My Life — Volume 1

By the time I reached the Rampische Gasse, the fighting had already started: the crowd had seized the armoury, and troops had fired grape-shot into the citizen guard. I saw a guard dragging a bleeding leg, and the crowd’s cry rose up: “To the barricades!” I followed the stream of people toward the Town Hall, pushed my way into the council chambers unnoticed, and found them in total chaos. I wandered home through the hastily built barricades of market stalls after dark, and returned the next morning to find the Town Hall had become the heart of the revolution. The King and his court had fled to the Königstein fortress, leaving the town council to summon the remaining Saxon Chamber deputies to form a provisional government. Their deputation to the ministry found no one there, and word came that Prussian troops were marching to occupy the city. News from Württemberg, where troops had sided with the parliament and forced the ministry to accept the Pan-German Constitution, gave the deputies hope that Saxon troops might do the same, avoiding bloodshed.

On May 5 I printed huge placards asking Saxon troops if they would fight the foreign Prussians, using the type meant for Röckel’s Volksblatt, but only informers paid them any mind. I saw Bakunin wandering the barricades in a black frockcoat, disgusted by the sloppy preparation, saying he’d leave if they didn’t get serious about strategy. I ran into sculptor Semper and my friend Rietschel in their citizen guard uniforms; Rietschel fretted about balancing his democratic beliefs with his academic position, and Semper just smiled and walked away without comment.

May 6 the provisional government was formally proclaimed from the Town Hall balcony, swearing allegiance to the Pan-German Constitution. Bakunin scoffed at the ceremony, but when Semper came to me worried about the shoddy barricades in Wild Strufergasse, I sent him to the military commission to fix them. That afternoon Erzgebirge miners, well-armed and organized, marched into the Old Market to cheering crowds, bringing small cannons with them. As I watched them, the old Opera House, where I’d conducted the Ninth just weeks prior, burst into flames, set deliberately as a defensive measure to protect the Semper barricade from a flank attack. I thought of all the critics who had complained for years about the ugly, fire-prone building, and realized practical need always trumped aesthetic complaint.

That evening I went home to Friedrichstadt, where Minna was surrounded by panicked women, including Röckel’s wife, who was convinced her husband had returned to join the fighting. My young nieces were giddy with excitement about the revolution, and we passed the evening joking about the sculptor Hänel, who had begged us to bolt the house against revolutionary entry, then panicked when he saw men with scythes in the street.

The next morning I tried to cut through to the Town Hall, and a citizen guard called after me, laughing: “Your Freude schöner Götterfunken has set fire to the place, conductor! The rotten building’s gone.” The joke filled me with a strange, giddy strength. Further on I ran into the orchestra’s first oboist Hiebendahl, who begged me not to side with Röckel, warning me I’d ruin my position. I burst out laughing and told him my position was worthless to me, just as Röckel came around the corner rounding up guns, complaining the provisional government was too scared to even use pitch brands to defend the barricades. I left him to it and made my way to the Town Hall, where Bakunin told me the provisional government had decided to abandon Dresden and retreat to the Erzgebirge, where they could concentrate the reinforcements pouring in from across Germany and turn the uprising into a proper civil war, rather than a futile street riot. The plan felt like the first meaningful thing I’d seen in weeks. I didn’t want to leave Minna behind, so I lied to her, told her we were just visiting my married sister Clara in Chemnitz for a few days, and left with my dog Peps early the next morning. As I walked the paths I’d wandered so many times alone, larks singing overhead and artillery thundering in the distance, I thought wryly that my exit from Dresden was far more dramatic than my quiet, obscure entry seven years prior.

Minna caught up to me an hour later with the parrot, and we took a one-horse carriage toward the Erzgebirge. We cheered the armed reinforcements marching toward Dresden, and fell silent when we passed a column of regular troops marching stolidly toward the city “to do their duty.” We reached Clara’s house in Chemnitz, and as soon as I’d reassured my family, I told them I was going back to Dresden the next morning to see how the fight was going. Against all their protests, I left at dawn, taking back roads through the countryside, hearing rumors the revolutionaries were holding their own. I reached the Town Hall after dark on May 9, and the sight stopped me cold: the whole Old Town was prepared for house-to-house fighting, the constant thud of cannon fire droned over the shouts of men calling between barricades and broken-through houses, pitch brands smoldered in the streets, pale exhausted fighters slumped at watch posts, and unarmed civilians were challenged at every turn. The Town Hall itself was worse: a haggard, tense crowd of men hoarse from shouting, the only familiar faces the ancient town hall servants in their three-cornered hats, now cutting ham and buttering bread to feed the messengers running supplies to the barricades. I found the provisional government members: Todt and Tschirner, who had panicked and fled the first day of fighting, now crept around like ghosts, chained to their duties. Only Heubner still had energy, his eyes burning with seven nights without sleep, delighted to see me as a good omen. Bakunin was exactly as he had been the day before, cigar in his mouth, sprawled on a mattress on the floor, no sign he hadn’t slept in days. Next to him was a young Galician violinist named Haimberger, who had followed him to Dresden and now shouldered a gun; every time the youth flinched at a cannon blast, Bakunin slapped him on the back and joked he wasn’t in his fiddle orchestra now.