Monika Cassel translates Durs Grünbein’s op-ed, which appeared on the front page of Die Zeit’s weekly magazine on February 12, 2015, the day before the 70th anniversary of Dresden’s bombing.
Every year, the city I was born in falls again. On the one hand this is a ritual (of commemoration), and on the other hand it is a reality (of history). All over the world, people know what happened to Dresden in February 1945, just before the great turning point in history when Germany was given the opportunity to better itself. The city lost nearly everything that had once made her charming and was from then on condemned to live on, severely handicapped, hideously deformed, and humiliated. Where once courtly splendor and stone-hewed bourgeois pride had delighted the eye, now desolate wastelands unfolded as I wandered through my city as a child. It is hard to imagine that this was where Casanova contracted a venereal disease and Frederick the Great, when he was still the crown prince, lost his virginity. According to legend, one of the delectable ladies-in-waiting pulled him through a concealed door and initiated him into the Saxon mysteries of love. I still remember imagining the Marquis de Sade visiting the city on the Elbe. In one thing, at least, historians are in agreement: what was supposedly once the most beautiful Italian city north of the Alps was a paradise on earth for all of the libertines of aristocratic Europe.
But it all turned out differently. Lately I have seen a monster in Dresden—it calls itself das Volk (the People) and thinks it has justice on its side. “We are the Volk,” it yells, shamelessly, and it cuts anyone off mid-sentence who dares disagree. It presumes to know who belongs and who does not. It intimidates those from foreign lands because—in the extremity of their plight—they have nowhere else to go, those who come in search of a better life. I can identify with these asylum-seekers. I was once a person who felt trapped in his country, in his native city. Who wanted to escape from a closed society—precisely the kind some wish we could return to again. Was I an economic refugee, driven by political dissent against the system that had planned my whole life for me, was it a yearning for foreign cultures, or all of these? Who can say?
But the Volk that demonstrates every Monday under the banner of Pegida, “People Against the Islamization of the West,” exercising its right to protest (and itself having arisen out of a mass of economic refugees from the GDR system), thinks it could say exactly. It does know, of course, what shrinking pensions and savings are, and has felt the heavy hand of the State as it fattens itself on rising tax rates, but it also claims to identify abuses of the system and asylum fraud; it redefines human rights and draws cultural boundaries. “We are the Volk”: for the first time, we hear that 1989 slogan again, under which the East German demonstrators rallied against the state that claimed to represent them. Back then, it was still dangerous to take to the streets; people were putting themselves on the line. But what is this Volk of today that thinks it is the lord of the manor and excludes everyone else?
A monster with no history,/ wild with barbarian ferocity,/ … that consumes passions, purity, sorrows,/ that welcomes death with an almost ironic/ involuntary stoic cruelty … answers Pier Paolo Pasolini in a poem from 1961. Today, I know to whom he was referring:
The new petty-bourgeois, slaves to consumer culture, who fear for nothing more than their little bit of property (the car, the TV, the living room set, the season tickets for the soccer stadium). Their vulgarity is revealed in the demands they make of the government, the entitlements they defend with tooth and claw. As early as the 1920s, Erich Kästner writes of them in his poem, “Contemporaries, in Masses”: It is not easy to depict them without hate,/ and completely impossible without disdain.
He was speaking of the man of the masses who no longer believes in anything but takes issue with religions, insisting on traditions that he hardly understands or observes. Elsewhere, people may take to the streets for freedom, demonstrating against some great dragon —a dictatorship, a military regime, a ruler in the Kremlin. The petty bourgeois takes to the streets because he wants to defend his turf: there’s always one threat or another out there. Preferably found among foreigners, people of other races, other religions. The policies he demands of his representatives are nothing more than a biological control program. It is the dream of Fortress Europe (or at least Fortress Dresden): selection, exclusion, containment.
I first encountered this kind of thinking during my schooldays. A classmate, a mixed-race child with a visibly dark cast to his skin—in Latin America, one would have called him mulatto—was late to class. Something bad had happened to him on the way to school as he rode the streetcar down Thälmann Street. He was sitting with his book bag in his lap when behind him he heard two grown Saxon men talking about him in the broadest of Saxon dialects. “Who’d believe it?” “What?” “Down underground the miners are woorkin’ their asses off, and up here the coals are joost roonin’ around in the streets.” He turned around, looked into their glittering, angry eyes, and decided to get out at the very next stop; that was why he’d been late.
I remembered this. But at first, it really seemed as unbelievable as particular events in the books of Karl May, our fairyteller uncle with swashbuckling adventure stories set in the Orient and American West, which we traded back then like contraband.
I left the city, and yet I have still not forgotten her. On some days I dream about a building on the banks of the Elbe, the Oriental tobacco and cigarette factory that the people dubbed “The Yenidize”; “Salem Aleikum” was printed on the labels of the cigarette packs that were manufactured there. At the entrance to the building, which had a minaret that could be seen from a long way off, was a gate decorated in an exotic, Oriental style. The factory’s architect was a man who would later be Hitler’s in-law. This foreign-looking fantasy building still stands today, and anyone who visits Dresden can see it from the windows of the train. From the outside it looks like a mosque. One could easily imagine that it is a sign of the “Islamization” of the West. But if you look at it long enough, it is as fantastical as the current fears of the city’s population. Dear Dresdeners, wake up: Islam was always among you, even if only as a Fata Morgana and the blue haze of tobacco smoke.
The urge among native Dresdeners to form a majority and shout down those who deviate from its norms is something that I have known about since the time I was in school. The angry vein popping out of the forehead of many Saxons, their anger against everything that they deem to be meddling from outsiders. It can be an intimidating sight, this army of people who fan the flames of fear because freedom is too big for them. Because they feel the fresh air wafting across Europe. Because they are no match for the consequences of globalization, which encompasses everything. But it cannot be stopped, and they can sense that vaguely, and now they, too, want to be unstoppably patriotic and pitch themselves against it. But patriotism is a form of hysteria and hypochondria—and in these days, when nation-states are dissolving like sugar cubes in a glass of tea, its time has certainly passed.
The poet Thomas Rosenlöcher was on the receiving end of this species of hatred when, in 2008, he chained himself in childish desperation to one of the old boulevard trees that was among the first to be razed for the construction of that monstrosity, the Waldschlösschen Bridge, a project that spoiled one of the most beautiful portions of the Elbe valley on the outskirts of Dresden. The threat that he came under did not come from being carried off by the police—bureaucracy, he knew, functions like a machine—but from the agitated citizens who berated him while defenseless, calling him a Nestbeschmutzer, a traitor, and hurling other nasty insults at him. Thou shalt not resist the will of the majority. It is the supreme commandment of the people in Dresden’s valley.
The triumphant defiance with which they wiped from the table UNESCO’s sanctions against the bridge, labeling them as insignificant meddling; the misplaced pride with which they even embraced UNESCO’s removal of the designation of the Elbe valley as a world heritage site: this behavior, too, I recognized. An artist friend told me another devastating story. She had returned to her home city in 1989 and settled in Loschwitzer Hang, a picturesque neighborhood, and just wanted to live in peace and quiet. But her heart stirred with loyalty when it came to the desecration of her neighborhood, when one of the most beautiful river panoramas in Europe was to be destroyed without reason. She joined the little group of bridge opponents (a shrinking minority even then) who stood up for their cause in the square in front of City Hall. They didn’t even have their own table. The sturdy booths with the pennants of local master butchers and plumbing businesses, where the lists of supporting signatures from the technocrats and Toyota-idiots (as we called them amongst ourselves) were displayed—those fancy kiosks advertising technological progress, sponsored by construction companies involved in the bridge project and the ruling circles of the Saxon parliament—were the focal points to which the masses drifted. As she walked around, marveling at the level of ignorance and indifference, already well on the defensive, an old woman pulled her aside and whispered a warning to her: “Don’t make yourself miserable, Mrs. Schlegel.” That directive has stayed with me. It comes back like a refrain when I read about the yearly memorial events commemorating February 13, the anniversary of the destruction of Dresden, when all the church bells in the city ring. It comes back to me when I talk on the phone with my parents, and they report the latest provincial shenanigans. It creeps into my ear again every four years, when I hear the disastrous election results with which Dresden and its political class must come to terms. In the parliament, neo-Nazis reverse cause and effect, equating the genocide among their own people—the eradication of the unpopular Jews (unpopular still today)—with the martyrdom of civilians in the bombing that led to the collapse of the “Third Reich.”
I knew all of this, knew it through and through. Since my school days, I had encountered the thought processes of these hard-headed, geographically marginalized people who have been frustrated by history. That collective sense of an “us” that is specific to Dresdeners: we’ve been made the dupes here, the ones who’ve been hung out to dry. First they take away our king, then Hitler comes and pronounces our city to be a pearl, promises us eternal protection, and in the end everything is lost, the good silver and the Meissen porcelain too. Then propaganda exults and drivels on about the destruction of a Western cultural capital city and the chances for an even more beautiful new rebirth. And once again Berlin dictates the rules, from Ulbricht and Honecker in the GDR up to Chancellor Merkel today.
Nowhere was German unity received more enthusiastically than at Helmut Kohl’s December 1989 nighttime appearance in front of the ruins of the Frauenkirche. Then Kurt Biedenkopf came along, became Saxony’s minister-president, and it felt like the autonomy that Dresdeners had so long yearned for. I still remember how I laughed when I heard the story of the taxi driver who was transporting his fare from Klotzsche Airport into the city center, who, when his passenger dared to criticize “King Kurt,” stepped on the brakes and forced the man to get out: “If you’re gonna inschult our minischter-president, you can schtep out of the car right here.” But the laughter always got stuck in my throat. This ugly sense of superiority, this Saxon urge to subjugate oneself, gave me pause. It can quickly give way to aggression, to a flash fire.
It is the sound of obstinacy, of compulsion and intimidation, that devastates me. I am not surprised that this sound, this diffuse sense of being under threat, erupted along the Elbe river. In other places, too, economic crises, the politics of the Euro, religious wars, and streams of refugees are cutting into the fabric of life. But only in Dresden do they cut into the psyche. Only there could “Islamization” become the symbol for everything that threatens the petty bourgeois, everything that is foreign or unfamiliar. If only they would at least read their Karl May books again. He was one of their tribe, a thwarted cosmopolitan who felt cramped among his people. Shortly before his death in 1912 he was interviewed by a sympathetic Austrian. In the interview, he announces the legacy he will pass on to the Germans, who had hounded him all his life because of his criminal history: “I wish that humans might learn to love one another! Above all I yearn for a reconciliation between the Orient and the Occident, as well as a recognition of everything that America has to offer us. That is why, in my books, I work to awaken sympathies for Orientals and for the American race. And I believe that I have succeeded in this. Every reader of my books knows what we owe the Orient and is thankful for it.”
***
Durs Grünbein, born in Dresden in 1962, studied theater at the Humboldt-University Berlin but interrupted his studies to begin working as a poet, essayist, and translator. His first book of poems, Grauzone morgens, was published in 1988 in West Germany. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, he traveled in Europe, Southeast Asia, and the United States. He has held guest professorships at NYU, Dartmouth, the Heinrich-Heine Universität in Düsseldorf, and the Villa Aurora in Los Angeles, the European Graduate School, and the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He has received numerous awards, including the Georg-Büchner Prize, and his work has been frequently anthologized and translated into numerous languages. Ashes for Breakfast, a selection of his poems, was published in English translation in 2015. In the past several years, his poems have been published in the US in the The New Yorker and The Paris Review.
Monika Cassel is Acting Chair of Creative Writing at New Mexico School for the Arts, a statewide public arts high school in Santa Fe, NM, where, with the support of the Lannan Foundation, she has developed a creative writing minor and is preparing to launch a major in 2016. Her poetry chapbook is on the longlist for the 2015 Venture Award; her translations and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Asymptote, The Laurel Review, Structo, and Stone Canoe.