Dis/Continuities in Dresden's Dances of Death

My be in possession of role in this strange dance was the embodiment of that figure standing between the beast and clump in a highly passive temper She was the last figure moving into This figure was called on to endure, as it were, on the other hand not to suffer from it and yet, she was not allowed to play the part of a puppet, nor could she leave the passage assigned to her.--Mary Wigman describing the rehearsal of her Dance of Death (1926) in Dresden's ducal palace, The Mary Wigman work [1]

Three examples of the Dance of Death, all of them produc in Dresden will be examined here: Christoph Walther I's Dance of Death sandstone relief of 1535 (Figs. 5-9) Alfred Rethel's series of six forest engravings Auch ein Totentanz (Another Dance of Death) of 1849 (Figs. 13-18) and Richard Peter's photobook Dresden--eine Kamera klagt an (Dresden--a Camera Accuses) of 1949 (Figs. 23-28) I thereby hint what might seem to be a somewhat forced trajectory from 1535 (Walther--the Lutheran Reformation), to 1848-49 (Rethel--the bourgeois revolution), and ultimately to 1949 (Peter--the early post-World War II era and the founding of the sum of two units Germanies, the German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany). My intent in so doing is to address the particular vexed question of Dresden's post-World War II image as a city of death. This image came to overlay the traditional image of peaceful Dresden as a "deutsches Florenz" (German Florence), as Johann Gottfried Herder famously called the city [2] The three Dan ce of Death by the agency of Walther, Rethel, and Peter proffer the opportunity to investigate the Dance of Death as a political allegory and the functions of the "before/ after" schema exerciseed in the overlay of "deutsches Florenz"/city of death. In other words, through virtue of being structured by dint of analogy, this scheme here loans itself to a critical analysis beneath the rubric of allegory. Prior to the discussion of the three Dances of Death, what I call the problematic image of Dresden as a city of death necessitys to be introduced. This image has proven itself one time more relevant and powerful beyond a local words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following first, as a small detail in the Historiherstreit, the historians' altercation of the mid-1980s in Germany, and, next to the first before and during the elaborate ceremonies of the fiftieth anniversary of the extremity of World War II held in February 1995 in Dresden

Dresden as a City of Death

Dresden was firebombed upon February 13 and 14, 1945 by dint of western Allied bomber divisions. [3] The city's historic center which had been largely spared massive bombing raids until then, was almost completely demolished during this attack. The mainly civilian victims, numbering at least thirty-five thousand, included citizens of Dresden as well as many refugee fleeing the eastern brow The destroyed center of Dresden had been famous for its Italianate Baroque architecture and its art treasures. While a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of the latter had been evacuated, the civilian population was unprepared and largely unprotect After the war, within the one and the other West and East Germany Dresden's immense los of human life and unique architectural heritage in just individual night became emblematic for the evil of war, and within the unfathomable los single particularly striking ruin became emblematic of the los the Lutheran Frauenkirche, a massive, domed Baroque house of worship built by Georg B[ddot{a}]hr between 1726 and 1743 First by dint of popular response and then in May 1966 by means of decree, this ruin became a memorial for the victims of the bombing, a function it serv not alone locally but also nationwide, upon both sides of the Iron Curtain. In Dresden various memorial services, a certain number of involving the ruin, were held annually upon the anniversary of the bombing, a practice that continued for decades and into the 1980 In November 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a cluster of citizens initiated the reconstruction of the Frauenkirche. Since German reunification in 1990 the building has been in the proces of reconstruction below the direction and administration of a foundation, the Stiffing Frauenkirche Dresden formed in 1991 (and reconstituted in 1994) As the ruins and a considerable amount of reusable building material excavated from the rubble are being incorporated into the of recent origin structure, many worry and predict that the church's function as a memorial will be weakened or plane obliterated once the building is finished. sum of two units arguments against this view are that Dresden s hould not have to continue to provide a pilgrimage site and a remembrancer for the entire country's bad feelings about the war, and that the ruin would pretty soon become outright kitsch in the rapidly prospering city. There are still other views, on the contrary this debate is not the subdue of my inquiry here. [4] Instead I wish to point to the other of Dresden's sum of two units memorials to victims of the bombing. This next to the first site goes unmentioned in general guides or other types of works on Dresden, although it has the size and shape of a parade mould or a secular way of the cros roughly 820 feet (250 meters) drawn out and 50 to 65 feet (15 to 20 meters) wide, and is limited by several monuments to its left and right and at the farthest extreme point This site is the Ehrenhain, or thicket of Honor, in the municipal Heidefriedhof (Figs. 1-4) It is a twentieth-century timber-landed cemetery in the hills north of the city and in the western part of what is called the Dresden Heath, familiar end Caspar David Friedrich's paintings of its scenery