On the night of February 13, 1945, Allied bombers began an aerial attack on the German city of Dresden. Over 2,400 tons of explosives were dropped, producing a massive firestorm that generated its own hurricane-force winds. Asphalt, glass and even brickwork were melted while those sheltering in cellars succumbed to heat and asphyxiation. Some 25,000 people died, by modern estimates, many of them civilians in a city known to house many refugees. The city’s beautiful Renaissance and baroque downtown — the Frauenkirche church, Brühl’s Terrace, King Augustus’ famous porcelain collection — was reduced to rubble within days.
In the English-speaking world, Dresden has become a symbol of moral ambivalence and the cost of war in general, most famously captured in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, “Slaughterhouse-Five.” Arguments still continue, mainly among historians, about whether it was a necessary military action or a war crime motivated mainly by vengeance.
For Germans today, talking about Dresden has far more immediate political stakes. One of Germany’s proudest cultural achievements has been its very public process of “coming to terms with the past,” establishing a mainstream political and cultural consensus around collective responsibility for the legacy of Nazi crimes. Where does the bombing of Dresden — a moment of suffering that totally reshaped the city, both culturally and architecturally, and that lives on in many local families’ memories — fit into all that?
The far right has eagerly adopted the portrayal of Dresden as a senseless war crime, holding an annual “march of mourning.” They use the bombings to draw false equivalencies about the damage of World War II and to suggest that Germany’s apologetic and largely anti-nationalist memory culture has gone too far. More mainstream elements have tended to advocate either for the avoidance of the topic altogether or — as a compromise position — for a policy of dignified “silent commemoration,” hoping to reject any kind of politicization of the date. Left-wing and community organizations, meanwhile, have made a priority of interrupting far-right actions while arguing that any commemoration on February 13 should foreground Dresden’s own Nazi past and the dangers of fascist politics in general. Under public pressure, the city’s major religious institutions and municipal government have begun to move away from silent commemoration, opening up the city to a range of other memorial activities around the date.
