The top tourist attraction in this eastern German city is a pile of charred and blasted rubble laid out neatly in piles and stacked on shelves in one of the main city squares.
The detritus is the 18th-Century Frauenkirche cathedral, or more precisely, what is left of it. Nearly 8,400 stones — some a big as a car, others small as a fist — are pieces in an architectural puzzle being put together five decades after the church was blown to bits in one of the more insane moments of World War II.
Now, more than 50 years later, Dresden is finally coming alive again. The city’s bombed-out museums, cathedrals and palaces are being sandblasted, painted and topped with shimmering gold leaf. The once-quiet quays along the Elbe River bustle with tourist-packed paddle-wheel steamers and a seemingly endless parade of fairs, circuses and hot-air balloon races.
“It is exciting to see the city changing almost every day,” says Manuela Miranda, a longtime resident. “Scaffolding going up next to where it is coming down. Now there is a beautiful building where before there was only something ugly and empty.”
The city is filled with cranes as the gem of Saxony struggles to regain its place as one of the most handsome places in all of Europe.
The target is to have all the work completed by 2006 — the 800th anniversary of the city’s founding.
Once praised as “Florence on the Elbe,” Dresden is working overtime to recover from a horrific 20th Century.
The city of art and culture sold its soul, as did the rest of Germany, to Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. Bombed by the British and Americans late in World War II, Dresden lost more than 30,000 people, and 75 percent of the central city was destroyed. Soon after, the Soviet army captured it, ushering in five decades of communist rule.
Dresden is a very different city today from the gray, sad place I first visited in the fall of 1990.
Back then, Dresden seemed like a city frozen in a hellish moment in time, circa 1945.
The German Democratic Republic was in its final days, the puppet of Moscow digested whole by the prosperous West Germany. Arriving by train from Prague, I stepped onto a windswept concrete plaza empty save for a colossus of Lenin.
I checked into my state-run hotel, one of three identical towers side-by-side. Tiny room, rubber floors that the maids each morning cleaned by dumping a bucket of water in the middle of the room and swabbing the deck with a mop.
From my hotel, I walked through the gray streets, past the main square where Dresdener Bank and a few other West German companies had set up shop as a first step toward the upcoming unification. Crowds gawked at the handful of sleek Mercedes-Benz sedans of Westerners come east to seek their fortune. The locals’ rusty, faded Trabants with their noisy, smoky engines sputtered up and down the potholed streets.
The baroque core of the city was a shock. The opera house and Zwinger palace had been restored by the communists, but the castle stood a bombed-out hulk, black and empty, untouched since the war. The Old Masters Gallery, with its Raphael-inspired tapestries, cityscapes by Canaletto, its Titians and Tintorettos, was open sometimes, closed much of the time.
I’d seen the pictures of the devastated German cities in World War II history books. But the Cologne, Munich, Hanover and Dusseldorf I knew were filled with neon-drenched high-rises, with newly built “old town” sections re-created on the carcasses of the old ones destroyed in the war. The cities might be sterile, but they were vibrant.
Yet in Dresden, the war seemed like yesterday. Though the bodies had been cleared and the rubble stacked into piles, Dresden was a dark, dead city.
Forward almost a decade. East Germany is gone. The Soviet troops long ago shipped home. Dresden soars against the sky.
My Mercedes rental car attracts nary a stare in a city filled with BMWs, Porsches and Mercedes. At the train station, the statue of Lenin, too, is gone, pulled down from its pedestal. The trio of hotels has been taken over by the Western-based Ibis firm as budget lodgings in a city now featuring a half dozen fancy hotels.
I stay at the Hilton, across the street from the Frauenkirche, which has risen five stories tall behind a mass of scaffolding. Restoration workers recovered nearly 8,400 pieces of the facade that were salvageable, while craftsmen fashioned 90,000 new ones based on 10,000 old pictures of the church before it was destroyed.
The project is expensive — with a final price tag expected to top 250 million deutsche marks (about $160 million U.S. dollars). By 2002, the city hopes to have all the work finished — not just on the church, but all the bomb-ravaged buildings.
Since my first visit, a number of cratered homes have been pulled down. Others have been gutted and are in various stages of restoration. Sandblasters remove years of grime, but can’t take away the scorched black stone of the firestorm. The church steeples are eerily beautiful, with new gold statues shimmering atop the black spires.
Dresdeners have no desire to look back. When I remark to a woman at a cafe how the prerecovery Dresden had a kind of macabre appeal for the history buff, I am politely but firmly chastised.
“The ruins might have been interesting to you, but to live among them was too sad,” says Gisela Haufe.
No wonder she and most others in Dresden feel as they do. While other areas of the former East Germany chafe under the winner-take-all capitalism of united Germany, Dresden is clearly a city that has taken to the new ways.
After three days of English in Berlin, I hear German ringing through this city. Dresden hasn’t quite caught on yet with the American and British tourist crowd, though it lies directly on the rail line between Berlin and Prague, two of the hottest destinations in Europe.
I take a walk down by the river at sunset. A half dozen paddle wheelers congregate around the docks, filled with evening cruise parties. On the lawn across the river, five hot-air balloons struggle with a stiff wind to launch into the sky for bird’s-eye views of the day’s end.
One painted with the likeness of Mozart breaks its moorings and appears headed straight for a highway bridge. The pilot throws the gas valve wide open and the flame roars, the balloon lurching just over the bridge, to the applause of the city.
On the river, the steamboats toot their steam whistles in unison and churn away, leaving the crowds along the waterfront cafes to savor the views across the Elbe.
Dresden, once the todt stadt — “dead city” — is bent on living fully again.
THE ALLIED DECISION TO LEVEL DRESDEN
The beauty of Dresden that took centuries to build was obliterated in one night in February 1945.
Dresden had long been a center of enlightenment and the arts, a baroque city of spires and colonnades where Goethe and other great German thinkers had lived or worked.
But like nearly all of the country, Dresden had eagerly embraced Adolf Hitler’s rise in the troubled 1930s.
The men joined the army to go to war or the SS to staff the concentration and extermination camps.
Through the first five and a half years of war, hundreds of hometown men fell in France or over England, in Africa or Russia. Yet, the Allied bombers that had leveled Hamburg, Berlin, Cologne and other major German cities since 1943 had spared Dresden.
The city of baroque beauty with priceless works of art and architectural marvels had no war industries or major military installations.
It had been only sporadically bombed, with Allied planes taking great pains to concentrate their attacks on the rail yards at the southern edge of town.
But in early 1945, the Soviets wanted help in slowing the German retreat west, fearing the Nazis might be able to regroup for a counterattack.
The British had drawn up Operation Thunderclap, a series of heavy carpet-bombing raids meant to disrupt retreat routes by destroying the few cities left intact.
The goal was to create enough despair and havoc in Germany that Hitler’s government in Berlin might fall, leading to an early surrender.
Though some at Allied Headquarters in London opposed the bombings on moral grounds, they were in the minority.
Originally, American B-17 bombers were to hit Dresden during the day on Feb. 13, 1945. But bad weather forced cancellation of those attacks.
By that evening, the weather had cleared enough that the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command was given the green light to attack.
Just before midnight, 796 Lancaster heavy bombers led by nine target-marking Mosquito “pathfinder” light bombers attacked Dresden in two waves three hours apart.
Heard but not seen, the bombers opened their bomb bays and released 1,182 tons of phosphorous incendiary bombs, which immolated everything the 1,427 tons of high-explosive bombs didn’t tear apart.
At dawn, the city a smoking ruin, 311 U.S. Army Air Force B-17 bombers dropped 771 more tons of bombs on Dresden, while American P-51 Mustang fighters strafed roads packed with soldiers and civilians fleeing the carnage.
A firestorm swept through that burned so hot, it sucked the oxygen out of the city. People were incinerated in their homes or suffocated in shelters below ground.
Only handfuls survived, including some American prisoners of war. Not long after the fires were out, the Red Army rolled into the city and took control. The city became an object lesson. To the Germans, it was proof of what Hitler had wrought on a jewel of German culture.
The bombing, which the Soviets had demanded, also became a propaganda tool. In other cities, bomb-damaged buildings were pulled down or restored. In Dresden, whole blocks in the downtown area were left as they were to show the “barbarism” of the West against a defenseless city.
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For information on Dresden, contact the German National Tour Office at 212-661-7200.
