GERMANY : Dresden Remembers Its Firestorm

Fifty years after the Allied firebombing that razed it to a moonscape, five years after breaking out of its Communist shackles, Dresden--a city once so rich in culture it was commonly called “Florence on the Elbe”--is rebuilding.

Scaffolding encases much of the semi-restored Old City, where 250-year-old masterpieces of baroque architecture are getting needed face lifts.

Protective metal roofs cover lots full of broken masonry, painstakingly salvaged for the rebuilding of the shattered Church of Our Lady.

Farther out, construction cranes crisscross the skyline.

But for all that, Dresden remains scarred, physically and spiritually.

Every jangling street scene--baroque spires rising oddly in front of Stalinist monstrosities, aluminum siding and mirror glass grafted onto carved stone and wrought iron--sends the unspoken message: This is a city that has had entirely too much history.

The defining moment of that history was the night of Feb. 13, 1945, when nearly 800 British aircraft in two waves--Americans would arrive in a wave of their own the next day--unleashed nearly 2,700 tons of bombs on Dresden in the war’s deadliest single attack on any German city. It wasn’t a turning point in the war, whose end was three months off, but it was a milestone in the annals of human destructiveness.

The battles of Warsaw, Stalingrad and Leningrad all produced more dead, as of course did Hitler’s death camps.

But “what was special about (Dresden’s) air raids was that they virtually extinguished a city at one blow,” military historian Alexander McKee said. “The instantaneous fire which struck from heaven, that alone was typical of 20th-Century technology at its peak. It would have been impossible earlier in the war.”

It was the new ability to create a firestorm that made the bombing of Dresden so path-breaking.

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The 1,000-degree heat melted even the tempered glass beakers in apothecary shops and whipped up hurricane-force winds that sucked the air out of basement bomb shelters. Many of the victims weren’t burned to death or crushed by falling buildings. They suffocated.

Historians still debate the death toll--36,000 is an often-repeated estimate, but no one will ever know the truth, for Dresden was choked with anonymous, homeless refugees on the night of the bombing.

“There were so many things that you just can’t describe with words,” said survivor Ingeborg Hommelsheim, who was 18 at the time. “Horses were running screaming through the streets. The whole sky was red. I saw a bus filled with dead soldiers, all sitting perfectly still in their seats, like dolls. An air-detonated percussion bomb had ruptured their lungs. I had never seen a dead body before in my life. Now, I saw every sort of mutilation you can imagine.”

It hasn’t been easy for Dresden’s survivors and their compatriots to know how to mourn the firebombing’s anniversaries, living as they do in a country where each piece of suffering is overshadowed by what Germany inflicted on others.

All through the years of East German communism, the regime made it harder still for Dresdeners to work through their grief, because it used the yearly commemorations to shake the national fist at whoever the state’s international enemies were at the moment.

In this 50th anniversary year, by contrast, Dresden will remember its catastrophe with a non-ideological outpouring, beginning on Sunday, of concerts, bell tollings, silent candlelight marches and worship services.

Reconciliation will be the theme. The Dresden youth choir will sing with the English Symphony Orchestra; the mayors of Coventry and Dresden will lay wreaths; the president of Germany will speak, and the Duke of Kent will represent the British Royal Family.

Concentration camp survivors, Israeli writers, intellectuals from Bosnia-Herzegovina and other foreign dignitaries will broaden the focus beyond Dresden.

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Stirring, but still not enough, Dresden resident and oral historian Matthias Neutzner said.

“What we need is a calm, quiet dialogue among people, not only between politicians, and we need it 365 days a year, not just on the anniversary,” he said. “This discussion needs to be focused precisely on the question of violence against civilians, and on how to keep it from happening again.”