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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
In studies of memory politics in post-war Germany, the role that music played in responding to the Allied bombing of Dresden on 13–14 February 1945 has been overlooked. This article examines one of the first musical reactions to this traumatic event: Rudolf Mauersberger's mourning motet Wie liegt die Stadt so wüst (How Deserted Lies the City, 1945). I argue that Mauersberger, who served as cantor of the world-famous Kreuzchor from 1930 until his death in 1971, used allegory rather than testimony to formulate a response to the firebombing that resonated with historical customs familiar to the city's residents. When premièred in the bombed-out Kreuzkirche, Mauersberger's music provided a communal setting to confront the effects of the air war, transforming a space of destruction into one of contemplation and mourning. Both his compositional process and the performance transformed rubble (the material aftermath of the attack) into a ruin (an aesthetic object).
1 Dietmar Süss, Death from the Skies: How the British and Germans Survived Bombing in World War II, trans. Lesley Sharpe and Jeremy Noakes (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 105. There have been vast discrepancies about the death toll, ranging from 10,000 to 200,000. For a discussion of these reports, see Tony Joel, The Dresden Firebombing: Memory and the Politics of Commemorating Destruction (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2013), 1–44. On the general difficulty of recording accurate death counts for the air war across German cities (not only Dresden), see Süss, Death from the Skies, 452–4.
2 Frederick Taylor, Dresden: February 13, 1945 (London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2004), 396–7.
3 The first printing of Richard Peter's photo-essay ran in 1949, and it was reprinted frequently in the GDR. Peter, Dresden: Eine Kamera klagt an (Dresden: Dresdener Verlagsgesellschaft, 1949). For a discussion of how this photo-essay has been used in Dresden's memory politics, see Steven Hoelscher, ‘“Dresden, a Camera Accuses”: Rubble Photography and the Politics of Memory in a Divided Germany’, History of Photography, 36 (2012), 288–305 (p. 289).
4 Richard Overy, The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War over Europe 1940–1945 (New York: Viking, 2013), xi; Süss, Death from the Skies, 6–7.
5 For a history of aerial bombing as a military strategy in the Second World War, see Horst Boog, ‘The Strategic Air War in Europe and Air Defence of the Reich’, Germany and the Second World War, ed. Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt Potsdam, 9 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990–2014), vii: Horst Boog, Gerhard Krebs and Detlef Vogel, The Strategic Air War in Europe and the War in the West and East Asia 1943–1944/5, trans. Derry Cook-Radmore (2006), 9–458.
6 Süss notes how the eastern and southern reaches of the Reich were considered safe until 1945. The final months of the Second World War were a period of intense brutality and destruction. See Süss, Death from the Skies, 105. For a detailed account of 1945 in German experience, see Richard Bessel, Germany 1945: From War to Peace (London and New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009). Dresden has been the focus of many studies of commemorative politics and memory in the past two decades. A study that focuses explicitly on how Dresden's pre-war reputation as a cultural centre shaped post-war constructions of the firebombing is Anne Fuchs's After the Dresden Bombing: Pathways of Memory, 1945 to the Present (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
7 The general consensus in scholarly literature is that this rhetoric of victimization began in the Third Reich. See Fuchs, After the Dresden Bombing, 22; and Süss, Death from the Skies, 105–9.
8 The term ‘working through’ comes from Freudian psychoanalysis. See Sigmund Freud, ‘Repetition, Remembering and Working Through’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1953–74), xii: The Case of Schreber, Papers on Technique, and Other Works (1911–13) (1957), 145–57.
9 For an overview of this discourse, see Thomas C. Fox, ‘Writing Dresden across the Generations’, Victims and Perpetrators, 1933–1945: (Re)presenting the Past in Post-Unification Culture, ed. Laural Cohen-Pfister and Dagmar Wienroeder-Skinner (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2006), 136–54.
10 Bill Niven, ‘The GDR and Memory of the Bombing of Dresden’, Germans as Victims: Remembering the Past in Contemporary Germany (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 109–29.
11 Gilad Margalit, ‘Der Luftangriff auf Dresden: Seine Bedeutung für die Erinnerungspolitik der DDR und für die Herauskristallisierung einer historischen Kriegserinnerung im Westen’, Narrative der Shoah: Repräsentationen der Vergangenheit in Historiographie, Kunst und Politik, ed. Susanne Düwell and Matthias Schmidt (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2002), 189–208 (p. 189–90).
12 Joel, The Dresden Firebombing, 94–5. Joel, a historian, confuses Mauersberger's motet Wie liegt die Stadt so wüst with his later Dresdner Requiem, first completed in 1948 and revised repeatedly until 1960. His discussion of this piece contains further errors about its première and subsequent uses at annual commemorations.
13 Margalit, ‘Der Luftangriff auf Dresden’, 192–3.
14 For example, Thomas C. Fox, ‘East Germany and the Bombing War’, Bombs Away! Representing the Air War over Europe and Japan, ed. Wilfried Wilms and William Rasch (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006), 113–30 (esp. pp. 128–9).
15 The volume Ruins of Modernity, ed. Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), includes essays by many of the authors who have contributed to this field of scholarship, including Svetlana Boym, Julia Hell, Andreas Huyssen, Eric Rentschler and Helmut Puff. Musicological work on this topic is under way, as I will discuss further below, and includes Abby Anderton's Rubble Music: Occupying the Ruins of Postwar Berlin, 1945–1950 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, forthcoming).
16 Discussions of funerary rhetoric in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century German repertories include Gregory Johnston, ‘Rhetorical Personification of the Dead in 17th-Century German Funeral Music: Heinrich Schütz's Musikalische Exequien (1636) and Three Works by Michael Wiedemann (1693)’, Journal of Musicology, 9 (1991), 186–213; David Yearsley, ‘Towards an Allegorical Interpretation of Buxtehude's Funerary Counterpoints’, Music and Letters, 80 (1999), 183–206; Janette Tilley, ‘Learning from Lazarus: The Seventeenth-Century Lutheran Art of Dying’, Early Music History, 28 (2009), 139–84; and Bettina Varwig, ‘Death and Life in J. S. Bach's Cantata Ich habe genung (BWV 82)’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 135 (2010), 315–56. Robin Leaver addresses how Brahms adapts these customs in ‘Brahms's Opus 45 and German Protestant Funeral Music’, Journal of Musicology, 19 (2002), 616–40.
17 Most reprints of this photograph list the date as 4 August 1945 (the date of the first post-war Vespers service). However, the footnote of one recent publication about the Kreuzkirche reflects long-held uncertainties about the provenance of the photograph, suggesting that it could instead be from a service held on 11 May 1946. Brigitte Monstadt-Barthier et al., Dresdner Kreuzkirche: Die Stadtkirche am Altmarkt (Dresden: Hille, 2016), 199, 258. The Kreuzkirche was not restored until 1955, which left the Kreuzchor without a stable religious – and performance – home for a decade. They usually performed Vespers services in less-damaged churches, but did perform occasional services in the ruins of the Kreuzkirche during this time period.
18 Susanne Vees-Gulani, ‘The Ruined Picture Postcard: Dresden's Visually Encoded History and the Television Drama Dresden’, New German Critique, 38 (2011), 85–113 (p. 87).
19 The latter term comes from the fact that on the night of 13–14 February 1945, Dresden was overwhelmingly populated by civilians, refugees and others not directly involved in the war effort. For an overview of the city's transformation into an ‘Opferstadt’, see Joel, The Dresden Firebombing, chapter 1: ‘The Western Allies’ Strategic Bombing Offensive and Dresden's Transformation from European Kulturstadt to Germany's Opferstadt’ (pp. 45–81).
20 The church officially reopened on the tenth anniversary of the Dresden firebombing. Joel, The Dresden Firebombing, 94.
21 Matthias Grün, Rudolf Mauersberger: Studien zu Leben und Werk (Regensburg, 1986), 91.
22 Begegnungen mit Rudolf Mauersberger: Dankesgabe eines Freundenkreises zum 75. Geburtstag des Dresdner Kreuz-Kantors, ed. Erna Hedwig Hofmann (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1968), 131.
23 Dated 1 May 1945, the complete score of this work has subsequently been lost. However, two of the parts – probably written out by members of the choir – are housed as part of Mauersberger's collection of manuscripts at the Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden (Mus 11302–E–518). For details of these holdings, see: Matthias Herrmann, Kreuzkantor zu Dresden: Rudolf Mauersberger (Dresden: Mauersberger-Museum, 2004), 56.
24 Dragotin Cvetko, ‘Jacobus Gallus Carniolus and his Music’, The Slavonic and East European Review, 31 (1953), 495–502 (p. 498).
25 For example, Handel had adapted Gallus's motet in his funeral anthem for Queen Caroline, The Ways of Zion Do Mourn (HWV 264, first performed in 1739), thus disseminating Gallus's funerary aesthetic across northern Europe. Friedrich Blume, Protestant Church Music: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), 131.
26 Walter Frisch, German Modernism: Music and the Arts (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005), 139.
27 Craig Koslofsky, The Reformation of the Dead: Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany, 1450–1700 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 95.
28 Erik Levi, Music in the Third Reich (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), esp. chapter 6; Pamela Potter, Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler's Reich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 68–77.
29 Pamela Potter, ‘German Musicology and Early Music Performance, 1918–1933’, Music and Performance during the Weimar Republic, ed. Bryan Gilliam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 94–106 (pp. 103–4). For further discussion of amateur choral societies in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, see Potter, Most German of the Arts, 4–9, 12–16.
30 A recent collection of Mauersberger's writings includes records of services held between 1933 and 1945. See Matthias Herrmann, Rudolf Mauersberger: Aus der Werkstatt eines Kreuzkantors: Briefe, Texte, Reden (Marburg: Tectum Verlag, 2014), 87–106.
31 Erna Hedwig Hofmann, ‘Diskographie: Schallplattenaufnahmen mit dem Dresdner Kreuzchor unter Leitung von Rudolf Mauersberger’, Begegnungen mit Rudolf Mauersberger: Lebensweg und Lebensleitung eines Dresdner Kreuzkantors, ed. Erna Hedwig Hofmann and Ingo Zimmermann, 6th edn (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1977), 160–6.
32 Michael H. Kater, The Twisted Muse: Musicians and their Music in the Third Reich (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 75–87.
33 Herrmann, Kreuzkantor zu Dresden, 53.
34 See, for example, Pamela Potter, Art of Suppression: Confronting the Nazi Past in Histories of the Visual and Performing Arts (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2016). Erik Levi notes that Mendelssohn recordings were still being added to the Deutsche Grammophon catalogue in 1937/8. He also briefly addresses the different repertories on recordings made for export and for the domestic market in Music in the Third Reich, 141–2 and 256, n. 28. I do not have details about the intended audience for the Kreuzchor's recordings.
35 Plans for, and reports on, the Schütz commemorations can be found in the archival collections of the Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden: Rudolf Mauersberger, ‘Arbeitsbericht’, addressed to Hans Böhm, 6 February 1968, Mscr.Dresd.App.2816.
36 Leaver, ‘Brahms's Opus 45’.
37 Celia Applegate, ‘Saving Music: Enduring Experiences of Culture’, History and Memory, 17 (2005), 217–37; Elizabeth Janik, Recomposing German Music: Politics and Musical Tradition in Cold War Berlin (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 81–124.
38 Julia Hell, ‘Ruins Travel: Orphic Journeys through 1940s Germany’, Writing Travel: The Poetics and Politics of the Modern Journey, ed. John Zilcosky (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 123–60 (pp. 123, 126).
39 Andreas Huyssen, ‘Nostalgia for Ruins’, Grey Room, 23 (2006), 6–21 (p. 8).
40 Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, ‘Gazing at Ruins: German Defeat as Visual Experience’, Journal of Modern European History, 9 (2011), 328–50 (p. 329).
41 For example, in his non-fictional novel about the firebombing of Hamburg, Hans Erich Nossack describes a piano frame that captures a solitary rose – a fleeting moment of clichéd beauty. Nossack, The End: Hamburg 1943, trans. Joel Agee (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 60.
42 Toby Thacker, Music after Hitler, 1945–1955 (Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 3.
43 Thacker, Music after Hitler, 68.
44 Ibid., 29–38.
45 Abby Anderton, ‘Hearing Democracy in the Ruins of Hitler's Reich: American Musicians in Postwar Germany’, Comparative Critical Studies, 13 (2016), 215–31. Anderton pursues these ideas further in Rubble Music: Occupying the Ruins of Postwar Berlin, 1945–1950 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, forthcoming).
46 Jürgen Helfricht, Dresdner Kreuzchor und Kreuzkirche: Eine Chronik von 1206 bis heute (Husum: Husum Verlag, 2004), 5, 77.
47 Fred Prieberg, Handbuch deutsche Musiker 1933–1945 [CD-ROM] (Kiel: Prieberg, 2004; also available at <https://archive.org/stream/bib130947_001_001/bib130947_001_001_djvu.txt>); pp. 4491–2, 9437.
48 Der Dresdner Kreuzchor: Geschichte und Gegenwart, Wirkungsstätten und Schule, ed. Dieter Härtwig and Matthias Herrmann (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2006), 136.
49 Der Dresdner Kreuzchor, ed. Härtwig and Herrmann, 136.
50 Grün, Rudolf Mauersberger, 63–4.
51 Neil Gregor, ‘Beethoven, Bayreuth, and the Origins of the Federal Republic of Germany’, English Historical Review, 126 (2011), 835–77 (p. 856).
52 Herrmann, Kreuzkantor zu Dresden, 51.
53 A chronological survey of the Kreuzchor's performances in the Third Reich can be found in Grün, Rudolf Mauersberger, 65–90.
54 Michael H. Kater, Hitler Youth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 22. A picture of the Dresdner Kreuzchor in uniform is reprinted in Helfricht's Dresdner Kreuzchor und Kreuzkirche, 46.
55 Kater, The Twisted Muse, 167.
56 Herrmann, Kreuzkantor zu Dresden, 55. On the nationwide Konzertverbot and its practical effect, see Levi, Music in the Third Reich, 182, 203, 216.
57 Gregor, ‘Beethoven, Bayreuth, and the Origins of the Federal Republic of Germany’, 860.
58 Stadtarchiv Dresden/Kreuzschul-Archiv, Bestand: Kreuzchor nach 1945, Signatur: 20.1.3, Nr. 1079.
59 ‘Es war eine aufrichtige ganz große Freude in meinem gr. Schmerz um alles, was wir gemeinsam verloren haben: die 6 toten Alumnen, unsere liebe Kreuzschule, der schöne Gesangsaal, die Kreuzkirche! Wie soll man so etwas Furchtbares ertragen können! Das Schreiben mach mir gr. Schwierigkeiten. Ich leide noch sehr unter den Lähmungserscheinungen der Finger, die nach dem fürchterlichen 2. Angriff auftraten, den ich in der Bürgerwiese liegend, nicht weit von der Kreuzschule, mit erlebte. Wie durch ein Wunder bin ich lebend geblieben. […] Die Rauchvergiftung hat meine Stimme vollends ruiniert. Auch Stud. Rat. Richter geht es so. […] Ach, was gäbe ich darum, wenn wir keine Toten im Chor hätten. Ich werde den Gedanken an sie u. die vielen Toten, die man gesehen hat, nicht los.’ Rudolf Mauersberger, ‘Bericht über die Nacht des 13./14. Februar 1945’, letter to Klaus Zimmermann, 3 March 1945, in Herrmann, Rudolf Mauersberger: Aus der Werkstatt eines Kreuzkantors, 107–8.
60 On Nossack, for example: ‘Throughout the text, it is obvious that Nossack is deeply affected by the events. One can detect both in himself and the people he depicts many examples of typical symptoms of acute and post-traumatic stress disorder.’ Susanne Vees-Gulani, Trauma and Guilt: Literature of Wartime Bombing in Germany (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 2003), 71.
61 Judith Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: BasicBooks, 1997), 160.
62 Stadtarchiv Dresden/Kreuzschul-Archiv, Bestand: Kreuzchor nach 1945, Signatur: 20.1.3, Nr. 1079.
63 Neil Gregor, ‘“Is he still alive, or long since dead?”: Loss, Absence and Remembrance in Nuremberg, 1945–1956’, German History, 21 (2003), 183–203 (p. 184).
64 Letter from the principal of the Kreuzschule to parents of the Kruzianer, 9 April 1945. Stadtarchiv Dresden/Kreuzschul-Archiv, Bestand: Kreuzchor nach 1945, Signatur 20.1.3, Nr. 1079.
65 James Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 30.
66 In 2012, there were nine testimonies in the Kreuzschul-Archiv (Kreuzchor nach 1945, Signatur: 20.1.3, Nr. 1079). Choristers have also published testimonies in edited volumes about Mauersberger and the Kreuzkirche. In addition, in 1967, Mauersberger's assistant, Erna Hedwig Hofmann, published a novel about the choir during the firebombing and its aftermath, entitled Kreuzchor anno 45: Ein Roman um den Kantor und seine Kruzianer (Kreuzchor, Year 1945: A Novel about the Cantor and his Kruzianer) (Berlin: Union Verlag, 1967). The novel incorporates testimonies from the firebombing as well.
67 ‘Dresden mahnt uns: Der Jahrestag der Zerstörung Dresdens durch USA-Bomben/Kampftag für Frieden, Einheit und ein Glückliches Leben’, Neues Deutschland, 13 February 1955, 3. Mauersberger's brief account appears under the subheading ‘Sie waren dabei’ (‘They were there’). ‘“Tiefflieger schossen in die Menge … ” Von Kreuzkantor Prof. Rudolf Mauersberger’, Neue Zeit, 13 February 1955, 3.
68 Grün, Rudolf Mauersberger, 218. Grün offers a detailed analysis of the motet at the end of his biography of the composer, but does not dwell on the motet's larger associations and their historical context.
69 These works include: Dresdner Te Deum (composed 1944–6), Wie liegt die Stadt so wüst (March 1945), Ihr wart wie wir (1945, also performed at the Gedenkvesper, but now lost), Dresdner Requiem (1947/8–60), Zyklus Dresden (1945–55) and Zyklus Erzgebirge (1946–54).
70 For a discussion of the underlying continuity of this concept in trauma studies, see Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 9–11.
71 Freud, ‘Repetition, Remembering and Working Through’.
72 See, for example, Herman, Trauma and Recovery. Maria Cizmic discusses recent developments in grief theory in Performing Pain: Music and Trauma in Eastern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 20–2.
73 Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London: Routledge, 2008), 8–14.
74 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1996), 7.
75 Cizmic, Performing Pain, 25–6.
76 J. Martin Daughtry, Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 92–8.
77 Herman, Trauma and Recovery, chapter 8: ‘Safety’ (pp. 155–74).
78 In their original format, each verse of the Lamentations in every chapter except the third contains three lines. Mauersberger often uses just part of his selected verses. Following Robert Kendrick's scholarship on the Lamentations, the letters in Table 2 indicate which part of the verse Mauersberger has selected. See Kendrick, Singing Jeremiah: Music and Meaning in Holy Week (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2014).
79 Alan Mintz has explored this issue at length in ‘The Rhetoric of Lamentations and the Representation of Catastrophe’, Prooftexts, 2 (1982), 1–17.
80 Jan Assmann, ‘Die Lebenden und die Toten’, Der Abschied von den Toten: Trauerrituale im Kulturvergleich, ed. Jan Assmann, Franz Maciejwski and Axel Michaelis (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007), 16 –36 (p. 31).
81 Ann Suter, ‘Introduction’, The Fall of Cities in the Mediterranean: Commemoration in Literature, Folk Song, and Liturgy, ed. Mary R. Bachvarova, Dorota Dutsch and Ann Suter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 1–12 (p. 2).
82 Süss, Death from the Skies, 271.
83 Ibid., 257.
84 The Kreuzchor's pre-war musical library was extensive and a point of pride. It certainly included the full repertory of Bach's cantatas, and it is also very likely that they had a copy of Matthias Weckmann's spirtual concerto, for he had trained in Dresden under Schütz. See Erna Hedwig Hofmann, Der Dresdner Kreuzchor (Leipzig: VEB Edition, 1962), 62–3.
85 Eric Chafe, Analyzing Bach Cantatas (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 132.
86 Konrad Jarausch, After Hitler: Recivilizing Germans, 1945–1955, trans. Brandon Hunziker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 3–19.
87 Hannah Arendt, ‘The Aftermath of Nazi Rule: Report from Germany’, Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed. and trans. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1994), 248–69 (p. 249).
88 Anke Pinkert, Film and Memory in East Germany (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2008), 3.
89 Vees-Gulani, Trauma and Guilt, 67.
90 On this narrative, see Frederick Taylor, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945 (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), chapter 13: ‘A City of No Military or Industrial Importance?’ (pp. 148–65).
91 Edward L. Greenstein, ‘Lamentation and Lament in the Hebrew Bible’, The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, ed. Karen Weisman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 67–84 (p. 68).
92 Adolf Nowak, ‘“Ein deutsches Requiem” im Traditionszusammenhang’, Brahms-Analysen, ed. Friedhelm Krummacher and Wolfram Steinbeck (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1984), 201–7 (pp. 202–3).
93 Daniel Beller-McKenna, Brahms and the German Spirit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 52–6.
94 Mintz, ‘The Rhetoric of Lamentations’, 2.
95 A diagram of the whole work, with the ‘Warum?’ interjections marked, can be found in Beller-McKenna, Brahms and the German Spirit, 51.
96 Jarausch, After Hitler, 3–18, 31–8. I thank the anonymous reviewer for drawing attention to this possible association in Mauersberger's work.
97 ‘Even though you have truly rejected us / And been very angry with us’. Robin Salter, Lamentations: A Critical and Exegetical Commentary (New York: T & T Clark, 2011), 341. I thank Robert Kendrick for drawing attention to the larger implications of this chapter.
98 W. G. Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2004).
99 Ibid., 14.
100 In relation to Dresden specifically, Thomas C. Fox argues that Sebald's work significantly misrepresents the response to the air war in East Germany, where the Allied bombing was framed as part of a national narrative of East German victimhood at the hands of the capitalist Allies. Fox, ‘East Germany and the Bombing War’, 114.
101 Robert G. Moeller, ‘On the History of Man-Made Destruction: Loss, Death, Memory, and Germany in the Bombing War’, History Workshop Journal, 61 (2006), 103–34.
102 Sebald, On the Natural History of Destruction, viii (emphasis added).
103 Since the mid-nineteenth century, Vespers had attracted increasingly larger audiences, including tourists, who considered the Saturday service more of a sacred concert than a declaration of Protestant faith. Grün, Rudolf Mauersberger, 54–5.
104 Frisch, German Modernism, 138.
105 Hoffmann, ‘Gazing at Ruins’, 2.
106 Laux's political commitments are problematic to analyse, but not unusual for this time period. Though Laux held a position as a music journalist and editor working for the newspaper Dresdner Neuesten Nachrichten from 1934 to 1945, in numerous post-war questionnaires for the Soviet Occupation Authorities drawn up in 1945–6 he states that he did not join the Nazi Party, and experienced personal and professional difficulties as a result. These documents are housed at the Sächsische Landesbibliothek – Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden: Mscr. Dresd. X1, Box 1, Items 1–7. Elaine Kelly includes Laux as an example of someone who enthusiastically converted to antifascism in the post-war period: Kelly, Composing the Canon in the German Democratic Republic: Narratives of Nineteenth-Century Music (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 34, n. 14. After the war, Laux established a ‘New Music Section’ of the Dresden Kulturbund and facilitated a series of international chamber music concerts in the SBZ. On these activities, see Thacker, Music after Hitler, 86.
107 Karl Laux, Nachklang: Autobiographie (Berlin: Verlag der Nation, 1977), 323.
108 Ibid., 322.
109 Fox, ‘Writing Dresden across the Generations’, 137–44.
110 Thomas Widera, Dresden 1945–1948: Politik und Gesellschaft unter sowjetischer Besatzungsherrschaft (Göttigen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 37–8.
111 Fox, ‘Writing Dresden across the Generations’, 123, 137.
112 Süss, Death from the Skies, 451.
113 Monica Black, Death in Berlin: From Weimar to Divided Germany (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 152–4; Süss, Death from the Skies, 435.
114 Black, Death in Berlin, 152–4.
115 Ibid., 88–91. For further discussion about funerary practices in the Third Reich, see chapter 5 of Volker Ackermann's landmark study of the semiotics of national burials in Germany: Nationale Totenfeiern in Deutschland: Von Wilhelm I. bis Franz Josef Strauss: Eine Studie zur politischen Semiotik (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1990), 119–68.
116 Peter, Dresden: Eine Kamera klagt an, 56. As David Crew notes in his recent monograph on visual representations of bodies and ruins in the early post-war years, the photographs of the Altmarkt funeral pyre are not Peter's own. When the war ended Peter was an American prisoner of war, and he returned to Dresden only in September 1945. The images of the Altmarkt reproduced in Dresden: Eine Kamera klagt an are from a different photographer who was in the city during the firebombing and had permission to take photographs. David Crew, Bodies and Ruins: Imagining the Bombing of Germany, 1945 to the Present (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 149, 152. For more information on the second, now anonymous, photographer, see: Ludger Derenthal, Bilder der Trümmer- und Aufbaujahre: Fotografie im sich teilenden Deutschland (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 1999), 71.
117 Cornelia Brink, ‘Secular Icons: Looking at Photographs from Nazi Concentration Camps’, History and Memory, 12 (2000), 135–50.
118 Süss, Death from the Skies, 427.
119 Bettina Varwig, Histories of Heinrich Schütz (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 141.
120 Süss, Death from the Skies, 253. In this context, it is perhaps also important to note a parallel effort in Bertolt Brecht's play Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder (1939) to use the Thirty Years War as provocative allegory for the Third Reich.
