Editing Bombing of Dresden (section)

==In literature and the arts==

===Kurt Vonnegut===
[[Kurt Vonnegut]]'s novel ''[[Slaughterhouse-Five|Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death]]'' (1969) used some elements from his experiences as a [[prisoner of war]] at Dresden during the bombing. The death toll of 135,000 given by Vonnegut was taken from ''[[The Destruction of Dresden]]'', a 1963 book by [[David Irving|Holocaust denier David Irving]]. In a 1965 letter to ''[[The Guardian]]'', Irving later adjusted his estimates even higher, "almost certainly between 100,000 and 250,000", but these figures were inflated; Irving finally published a correction in ''The Times'' in a 1966 letter to the editor<ref>{{Cite web |title=Letter to the editor, Thursday, July 7th, 1966 |url=http://www.fpp.co.uk/History/General/Dresden/TheTimes070766.html |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170509060100/http://www.fpp.co.uk/History/General/Dresden/TheTimes070766.html |archive-date=9 May 2017}}</ref> lowering it to 25,000, in line with subsequent scholarship. Despite Irving's eventual much lower numbers, and later accusations of generally poor scholarship, the figure popularised by Vonnegut remains in general circulation.

In a 2006 ''Rolling Stone'' article, Vonnegut is quoted recalling "utter destruction" and "carnage unfathomable". The Germans put him and other POWs to work gathering bodies for mass burial. "But there were too many corpses to bury. So instead the Nazis sent in troops with [[flamethrower]]s. All these civilians' remains were burned to ashes."<ref name="rolling">{{Cite magazine|first=Douglas|last=Brinkley|title=Vonnegut's Apocalypse|magazine=[[Rolling Stone]]|url=https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11123162/kurt_vonnegut_says_this_is_the_end_of_the_world|date=24 August 2006|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070416061205/http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/11123162/kurt_vonnegut_says_this_is_the_end_of_the_world|archive-date=16 April 2007}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |title=No Touch Monkey! |url=https://capnmarrrrk.blogspot.com/2006/09/vonneguts-apocalypse.html |access-date=2023-03-18 |website=capnmarrrrk.blogspot.com |archive-date=18 March 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230318191015/https://capnmarrrrk.blogspot.com/2006/09/vonneguts-apocalypse.html |url-status=dead }}</ref>

In the special introduction to the 1976 [[The Franklin Mint#The Franklin Library|Franklin Library]] edition of the novel, he wrote:
{{blockquote|The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was so meaningless, finally, that only one person on the entire planet got any benefit from it. I am that person. I wrote this book, which earned a lot of money for me and made my reputation, such as it is. One way or another, I got two or three dollars for every person killed. Some business I'm in.<ref>{{cite book|first=Kurt|last=Vonnegut|title=Palm Sunday|publisher=Delacorte Press|location=New York|year=1981|page=302|title-link=Palm Sunday (book)}}</ref>}}

The firebombing of Dresden was depicted in [[George Roy Hill]]'s 1972 [[Slaughterhouse-Five (film)|movie adaptation of Vonnegut's novel]].

Vonnegut's experiences in Dresden were also used in several of his other books and are included in his posthumously published writings in ''[[Armageddon in Retrospect]]''.<ref name="rolling" /> In one of those essays, Vonnegut paraphrased leaflets dropped by the Allies in the days after the bombings as saying: <blockquote>To the people of Dresden: We were forced to bomb your city because of the heavy military traffic your railroad facilities have been carrying.  We realize that we haven't always hit our objectives.  Destruction of anything other than military objectives was unintentional, unavoidable fortunes of war.</blockquote>  Vonnegut notes that many of those railroad facilities were not actually bombed, and those that were hit were restored to operation within several days.<ref>[[Kurt Vonnegut|Vonnegut, Kurt]] (ndg) "Wailing Shall be in All Streets" in (2009) ''[[Armageddon in Retrospect]]'' pp.41–42. London: Vintage Books {{isbn|978-0-099-52408-3}}</ref>

[[Freeman Dyson]], a British-American physicist who had worked as a young man with [[RAF Bomber Command]] from July 1943 to the end of the war,{{sfn|Dyson|2006}} wrote in later years (1979):

{{blockquote|For many years I had intended to write a book on the bombing. Now I do not need to write it, because Vonnegut has written it much better than I could. He was in Dresden at the time and saw what happened. His book is not only good literature. It is also truthful. The only inaccuracy that I found in it is that it does not say that the night attack which produced the holocaust was a British affair. The Americans only came the following day to plow over the rubble. Vonnegut, being American, did not want to write his account in such a way that the whole thing could be blamed on the British. Apart from that, everything he says is true.{{sfn|Dyson|1979|pages=28–29}}}}

In 1995, Vonnegut recalled having discussed the bombing with Dyson, and quotes Dyson as attributing the decision to bomb Dresden to "bureaucratic momentum".<ref>{{Cite web |date=1995 |title=Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller discuss World War II + Q&A (1995) – YouTube |url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWXXpMWqG9Q&t=2408s |access-date=18 March 2023 |publisher=C-SPAN}}</ref>

===Other===
* {{Interlanguage link|Henny Brenner|de}} (nee Wolf) wrote about the bombing in her memoir, ''The Song is Over: Survival of a Jewish Girl in Dresden'' about how it allowed her and her parents to flee into hiding and avoid reporting pursuant to orders to show up for resettlement to a new "work assignment" on February 16, 1945, thus saving their lives.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Whitfield|first=Stephen J.|date=2011|title=The Song is Over: Survival of a Jewish Girl in Dresden (review)|url=https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/60/article/478220|journal=Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies|volume=29|issue=3|pages=135–137|doi=10.1353/sho.2011.0127|s2cid=145109653 |issn=1534-5165}}</ref>
* The German diarist [[Victor Klemperer]] includes a first-hand account of the firestorm in his published works.<ref>{{cite news|url=http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,341230,00.html|title=Victor Klemperer's Dresden Diaries: Surviving the Firestorm|author=((SPIEGEL ONLINE, Hamburg, Germany))|date=11 February 2005|newspaper=SPIEGEL ONLINE|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20100812110607/http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,341230,00.html|archive-date=12 August 2010}}</ref>
* The main action of the 1965 novella ''[[Closely Observed Trains (novella)|Closely Observed Trains]]'', by Czech author [[Bohumil Hrabal]], takes place on the night of the first raid.
* In the 1983 Pink Floyd album ''[[The Final Cut (album)|The Final Cut]]'', "[[The Hero's Return]]", the protagonist lives his years after World War II tormented by "desperate memories", part of him still flying "over Dresden at angels 1–5" (fifteen-thousand feet).
* [[Jonathan Safran Foer]]'s 2005 novel ''[[Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close]]'' (as well as the [[Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (film)|2011 film adaptation of the same name]]) incorporates the bombings into essential parts of the story.
* The bombings are a central theme in the 2006 German TV production ''[[Dresden (2006 film)|Dresden]]'' by director Roland Suso Richter. Along with the romantic plot between a British bomber pilot and a German nurse, the movie attempts to reconstruct the facts surrounding the Dresden bombings from both the perspective of the RAF pilots and the Germans in Dresden at the time.{{Citation needed|date=June 2024}}
* [[Five Days, Five Nights (1960 film)|''Five Days, Five Nights'']] is a 1961 joint Soviet–East German film that dramatizes the search for the missing paintings of the [[Dresden Gallery]] in the aftermath of WWII
* The bombing is featured in the 1992 [[Vincent Ward (director)|Vincent Ward]] film, ''[[Map of the Human Heart]]'', with the hero, Avik, forced to bail out of his bomber and parachute down into the inferno.
* The devastation of Dresden was recorded in the woodcuts of [[Wilhelm Rudolph]], an artist born in the city who resided there until his death in 1982, and was 55 at the time of the bombing. His studio having burned in the attack with his life's work, Rudolph immediately set out to record the destruction, systematically drawing block after block, often repeatedly to show the progress of clearing or chaos that ensued in the ruins. Although the city had been sealed off by the Wehrmacht to prevent looting, Rudolph was granted a special permit to enter and carry out his work, as he would be during the Russian occupation as well. By the end of 1945 he had completed almost 200 drawings, which he transferred to woodcuts following the war. He organised these as discrete series that he would always show as a whole, from the 52 woodcuts of ''Aus'' (Out, or Gone) in 1948, the 35 woodcuts ''Dresden 1945–After the Catastrophe'' in 1949, and the 15 woodcuts and 5 lithographs of ''Dresden 1945'' in 1955. Of this work, Rudolph later described himself as gripped by an "obsessive-compulsive state", under the preternatural spell of war, which revealed to him that "the utterly fantastic is the reality. ... Beside that, every human invention remains feeble."<ref>Schmidt, Johannes. [http://artinprint.org/article/wilhelmrudolph/ "Dresden 1945: Wilhelm Rudolph's Compulsive Inventory,"] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210224062234/https://artinprint.org/article/wilhelmrudolph/ |date=24 February 2021 }} ''Art in Print'', Vol. 5 No. 3 (September–October 2015).</ref>
* In [[David Alan Mack]]'s ''The Midnight Front'', first book of his secret history [[historical fantasy]] series ''The Dark Arts'', the bombing was a concentrated effort by the British, Soviet, and American forces to kill all of the known karcists (sorcerers) in the world in one fell swoop, allied or not, out of fear of their power.
* The bombing is featured in the 2018 German film, ''[[Never Look Away (2018 film)|Never Look Away]]''.<ref>{{cite news|title=A towering achievement of a film, full of horrific secrets|url=https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/movies/a-towering-achievement-of-a-film-full-of-horrific-secrets-20190619-p51z5b.html|work=The Sydney Morning Herald|date=19 June 2019}}</ref>
* The tragedy of Dresden, as seen through the eyes of Polish forced laborers, was presented by Polish director [[Jan Rybkowski]] in the 1961 movie ''[[Tonight a City Will Die]]''.
* The 1978 piece for wind ensemble, ''Symphony I: In Memoriam, Dresden Germany, 1945'' by composer [[Daniel Bukvich]] retells the bombing of Dresden through four intense movements depicting the emotion and stages before, during, and after the bombing.