570
PARTISAN REVIEW
Frauenkirche's first organ concert. Weber and Wagner were among the
composers at the opera house.
But for forty-five years after the
I
94
5 bombing, the view across the
Elbe was of the piles of stone, staircases overgrown with bushes, wall
fragments silhouetted against the sky, the skeleton of one burned-out
dome sticking out above overgrown rubble piles in a huge vacant lot
that had been cleared with bulldozers.
In
I949,
when the Cold War began with Germany splitting into West
and East, Dresden was on the Eastern side. East Germany saw itself as
a bold new experiment, a radical departure from the old and profoundly
disastrous Germany. East Germany, the German Democratic Republic,
found a perfect convergence of political rhetoric and economic reality.
They did not have the money to completely rebuild their cities, but in
leaving central Berlin with bullet holes and crumbling walls, and Dres–
den with its charred remains, they were creating monuments to the hor–
ror the fascists had brought on the German people.
In the new East Germany, history was not to be forgotten. Every Feb–
ruary 13, Dresden schoolchildren were gathered to remember the bomb–
ing. Townspeople went to the remaining charred tower facing the pile of
rocks that was once the Frauenkirche, and lit candles.
All this ended in
I990
along with East Germany. The West Germans,
unlovingly known here as the Wessies, arrived with their own brand of
wiedergutmachung,
making it good again. It was all so nice before the
Communists and the Nazis, they said, couldn't we just put it back the
way it was?
New York-based scientist Gunter Blobel, who as a child refugee from
Silesia had been just outside of Dresden and saw it before and after the
bombing, had never forgotten either sight. He started a drive to raise
millions of dollars for the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche. In
I999,
he
won the Nobel Prize in medicine and donated his prize money, almost
one million dollars, to his fund to rebuild the church. A tall man with a
thick cloud of white hair, Blobel dismisses twentieth-century history
with an impatient flick of his arm. "I want beautiful spaces. Why should
we take these stupid, banal, evil dictators as our identity? Why let them
dictate what we live with?"
That Nazism and Communism were two similar evils has been
emerging as the great lie of the twentieth century. Following this argu–
ment, West Germans sometimes imply that the Third Reich and the Ger–
man Democratic Republic were comparable-both dictatorships. This
subtle revisionism has the dual function of blackening Communism and
glossing over the crimes of the Holocaust.
