The beautiful rebirth of Dresden (1)

The Florence on the Elbe

On the evening of February 13, 1945, Prince Ernst Heinrich, son of the last Saxon king, looked down on the city where his ancestors once ruled for the final time and watched it burn.

The prince had been lucky to escape this far; he had almost been murdered in 1934 for his democratic sympathies and, in 1943, while an officer with the Abwehr – the most anti-Nazi of German agencies – he had been ordered into service in Stalingrad, a deliberate death sentence instigated by someone high up in the regime. Kissing goodbye to his children, he prepared to meet his fate before the order was mysteriously rescinded.

A widower, Ernst Heinrich was in the city that day to meet his fiancée when the sirens started at 9.51 in the evening. Dresden, until then relatively untouched by Allied bombing, was about to become a byword for slaughter.

The first wave of RAF bombs came at 10.13 PM, targeted at the centre of a city which served as a supply line for the Reich’s war in the east. An even more deadly wave followed later in the night, creating a firestorm that turned the Saxon capital of 700,000 souls into an inferno.

Somewhere around 25,000 people were killed in the attack, although both the Nazis and later communists inflated that figure, either burned to death or asphyxiated by a 1000-degree firestorm which sucked the oxygen out of the air.

The Saxon prince and his fiancée found refuge in a cellar on the edge of the city alongside other evacuees, eventually reaching a nearby village where, standing on a hill in the small hours, he looked at the city of his forefathers in flames.

The broken-hearted prince later recalled: ‘the entire city was a sea of flame. This was the end! Glorious Dresden was burning, our Florence on the Elbe, in which my family had resided for almost four hundred years. The art and tradition and beauty of centuries had been destroyed in a single night. I stood as if turned to stone.’

It was the end of Dresden.

The Protestant church viewed from near the banks of the Elbe

The bombing - 80 years ago today - was one of the most devastating of the war, and perhaps the most controversial. The debate over whether it was justified I will leave for another day, but while the issue was often promoted both by the extreme Right and Left, it’s notable that the attack caused regret among many senior members of British society almost immediately.

It was not just the sheer number of casualties – the Hamburg firestorm killed more - although the human suffering and grief was intense. Dresden, while certainly a military target – it had well over a hundred factories aiding the war effort – was also notably one of the most beautiful cities in Europe. People talked of it in the way we might talk of Prague now.

Dresden, that fine baroque city which expressed all the great civilising optimism of 18th century Europe, had gone up in smoke that Shrove Tuesday, further degraded the following day by daytime American raids.

In his account of the firestorm, Frederick Taylor observed that ‘For the British elite, “Florence on the Elbe” was significant in a way that plain German cities such as Dortmund or Chemnitz or Wuppertal could never be. Many had visited Dresden as tourists, or even lived there, perhaps as students.’ In the days following the attack, Violet Bonham-Carter, daughter of Great War leader H.H. Asquith, marched into 10 Downing Street and demanded to speak to Churchill about the bombing of the city where she had attended finishing school.

Some of the finest baroque streets in Europe, its most magnificent churches – all gone. Indeed, after the war, the city’s grotesque local ruler, Martin Mutschmann, lamented the artistic destruction more than the loss of lives, because ‘artistic treasures can’t be replaced’.

One can barely appreciate the psychological toll this took on the local people who survived. Taylor recalled the experience of Otto Griebel, an artist with strong anti-Nazi sympathies, writing how ‘Griebel took a long, last look along the rivers in the direction of the Altstadt, all the buildings he had known all his life burning to destruction, including the Academy of Arts where he had studied, and the galleries around the Albertinum. The familiar skyline was starting to disappear in a monstrous pillar of smoke and flame. Across the river, much of the Neustadt – although not included in the RAF’s original sector bombing plan – was also ablaze.’

Drezdzany was the Slavic word that gave its name to a city first ruled by the German margraves of Meissen in the 12^th century and, from 1319, the Wettin dynasty, later electors and then kings of Saxony. It was in the 17th century, under the reign of Augustus the Strong, that Dresden took its place among the most beautiful cities in Europe. In the words of a contemporary, he could boast that he ‘found Dresden a small city made of wood, but… left it a large, glorious city built of stone’.

The Catholic cathedral

Augustus was described by one subject as ‘half-bull, half-cock’. He was a great patron of the arts but, as Polish historian Adam Zamoyski characterised him, he could also ‘break horseshoes with one hand, shoot with astonishing accuracy, drink almost anyone under the table, and fornicate on a scale which would be unbelievable if he had not left platoons of bastards to prove it.’

Augustus was not notably pious – his 354 illegitimate children may testify to that fact – but he died within the embrace of the Roman Catholic Church, having rather cynically converted in 1697 in order to become King of Poland. This was a bold move for the ruler of one of Protestantism’s great heartlands, but despite this, his overwhelmingly Lutheran subjects tolerated the dynasty’s new religion.

It was Augustus who built the city’s Catholic cathedral, where the bodies of the House of Wettin would lie for centuries. A bridge was built across the street to connect it to the royal palace, lest the pious royals have to see, or be seen by, the heretical public as they went to Mass.

In 1722 work began on Dresden’s great Protestant Frauenkirche, the Church of Our Lady, funded by the city elders and designed to show that the reformed religion was still dominant, ‘a symbol both of Protestant self-assertion and municipal wealth’ - although in style as well as name it is confusingly Catholic-looking.

Taylor described it as ‘an extraordinary design, unlike anything built elsewhere in Europe before or since’, and it was also noted for its wonderful acoustics. In 1736, J.S. Bach travelled from his home in nearby Leipzig to give a first public performance on its organ, built by Gottfried Silbermann, one of 18^th century Europe’s finest keyboard makers.

The Catholic Church, right, and the royal palace

Despite its partial destruction by the Prussian army of Frederick the Great in the 1760s, when tens of thousands of Saxons died and the city’s population fell by almost half, Dresden rose again, more beautiful than before. It was Johann Gottfried Herder who thereafter named it the ‘German Florence’, or the Florence on the Elbe – Elbflorenz.

A city of renowned culture, Dresden was home to Caspar David Friedrich, while its opera house saw works by Richard Wagner – a resident for seven years - and Richard Strauss. It was also a city of industry and innovation; the bra was invented here in 1889, by German woman Christine Hardt, while it was the first place in Europe to manufacture cigarettes, coffee filters, tea bags, squeezable toothpaste and latex condoms. Typewriters and cameras, however, would become its main industries.

It was also the first city to instigate zoning, an early imposer of strict planning, and so precious was its beauty that the railway wasn’t allowed into the city centre. Unlike in most expanding European cities, it was noted for having no exclusively working-class ghettos.

Little of the great Augustan city would survive Hitler’s war, although it looked at first that the Frauenkirche had made it. Just as Prussian cannonballs bounced off its copper dome in 1760, none of the British bombs had penetrated the building; though damaged, it remained standing.

‘Early on the morning of February 15,’ Taylor wrote, local resident Hannelore Kuhn ‘gazed out from the southern heights where her family had found refuge after the American midday raid destroyed their home in the Bamberger Strasse. “Everything lay swathed in smoke, and there were fires still burning. But I saw the Frauenkirche. It still stood out, the dome. And I came back to my parents and I said, the Frauenkirche is still standing.” She must have been one of the last people to see it. The Frauenkirche disintegrated at around 10.45.’ The cooling metal had caused it to collapse, leaving just one corner remaining.

Before the Russians finally arrived, there was one last coda of destruction: to prevent the Soviet advance, the SS destroyed one bridge, the Carola, and placed charges on another, the Loschwitz. In the night, however, two courageous citizens sneaked out and cut the detonators, and so this ‘Blue Wonder’ was saved. Dresden fell to the Red Army on May 8, signalling the end of their nightmare and the start of a bad dream. Forty-five years of Marxism-Leninism followed.

The communists in eastern Europe may have been hostile to symbols of the past, but they were hardly more destructive of architecture than most western governments; in many ways they better preserved them. The Russian occupiers could also be appreciative of beauty, and it was they who saved the Zwinger, a baroque orangery, which local communists wished to detonate.

Although shells and façades began to be dynamited after the war, notionally for safety reasons, some of the city’s great buildings were saved: ‘A small number of high-profile architectural gems – the royal castle, the Hofkirche [Catholic Cathedral], the opera house, the Albertinum, and others close to the Elbe, were to be rebuilt in the long term,’ Taylor noted: ‘The rest of the centre of Dresden was to be given over to the “democratic home building” program… The result was, finally, the destruction through neglect of what was left of bourgeoise Dresden.

‘By the 1980s, the Elbe skyline had largely been restored. The State Theatre, the Bruhl Terrace with the Academy of Arts… had been rebuilt and – last of all, for some in the party had opposed its restoration on ideological grounds – the massive work of re-creating the Saxon royal Schloss had begun.’ Yet while royal palaces were preserved, ‘what was left of the many square miles of fine housing and public architecture that had been, in many ways, the city’s true glory, was allowed to disappear.’

The communists could argue that their modern housing was more spacious and had better amenities, which was true, as it was in Britain - but, just as with Britain, many residents complained of isolation in functional, ugly high-rise blocks. It is certainly not an aesthetically pleasing style, and as Taylor wrote: ‘From the centre to the outskirts, Dresden became a city of broad highways, flanked by row after row of rectangular, uniform cement-block apartment houses’ called Plattenbauten – slab buildings. ‘This was the “socialist city”.’

The Protestant church and the restored Neumarkt. Portraits of Holocaust survivors commemorate the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation

The Saxons were lucky, though, in that the DDR was too poor to redevelop much of the city centre, unlike in most West German cities where soulless steel and glass came to replace what was lost. Instead, much of central Dresden was just left derelict.

Then came the fall of the Berlin Wall and Reunification, new freedoms and – perhaps more importantly – Deutsch Marks. A campaign was begun to restore the Frauenkirche, led by local figures like pastor Karl-Ludwig Hoch; the decision was approved in 1994, and reconstruction would continue for the next decade, paid for by a mixture of state funding and voluntary contributions.

Almost everything here is new

It proved to be a cathartic moment, but also one of Christian forgiveness. In 2005, when the church was reconsecrated, Queen Elizabeth’s cousin the Duke of Kent addressed the crowd in fluent German as he unveiled a new cross sculpted by a British blacksmith - the son of one of the pilots who flew over the city that dark day.

The cross came to be seen as a symbol of reconciliation between the two countries, all the more touching as the Dresden Trust had raised £1 million from British well-wishers to help fund the church, including a substantial gift from the Queen.

Yet the restoration of that church was not the end of Dresden’s rebirth – if anything, it was only the end of the beginning.

Read the rest here…