Eyewitness Account

The gray-haired German in my train compartment turned out to be an interesting conversationalist. Lost in silence, he held an album with pictures of Dresden’s streets and squares on his lap. A drawing triggered our conversation. The German said he liked to draw, had spent almost all his life in Dresden, and sorely missed his grandchildren, which is why he had to travel every now and then to see them in Berlin. What was initially small talk finally led to the subject of the 1945 Dresden bombings, which had recently sparked a bitter debate in Germany. Mr. Martin, as my fellow traveler was called, was still a boy when he lived through the death and resurrection of his native city. He did not mind me switching on the tape recorder.

“The British and Americans bombed Germany until the very last days of the war. What do contemporary Germans think about the complete destruction of Dresden in 1945?”

“ I sometimes draw in my spare time. So if I take this matchbox, I can draw a top, bottom, or side view of it. The problem for many people is that they view the matchbox from one side only. Some do so because they just can’t do otherwise, and others because they don’t want to. The same applies to Dresden. A bomb looks different from the viewpoint of the pilot and from the standpoint of the person on whose head it falls. In February 1945 a lot of people were killed in Dresden — 35,000 by official reports alone.”

“The British and US command considered Dresden an important strategic point. The allies sought to undermine the enemy’s morale, while their pilots remembered that the Germans had bombed London and Rotterdam and razed Coventry to the ground.”

“It is definitely the Germans who invented carpet bombing of populated areas — the British and Americans learned this from us. But why did the British Royal Air Force have to learn this from the German Luftwaffe? An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth? No, I can’t accept this.”

“Remembering who started the war does not mean that the enemy should be fought and bombed with pleasure. As far as I know, some Canadian and Australian pilots expressed discontent over the Dresden devastation and even threatened to stop carrying out those missions.”

“I am not saying that the British pilots, who now consider themselves heroes, were pleased to drop their lethal loads.

“Orders must be obeyed. That was their job. It is harder to bayonet a man than to kill dozens of men by dropping a bomb from behind clouds. When Dresden was bombed, there were not just the local residents in the city but also 200,000 refugees trying to flee from the Russian [Soviet — Ed.] troops advancing from the east. The planes dropped both conventional and incendiary bombs. People literally found themselves in a fiery trap. That’s it. Of course, one should not equate what we did with what the Americans and British did.”

“Whom do you mean by “we”?”

“We, Germans.”

“How old were you in 1945?”

“I was only 6 years old in 1945. But let me go on. I am personally afraid of putting this equal sign. Nor do I want this sign to be placed by those who did not live through the war or those who are trying to take advantage of Dresden’s tragedy to whitewash their old sins or the sins of their spiritual progenitors. The ultra-right in our Saxon land parliament already call the Dresden bombing a ‘holocaust,’ and they have dubbed the shelters where civilians hid ‘crematoriums.’

“But I have always resented the left, too. In East Germany everyone who showed the slightest interest in this problem was automatically branded a revenge seeker. In West Germany, too, the left would also eschew it in every possible way.”

“Then speaking out and keeping silent are equally bad things...”

“We need sober-minded historians, but there are too few of them. We still depend on our roots. A good friend of mine, a Pole, has long been tackling the problem of text interpretation. I think this will be interesting to you, a Ukrainian. About ten years ago he was going to write a thesis on the image of Ukraine, Ukrainians, and the Ukrainian language in Polish literature, and the idea of the Poles, their language and country packaged by Ukrainian authors. My friend soon stopped working on the thesis. No one was putting pressure on him and he collected a lot of materials. He said he dropped the thesis because he was clearly aware that he would not be able to do an unbiased study because he was a Pole. ‘Whether or not I wanted to,’ he said to me, ‘I would have begun interpreting texts in favor of my compatriots, with due account of the difficult history of these two peoples. I would have failed to fully control myself.’

“Or take the latest example. You must have heard about the tensions between China and Japan over history manuals that the Chinese claim play down the atrocities that the Japanese committed against the Chinese populace. In short, we need unemotional experts, but this will take some time.”

“But haven’t you tackled the problem of allied raids before?”

“Naturally, we have, but the polemics have become especially bitter now, on the eve of the 60th anniversary of VE-Day. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the book Fire by Jorg Friedrich. This is a picture of Dresden in flames through the eyes of a German; this is, so to speak, the back of a matchbox. A different view of the problem is presented in the book by the English writer Frederic Taylor and the ensuing debate on whether it was advisable to bomb Dresden. Presenting his book, Taylor even said that what happened in the city was a disaster for humanity, not just Germany. In Britain, some people are demanding that London officially apologize for what it did in Dresden.”

“I haven’t read Friedrich or Taylor, but I do remember an episode from a book by George Tabori. An old Nazi is telling his son about his role in the war. He is bursting to recount the Dresden bombings. When bombs kept showering from the sky, claiming the lives of thousands of civilians, he felt really good for the first time during the whole war. This seemed to have taken a load off his heart: now his hands are not the only ones stained with oceans of innocent blood.”

“Yes, I remember that short story. This character shouts to the pilots in the sky, ‘Hey, you, shitheads! You’re no better than us.’ Then he confesses to his son, ‘Good Lord, how wonderful I felt that night!’”

“The 60th anniversary is not exactly a special one. Why are passions running so high right now? After all, there was the 50th anniversary. Can it really be connected to Taylor and Friedrich’s books?”

“Not just them. It is connected to present-day Germany. Its internal and external situation cannot be compared to what it was 10 or even 20 years ago. Before, we needed the British and Americans much more than we do now. This was especially evident during the Cold War. They had their military bases here, so any criticism would have been out of place. But now Chancellor Schroeder has made it clear that we, Germans, can once again march with our heads raised, not lowered. On May 9 he will go to Moscow on Putin’s invitation and will be laying wreaths according to protocol. Thirty-five years ago another federal chancellor, Willy Brandt, knelt before the monument to the Polish victims of Nazism. That was an off-protocol gesture. Willy Brandt did this because he felt it was necessary, while Schroeder has made it clear that we should not forget about Nazi crimes, but at the same time he has declared that it is wrong to indulge only in self-flagellation.”

“And what did your self-flagellation look like in reality?”

“It was a never-ending and deep-seated feeling of guilt before other nations. I had it, too. Or take my two daughters. They live in Berlin. Do you know what names they gave to their children? Sarah, Benjamin, David, and Rebecca.”

“You were 6 years old during the war...”

“Yes. But I can remember Dresden burning. Sometimes I remember the fires when I strike a match.”

“Do you think the Dresden bombing debate has already reached its peak?”

“No, I think it will resume in August on the eve of the 60th anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.”