Charles M. Sennott: Dresden's Changing Story Line

... The late W.G. Sebald, a German-born writer who has been regarded as one of Europe's greatest modern intellectuals, has described the silence over the destruction and civilian deaths from Allied bombing as "a kind of taboo, like a shameful family secret."

   For at least a half-century after World War II, the bombing raids were seen as a "just punishment, even an act of retribution on the part of a higher power with whom there could be no dispute," Sebald wrote in "On The Natural History of Destruction," a work that was published just before he died in 2001.

   The book was the first of several treatises on a German victim status in recent years. Gunter Grass's latest novel, "Crabwalk," dealt with the Allied sinking of a cruise ship filled with German refugees, including 4,000 children, in one of the largest maritime disasters ever. "The Fall of Berlin," by the British historian Anthony Beevor, documented mass rapes of German women by the Red Army.

   Perhaps the most discussed book on Germans as victims is the German revisionist historian Jorg Friedrich's "The Fire: Germany in the Bombing War," published in 2002 and being released this year in English by Columbia University Press. Critics view it as being overly focused on the horrors inflicted on German civilians, while avoiding the origin of the "total war" pioneered by the German Luftwaffe's bombing campaigns in Guernica, Rotterdam, London, and Coventry.

   The author's choice of words is perceived by his many critics as dangerously revisionist. For example, Friedrich describes the basement shelters where many Germans died of burns and smoke inhalation as "crematoriums." This, the critics say, is a conscious attempt to warp history by equating the Allied killing with the crematoriums in Nazi death camps.

   On a cold night last month, at a cafe in Berlin's Charlottenberg district, Friedrich defended his book. Before the war, Charlottenberg had been a wealthy neighborhood where many German Jews lived until they were rounded up and deported to concentration camps.

   "What I am trying to do is give the narrative more scope and more depth," Friedrich said. "I want to show that some of the perpetrators were victims and that some of those seen as victims were also perpetrators."

   Few accept Friedrich's notion of balance. But the academic and political mainstream has begun to reconsider the nation's history, and to try to lift some of the burden of guilt for the war.

   Gerhard Schroeder became the first German chancellor to receive an invitation to a ceremony marking an anniversary of D-Day; he attended the 60th anniversary festivities in June. Schroeder also poignantly connected with his own personal loss of his father, whom he never knew and who died as a corporal in the German Army and who lies in a grave in Romania. Schroeder's sister spent years tracking down the site.

   Under Schroeder, there has also been an increased official prominence to the ceremonies marking the failed attempt to kill Hitler on July 20, 1944.

   These gestures, political analysts say, are aimed at showing Germany as a victim of war and a resister of Nazism. They seek to recast the nation as a modern European country ready to take its place as a leader in the European Union and to assert its role as a "peace power," as Schroeder calls Germany, that can counter the American "superpower."

   Memory is often political.

   During the Cold War, East Germans were encouraged to remember Dresden as an example of the capitalist West's indifference to the German people. And West Germans were reminded of the Red Army's brutal treatment of Germans under their occupation. With reunification 10 years ago, Germany began to sort through memories in a new way.

   Beate Lindemann, director of Atlantik Bruecke, a Berlin-based organization that seeks to foster understanding of modern Germany and its accomplishments, heads a program to bring American high school teachers and students to Germany.

In high schools that teach only about the evils of Hitler and the Holocaust, Lindemann's goal is to encourage teachers to deepen an understanding of modern Germany.

   "We are so aware of our past, and have so diligently stood up to our past, that now perhaps we feel we have earned the freedom to say Germany is about more than just these 16 years of Hitler's rise to power . . . We want to show we have a deeper history and a very positive future,Lindemann said.