Phoenix and Farce: Competing Narratives of Dresden for Americans since World War I

Say “Dresden” to an American undergraduate now, or a popular history buff since the 1960s and the story that comes to mind is that told by Kurt Vonnegut’s narrator in Slaughterhouse–Five (1969). That is, the generation or two over the last forty years or so knows about “Dresden” only as the story of its destruction framed as a farcical parable about the senselessness of war. But say “Dresden” to an American opera fan, or musicologist, or art historian, and the story is a two-part tale of destruction and resurrection. The images of Dresden held in the minds and sometimes memories of American elites formed in the nineteenth century endured into the twentieth, and despite World War I and the Nazi regime, many thought of Dresden in terms of the arts and high culture, or even the sophisticated scientific research emanating from Germany and demonstrated by the glass anatomical model on display at the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden. When Dresden was destroyed by Allied bombings in February of 1945, that high culture was marked as destroyed and a narrative of Dresden’s Baroque glories rising from the ruins was rehearsed consistently. An exhibition of “The Splendors of Dresden” at the Met in 1978 reinforced this narrative. A third narrative of Dresden demonstrates more modest traction in the American imagination, and it is that of a post-GDR Dresden once again worth visiting, and able to be visited without the troubles of negotiating the Wall. My paper will survey the representation and reception of the Phoenix story, first with a survey of discourses in American journals, and then at the coverage of the celebrations surrounding the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche. Then I will return to Vonnegut and his novel’s success at portraying war as deadly farce.