The beautiful rebirth of Dresden (2)

A city rises from the ashes

Read the first part here

I arrived from Berlin, on one of those double-decker German trains which never cease to delight me, stepping off at Dresden’s Neustadt station in the north of the Saxon city. Walking along the north bank of the Elbe, most of the buildings are depressing slabs of communism, some decorated with graffiti, and I thought of Theodore Dalrymple’s observation that vandals will invariably target modern architecture while leaving older buildings untouched.

The avenue to the north of the river, the Neustädter Markt, looks like an old postcard from East Germany, although currently lined with political posters for the upcoming election. This modernist style contrasts with a facing gold statue of Augustus the Strong on horseback, which had been moved to safekeeping during the war and so avoiding the firestorm which hit Dresden 80 years ago today. Indeed, the statue is not just gold, but perhaps the goldest thing I’ve ever seen.

Once one steps onto the Augustus Bridge, however, the delightful vista of old Dresden comes into view. Walking along the tram line, I was headed for the Neumarkt – which is, confusingly, in the Aldstadt – where I met Leon Furkert, who in his spare time works for the Gesellschaft Historischer Neumarkt Dresden or ‘Dresden Historical Neumarkt Society’. It’s a voluntary organisation founded to lobby for the rebuilding of the old city, and we had mutual acquaintances through the British group Create Streets, which had invited him to an event held last year in Dresden’s sister city, Coventry.

Leon had taken the time to take me on an architectural tour of a city once famed for its beauty. He’s eloquent and likeable, and like many young Germans has that charming habit of apologising for his – perfect – English when briefly stumbling for a complex word. I was aware of the rebuilding programme here, but it was surprising just how much they had restored - and the story of the Dresden Society is a remarkable testament to how a relatively small number of civic-minded citizens can transform a city.

The group was formed in 1999 by local people inspired by the reconstruction of the Frauenkirche; while the church was indeed beautiful, the surrounding Neumarkt was still composed of ruins or substandard modernist replacements – when it had once been one of the most striking in central Europe. Architecture, unlike other art forms, does not stand alone, and every work is influenced by – and influences in turn – its surrounding environment. They wanted the Neumarkt rebuilt as ‘a harmonious urban unit’.

In Germany, people can force local politicians to debate an issue if they get more than 10 percent of residents to sign a petition, and so in 2002 the group did just this – and because this was pre-internet for many people, mostly the old-fashioned way by standing in streets.

They raised 80,000 signatures, and – remarkably for me, coming from a country where almost no war-damaged building has ever been restored – they succeeded. Rebuilding the square in eight different sections, or ‘quarters’, they have already completed six and the final two are nearly finished.

The buildings to the right, and the Protestant church beyond them, are all new

The end result is impressive. Despite the intense cold, people wander around the square, clearly enjoying the surroundings and, Leon tells me, it comes to life in the summer. Yet almost everything I see before me was built in the last few years.

Off the main market, in a line of newly restored 18th century buildings, Leon points to a reconstructed house where King Augustus is supposed to have kept one of his umpteen mistresses. Just a few doors down, the group - which now has about 500 members - have their offices in a reconstructed building. The line of houses was restored with the help of art historians, and even many of the gables and decorations are faithful to the originals (although some new-builds are not exact replicas and they don’t oppose anything so long as it’s in sympathy with the style).

It is only in the basement of their restored office that one can see the line where the original bricks begin below street level; the same basements, I cannot help but reflect, where so many of the city’s civilians suffocated in February 1945.

We visited both the Protestant and Catholic churches, the latter containing the only one of Dresden’s 12 organs to survive the bombing: the Catholics were far more sceptical about the authorities’ reassurances, and so moved it out. Although the damaged Catholic cathedral was restored in the post-war period, the walkway leading to the royal palace was only recently rebuilt. (There is something especially pleasing to the eye about these overhead arched walkways.)

We pass by a restored house which commemorates the city’s Jewish residents, whose synagogue was destroyed on Kristallnacht; the city’s surviving Jews had been ordered to assemble here for February 16, 1945, to await ‘transportation’, and as a result of the bombing many – including Victor Klemperer– were able to survive.

Leon also points to a beautiful wine merchant’s home, again restored, and adds that Saxony has something of a microclimate, caused by its location within a valley, which allows it to produce vineyards – the most northerly of Europe’s wine-growing regions. He also shows me one nearly complete building in a street off the Neumarkt which will open in the summer. Behind some of these impressive street facades, the city has also restored courtyards which pass between streets, an especially cosy aspect of urban living lost by monumental plans.

What is really surprising – and heartening – is that their work isn’t at all done. Their next proposal is for the Hotel Stadt Rom, originally built around 1740. This rococo building, with its curved, corner bay windows, was seen as one of the most beautiful in Dresden and was already rebuilt twice, in 1760 – after the Prussian invasion – and in 1848. Turned into a hotel in 1832, Karl Marx and Casanova were among its famous guests.

The society has also drawn up plans to renew the Neustädter Markt on the north side of the river, as well as the Königsufer, the large, busy road which cuts off the new town from the old. Their aim is to return it to its original size, with fewer lanes serving only trams and bicycles, with the rest of the space occupied, as before, by traditional roofed buildings. Like the urbanist movement in the US and Britain, they want to make streets more people-friendly and less dominated by cars. This is feasible, and the state of Saxony – which owns many of the nearby buildings - has already indicated that it might be willing to sell.

Another opportunity recently presented itself with a strange serendipity. A few hundred metres to the east of the Augustus Bridge stands the Carola Bridge, the replacement rebuilt by the DDR - until its collapse last year (luckily, in the early hours of the morning). The group now hopes to have the beautiful old, pre-war bridge restored, reserved for trams and bicycles, and describe having ‘enormous support, commitment and interest’ in the idea.

The Carola Bridge

Dresden is not alone in restoring its old cities. In Berlin I saw the reconstructed Palace, while Frankfurt has rebuilt part of its medieval city centre, as has Potsdam. But it is in Dresden where the rebuilding is most extensive and, Leon says with some pride, the most accurate.

There is opposition, in particular from the architectural establishment – and one can gauge from this proposal how they see the city’s future. Many of the criticisms are familiar to English speakers; the buildings are inauthentic, or even comparable to Disneyland, which I always find an unconvincing argument when people spend huge amounts of money to stay in theme parks like the Efteling precisely because they present the only modern architecture specifically designed to make people happy.

The question of authenticity may be a philosophical one, I suppose, a Ship of Theseus debate, but I personally don’t see architecture as being analogous to works of art; its value does not lie in its ‘authenticity’, because its scarcity has no value to its owner. Its real value lies in its aesthetics – enjoyed or suffered by everyone. The city’s old Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann was also wrong in his callous assessment of 1945 – human beings can’t be replaced, but buildings can.

Others see restoration as representing ‘neoliberalism’, or as erasing the history of the German Democratic Republic, which produced its own architectural style – ‘Ostmoderne’ - and is part of the country’s story. Although the housing estates of communist Germany were aesthetically lamentable, its cultural centres certainly have their own identity, and the Kulturpalast in Dresden survives. Leon is actually quite fond of it, praises its wonderful acoustics, and is happy for it to stay.

The Kulturpalast

Architecture can hardly avoid being sucked into questions of history, in Germany more than any other country, and so there is also the argument that to restore the buildings of the past is to justify that past. Although the Society is sensitive to people’s concerns, I do feel that it is a weak objection, and indeed risks justifying the Nazi’s own claim that they somehow represented the ‘real’ Germany, rather than an aberration.

It is true that the Nazis, like the communists, saw architecture as central to their ideology; they even destroyed the city’s modernist Kugelhaus, or Globe House, which traditionalists detested. Yet they also loathed what old Dresden represented, both its baroque decadence and human scale. Before their nemesis, the National Socialists also had grandiose plans for the city, including a gigantic new conference hall that would have been in total conflict with the scale of the city, and entailed the destruction of hundreds of old dwellings.

The Nazis, unlike traditional architecture enthusiasts across the West today, were also ideologically pro-car, and as Frederick Taylor wrote, ‘in the Aldstadt alone, it was planned that twenty-six hundred dwelling units would have to disappear to “open up” Dresden to cars and trucks… From now on, the fuddy-duddy conservationists who had hitherto prevented widespread changes in the face of the city were rendered powerless.’

Likewise, just as Coventry’s civic leaders saw the city’s destruction as an opportunity to reshape it in their own image, so some war-crazed Nazis saw the same with Dresden. Reichsleiter Robert Ley even wrote an article after the firebombing, called ‘Without Baggage’, arguing that the destruction would liberate Germany from the ‘burden’ of its humanist, tolerant past and that ‘heavy spiritual and material bourgeois baggage.’

He wasn’t alone, Taylor pointed out, and ‘Several Gauleiters wanted to rebuild their historic cities in a way that would reflect Nazi ideology and attitudes rather than the “weak” Christian-humanist past; such men saw the destruction of those cities as just such an opportunity.’ Historic buildings they ‘considered reflective of the wrong kind of history’ could now be removed.

If Nazi hostility to the old Dresden reflected a certain psychology, so did the attitudes of the post-war generations. In Aftermath, his account of post-war Germany, Harald Jähner observed how traumatised Germans in urban ruins developed an aversion to ornamental buildings. They saw destruction as ‘the judgement of history’ and revelled in the ‘beauty of ruins’.

Jähner wrote that ‘the modern hatred of the ornamental was seen as a sign of a dissolute past that led with false premises and hollow phrases to the very catastrophe that they now faced.’ This rejection of decoration ‘led to a strange phenomenon known as Entstuckung, literally “the removal of stucco”; superfluous ornaments were hacked away so that buildings appeared stropped down and “somehow more true”. Often safety aspects were invoked, because here and there stucco still fell from damaged houses, but the real reason was the revulsion against anything superfluous. Ornament – not cherished again until the present day – was enthusiastically hammered away from late nineteenth-century buildings, and presented the “purged” cube of the building as an aesthetic norm in accordance with the times.’

The ugliness of much modern architecture was clearly a psychological response to the pain of 1914-1945, a phenomenon obvious in Britain too. Many were traumatised by the wars which European civilisation had unleashed, and turned against the old - but this doesn’t feel like a healthy response.

The ideologically-inclined may see architecture as a reflection of their worldview, but most people aren’t ideological; they just want normality and beauty. As with Britain, the restoration project here enjoys the support of a large majority of locals, Leon says, and people sometimes express gratitude when they learn about his hobby. If there is a worldview attached to the new Dresden, it is the humanistic vision of Middle Europe espoused by Augustus the Strong.

After our long walk, we enjoy a traditional German meal in a restaurant off the Neumarkt, a pork and pea soup followed by schnitzel, potato and cabbage (German food is an acquired taste, but I’m a convert). Leon explains how he originally came from the west, but loves Dresden and takes great pride in its unique beauty; his guiding philosophy is that every place has its own style, distinctive and precious. His desire is to leave something for future generations, even if he and his fellow campaigners will be long forgotten; that way, they can at last say that they left their home a better place.

Although this has become a sort of one-man history tour, it feels significant that Leon speaks of the city’s rebirth entirely in the future tense. He sees it not as escaping to the past, but looking to the future, a brighter destination in which Dresden might one day retake its place among Europe’s premier league of beautiful cities – Krakow, Prague, Paris, Vienna and, of course, Florence.

I end up leaving the city with an uncharacteristic feeling of optimism. If Dresden can rebirth like this, imagine what we could do in England.

Read more about the Dresden Historical Neumarkt Society on their website (you will need to click on Google Translate as it is currently only in German), or follow them on Instagram. A video is also available, explaining the story of Dresden’s rebuilding.
To become a member or support their work, email info@neumarkt-dresden.de