As any reader of W. G. Sebald will tell you, the ruins haunt us. Arguably, the destruction wrought on phenomenal cities like Dresden by Bomber Harris produced a post-apocalyptic landscape beyond the status of ruins. Hence the fascination with Dresden's postwar reconstruction, the paragon feature of which is the Frauenkirche. "The Frauenkirche, [however] has become a model to all those in Germany who would like to see architectural monuments of old rebuilt", Der Spiegel explains. "The church was finished in 2005 and has become the new pride of Dresden. Given the splendor of the finished product, no one now dares question whether it was worth it." The reconstructed Frauenkirche, not to mention the buildings surrounding it, appear to embody perfection, otherwise known as 'historical Disneyland'.
What motivates this desire for perfect reconstruction? Even today Dresden appears timeless, as if the past, or certain significant aspects of it, had not happened. Reconstruction is likely to encourage amnesia by clawing time back into the present, maintaining the illusion of seamless continuity. Daniel Libeskind is quoted in one of the captions:
People want to have something of the city's glory days, but even if you rebuild the Frauenkirche and the city's other great buildings, you cannot bring back the history.Rebuilding monuments from the past erects monuments to the past that collectively set the terms of historical memory. You have to ask what is being shielded by the process of perfect reconstruction. It seems to me that the lie of the Frauenkirche - that it was never set alight, its destruction never so comprehensively attempted - acts as a physical blockage to the account of history available to future Dresden citizens. The same is undoubtedly true of Berlin's Stadtschloss, which over the next decade is due to be completely reconstructed as perfectly as the Frauenkirche. In Berlin, the binary of East-West is dissolved in direct proportion to the rate at which the Stadtschloss is rebuilt: the preference for the latter monument to prewar West Berlin has cancelled out the other monument that rested on the same site in postwar, East Berlin - the Palast der Republik. Whilst good taste would always dictate a penchant for the conventional palatial beauty of the Stadtschloss, political good sense might have preferred the retention of the unapologetic ugliness of the palatial-in-nothing-but-name East German parliament. The plans for the Stadtschloss form an isolated example in the otherwise famed open wound that is Berlin's postwar landscape. And so they cannot be ignored as the political gesture that twenty-first century Berlin is offering its citizens in much the same way as Dresden has offered theirs.
This brings me to the starting point for this post. I was struck by the way in which one of Der Spiegel's captions resembled a strand of Sebald's complex argument in 'Air War and Literature' about the Allied bombings of German cities. Sebald stresses the horrific reality of this controversial 'act of war' in order to establish the terms not of German victimhood but of the need for Germany to come to terms with the outright devastation of its cities and of the loss of life entailed by the decisions of Bomber Command. But rather than anticipating any form of historical Disneyland, Sebald's demand is for German writers to confront the ruins rather than brush them aside and start anew. Sebald's lectures overshadow Der Spiegel's objective-sounding caption under an image of idyllic, timeless Dresden. The Dresden not of the past but of the present.
Dresden had been largely undamaged until February 1945. But then, wave upon wave of English and US bombers unloaded their deadly cargo on the city, resulting in a firestorm that killed 25,000 people and demolished the city center.
