576
PARTISAN REVIEW
was completed in
1743,
or a large, grumbling nineteenth-century organ
like the one that was destroyed in the
1945
bombing?
Are they restoring the eighteenth-century splendor of Dresden's
golden age or simply undoing the
1945
bombing? Are they trying to
remember the eighteenth century or forget the twentieth century? Are
there to be no traces left of World War II? Some want to tear down East
German buildings too. What of history should be remembered?
Some marble doorways will show broken corners and some surviving
towers will be preserved in their slightly damaged state, but postwar Dres–
den will be gone.
In
the next few years, the last of the burned-out and
bomb-crumbled walls will be rebuilt. The new buildings of old Dresden
are a patchwork of cream-colored new stone and black original stone. I
could look at the black stones and imagine what the ruins had looked like.
But architects say most of the blackening is a natural process, an oxida–
tion of minerals in the sandstone. As this new century wears on, it will
become increasingly difficult to see the difference between old and new
stones and in time, this last trace of
1945
will have faded.
DRESDEN HOPES to become one of those perfect European spots. You
can go to the museum and see the Diirers and Holbeins and you can go
to the opera and hear Weber and Wagner in a house where the com–
posers debuted their work.
Ah, the wonder of Europe, if only history came for free. There is dry
but fruity Saxon wine and game from the forest. I was there at Christ–
mas time, which is a particularly picturesque moment to visit old Dres–
den. Wandering the old Christmas market, the oldest Christmas market
in Germany, I examined the traditional blue folk pottery, the cut-out
wood and paper, local lace, the famous Meissen porcelain, the china–
faced dolls in elaborate lacy dresses and thick braids of golden hair. I ate
the local sausage, kept warm on the steamy, strongly spiked
giuhwein,
sampled the buttery yeast and dried fruit stollen for which Christmas in
Dresden is famous . I listened to the old songs of simple, perfect music
being sung to silly, merry German lyrics in clear theatrical voices in the
children's theater on the square.
If
I craned my neck just right I saw the
dark swirly steeples of the old rebuilt skyline, and now, with the twen–
tieth century over, it could almost look like it never happened . Here
there are no East Germans, no West Germans, no master race and no
Jews.
If
only I would stop staring into elderly faces.
If
only I could for–
get what they did.
