Oath of the Stones, #1 - 2022

Those who forget the history of Hellerau will not understand the present.

By Michael Ernst

Stones cannot speak. Stones are contemporary witnesses, but they remain silent. No matter how eloquent the buildings created from them may be. According to Dresden's Mayor of Culture Annekatrin Klepsch, Hellerau has a similar significance as cultural heritage as the Semper Opera House and the Zwinger. "Hellerau is an expression of a reform movement at the beginning of the 20th century and stands as an antipode to the former royal seat. But also as a nucleus for an artistic avant-garde and for new forms of engagement with society and its lifestyles in a large city."

The history of the first years of the garden city has already been well researched, including the connections to former reformers such as Émile Jaques-Dalcroze. Such artistically visionary undertakings always harbour the risk of financial failure, as was the case at the time. The politician believes it is all the more important that the Free State and the city have returned the former festival theatre site to artistic use following the end of its use as a barracks and are also supporting this financially. "Our aim," says Klepsch, "must be to make more than just the architectural heritage visible. That's why artistic continuity is so important in terms of aspiring to the avant-garde." Although housing the Red Army for decades was an absolute outrage from today's perspective, this cannot be equated with the police school that was set up there until 1945. "During the Nazi dictatorship, people were trained here who then carried out massive violence throughout Europe," the politician states. "What happened afterwards was the result of the liberation of Germany by the Allies." How difficult life was for the Soviet soldiers is currently another subject of research.

Councillor Tilo Wirtz takes a similar view: "Even the conversion of Hellerau into barracks in 1938 was a violation of Heinrich Tessenow's ideas, as the arrangement of the barracks wings and the resulting barracks courtyard destroyed the open piazza." The plans in the 1990s did not take this into account retrospectively, as no thought was given to the history and Hellerau was only considered in connection with the reform movement. Wirtz was taken aback when he learnt that a police barracks had been established there from 1938. "At the time, the police and SS were led by Heinrich Himmler and were equally involved in the Holocaust." The more this realisation was confirmed and the sources could be consolidated, the more important the topic became for the historically interested city council. "Particularly in connection with the application for the title of World Heritage Site, we must not expose ourselves to the accusation that Dresden would do nothing for such a reappraisal. Over the course of the 2000s, there has been an increasing wealth of material on this topic." What drove him to dig deeper here was "the knowledge of gaps in the reappraisal that are no longer acceptable today". He counters the opinion of Dresden as an "innocent city" that is still sometimes held: "It was not only the SS that was responsible for atrocities, especially in the countries of Eastern Europe invaded by Germany, but also regular police units. People who grew up in the 1920s. People who knew what they were doing." He had to realise that the period from 1933 to 1945 was far too poorly dealt with in Dresden. "The focus on 13 February obscures the view of the time before that, there is a fatal lack of interest and even ignorance. Nobody wants to deal with it. But no traffic policemen were trained at the police academy in Hellerau." From the summer of 1943, this institution was called the Police Weapons School Hellerau I.

How to deal with this legacy?

Researching the content of this misuse is also an important concern for historian Stefan Dornheim from the Dresden City Archive. "In order to prepare the UNESCO application well, we need to do a lot of research into this period and present a concept for how the city's society wants to deal with this heritage. There were colourful and dark sides to it, which we still know too little about. But we should be able to provide valid information."

He sees the successful cooperation between the Cultural Office and the Institute for Saxon History and Folklore (ISGV) as ideal in this respect. Robert Badura, who is in charge of the project, and Claudia Dietze are not only connected by their historical interest, but also by their longstanding collaboration with the front-of-house staff at the European Centre for the Arts. They are familiar with the material to be analysed and have already begun to sift through surviving material. Badura is now researching further material, for example on the organisational integration of the various institutions. As the police apparatus and thus also the police school were formally state institutions, Badura is primarily working in the main state archive and the Dresden city archive. However, the large file collections in Moscow, which are subject to embargo periods and are still not accessible, and pandemic-related restrictions in the Berlin federal archives are still problematic.

However, Claudia Dietze and Robert Badura have already been able to look through a lot of local material on the garden city and are therefore aware of how quickly the NSDAP was able to gain a foothold in Hellerau, how quickly the mayor at the time implemented the directives imposed from 1933 onwards and, for example, how happy he was about the decline in unemployment. He is also said to have proudly announced celebrations organised by the local NSDAP group.

With the incorporation into Dresden in mid-1950, all files were transferred to the city archive. They describe drastic changes such as war preparations and flight exercises, as well as all building matters and files on so-called community care and festivals. By examining these files, it will be possible to find out how civil society dealt with the police school, whether there was cooperation or whether people felt disturbed. Stefan Dornheim wants to know the extent to which the police academy was seen as a foreign body or whether there was an amicable coexistence. "After a rough inspection, we know that there were definitely complaints against massive police exercises. However, in addition to the joint use of the sports field and cinema events for the community in the Festspielhaus, there were also public festivals that were part of clear traditions. Research into folk ideology shows that these movements already existed before 1933 and that the life reform movement took very different turns, from a general reform movement to folk esoteric developments. So it wasn't all liberal and international, as was later often assumed."

Thomas Nitschke and Justus H. Ulbricht have also already researched the blind spots. Thomas Nitschke's recent article in the colloquium volume on the World Heritage application provides illuminating details on Hellerau as a "centre of the Völkisch movement". Claudia Dietze also explored these and other aspects of the past in her master's thesis, which she wrote in 2017. Together with Robert Badura, she offers guided tours on the topic of "The Garden City under National Socialism" in order to impart as much knowledge as possible about this chapter of German history. "Interest in it hasn't waned," she reports and considers further reappraisal to be important: "This is work against forgetting. What happened should be remembered for future generations. There are always people behind all developments, individual people, and they must not be forgotten." One aspect that has not yet been sufficiently illuminated is that there was also a Jewish population in Hellerau, about which little is known. "That absolutely has to be dealt with, that is remembrance work!"

"History only becomes real when all sides are illuminated, including the bad sides."

Robert Badura is certain that the " Helleraumyth" needs to be corrected. "This was not an island of the blessed that emerged from the Lebensreform and sank again after a dozen years until it reappeared after reunification. We have the motivation to shed more light on it. Hellerau should not be declared a place of evil, but should be portrayed as real." And Claudia Dietze adds: "History only becomes real when all sides are illuminated, including the bad sides." Thomas Nitschke reports in the aforementioned colloquium volume, for example, that there were "significant overlaps between the life reformers and the völkisch movement", but that the völkisch movement also distanced itself from the ideas of the life reformers. Nitschke states: "However, the rejection of political liberalism and the fight against basic humanist values remained alien to most life reformers." The life reformers also did not follow the "rigorous anti-Slavism and anti-Semitism" found in nationalist movements.

According to Robert Badura, there is a lot to be learnt from the files on the Festspielhaus and the garden city, from the use of the building by the police and SS to references to the ranks and everyday life of the instructors. He emphasises his ambition to find out much more about the perpetrators' perspective and what happened later at the places where the people trained at Hellerau were deployed." Piece by piece, it was possible to work out that the operas "Alcestis" and "Iphigenia in Aulis" by Christoph Willibald Gluck and Handel's "Julius Caesar" were performed in the otherwise often empty Festspielhaus for the first so-called Reich Theatre Week in 1934, that the square had already been renamed Adolf-Hitler-Platz a year earlier and was closed to the public from 1938/39.

As a result, military and police institutions came into close contact and exchange, and a military complex was created in the north of Dresden with the airport and military training area on the Heller and the National Political Education Centre at the former state school. The German Workshops were considered important for the war effort.

Robert Badura states that he is amazed and pleased "that funds have been freed up in Dresden in the last few metres of this double budget to promote historical reappraisal." But how should the results of all this research be dealt with in the near future? Mayor of Culture Annekatrin Klepsch can imagine educational projects such as further guided tours of the site. To this end, there are still discussions with the monument preservation authorities, the architects and the planning office for the current remodelling of the east wing. However, she also sees it as a task to create awareness for all future guests of the Festspielhaus: "Watch out, there was also this chapter in the history of the building!"

If you would like to find out more about the eventful history of the Festspielhaus and the garden city, you can read more here:

Nitschke, T. (2005). Fundamental research on the history of the garden city Hellerau. Volume 1 "The founding years". Leipzig: Engelsdorfer Verlag.

Nitschke, T. (2007). The garden city Hellerau in the tense relationship between cosmopolitan reform settlement and nationalistically minded ethnic community. Dissertation Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg.

Nitschke, T. (2009). History of the garden city Hellerau. Dresden: Hellerau-Verlag.

Nitschke, T. (2021). Die Gartenstadt Hellerau: Eine "Pädagogische Provinz" und ihre Gegner. Dresden: Thelem-Verlag (university publisher).

Schinker, N. (2013). The garden city Hellerau 1909-1945. Urban architecture. Small housing construction. Social and land reform. Dresden: Sandstein Verlag.

Teufel, A. (2014). The "incomprehensible" prophet. Paul Adler. A German-Jewish poet. Dresden: Thelem-Verlag (university publisher).

Ulbricht, J. H. (2007). Germ cells of "German rebirth" - The Völkische in Hellerau and Dresden. Dresdner Hefte: Contributions to Cultural History, 15, (51), pp. 80-86.