《我的生平——第一卷》

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.