Carly Berwick writes in Slate Magazine about the contested nature of the memory of the Allied firebombing of Dresden during the Second World War. Memories of Dresden have become the focal point of a contemporary political debate in Germany about the memory of the war dead. It is not entirely clear how a nation like Germany should mourn its war dead because of the ideology they fought for, or even whether they should be mourned at all. There is no doubt that the war dead retain important cultural meaning.

Dresden is a particularly lovely German city, even when 4,200 neo-Nazis are marching through it like orderly black ants. Since it was bombed to rubble by British and American pilots in World War II on Feb. 13, 1945, its center has been rebuilt to a digestible, weekender version of its 18th-century Baroque grandeur. The neo-Nazis marched last Saturday to observe the 61st anniversary of the bombing.

They are at the far-right extreme of a vigorous debate that’s taken hold in the past five years or so about whether Germans have a right to mourn their war dead. Moderate politicians and antifascist protesters alike are queasy at the prospect of a united Germany talking about its deprivation and suffering, exactly the sort of terms Hitler invoked in the 1930s. The debate over Dresden is, in the end, over who has the authority to assert loss, victimization, and the perceived attendant political capital.

Dresden has become a particularly charged symbol of suffering, in part because the former East Germany encouraged commemoration of the bombing, and questioning of the Western powers and reunification has brought the discussion of the Dresden fire-bombing to the entire country. But there has also been prodigious recent literary attention focused on it. The destruction of Dresden has been taken up by historians and literary humanists, including W.G. Sebald in On the Natural History of Destruction (who spreads his ruminations across many bombed cities), Jonathan Safran Foer in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, German historian Jörg Friedrich in Der Brand (The Fire), and British historian Frederick Taylor in Dresden, as well as in a new film melodrama, Dresden, which just premiered at the Berlin Film Festival.

The full article from Slate: “Do Germans have a right to mourn their war dead?

Sergio Luzzatto, author of The Body of Il Duce: Mussolini’s Corpse and the Fortunes of Italy, describes how Benito Mussolini’s body has been beaten, buried, exhumed, stolen, hidden and turned into a shrine by his followers. He says the struggle over the remains reflects Italy’s struggle to become a republic and leave fascism behind.

Listen to the interview on NPR: ‘The Body of Il Duce’ Reflects Italian History

For eight decades he has been lying in state on public display, a cadaver in a succession of dark suits, encased in a glass box beside a walkway in the basement of his granite mausoleum. Many who revere him say he is at peace, the leader in repose beneath the lights. Others think he just looks macabre.

Time has been unkind to Lenin, whose remains here in Red Square are said to sprout occasional fungi, and whose ideology and party long ago fell to ruins. Now the inevitable question has returned. Should his body be moved?

Revisiting a proposal that thwarted Boris N. Yeltsin, who faced down tanks but in his time as president could not persuade Russians to remove the Soviet Union’s founder from his place of honor, a senior aide to President Vladimir V. Putin raised the matter last week, saying it was time to bury the man.

”Our country has been shaken by strife, but only a few people were held accountable for that in our lifetime,” said the aide, Georgi Poltavchenko. ”I do not think it is fair that those who initiated the strife remain in the center of our state near the Kremlin.”

In the unending debate about what exactly the new Russia is, the subject of Lenin resembles a Rorschach inkblot test. People project their views of their state onto him and see what they wish. And so as Mr. Poltavchenko’s suggestion has ignited fresh public sparring over Lenin’s place, both in history and in the grave, the dispute has been implicitly bizarre and a window into the state of civil society here.

The full article from the New York Times: With Lenin’s Ideas Dead, What to Do With His Body?