Dresden

Dresden has become a particularly charged symbol of suffering, in part because the former East Germany encouraged commemoration of the bombing, and questioning of the Western powers and reunification has brought the discussion of the Dresden fire-bombing to the entire country. But there has also been prodigious recent literary attention focused on it. The destruction of Dresden has been taken up by historians and literary humanists, including W.G. Sebald in On the Natural History of Destruction (who spreads his ruminations across many bombed cities), Jonathan Safran Foer in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, German historian Jörg Friedrich in Der Brand (The Fire), and British historian Frederick Taylor in Dresden, as well as in a new film melodrama, Dresden, which just premiered at the Berlin Film Festival.

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