In my last post I complained that the 60-year commemoration of the Dresden firebombing has been ignored in the US press. This morning Charles M. Sennott has a good front-page article on Dresden in The Boston Globe. Sennott discusses how rememberance of the victims in Dresden has been expropriated by the right-wing extremists. He also mentions Jörg Friedrich’s book Der Brand (see Reading List in the left column).
The author’s choice of words is perceived by his many critics as
dangerously revisionist. For example, Friedrich describes the basement
shelters where many Germans died of burns and smoke inhalation as
"crematoriums." This, the critics say, is a conscious attempt to warp
history by equating the Allied killing with the crematoriums in Nazi
death camps.
I’ve read Friedrich’s book and don’t consider him to be a "revisionist historian". The book is well-researched and provides a lot of detailed information – especially on the bombing of the Ruhr region. An English translation is being released this year by Columbia Univeristy Press, and I look forward to the inevitable discussion that this will generate.
Finally, Ivo Bozik reminds us in Jungle World that it is not only the extreme right in Germany that is distorting history for its own purposes. Throughout the history of DDR the ruling SED used the destruction of Dresden for its own propaganda, calling it "imperialistic barbarism". The German people were seen as victims of "Anglo-American Terror". Liberation from "Hitlerfascism" was the work of the Red Army exclusively. This view is echoed today in the political rhetorik of the PDS.
