From Hiroshima to Dresden: Recasting National Histories of Wartime Suffering

W.G. Sebald astutely observed post-war German amnesia regarding the Allied Bombings of Dresden, Hamburg and Cologne in his 1999 book On the Natural History of Destruction. Compared to Japan’s official reaction to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, (West) Germany for decades kept silent on the devastation these air wars wreaked. On February 13, 2017, the 72^ndanniversary of the bombing of Dresden, the city also commemorated the German victims of the air raids, but framed the overall memorialization around Jewish victims of the Holocaust as well as present-day refugees, which led to a pointed response by Germany’s new-right. The paper explores this attempted recasting of Germany’s wartime suffering in a context of a newly cosmopolitan German right that seeks to forge alliances across national boundaries.