A FIRESTORM IN DRESDEN

Video: https://vimeo.com/66831437

Man is the only being of Mother Nature capable of destroying his own species consciously. The question of the sense of the death instinct and the encounter of Eros and Tanatos is in fact the temptation to believe that sadistic pleasure in killing is in many ways similar to the sexual instinct. That is when the real man gets revenge for his restraint in a frenzied orgy. The instincts that have been suppressed by the society for a long time, are becoming important, sacred and the highest motive again.

On Tuesday, February 13th 1945 there was a carnival in Dresden. Thousands of children flooded the streets, although the Red Army was about 100 kilometres far from the town. Hundreds of thousands refugees had been pouring into the streets, together with 600.000 inhabitants of Dresden. At about 10.30  245 heavy Lancaster bombers appeared in the sky. They started dropping 2-ton bombs onto the town. Immediately after these massive destructive bombs, followed the rain of incendiary ones. The bombardment was so concentrated that the scattered fires became a sea of blaze. Dresden turned into a burning hell, the centre of the so-called  FIRESTORMS.

At that time there were only a few unimportant factories in Dresden. During the Allies' bombing in Dresden none of the anti-aircraft cannons fired, none of the German fighters soared into the air. Industrial areas remained untouched. The bombardment was oriented solely to the town centre.

Due to the establishment of the relation between the result of the destruction (the presentation of the destruction - the ashes) and the cause of the destruction (the recording) some space is made where fiction and faction are summarized, interwoven, making all the units of measurement relative, where the only point of measurement is our personal experience and willingness to accept even the most fantastic and banal responses, which can be firmly founded as well as official history.

It is the fact that Man has been adjusting to this world physically for thousands of years. If the only real revolution in human history is the evoultion of human consciousness, then that process has not approached its zenith at all, which is confirmed by a large number of events in the rich history of human destruction.

Historiographical metafiction denies the natural and common-sense methods of differentiating historical facts from reality. It rejects the view where only history possesses the demand for truth in the way that it suspects the reason for that demand in historiography and claims that both history and fiction are discourses of human construction, designating systems and that both make their main demand for truth from that identity.

                                                                                       Linda Hutcheon

Dozens of thousands suffocated when there was no oxygen after the first raid, thousands of others were driven into the fire by the air current while they were trying to escape the flames. Desperate parents were throwing their children into the Elba, the children either drowned or burnt alive because the river was boiling here and there because of the burning asphalt which had plummeted into the water.