Memory and Mythicization

IN JULY AND AUGUST 1943, British and US air forces carried out attacks on Hamburg, and a similar assault largely destroyed Dresden just before the end of the Second World War. The air raids caused destruction, loss, and suffering that permeated individual, collective, and cultural memory in Germany for decades to come. Existing scholarship has described the firestorms extensively; this chapter instead examines religious, civic, and governmental political organizations and institutions engaged in the performative appropriation of public space by organizing commemorative events affecting the construction of individual and collective memories. Focusing on the mythicization of history and participation from National Socialism up to the reunification period, I will demonstrate how stakeholders direct their historic narration toward their current needs as well as how mnemonic communities establish and change inclusive and exclusive frames of significance during processes of institutionalization. The term “mythicization” refers to the collective narration about bombings and destruction narrative elements like inflated mortality records, legends of unethical attacks, and assumptions about the Allied bombings strategies that were intensified and disassociated from historical facts.

The positions of the stakeholders are structured by “the persuasive character of language use” described by the German sociologist Bernhard Forchtner. Forchtner elaborates four discursive structures that define the topos of history as a teacher (“historia magistra vitae”): rhetorics of judgment, failure, penitence, and judge-penitence. Following Forchtner's typology, especially in the rhetorics of penitence, catastrophes like the bombings of Hamburg and Dresden can serve as a turning point and thus result in catharsis. As Forchtner explains, “rhetorics of penitence frame our past as wrong and, more or less explicitly, emphasize the ongoing necessity to demarcate the contemporary in-group from its past wrongdoing.” These rhetorics allow collective identity to be reconstructed, admitting “full responsibility, a renunciation of the act, and a call to refrain.” Rethinking one's own experiences of loss and pain, then, is subject to at least one condition: the integration of other perspectives such as those of former enemies and victims.

Dresden, the “city of art and culture,” the “Florence on the Elbe,” or “German Florence” (as Johann Gottfried Herder had described Dresden in “Adrastea,” 1801–1803), bombed on February 13, 1945, has the strongest, most emotive tradition of memorializing bombings, although Hamburg also has a significant role in the national narrative.