Dresden (and Guernika)

May 26 began in Dresden. We walked to the center from our hotel near the main train station. The entire distance, through what once was the core of old Dresden, was filled with new buildings, as a result of the old center being destroyed in the 1945 fire bombing. Only as we approached the Elbe River and the old palace of the Saxon kings, the Semper Opera House, the catholic Cathedral and the Frauenkirche did old buildings appear, and most, if not all of these were a result of rebuilding.

                                                   Pieta (made partially of rubble from 1945
                                                   firebombing) in Dresden's Catholic
                                                   Cathedral.  Dates etched into altar 30-1-33
                                                   and 13-2-45 note start of Nazi rule and night
                                                   of bombing.

Our visit to the old heart of the city started at the palace of the Saxon monarchy. It is a glorious place, with a porcelain museum housed there today. It reflects the power and wealth of old Saxony, which made it both a power and a prize I the unification of Germany. As a result of the power and local creativity, Dresden came to be known as the Florence of the North, with beautiful public buildings, churches, and the famed balcony of Europe, the promenade that follows the Elbe through downtown.

After the palace and opera, we walked to the Catholic Cathedral. While Saxony was a home of Lutheranism, as the kingdom came to include major areas of Catholic settlement,the monarchy bu8ilt the Cathedral and celebrated Catholicism to win the support of these populations. The Cathedral was heavily damaged by the World War II bombing Now rebuilt, one of the side altars houses a modern pieta, carved from ruins. Also, while there, we saw a display celebrating the sacrifice o f one of the priests who served the Cathedral parish and who died in the “priest bloc' [barracks] at Dachau. As so much in Dresden, the Cathedral and its contents reminds one of the horrors of Nazism and war generally.

                                                              Fauenkirche, Dresden

However, the biggest symbol of the horrors of war is the Frauenkirche, the huge Lutheran church. The Frauenkirche, survived the bombing, seeming to rise above Dresden's doom on Ash Wednesday 1945. However, the churches greatly weakened support structure then failed. The ruins of the collapsed church were allowed to sit as a pile of rubble until after the end of the Cold War. Only in the 1990s was rebuilding begun, to be completed a few years ago. Now the church is a symbol of hope, assembled from many fire scared and some clean new stone. We climbed to the church's towering coupala where the whole city lay beneath us.

The prime reason for coming to Dresden was to see one final World War II victim of incendiary bombing, the technique refined at Guernika by German pilots. First drop large explosive bombs that make fire fighting difficult and open holes in structures. Then the incendiary bombs were dropped next, starting massive and uncontrolled fires. The final step, which apparently came the next day, on Ash Wednesday was strafing the fleeing inhabitants with machine gun fire. As at Guernika, where the bombing took place on Market Day, when the city would be most full of people; the Dresden bombing took place on the night of shrove Tuesday, when the city would witness crowds celebrating before the start of Lent.

                                          Conducting a class discussion in the Baroque palace
                                                   of the Elector of Saxony in Dresden

This approach was described by Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse Five, excepts of which we have read. As Vonnegut says, in his usual off-hand way, of the machine gunning of civilians along the Elbe, "The idea was to hasten the end of the war.” Of course, the issue for us to consider is how can we place controls of nations and their leaders, so they do not endorse indiscriminate fire bombing again. Yet, long after Dresden, the U.S., as others, practiced bombing that seemed to grow from this technique.

Related to the institutional leadership theme of so much of our course, Dresden in so many ways reminds us of the link of churches to foreign and military policy. First, many churches have raised fundamental, if not often ignored, criticism of military policies. Some church leaders, as the many priests in the priest bloc at Dachau, paid with their lives. Yet, also there is the problem of churches blessing national military policy. How can we build the type church that promotes peace and the rule of law and not the one that has contempt for the rule of law and accepts defense of the fatherland as a Christian duty.