Dresden Sans Firebombs

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What was old is new. What was new is old. But hip.

I think the first time Dresden entered my consciousness was while I was suffering in ninth-grade at DeKalb High School. A visiting orchestra was giving a free performance to the student body (one that largely could have cared less about classical music). The main piece was Symphony No. 1 by David Bukvich, a memorial to the 1945 Allied fire-bombing that left the city a skeleton buried in rubble and ashes. The musicians used their voices to imitate the sounds of the airplanes and the wailing sirens. I remember being spooked, without then knowing the history of the situation. Most of my peers, however, giggled.

Today I am in Dresden, my last stop in Germany before heading to the Czech Republic. I had decided almost from the time I was accepted to the seminar that I would visit Dresden, to see this mythic place I had encountered in Bukvich’s haunting music so long ago. Friends who had already gone told me that it had been completely rebuilt, but somehow I was still stunned by what I saw as I walked around the Altstadt - the Old City - of Dresden this afternoon. There’s not a sign that this extravagantly Baroque showcase of a city, with its over- the-top churches, palaces, and bridges, was essentially leveled at the end of WWII.

As I jostled with the day-tripper crowds, I found that the experience of being in the Old City became increasingly unsettling. Don’t get me wrong. The place is stunning, each turn providing an even more beautiful view, but it all feels rather unreal. I half expected to look behind the resurrected Frauenkirche and find that it was just a plywood movie set (going inside didn’t really help…the interior was gaudily new). The Altstadt is now for all intents and purposes a museum, a sanitized version of the city created by the Saxon leader August the Strong (apparently not a subtle man!). Beautiful but whitewashed of its dramatic 20th century history. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel something should have been left as a memory of the fire-bombing in particular and the devastation of war in general (as the Frauenkirche was during the GDR period).

Strangely, across the Elbe River, in the Neustadt - New City - things are utterly different. First of all, although historically “newer” than the Altstadt, the New City was largely spared the worst of the destruction in 1945. So many of the buildings here are actually older than the reconstructions in the Old City. But beyond that, the area is also more “alive”. Especially as you get into the upper reaches of the neighborhood, things start to get funky. Cool coffee-shops, restaurants, clubs, second-hand clothing music and clothing stores, art spaces, etc. This is where the young and creative of Dresden live and hang-out; the Neustadters seem to shun the other side of the river.

But I’m glad I got to see both the Old and the New.

PS I thought I saw a gigantic mosque on the edge of town. Turns out it's old tobacco factory. There's a restaurant in the dome. I'm so confused...

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Comments

[Dad]

Jame, Liked those things on the side of buildings. Gives me ideas. Back from our road trip. Love, Dad