After the Dresden Bombing: Pathways of Memory, 1945 to the Present by Anne Fuchs (review)

If the overwhelming body of work on the memory of World War II in Germany has gone through one key turn in recent years, it is that scholars across the disciplines have moved away from readings of memory cultures in which politics are seen to have been all-determining, and seek now instead to understand the more visceral qualities of the phenomenon: those which resist reductionist treatment as an expression of ideological exigency or political expediency. In seeking to make sense of memory as something both affective and discursive, Anne Fuchs' study of Dresden has much of interest to offer scholars approaching the problem from many directions. However, in privileging the study of memory through photographic, literary, filmic, and architectural discourses, her own approach sits within a tradition of thinking about memory which seeks the traces of trauma as they echo through cultural fields considered to function with a large degree of autonomy, rather than as a reflection of anything rooted in the social.

The nods to Cold War politics or the context of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) notwithstanding, this book is essentially about various media representations and their intermedial interplay; indeed, much of Fuchs' emphasis is on the capacity of the various genres she interrogates to resist the domestication of violent experiences through the imposition of political frames. Throughout, she stresses that GDR cultural authorities sought to mobilize what she refers to as the "impact event" of the bombing in the service of socialist reconstruction, but that the "impact narrative" of the bombing resisted this, for the memories of violence were simply impossible to contain in this way. But in accordance with a number of recent studies, she emphasizes that memory cultures were not focused solely on the event—in this case the bombing—and on the search for an appropriate mode of narration; rather, they also resonated with an affective attachment to an imagined place, a place which obviously no longer existed and, indeed, never had. Echoing through the memory cultures of the postwar years was a nostalgic attachment to the lost "Florence on the Elbe," whose cultural treasures had gone up in flames. GDR town planners were unable to eradicate this attachment, despite their recasting of the city's landscape and function.

Similar memories permeated novels or films about the war, merging over time with representations from without to create what, according to Fuchs, was a uniquely iconic place for Dresden. Such a claim may make instinctive sense, but it is unclear what, if any, comparative work underpins the assertion. In this context it is unfortunate that Fuchs has ignored so much of the work undertaken by historians on other cities in recent years—most obviously Malte Thiessen's outstanding work on Hamburg (Eingebrandt ins Gedächtnis. Hamburgs Gedenken an Luftkrieg und Kriegsende 1943 bis 2005 [Munich, 2007]) or Jörg Arnold's similarly essential comparison of the memory of the bombing in the decidedly un-iconic cities of Kassel and Magdeburg (The Allied Air War and Urban Memory: The Legacy of Strategic Bombing in Germany [New York, 2011]). Both of these considerably more detailed studies also offer the kinds of thick description of the interplay of different kinds of media, as well as of political, social, and cultural dynamics—something which this more limited study, focused on a more limited set of representations, cannot.

An important question, indeed, is why the study focuses on certain representations and not others. Again, common sense assertions relating to the familiarity of many of them may get us only so far. But it is unclear that a book which claims to be tracing the emergence of an increasingly globalized "impact narrative," and which asserts that David Irving's book on Dresden (The Destruction of Dresden [London, 1963]) was a central moment in that process, should elect not to offer an analysis of that book and its reception, but focus instead on other, more...