Dissident Gardens (37 page)

Your loving “dad,”

Albert

12 December 1968, 5 Vitzthumstrasse Dresden

Dear Miriam,

It seems it needs the shock of your report on Alma to overcome the block I’ve had to writing you. In fact this is the fourth attempt and I hope this will be mailed finally. Not that I find it so difficult, on the contrary I still have a warm and close feeling every time I think of our too-brief reunion, and have frequently hoped it could be repeated, but what I consider a “real” letter takes time and leisure, both at a premium in the rather hectic life I still lead. Though I try to take it more easy, the work still takes a lot out of me, which just can’t be helped. As it happens, I have been able to travel recently. In September my researches brought me to Spain, to visit the site of the widely known Guernica “terrors,” which Western propaganda, you will likely not be surprised to discover, has exaggerated and distorted. Afterward, Michaela and I were granted a holiday at Lake Garda in Italy, where I did a lot of swimming and generally was very lazy. Then, for my birthday, we went to Verona and saw
Aida
in the
huge old Roman amphitheater, the singers’ voices carrying in the open air without amplification. The Italians love their opera, and I really don’t know what I enjoyed more, the performance or the audience. Both belonged to each other and complemented each other; life in Italy seems not as horribly serious and heavy-handed as it is in Germany.

So, when you say I should not delay in making a visit to North America if I want to see my mother again, I admit it is possible that I would gain this dispensation. Probably I could find a number of rather valid excuses as to why I can’t come at this time—Michaela’s pregnancy, financial, business, and whatnot—but, you know something, I really don’t want to come. I don’t think I want to see Alma again, for a variety of reasons. First of all, I find it easier to lie in a letter than stand before her and lie to her straight in the face, concerning so many details of my present life which have been concealed from her. More, I fear the emotional strain involved in saying goodbye. There would be something so completely final about a farewell certain to be the “last.” Then, too, I notice from her letters that Mother is approaching senility rather quickly now. I would rather like to hold on to the picture I still have of her from her last visit here, ten years ago, when we still went hiking together and could talk about many interesting things. This is perhaps terribly selfish, but there it is. This letter must get on its way now. I hope that the interval to the next will be shorter. For you and Thomas I send my very best wishes for 1969.

Yours,

Albert

24 June 1969, 5 Vitzthumstrasse, Dresden

Dear Miriam,

Belated thank-you for the postcard reproduction of Picasso’s
Guernica
—needless to say that image is familiar to us here, despite the fact that we do not have the privilege of seeing it in person as
you do in New York, but I assume your reference was “tongue in cheek”—and for your congratulations on Michaela’s pregnancy! Well, she has now ferried into the world your new half brother, Errol, of whom a pink and nevertheless rather delightful photograph is here enclosed. I hope you’ll have a chance to meet each other soon, please let me know if there’s the remotest chance of another visit to us here.

Sending love,

“Dad”

8 November 1969, 5 Vitzthumstrasse, Dresden

Dear Miriam,

I write to thank you for the fourth in what I fear may be an inexhaustible sequence of
Guernica
postcards, and while I find these brief and rather cryptic messages not unfriendly, I do feel concerned that I may have missed a more substantial letter from you these past months. Please write and reassure me that nothing has gone astray as I fear! You probably understand that I worry about the mails.

Fond regards from Michaela, and from Errol (whose exact time of birth, since you have requested this information twice, was according to the certificate at fourteen minutes past the hour of three, in the early hours of the morning of 26 May).

“Dad”

3 August 1971, Dresden

Dear Miriam,

If you will permit me, my daughter. Your keen intelligence has perhaps been betrayed by the tiny quantity of historical critique one can fit onto the back of a postcard. I find you susceptible to thinking in images and symbols, in Madison Avenue–style cameos and
slogans. Yet a few of your assertions demand a response, concerning as they do what has become my life’s work. You mention Coventry, you mention Rotterdam, and of course you again and again with your postcards “mention” Guernica. You write (in boldly illuminated hand, decorating your script with flowers and “peace signs” as if wishing to impart some kind of medieval biblical enchantment to your words!), “Suffering is suffering.” All this, in dispute of the truth to which I’ve been documenting: that the Allied firebombing of Dresden was a unique moral and cultural catastrophe, on a par, in the final human reckoning, only with the atomic bombs dropped on the Japanese cities (more died in Dresden, I remind you, than at either of those targets). Dresden also mirrors the Nazi Party’s own atrocities, those which have come to define twentieth-century horror in the popular imagination—most understandably, I add!—even to the detail of so many families roasted while huddling together in bunkers into which they entered docilely or were enticed by promises of safety.

There is no precedent for Dresden. Coventry was the center of the U.K. arms manufacture. To overlook this is to overlook the essential facts. The civilian death toll in Coventry, while horrendous, was the by-product of a valid military target. Inquiry into the circumstances at Rotterdam, equally, reveal an episode in “military history”—rather than, as in Dresden, the annals of “terror.” A division of the Dutch army was encamped in the city, and indeed, the bombing resulted in the surrender of the Dutch military forces. The Luftwaffe even attempted to call off the attack when they learned of peace talks. Their failure is evidence of the chaos of war.

This leaves your postcard’s face. Would it astonish you too much to learn that von Richthofen’s fliers aimed their bombs almost exclusively at Guernica’s bridges and arterial roads? Again, a military episode. “Suffering is suffering,” but the special exaggeration of the tragedies in Spain is a fetish of those who, thanks to artists like Picasso and George Orwell and Rose Angrush, accord a special sacred moral value to the minor scuffles of the “Lincoln Brigade.” I was once quite under the spell of such artists myself, so I feel rather indulgent of this error. Yet it is one.

Why have I allowed myself to become so tendentious, when I’m
sure it will be irritating to you? My wish, Miriam, is for you to understand that we are on the same side. You say I am “obsessed” with German suffering. Yet to deplore the U.S. actions in Vietnam without grasping napalm’s point of origin in the Dresden fire is to lose sight of the trajectory of history. In that, Dresden, like Hiroshima, was not the final phase of the previous imperialist war but the opening shot of the next, and one even more successful in its employment of terror than Hitler’s. We all of us live here in the flickering shadow of that fire which has in fact never been put out. To gather and sift testimony as I’ve spent more than a decade doing is to enlist in what any lover of peace such as yourself must see is the task of assembling human voices against the terrible universality of oppression, and of death.

You say that travel is impossible, and I reluctantly understand. I do nonetheless hope that our Errol and your Sergius will someday play together, and more, that they have the chance to live in a world freed of the destructive legacy of national boundaries—if these sentiments do not seem too optimistic, after my letter.

With my fondest regards,

Albert

P.S. Now that I have begun my long-delayed “paternalism” toward you I find myself incapable of stopping; forgive me. The astrological mysticism in your letters strikes me as sheerest gibberish, and I wish I could make you think better of it. Little Errol is no more “a Gemini with a moon in Mars” than I am a centaur. In fact, it looks from my perspective like a reversion to some kabbalistic superstition, not so far from your mother’s hysterical and self-loathing reversions to folk Judaism, as when she imposed a rabbi on your wedding party. The world we dwell in, my daughter, is mysterious enough for us not to wish to veil it in metaphysics! But enough.

19 March 1972, 5 Vitzthumstrasse, Dresden

Dear Miriam,

If I consent that the horse in the painting cannot “by definition” have been a political or military target of importance, will you grant
in return that the depiction of a horse in oil paint consists of not an account from the historical record but rather a poetical interpretation? Or better still, if I acknowledge what you wish, might you please cease sending me the postcard? Doubtless you’ve enriched the gift shop of the Museum of Modern Art sufficiently by this point.

Yours,

Albert