Introduction

The process of ossification and decline that characterised the memorial culture in the 1970s did not affect all vectors of memory in equal measure. Despite the scaling back of commemorative activity in both Kassel and Magdeburg, the air raids retained their significance as important points of reference for local historiography. When Herfried Homburg published his cultural history Kassel: the Intellectual Profile of a Thousand Year Old Town, in 1969, he dedicated his work ‘in memory of 22 October 1943’. The same perspective was shared by the Communist Willi Belz, who explicitly invoked ‘the tragedy of 22 October 1943’ in the preface to his autobiographical study of local resistance to Nazism. In Magdeburg, too, the bombing remained an important marker in local historical writing, although perhaps not quite to the same extent as in Kassel. The official History of the City of Magdeburg, published by the city council in 1975, devoted a subchapter to the attack of 16 January 1945.