Dresden Destruída, 1945, Dresden, Alemanha - Richard Peter
Dresden - Alemanha
Fotografia
On the night of the 13 February 1945, the German city of Dresden was attacked by over 800 bombers from the Royal Air Force, followed by another 500 American planes over the next two days, which dropped a total of 3,900 tonnes of bombs and incendiary explosives on the city. The result of this unrelenting aerial bombardment upon a relatively small urban area was to produce a massive firestorm which, as well as engulfing buildings and their occupants, was so large that it even sucked up all the oxygen, causing those who survived the initial bombing to suffocate to death in the cellars and air raid shelters where they had taken cover. Estimates of those killed in the bombing vary from 25,000 to 200,000 but it is in no doubt that large numbers of people met an agonising death in this city which had little or no real military value and was full of refugees fleeing the Russian advance.
With the advancement of aviation in the 1930s it became readily apparent that any new war would bring about unprecedented aerial attacks on cities and civilian populations. In a total war defined by unprecedented advances in technology there was no longer any safe place. What the effects of this bombing would be, nobody knew. Many predicted that those who survived such attacks would either go insane or else be so horrified that they would rise up against their government and immediately sue for peace with the enemy. What the Second World War showed was that, for the most part, the immediate effect of bombing on survivors did not have as dramatic an effect as predicted and in some ways even helped to unite diverse strands of opinion against a common enemy.
For much of the war, Britain was left isolated from the rest of Europe occupied by the Nazis and the main way to damage the German war machine was to bomb their cities and industry. To do this they invested heavily in building up a massive fleet of long range bombing aircraft which night after night rained British bombs down upon the Reich. Following the American entry into the war, the US began bombing in daylight, giving no respite to either occupied Europe or Nazi Germany. (The Germans were no stranger to the use of carpet-bombing and used it heavily during the early part of the war, most notably over Warsaw and London, but they tended to use it as a precursor to an immediate land invasion.) Based upon the ideas of the 1930s bombing raids were designed to have two purposes; to physically destroy the military capabilities, industry and infrastructure of the enemy and also to produce so much terror within the German populace that it would lose the will to continue the fight. The fact that the war raged on right up to the doorstep of Hitler’s Berlin bunker proves that this particular premise was wrong.
Returning to Dresden, the morality of these attacks has been a subject of much controversy and debate ever since. The fact that the Nazi state was a horrendously vicious regime that murdered vast numbers of people without compunction should not excuse the actions of the Allies. As the philosopher A.C. Grayling has argued, the Allies presented themselves as being engaged in a ‘just war’ in which their actions were contrasted to the amorality of the Nazis. In order to fit into this scheme of a ‘just war’ the bombing of Dresden has to satisfy two criteria; it had to be both proportionate and necessary. On both counts, it fails. The attack was clearly completely disproportionate in nature and, at this late stage in the war, it was unnecessary. The fact that the Nazis were morally bankrupt and evil should not excuse what was a war crime perpetrated by the Allies.
One possible explanation given is that, with the war drawing to an end, the Americans and British wanted to show the Soviets, who would soon occupy the city, the destructive power of their air-power and let them know in no uncertain terms that while it might be Dresden today, it could be Moscow tomorrow. Another possible explanation is that there were internal institutional pressures for the air forces of Britain and America to justify the vast resources and expenses invested in them and results were expected to be delivered. With the war drawing to a close by 1945 the numbers of targets left available to bomb in Germany by these vast aerial armadas was dwindling. I personally think there may have been, in part, a desire by the Allies to see the effectiveness of a massive concentrated attack on a city in order to refine future developments in bombing capabilities. Whatever the true reason, it is in no doubt that the attack on Dresden did little to hasten the German surrender.
Richard Peter, a former press photographer who had fallen foul of the Nazis for his left-wing work with the AIZ, began to document the aftermath of war when he returned from military service in September 1945. He spent the next four years photographing the shattered remains of this once magnificent city which was published as a book in 1949. Undoubtedly his pre-war pedigree and connections would have served him well in getting the book published under the new communist administration of the Soviet occupied zone during a time of severe shortages. The book at first glance appears to present a straightforward documentation of the ruined city and the rebuilding work taking place there. But there are other layers to this work that are informed by the context in which it was made; primarily the tension in representing German people as both perpetrators and victims of this war. Even the title of the book poses a question. To accuse implies that you believe somebody to be guilty. But exactly to whom or what is the camera assigning guilt to? Britain? Hitler? The German people? Fascism? The brutality of war? Mans inhumanity to man??
It is possible to divide the narrative structure of the book into three acts; the fall of the city, the wages of sin and, finally, redemption. The first section of the book depicts the centre of the ruined city, with architectural images of buildings before and after the bombing raids, now reduced to smouldering heaps of brick and stone. It is here that we see the iconic photograph of the stone angel atop the city hall, arm outstretched in mute horror, as it gazes out over a sea of utter desolation. This is one of the few images in the book that gives a sense of the sheer scale of destruction; most other images concentrate on individual buildings or street scenes. People are completely absent from these blasted cityscapes. Peter presents a catalogue of deserted, people-less rubble punctuated by the remains of some architectural feature that has managed to survive the cataclysm. He surveys the aspects of the city; the town hall, the commercial area, industry, the medieval old town and the churches. All have been shattered and reduced to ruins. Here Peter presents us with the remnants of German culture and civilisation, twisted by the Nazis as an instrument of world domination, and now crushed into dust.
About halfway through the book we are presented with a double-page spread which is clearly designed to shock; two full page photographs of bodies unearthed from the cellars in which they had been entombed. The left hand page shows the body of long haired woman, facial features still partly discernable, head downcast in agony, while facing her is a corpse that still wears a swastika armband, whose grinning skull directly confronts the viewer. In another iconic image, Peter shows an anatomical skeleton with a building torn in half in the background. The message is stark; the war didn’t discriminate between the innocent and the guilty. All were mercilessly cut down by the aerial onslaught.
The final section of the book deals with the post-war activity of rebuilding this shattered city. We see people returning home with activity to clear the damage and bring order to the chaos. As this book was published in 1949 under the auspices of what was to become the East German state, this last section produces an abrupt change of tone in the narrative, allowing the book to end on a positive note. Here we are presented with people coming together collectively to rebuild their city, lives and self-respect. The images move swiftly along and after a couple of pages of people sifting through the rubble, Peter presents us with images of newly built apartment blocks, factories and the contented audience of a newly restored concert hall, signalling that German culture had not been destroyed. Germany had lost its way under Hitler but the communists would restore it. In the second half of the 1940s an ideological battle between capitalism and communism for the hearts, minds and territory of the ruined German state was being waged between the winners of the war and it is no coincidence that the destruction wrought by capitalist Britain and America is being rebuilt by the communists. It is into this vacuum of uncertainty the communists offer a lifeline to the German people; work with us and help to wipe the slate clean of past sins. This book is not just a straightforward depiction of the aftermath of a war crime, although it most certainly is. There are layers to this book that reflect the confused and contradictory state of a traumatised post-war German society struggling to come to terms with the magnitude of what was unleashed upon the world ostensibly in their name and how they should respond to it.
View from the Dresden City Hall Tower Toward the South:
Immediately after the end of the war, the Dresden photographer Richard Peter sen, started an ambitious cycle on the demolished city that had once been known as the "Florence on the Elbe." By the end of the 1940s, he had completed approximately a thousand photographs, including this famed view from the City Hall Tower looking toward the south.
Almost miraculously, the tower of the New City Hall, dating from the mid-eighteenth century, survived the firestorm of 13-14 February 1945. Not that it had totally escaped being damaged in the inferno, of course, but compared to the Zwinger palace or the Frauenkirche, whose former glory now lay buried under the ruins, the City Hall, located between the Ring-.strasse, the City Hall Square, and Kreuzstrasse, was at least reparable. The east wing of the building had been particularly heavily damaged by fire bombs and blockbusters, but the tower, visible from a great distance, still remained standing, its hands stopped at 2:30 a.m. At a height of more than 325 feet, the tower was the tallest building in the city, but had lost its cupola. All that remained of it was a filigree-like skeleton, crowned by Dresden's recently adopted municipal emblem - a sculpted male figure in gilded bronze by Richard Cuhr, which now seemed to be balan-.cing as if on a tightrope. The famous double staircase had also survived the force of the demolition and firebombs. Richard Peter sen. climbed these steps for the first time in the middle of September 1945.
The photographer, well known in Dresden, was not the only one to make his way to the top of the City Hall Tower after the war had ended, however. The collection of the German Fotothek Dresden contains numerous views of the city taken from the tower - or rather, views of what remained of the "princely Saxon residence" (Gotz Bergander), "famed throughout the world as a treasure chamber of art" (Fritz Loffler), the city that had once been the Florence on the Elbe. In all these photographs, the view was always shot over the shoulder of one of the figures sculpted by Peter Poppelmann or August Schreitmuller, looking down onto the landscape of ruins. It is just this opposition - between personified virtue and death, light and darkness, proximity and distance, height and depth - that lends the photographs by Ernst Schmidt, W. Hahn, Wunderlich, Doring, Willi Rossner, and Hilmar Pabel their excitement, their suggestive power, and their memorial value.
Although some of these photographs may differ in their manner of pre-senting the subject, we may rest assured that it was Richard Peter's square photograph that inspired the others to find their way up the tower of the City Hall located in the south-east of the old city. In any case, Richard Peter's photograph was indisputably the first of an entire series of similar motifs - an image that bequeathed the world a valid pictorial formula for the horror of the bombing in general and of the destruction of the Baroque city of Dresden in particular.
The fire-bombing of Dresden is often compared with the dropping of the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the totality of the destruc-tion and the number of victims - as well as in the sense of being a 'fit-ting' symbol for the times - all three catastrophes have much in com¬mon. On 13 and 14 February 1945, 'merely' three attacks, each by several hundred Lancaster bombers, Mosquitoes, Liberators, and Halifax planes of the Royal Air Force, sufficed to extinguish the strategically unimportant but historically unique center of the historic city of Dresden. The number of the victims is still disputed today, but estimates begin at more than 30,000; the exact figure will never be known, because many victims were instantly cremated. Furthermore, as pointed out by Adelbert Weinstein, the "already buried dead could in any case no longer be excavated from the cellars in this landscape of ruins. Because of the danger of epidemics, the rescue troops were even forced to wall up the make-shift bunkers or lo burn them out with flame throwers." The damage to the buildings, on the other hand, can be statistically compiled. A surface area of nearly six square miles was completely devastated. Seven thousand public buildings - museums, churches, palaces, castles, schools, hospitals - lay in ruin and ashes. Ol the city apartments, 24,866 of 28,410 fell victim to the bombing attack. More than thirteen million cubic yards of rubble had to be cleared away before reconstruction - still continuing to this day -could begin.
In the years following war, Richard Peter sen., born in Silesia in 1895, was one of the many piotographers who sought a pictorial response to the apocalypse that hsd ended in Europe in May 1945. Parallel to the often-discussed Trummerliteratur (literature of ruins), one may also speak of a regular 'photography of ruins' - the scenes of destruction offered by every larger German city to its own pictorial chroniclers: Friedrich Seidenstucker and Fritz Eschen in Berlin, Herbert List in Munich, Wol Strache in Stuttgart, August Sander in Cologne, Karl Heinz Mai in Leipzig. Poto-graphically important after 1945 were especially the cycles by Hermann Claasen and Richa'd Peter sen., whose books Gesong im Feuerofen (1947; Song in the Furnace) and Dresden - eine Kamera klagt an (1949; Dresden: A Camera Accuses) were among the most-discussed publications of the post-war period.
Not until seven months after the inferno - that is, only on 17 September 1945 - did Richard Peter sen. return to Dresden, his adopted city of residence. Not only did he find the city in which he had lived since the 1920s, and where he had worked as a photojournalist with the legendary A.I.Z., completely devastated, but also his own pictorial archive containing thousands of plates, negatives, prints, the sum of thirty years of photographic work, had been destroyed beyond repair. With a Leica that someone gave him as a gift, he set out once more to photograph: ruins, urban 'canyons', car wrecks, and finally the corpses in the air raid shelters, which began to be opened in 1946. This work occupied him for more than four years. Among the thousands of pictures he created was his View from the City Hail Tower, on which Peter worked for a full week, according to his own report.
"Rubble, ruins, burnt-out debris as far as the eye can see. To comprise the totality of this barbaric destruction in a single picture," as Peter himself described the creation of the photograph, "seemed at most a vague possibility. It could be done only from a bird's eye view. But the stairs to almost all the towers were burned out or blocked. In spite of the ubiquitous signs warning 'Danger of Collapse,' I nonetheless ascended most of them - and finally, one afternoon, the City Hall Tower itself. But on that day, the light was from absolutely the wrong direction, thus making it impossible to take a photograph. The next day I climbed up again, and while inspecting the tower platform, discovered an approximately ten-foot-high stone figure - which could not in any way be drawn into the picture, however. The only window which might have offered the possibility for this was located around 13 feet above the platform, reachable only from inside the tower. Two stories down, I found a 16-foot stepiadderthat someone may have carried up after the fire to assess the extent of the damage. The iron stairway was still in good repair. How I managed to get that murderous ladder up the two stories remains a riddle to this day. But now I was standing high enough over the figure [to photograph] and the width of the window also allowed the necessary distance. The series of exposures made with a Leica, however, resulted in such plunging lines, that the photographs were almost unusable. In this case only a quadratic camera could help, but I didn't own one. After two days, I finally hunted one down, climbed the endless tower stairs for the third time, and thus created the photograph with the accusatory gesture of the stone figure - after a week of drudgery effort and scurrying about." Peter's photograph appeared in Dresden - eine Kamera kiagt an, published in 1949 in the former German Democratic Republic with a first run of fifty thousand copies. That the cropped figure in the picture is not the angel of peace, but the personification of 'Bonitas', or Goodness, does nothing to diminish the symbolic character of the photograph. The fact that streets were by then largely cleared of debris and rubble even in-creases the feeling of emptiness as well as the stillness, which for many people was the most striking characteristic after capitulation in May 1945. Wolfgang Kil once described Richard Peter's completely subjective images, which were intended as affective warnings, as "landscapes of the soul." In these pictures, an entire generation found their experience of the war visually preserved.
This must be the best photo summing up Nazi Germany that I've ever seen. It was taken by Richard Peter in an air-raid shelter in 1946. I found the photo while looking for material from his book "Dresden - Eine Kamera klagt an". After the destruction of Dresden, Peter had taken tons of photos of the city, the most famous one being a statue overlooking the ruins of the city. The book was published in the early 1950s in East Germany.
Richard Peter (10 May 1895 – 3 October 1977) was a German press photographer and photojournalist. He is best known for his photographs of Dresden just after the end of World War II.
Richard Peter was born and raised in Silesia, working as a smith and a miner while dabbling in photography. He was drafted into the German army in 1914 to serve in World War I. After the war he settled in Halle and later in Dresden. He joined the labor movement and the Communist Party of Germany. During the 1920s and early 1930s he published his photographs in various left-wing publications. Because of this he was promptly barred from working as a press photographer when the Nazi Party rose to power in 1933. During the Third Reich he worked in advertising, before being drafted again to serve in World War II.
Peter returned to Dresden in September 1945 to find the city destroyed after the bombing of Dresden in February 1945. His personal archive and equipment had been completely destroyed in the raids. Starting over with borrowed equipment, he began to document the damage to the city and the beginnings of its reconstruction. His photographs were published in 1949 in a volume called Dresden, eine Kamera klagt an ("Dresden, a photographic accusation", ISBN 3-930195-03-8).
In 1949 Peter was expelled from the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, the successor of the Communist Party, when he investigated corrupt party officials. He continued to work as a freelance art photographer in Dresden until his death in 1977, and eventually won some international recognition for his work. Peter's more than 5,000 negatives and prints were acquired by the State Library of Saxony in 1983.
