Enveloping History

I've had some things to say on the topic of German WWII guilt in Memorials and Memory Holes. Via ALDaily is this excellently written article by Theodore Dalrymple The Specters Haunting Dresden.

On no city does history weigh heavier than on Dresden. It is 60 years in February 2005 since the bombing that forever changed the basis of the city’s renown. Overnight, the Florence of the Elbe became a perpetual monument to destruction from the air, famed for its rubble and its corpses rather than its baroque architecture and its devotion to art. And then came communism.

You meet people in Dresden who, until a few years ago, knew nothing but life under Hitler, Ulbricht, and Honecker. Truly the sins of their fathers were visited upon them, for they brought neither the Nazis nor the communists to power, and there was nothing they could do to escape them. For such people, the sudden change in 1990 was both liberation and burden. Avid to see a world that was previously forbidden them, they took immediate advantage of their new freedom to visit the farthest corners of the globe, the more exotic the better. But the liberation brought with it a heightened awareness of the man-made desert of their own pasts, seven-eighths of their lives, truly an expense of spirit in a waste of shame. Never was Joy’s grape burst more decisively against veil’d Melancholy’s palate fine.

He goes on to talk about how the bombing of Dresden is used by Holocaust deniers and anti-semites to equate the two sides and, as if on cue, this story from Reuters today German Far-Right Fracas on Eve of Auschwitz Ceremony includes this,

The far-right National Democratic Party (NPD) provoked outrage on Friday by walking out of a minute's silence for Nazi victims and referring to Allied strikes on the German city of Dresden in 1945 as a "bombing holocaust."