Dresden Mon Amour REALISM OR REVISIONISM? GERMANS REVISIT the WAR
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, HAMBURG BILDARCHIV ERICH ANDRES/DENKMALSCHUTZAMT Dresden Mon Amour REALISM OR REVISIONISM? GERMANS REVISIT THE WAR BY NOAH ISENBERG • “A SIGNAL IS NEEDED Dresden. This development, which can be charted along a number of different lines (historical, literary, popular, etc.), was previously unimaginable. AGAINST THE ONE-SIDED MOURNING IN GERMANY,” For over half a century, German discussions of the Third Reich have focused almost unremittingly on the crimes committed by the Nazis, and in doing so have DECLARED PETER LAUER, A SIXTY-FOUR-YEAR-OLD tended to implicate not only Hitler’s most fervent supporters but the German pop- ulation as a whole——for its passivity, for its basic endorsement of the regime, for SCHOOLTEACHER TAKING PART IN A NEO-NAZI its incapacity to recognize the heinous nature of the National Socialist cause. Even if these discussions have occasionally been punctuated by sharp challenges——such COUNTERDEMONSTRATION TO MARK THE SIXTIETH as the infamous Historikerstreit (“historians’ dispute”) of 1986, when a strident WORKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE: ANNIVERSARY OF THE FIREBOMBING OF DRESDEN, THE END: HAMBURG 1943 ON FEBRUARY 13 OF THIS YEAR. “WE MUST ALSO BY HANS ERICH NOSSACK TRANSLATED AND WITH A FOREWORD BY JOEL AGEE MOURN THE GERMAN VICTIMS.” THE EMOTIONALLY CHICAGO: UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. 112 PAGES. $20. ON THE NATURAL HISTORY OF DESTRUCTION CHARGED ANNIVERSARY WAS ALSO MARKED BY AN BY W. G. SEBALD, TRANSLATED BY ANTHEA BELL NEW YORK: MODERN LIBRARY. 224 PAGES. $13. OFFICIAL CEREMONY AND A MASS PROCESSION DRESDEN VATERSTADT BY JOCHEN AND HARF ZIMMERMANN in which many of the marchers bore white roses as a symbol of opposition to the BERLIN: NICOLAISCHE VERLAGSBUCHHANDLUNG. 120 PAGES. $26. presence of Lauer’s group, the largest neo-Nazi gathering in decades. But while Lauer identifies himself as a supporter of the rightist National Democratic Party DER BRAND: DEUTSCHLAND IM BOMBENKRIEG, 1940–1945 (NPD), which now holds twelve seats in the local Saxon parliament, his sentiment BY JÖRG FRIEDRICH does not represent merely Germany’s fringe. Indeed, this year’s anniversary of the BERLIN: LIST TASCHENBUCH. 589 PAGES. $14. end of the war has seen not only official commemorations of the enormous death toll brought about by the Nazi regime but also much attention paid to German suf- DOWNFALL fering and German civilian casualties incurred during the Allied bombing of cities like DIRECTED BY OLIVER HIRSCHBIEGEL 4 BOOKFORUM • SUMMER 2005 effort to normalize the German past was put forward by conservative historian spectator. I was spared the fate of playing a role in it. I don’t know why. I can’t even Ernst Nolte——Germans have generally felt deeply and irreversibly entrenched on the decide whether that was a privilege. For me the city went to ruin as a whole, side of the perpetrators. As a result, a sense of bereavement for their own people and my danger consisted in being overpowered by seeing and knowing the entirety has not come easily. In the late 1960s, the psychoanalysts Alexander and Margarete of its fate.” He then explains, with acute self-awareness and unusual foresight, the Mitscherlich wrote presciently of Germany’s “inability to mourn.” In the years nature of his undertaking: since, the self-imposed silence often elicited by mention of the war or the Holo- I feel that I have been given a mandate to render an account. Let no one ask me why I pre- caust has similarly impaired any candid expression of German loss. sume to speak of a mandate: I cannot answer that. I feel that my mouth would remain But in fall 1997, in what was one of the first prominent, unflinching examinations closed forever if I did not take care of this first. Also, I feel an urgency to set it down right of German suffering during the Allied air campaign, the acclaimed German novelist away, even though only three months have passed. For reason will never be capable of W. G. Sebald gave a series of lectures in Zurich under the title “Air War and Litera- comprehending as a reality or preserving in memory what happened there. I am afraid ture” (published in English translation, after Sebald’s untimely death in 2001, as that, if I do not bear witness now, it will gradually fade like an evil dream. On the Natural History of Destruction). Pitched in a semipolemical vein, Sebald’s remarks took to task German writers of the previous generation, and the German As if possessing a sick, prophetic sense of the blanket of silence that would soon public along with them, for falling under the spell of a kind of “individual and col- come to shroud the event, Nossack then proceeds to transcribe his impressions of lective amnesia,” a willful forgetting that kept them from addressing this vital part the devastation around him. Like his fellow wartime diarist Victor Klemperer, of their postwar identity. As Sebald told it, from the end of the war into the late whose multivolume Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten (I Will Bear Witness) 1990s very few literary testimonies were written, and those that were faced severe gives a Jewish eyewitness account of the war years, Nossack sees his role as a kind delays in publication——as in the case of Heinrich Böll’s dark war novel Der Engel of moral imperative. schwieg (The Silent Angel), which was written in the late 1940s but didn’t appear Nossack’s chronicle addresses, and even anticipates, many of the same issues until 1992——or barely reached an audience. Despite the fact that so many Germans that Sebald would treat in his lectures more than half a century later: the “uncanny were profoundly affected by the unprecedented devastation——according to Sebald’s silence,” the almost immediate desire to move forward, the guilt, fear, and shame that calculations, some six hundred thousand civilians died in the air raids, and by the promptly set in. The End portrays, in a number of revealing instances, how the war’s final days 7.5 million citizens of the former Reich were without a home——the trauma from the attacks manifested itself: “People were simply without a center, topic was essentially closed to debate. Germany, in Sebald’s words, was “always the roots were torn out and swayed back and forth in search of some soil.” A looking and looking away at the same time.” woman Nossack observes, surrounded by rubble, insists on frantically scrubbing As a result, the subject of German loss had no place in the dominant postwar her windows. In a related moment, he notes how Hamburg’s citizens, reverting to narrative of reconstruction and rebirth, the so-called Wirtschaftswunder (“economic their established bourgeois habits in the wake of the bombing, sit on their verandas miracle”) for which the Federal Republic of Germany would soon become famous. and drink coffee. Even those who lost family and friends appear, in Nossack’s account, Not unlike the protagonist of R. W. Fassbinder’s politically minded 1979 film Die bent on erasing——or repressing——the experience. “How often, when I ask one of the Ehe der Maria Braun (The Marriage of Maria Braun), a woman whose relentless victims about someone who I know was their friend, do I hear the answer: He’s fin- zeal for upward mobility mirrors the development of the nation, postwar Germany ished for me.” One finds in Nossack’s narrative that along with the palpable sense was largely content to paper over its tarnished image, to rebuild directly atop the of doom (the original German title, Der Untergang, means at once “the collapse,” “the ruins, and to avoid, at all costs, looking back. As Sebald put it, “The darkest aspects demise,” and “the downfall”), there are also hints of a new beginning. Unable to dis- of the final act of destruction, as experienced by the great majority of the German miss or repress these urges, and clearly made uncomfortable by them, Nossack instead population, remained under a kind of taboo like a shameful family secret, a secret confronts them as they impinge on his project. “Why go on? I mean, why record all that perhaps could not even be privately acknowledged.” this? Wouldn’t it be better to surrender it to oblivion for all time? For those who were As we know from period documentary footage, mainly photographs and news- there certainly don’t have to read it. And the others, and those who will come later?” reels, a number of German cities were completely leveled in World War II. The Allied air campaign left them buried beneath mountains of ruins; Dresden alone had as much as 42.8 cubic meters of rubble per inhabitant. The Allied bombing of Dresden represents, for many, an especially tragic example, given that it occurred so late in the war, , HAMBURG BILDARCHIV that it destroyed the city’s most precious cultural insti- tutions, and that Dresden, unlike Hamburg, was not considered a vital military target. In his survey of the destruction, Sebald includes, as he typically does in his fictional work as well, an array of uncaptioned photo- graphs, providing a visual dimension to his words. The poignant images——decimated cityscapes dotted with heaps of rubble, charred body parts strewn across a city ERICH ANDRES/DENKMALSCHUTZAMT street, bombed-out buildings evoking statuelike severed torsos or ancient ruins——betray not only the horrifying scale of the destruction but also the sweeping effort to repress these horrors. In a number of instances, Sebald includes a diptych, the first an image from the aftermath of the bombings, the second a shot of the city reconstructed. (A recent German publication, Dresden Vaterstadt, a father-son photographic collaboration by Jochen and Harf Zimmermann, takes a similar approach——presenting snapshots from 1949 juxtaposed with those taken from the same vantage point in 2004—— to show the complex course of urban development and to remind viewers what the city had looked like before Opposite and above: Hamburg, July 1943.