Dresden: 1945 / 2003

Abstract

At the beginning of February 1945 there were 800,000, perhaps one million people in Dresden, 640,000 of them civilians, the rest refugees. In the air attack of February 13/14, 1945, both groups together lost 40,000, next to Hamburg, the highest human loss in a German city during the air war. – Joerg Friedrich, Der Brand 1. Sheep graze by a mound of debris from which two tall stone fingers point at the sky: they're blackened from smoke, dust, and years of pointing out how history is marked by sacked cities. Didn't I learn this at school: Troy, Jerusalem, Constantinople, Rome, Stalingrad, Coventry, Hiroshima . . . I hold a postcard with the archive photo – you can buy it at the local stores – how the shepherd stands patiently by his flock, while under his feet there must be cobblestones of a street and the nearby market square. Before the city crumbled he might have been a mason or soldier – [End Page 154] he looks stubbly and gray enough – but now he's leaning on a stick feeling the ground below him, and the sheep seem happy with the weeds or just indifferent. I look up to see the same place now, what's rising here out of the ground: the old Baroque cathedral, two thirds of it gleaming in cream-colored sandstone, eight slender columns linked by walls with high windows in between, only the huge dome over the building's center is still hidden under scaffolding. Two black fingers fuse with corners in the wall, which, like a freckled face, is speckled where the stone remains blackened: with a glance you see what's salvaged from before and what's newly finished. Now the giant crane moves forward to lift a single stone through the air, turning and lowering it, slowly guided by hands into the waiting gap. The mind has learned to wait like that. 2. A nose plucked from its face – slender ridge flaring into nostrils almost breathing under glass on black velvet, just as that elbow next to it curved so convincingly into the lower arm, reaching out somewhere ready to touch, even if handless, and, separately, fingers in twos and threes, a whole hand gesturing, toes, a foot, two specimens of the male sex, their shades of marble matching gods and mortals posed high on their pedestals. Such lively fragments in the sculpture hall of the Albertinum – were they what was left of figures never completely unearthed? [End Page 155] Then I read about the craftsmen – some famous, like Balthazar Permoser – who had carved these pieces for the king's antique collection, to refit what centuries of war and erosion had spoiled, or carelessness much later while being hauled across the Alps. Snuggly fitted, these prostheses mimicked wholeness to please the Saxon court, until a later age no longer tolerated such pretense or distortion of perfection, and took them off again: amputations by scholars and stone masons, castrations expertly performed to free a space that once was blemish, but now crucial absence carved in air. I stood wondering if both efforts served the same wish: to undo damage – no matter how the mind was given to see, mending what it saw fit to mend. 3. There's fish market today on the Altmarkt: booths spread out over cobblestones, men in bloody aprons slapping limp bodies onto planks, a catch shipped down from Hamburg, promptly gutted and filleted, and someone shouts out names and numbers where people line up with shopping bags before the reconstructed church off to the side, where the hour strikes – It must have struck ten times that February night, minutes before the Master Bomber marked the targets with his flares, floating down as silently as snowflakes. Here under arcades, sheltering windows of fashion manikins and frosted pastries, that photo keeps flashing up behind the eye: there, where the fish booths are a pyre covered this open space and reached up to the second floor of...