Professor Karen Leeder will give the talk on: White Gold: Meissen Porcelain and The Destruction of Dresden
The aerial bombing of Dresden in February 1945 is one of the most controversial acts of war in Allied history: a war crime perpetrated against an innocent icon of German culture for some; a legitimate retaliation in the logic of War for others. The deliberate razing of Dresden has also seared itself into German memory: weaponised by successive German regimes (controversial at home too, with Churchill quickly distancing himself and leaving Sir Arthur Bomber Harris to become the unrepentant apologist), but also an unresolved trauma for the families who experienced it and who have grown up in amidst the ruins it left behind. Today too, the memories are among the most acute in Germany with the annual reconciliation ceremonies accompanied by right wing demonstrations, keen to nurture the national myth of victimhood and arguably denying ordinary people the right to mourn.
Historians in English and German keep returning to this raw spot which produced major innovations in the art of warfare. Art proper too has been obsessed with it almost since 1945 from the diaries of Jewish Philologist Victor Klemperer, whose life was ironically saved by the bombing, to Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. This talk takes its cue from Porcelain: Poem on the Downfall of my City (2020) by prominent German writer Durs Grünbein to explore that legacy through the lens of the Meissen pottery famously produced there. The ‘white gold’ in the soil round Dresden was the source of the city’s wealth. Every ordinary family has its own Meissen heirlooms. But porcelain was also implicated in the atrocities: the Nazi regime shifted its manufacture into the death camps.
The recording of this event can be viewed on our YouTube channel.