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Authors: Frederick Taylor
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classes, humiliated by the Versailles Treaty, with their savings wiped out by hyperinflation, resentful of the new workersâ rights enshrined in law after 1918, fretting for their lost privileges, and worried about their childrenâs future, were alienated from the new status quo. Most longed for the old days of order and authority, of kings and generals and professors who knew how to rule and workers who knew their place. This was nowhere more true than in Dresden, where so many conservative-minded lawyers, civil servants, and education professionals were concentrated. To overcome the hostility of this key group, democracy needed stability. That was precisely what it did not get.
There was a short period of relative prosperity in the mid-1920s. Tourism in Dresden revived a little. No longer the wealthy independent travelers of the prewar period, or the long-stay foreign rentiers , but new trippers, who came in by train and made quick group tours of the city and its surrounding countryside in the new motor buses. It was a healthy contribution to the cityâs economy, but not the continuous subsidy that Dresden had been used to before 1914, when there had been a permanent, wealthy expatriate community numbering many thousands.
The artistic and architectural heritage of Dresden was still a great draw. In the 1920s Dresden even flourished briefly as a haven for the avant-garde. Before 1914 the Brücke (Bridge) group of artists, based in Dresden, had blazed a trail for the Expressionist movement. After the war many young artists, who had been through the hell of the trenches, were not satisfied with anything less than what they saw as absolute artistic truth. Searing paintings from this period include Otto Dixâs The War Cripple and Prager Strasse (which featured war wounded begging on Dresdenâs most exclusive shopping street), and The Unemployed Man by Otto Griebel. The Austrian Oskar Kokoschka was professor at the Dresden Academy from 1919 to 1924, though he eventually left, finding Dresden âsuffocating.â
Toward the end of the 1920s many stalwarts of the avant-garde left for Berlin or Paris. Dresden remained provincial at heart, they decided. People flocked there to see old, beautiful things and an aesthetically comforting vision of history, not to endure too much reality.
Dresden lived to a great extent in the past, which was where its visitors and citizens alike were most comfortable. It was no accident that two of the earliest acts of Dresdenâs Nazis after taking power were these: the dismissal of Otto Dix from his teaching post at the academy, and the demolition of the modernistic, glass-and-steel Kugelhaus (the Globe House), built for the Health and Hygiene Exhibition in 1928 and loathed by the cityâs numerous artistic conservatives.
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AFTER THE FIRST WORLD WAR, Dresdenâs manufacturing industries were saved by the fact that they were, by and large, of the more modern sort: cameras and optical instruments, typewriters, sewing machines, cigarettes, and toward the end of the 1920s, radios. In other parts of Saxony, traditional industries predominated, and they proved brutally vulnerable to foreign competition: Textiles, toys, bicycles, musicalinstruments (which also suffered from the advent of radio and cinema) all declined. During the temporary revival in world trade, the Saxon capital benefited more than the countryside.
But then came the slump. Dresden slid into the same economic quicksand as the rest of the world. The number of wholly dependent welfare recipients in the city increased from fewer than twenty-eight thousand in 1927 to almost seventy-four thousand in 1932. In Saxony, unemployment rates were the highest in Germany. The Social Democrats remained the largest party but continued their slow decline. In 1930 elections brought increases in both the Communist and the Nazi vote. Parliament was paralyzed.
Gertraud Freundelâs father was one among tens of
There was a short period of relative prosperity in the mid-1920s. Tourism in Dresden revived a little. No longer the wealthy independent travelers of the prewar period, or the long-stay foreign rentiers , but new trippers, who came in by train and made quick group tours of the city and its surrounding countryside in the new motor buses. It was a healthy contribution to the cityâs economy, but not the continuous subsidy that Dresden had been used to before 1914, when there had been a permanent, wealthy expatriate community numbering many thousands.
The artistic and architectural heritage of Dresden was still a great draw. In the 1920s Dresden even flourished briefly as a haven for the avant-garde. Before 1914 the Brücke (Bridge) group of artists, based in Dresden, had blazed a trail for the Expressionist movement. After the war many young artists, who had been through the hell of the trenches, were not satisfied with anything less than what they saw as absolute artistic truth. Searing paintings from this period include Otto Dixâs The War Cripple and Prager Strasse (which featured war wounded begging on Dresdenâs most exclusive shopping street), and The Unemployed Man by Otto Griebel. The Austrian Oskar Kokoschka was professor at the Dresden Academy from 1919 to 1924, though he eventually left, finding Dresden âsuffocating.â
Toward the end of the 1920s many stalwarts of the avant-garde left for Berlin or Paris. Dresden remained provincial at heart, they decided. People flocked there to see old, beautiful things and an aesthetically comforting vision of history, not to endure too much reality.
Dresden lived to a great extent in the past, which was where its visitors and citizens alike were most comfortable. It was no accident that two of the earliest acts of Dresdenâs Nazis after taking power were these: the dismissal of Otto Dix from his teaching post at the academy, and the demolition of the modernistic, glass-and-steel Kugelhaus (the Globe House), built for the Health and Hygiene Exhibition in 1928 and loathed by the cityâs numerous artistic conservatives.
Â
AFTER THE FIRST WORLD WAR, Dresdenâs manufacturing industries were saved by the fact that they were, by and large, of the more modern sort: cameras and optical instruments, typewriters, sewing machines, cigarettes, and toward the end of the 1920s, radios. In other parts of Saxony, traditional industries predominated, and they proved brutally vulnerable to foreign competition: Textiles, toys, bicycles, musicalinstruments (which also suffered from the advent of radio and cinema) all declined. During the temporary revival in world trade, the Saxon capital benefited more than the countryside.
But then came the slump. Dresden slid into the same economic quicksand as the rest of the world. The number of wholly dependent welfare recipients in the city increased from fewer than twenty-eight thousand in 1927 to almost seventy-four thousand in 1932. In Saxony, unemployment rates were the highest in Germany. The Social Democrats remained the largest party but continued their slow decline. In 1930 elections brought increases in both the Communist and the Nazi vote. Parliament was paralyzed.
Gertraud Freundelâs father was one among tens of
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