A Chosen Few - Mark Kurlansky [3]
In 1949, when the Cold War began with Germany splitting into West and East, East Germany, the German Democratic Republic, found a perfect convergence of political rhetoric and economic reality. They did not have the money to completely rebuild their cities, but in leaving central Berlin with bullet holes and crumbling walls and Dresden with its charred remains, they were creating monuments to the horror the fascists had brought on the German people. Fascists were the perpetrators and Germans were the victims.
In the new East Germany, history might be rewritten, but it was never to be forgotten. Every February 13, Dresden school children were gathered in a remembrance of the bombing. Townspeople went to the remaining charred tower facing the pile of rocks that was once the Frauenkirche, and lit candles.
All this ended in 1990 along with East Germany. The West Germans, unlovingly known in the East as the Wessies, arrived with their own brand of Wiedergutmachung, making it good again. It was all so nice before the Communists and the Nazis, they said, couldn't we just put it back the way it was.
Since the reunification of Germany—that is the term always used because it has been unified before—the Wessies have been rushing into the bombed-out parts of the East such as Dresden and the center of Berlin and rebuilding, making Germany historic and lovely again and, in so doing, removing those East German reminders of unlovely history.
In Dresden alone, in the ten years following the reunification of Germany in October 1990, about $47 billion, some private and some government funds, was spent on reconstruction. Dresden's new tourist literature, in giving the history of the city, seldom offers a date between 1918, when the Saxon monarchy was abolished, and the 1945 bombing. “The Friends of Dresden” brochure to raise money for the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche, offers no date between an 1843 Wagner debut and the 1945 bombing. Photographs of the blackened rubble, some of it untouched until very recently, are readily available More difficult to find is the 1934 picture of little Nazi boys in brown shirts, all at attention for the visit of Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels to the city, or the 1944 photo of thousands of Dresdeners cheering flags of the Third Reich, the graceful arches of the fourteenth-century Augustus Bridge in the background.
A decade after reunification, Ossies and Wessies still look and think so differently that they are immediately distinguishable in a bar or on a street corner. The Ossies look defeated and the Wessies strut like conquerors. The demeanor, the body language, would betray them if the clothes and words didn't. The Ossie Jews who went back to build Communism and the Wessie Jews, who went back to earn money, along with their children, have remained even farther apart than non-Jewish Germans.
The local Ossies, even the non-Jewish ones, showed little enthusiasm for the Wessies and their billions spent rebuilding the Frauenkirche. Many viewed the project as the destruction of their anti-war and anti-fascism monument.
Other curious controversies have arisen. The Dresden castle was to be restored to its 1733 condition. But as stone fragments are fitted together and missing parts resculpted and a fresh bright layer of gilding laid on, an argument has emerged. Should it all look bright and shiny the way it did in 1733, or antique and historic the way it did in 1945 before the bombing? Should the Frauenkirche be furnished with a baroque organ, the kind of light, crisp, harpsicord-like instrument for which Bach and the other baroque composer wrote, an organ like the original installed when the church was completed in 1743, or should they install a large, grumbling nineteenth-century organ like the one that was destroyed in the 1945 bombing?
Are they restoring the eighteenth-century