On Groceries and Fire Bombing

February 26th, 2006

“The Big Nurse is able to set the wall clock at what­ever speed she wants by just turn­ing one of those dials in the steel door; she takes a notion to hurry things up, she turns the speed up, and those hands whip around that disk like spokes in a wheel. The scene in the picture-screen win­dows goes through rapid changes of light to show morn­ing, noon, and night — throb off and on furi­ously with day and dark, and every­body is dri­ven like mad to keep up with that pass­ing of fake time…“
~ Ken Kesey (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest)

Mean­while, Patrick and I are being dri­ven mad try­ing to find an open gro­cery store to get some good break­fast and lunch food (while spend­ing 10–15 euro on din­ner is not incred­i­bly trau­matic, spend­ing the same on break­fast and lunch seems a bit extrav­a­gant). One is tempted to share the schizoid para­noia of Kesey’s nar­ra­tor… per­haps the Ger­mans know our plans and have hired a huge group of peo­ple to move the build­ings, piece by piece, before we arrive. Or maybe they’re turn­ing out the lights just as we’re about to round the cor­ner, all cur­rent cus­tomers hid­ing behind the shelves. Just another closed store, boys! Move on through! Danke shen!

This is new to me. And it reminds me that with every new expe­ri­ence, there’s another old assump­tion that gets bro­ken. Here in Dres­den, you are hard pressed to find any neces­sity shop­ping (or any sort of shop­ping that’s not totally tourist-based) on a Sun­day. Most places are closed. And even if they’re open, they’re hard to spot. The tell­tale look of a Safe­way or an Extra Foods or a Sainsbury’s (for the Brits among us)? Oh no. Noth­ing so sim­ple. “Look for any­thing that says ‘Markt’,” Patrick says. And more likely than not, it’s going to be at the bot­tom of some apart­ment build­ing with noth­ing but a small sign to announce its presence.

We never found the gro­ceries, but I did man­age to get a more com­pre­hen­sive look at Dres­den. Bombed out cathe­drals, forested areas in the mid­dle of the city (appar­ently, it’s one of the green­est cities in Europe), cas­tles, and col­or­ful, some­times aban­doned, man­sions were the scenery for our gro­cery hunt. I think the absence of cheap food for a day was a worth­while trade for tak­ing a scenic route to nowhere in particular.

That night I got a guided tour of the old town area, and all those big old build­ings, inter­est­ing enough just to look at them, took on the dimen­sion of his­tory. At one point, we arrived at a church with some black bricks mixed among the whitish ones. “Dur­ing the war,” Patrick explained, “About two thou­sand peo­ple hid in this church. It never got hit. They con­sid­ered it a mir­a­cle. Then about two days after the bomb­ing run, after all the peo­ple had exited the church, the pure heat gen­er­ated from the bomb­ing in the area caused the build­ing to basi­cally explode. Look, there’s a chunk of it there.” And I saw a large piece of stone that had obvi­ously been left in its exploded posi­tion as a reminder of what hap­pened here.

There are a lot of peo­ple who say the bomb­ing of Dres­den was itself a war crime. No mil­i­tary instal­la­tions, no real value in defeat­ing the Nazis. Of course, the hawks will argue that there were offices, etc. here that were of strate­gic impor­tance and that, dur­ing the war, the lives of a thou­sand Ger­mans were not worth as much as the life of one of the Allied forces. It’s tempt­ing, given the evil that the coun­try as a whole com­mit­ted, to go along with that. Then again, the guys fly­ing planes into build­ings a few years back also felt they were fight­ing a greater evil. I think most of the more neu­tral play­ers in the world would dis­agree with the valid­ity of both attacks.

“One must be care­ful when fight­ing mon­sters, lest one becomes a mon­ster one­self.“
~ Nietzsche

War tends to make us all into mon­sters. It’s a dif­fi­cult task to not go over that line. Have we in North Amer­ica become the mon­ster? I don’t know. Per­haps it’s a mon­stros­ity of a dif­fer­ent kind. More sub­tle than that of Ger­many dur­ing the 30s and 40s. We don’t con­quer with guns any more. We con­quer with the weight of our money and our tech­nol­ogy. We can sweep whole cul­tures away with debt relief and a few McDonald’s. But gosh, even as I crit­i­cize my impe­ri­al­is­tic roots, I can’t help but be incred­i­bly com­forted when I’m scared and lost in a for­eign coun­try — to sud­denly turn and see a famil­iar con­quer­ing piece of cor­po­rate Amer­ica. Finally, some­thing like home!

The church was rebuilt. That’s why you see the white stones. They’re the new ones. The iron in the stone oxi­dizes over the years, turn­ing the old ones to black. Give the new ones a few hun­dred years and even­tu­ally even the stains of war will be washed from this city.