Nazi era continues to haunt this German city

Foreign Policy has published an article saying the tensions surrounding the legacy of the Dresden bombing illustrate the continuing potency of the city’s history. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

One morning in mid-January, residents of Dresden, Germany, awoke to find that a sandstone plaque commemorating the victims of the city’s bombing in World War II was gone. For decades, it had stood in the city’s Altmarkt square to commemorate the thousands of German civilians who had died in the attack. “The horrors of the war, which had been carried from Germany all over the world, also came back to our city,” its inscription read.

The plaque’s removal made headlines in the city and beyond. The extreme-right German magazine Compact was incensed: Multiple articles on the publication’s website described the removal as an insult to the victims and initially suggested that left-wing activists were behind it because they didn’t respect the German lives lost. Ultimately, it turned out the city itself had removed the plaque as part of its ongoing plans to overhaul the memorial elements in the square—it had just “acted extremely poorly from a communications point of view,” Dresden Mayor Dirk Hilbert said in a statement.

The incident, which came weeks before the 79th anniversary of the bombing, illustrated how heated emotions can be this time of year in Dresden. On the evening of Feb. 13, 1945, Allied forces bombed the city, turning its historic center to rubble in a fiery night of explosions. Modern estimates put the total death toll at around 25,000. The city itself—a cultural hub along the Elbe River and the heart of the former Saxon kingdom—was destroyed.

Each February since the early 2000s, neo-Nazi groups have organized a “march of mourning” for the victims, with hundreds of participants making their way through the city. They argue that the bombing was a war crime and the clearest example that Germans were not only perpetrators during the war. This year, that march is slated to take place on Sunday. In response, Dresden residents who oppose the far right will gather for a counter-commemoration on February 13, building a “human chain” around the city center as a statement against xenophobia. Both events typically see pushback from counter-protesters. The demonstrations are expected to be especially contentious this year, as the country’s populist far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has surged in popularity and a series of anti-AfD protests have gained momentum across the country.

In the English-speaking world, the bombing of Dresden has become a symbol of ambivalence about Allied forces’ actions during the war and the loss of civilian life their victory included. But the protests show that within Germany, Dresden’s legacy has been at the center of a very different debate—one about how the country should view its own losses and suffering during the war. As Claudia Jerzak, a Dresden-based sociologist, said, “Dresden has always been the primary place where the German victimhood discourse played out.”

Germany’s comprehensive approach to acknowledging its culpability in the Holocaust has made it a model for memory culture around the world. Guilt and responsibility are central tenets of the country’s modern identity: Students visit concentration camps and undergo comprehensive education about the Nazi era, monuments and plaques across the country remind passersby of Nazi crimes, and politicians regularly participate in commemorative events.

However, as a recognizable symbol of destruction and death in Germany, Dresden has been “able to build its own victim identity,” Jerzak said. In the aftermath of the 1945 bombing, Nazi propaganda claimed that up to 200,000 people had died, painting the city’s demise as proof of the Allies’ depravity. In their telling, Dresden was “an innocent art and culture city that was somehow destroyed anyway,” Jerzak said.

That narrative of victimhood continued, albeit for different reasons, under the Communist East German government. It portrayed Dresden—an East German city—as a victim of Allied warmongers who had now become the allies of West Germany. Early commemorations of the bombing featured phrases such as “Yesterday Dresden, today Korea, tomorrow the whole world.”

In the 1990s and early 2000s, as the former East Germany struggled with the rise of neo-Nazi movements after German reunification, neo-Nazis revived the Third Reich’s narratives of German victimhood and began organizing the marches of mourning to mark the anniversary of the Dresden bombings.

Debates over the number of victims in the attack became so heated that the city established a historical commission to examine the issue, which found in its 2010 report that the Nazis had inflated the death toll by around eight times. “Dresden remains unique in one way—and that is this strong propagandistic symbolic charge,” Matthias Neutzner, a member of the historical commission, told the German broadcaster MDR.

The lines are often blurred between the political far right (the AfD) and Germany’s network of extreme-right groups, several of which are under surveillance by the domestic intelligence service for anti-democratic activities. But both perpetuate similar narratives about German memory culture and point to Dresden to argue that Germany should stop unnecessarily beating itself up for its past.