretching protectively around the city centre.
It is said that Steinmeier has struggled to find the right words for the occasion. That would be forgiveable. It is not easy for Germans to know what to say about Dresden.
On the one hand, it was a horrific and strategically questionable loss of civilian life. On the other, the city was a logistics hub and centre of munitions manufacture for a barbaric regime that had declared total war on half the world.
As the communist dictator Erich Honecker said when he inaugurated the rebuilt opera house on the 40th anniversary of the bombing: the war that set forth from Berlin came back, in due course, to Dresden.
Small wonder if Steinmeier’s speechwriters are scratching their heads.
The far Right, however, has no such compunction, and is noisily retailing its own version of the history, giving new life to falsehoods first spread by Hitler’s propagandists.
Tomorrow, thousands of neoNazis from across Europe are expected to descend on Dresden for a sombre march in protest against the ‘‘Anglo-American air gangsters’’ who punished the ‘‘innocent’’ German population with fire.
More subtly, the populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is muscling in. This week it will hold an ‘‘alternative’’ wreath-laying ceremony and set up an ‘‘information stand’’ dispensing its own facts about the bombing.
The party’s new co-leader is Tino Chrupalla, a Dresden native who says his grandfather and father – who was five at the time – survived the inferno by sheltering under a bridge. Chrupalla, 44, claimed in an interview at the weekend that the true death toll was more like 100,000, rather than the 25,000 calculated from Nazi records by a panel of eminent historians.
For Hans Muller-Steinhagen, rector of TU Dresden, the city’s leading university, this is part of a dangerous attempt to lighten Germany’s burden of historic guilt and rehabilitate tubthumping ultra-nationalism in the 21st century.
‘‘In my view, the AfD increasingly utilises the rhetoric of the National Socialists and makes a concerted effort to falsify the culture of remembrance,’’ he says. ‘‘Tino Chrupalla concocts highly inflated numbers of victims of February 13, 1945, in order to reignite the so-called ‘German victim myth’ . . . The AfD’s repeated use of these statements is a sustained attempt to make right-wing ideology socially acceptable again.’’
Chrupalla did not respond to a request for interview, but the ancestry of his theory about the 100,000 casualties can be traced directly back to Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s chief spin doctor. Two days after the attack Goebbels quadrupled the death toll in a briefing to the few foreign correspondents who had remained in Berlin. The Swedish press reported first that 100,000 had died, then 200,000, which would have been roughly a third of the city’s population.
As Dresden folklore has it, exactly a year after the bombing two schoolboys climbed the tower of the Kreuzkirche and, in defiance of an edict from the Russian occupiers, rang the church bell in memory of the dead.
Over the next four decades of communist rule in East Germany the commemoration was a slightly subdued affair,
tending to dwell on the painstaking reconstruction of the city and the crimes of the Nazis, who were portrayed almost as an occupying force thrust on the local population by the ‘‘fascists’’ of West Germany.
Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, the spectre of Nazi propaganda returned. In 1990, on the 45th anniversary of the attack, British Holocaust denier David Irving visited the city and resurrected the myth in an
address to some 500 onlookers.
Nine years later, the hard Right began to stage its funeral marches. In 2009 some 6500 gathered for Europe’s largest neo-Nazi gathering in decades.
In recent years the city has fought back, holding lectures, church services and panel discussions to right the historical record. For the past 10 years its dignitaries, among them Muller-Steinhagen, have formed the human chains around its historic heart.
‘‘For me, it is a powerful signal against racism and inhumanity,’’ he says. ‘‘Each year I am deeply moved by this event, as it symbolises and projects an image of peaceful co-existence, which our society so urgently needs in times of increasing and divisive polarisation.’’
But the growing power and self-confidence of the AfD, which won a quarter of the vote in the surrounding state of Saxony last September, poses a new problem.
The party has the heft to amplify the revisionist history of the bombings for an audience far beyond the neo-Nazi underground.
Johann Schutz, a historian at TU Dresden, says the AfD’s approach is much subtler than that of its more obviously extremist predecessors. ‘‘The party mobilises the emotions of many people and, in doing so, makes out that it is part of a bourgeois conservative movement.
‘‘Dresden also allows the AfD to spread its interpretation of German history and to relativise Germany’s guilt. You can see this in the way the AfD side too now talks about the number of victims and the military significance of the destruction of Dresden.’’
Three-quarters of a century on, the bombing is a live battleground in a broader culture war over Germany’s past and its modern identity. – The
Times