Bonus issue 1: Dresden
I was in Dresden the other weekend for roller derby, and this time I scheduled my train so I could spend a little time in the city. That's the worst part about travelling for sports: you don't get much time in a place, and you spend all of it in a sports venue. I was in Dresden 3 times last year and never left the skating area. Kind of like going to a convention, actually.
I don't know why, but I've always found Dresden interesting.
A little over 11 years ago, I wrote a short story set in the Semperoper, the opera house in Dresden, in 1917-18. I’d never been there at that time, but my then-mother-in-law had picked me up a souvenir tourist book when she went there during a conference, so I used that and a ton of google image search and historical maps to put it together.
That story got me into Viable Paradise (2013) and has been published twice. (The original anthology is out of print, but the reprint is available here.)
When I was in college, I spent my junior (third) year abroad in Marburg, Germany. It was basically required for German double-majors, because my college was so small that it only had one German professor, which meant only one literature or culture class a semester, which does not a degree program make. (They no longer have even one German professor.) I spent part of the semester break travelling around Germany. I had my 1996 Let’s Go! Germany all marked up with places I wanted to see, and Dresden was on it. I didn’t make it there, for whatever reason.
Then a whole bunch of life intervened, and I finally made it to Dresden in summer 2017, funded mostly by a grad student grant from the German department where I got my MA. I was happy to learn that I hadn’t described the opera house too poorly, though I had been pretty vague about it. I took a guided tour, and the tour guide spoke with a pretty strong Saxon accent, so I completely missed several things. But it was cool; I got to see the inside of this place I wrote about based on pictures from a tourist book.
One thing that’s important to know about Dresden is that it’s known as Florence on the Elbe, because of its beautiful architecture in the old town.
One other thing that’s important to know about Dresden is that starting on the night of February 13, 1945, Allied airplanes firebombed the old town to rubble.
One thing that’s important to know about East Germany is that they didn’t have a whole lot of money.
The East German regime equated royalty and nobility with fascism and held it in contempt, so they didn’t have a lot of motivation to rebuild the old royal palaces and whatnot.
The Semperoper reopened in 1985. It was the third time it opened. The first time was in 1841. The walls were built with wood and marble, which fueled the fire that gutted it in 1869. When it was rebuilt, the walls were done in a sort of plaster that was painted to look like wood, and the columns were clay that was made to look like marble (or maybe they’re also plaster). (At least, this is what I remember from the Saxon-speaking tour guide 7 years ago. The German version of the wikipedia page has a lot more information than the English one, but it does not include this detail.) It reopened in 1878.
After the war, the government made plans to rebuild it. Culture is important, after all, and it should be accessible to everyone. The ruins were stabilized first, which took until 1955. Plans were made for reconstruction from 1968-76, then work began, and it was reopened in 1985.
What I recall the tour guide saying was this: They had to rebuild it exactly like it was in 1878 (possibly because of historical preservation). Which meant they had to find the like two guys in all of the Warsaw Pact who knew how to do that type of plaster painting rather than use wood, and they couldn’t just import marble, either. Finding these artisans and paying them cost a lot more than just doing it the usual way.
Ironic, eh?
Across Theater Square is the Royal Residence, which is now home to a museum. There is an enclosed sky bridge between the Residence and the Taschenberg Palace (now a luxury hotel). The Taschenberg has a modern plaster facade and a sandstone fence blackened by time; the sky bridge’s blackened sandstone adjoins the Taschenberg’s clean plaster.
The Frauenkirche was still rubble in 1990, and it was only rebuilt because of a citizens’ initiative and a lot of donations. The first church on that site was built in the 11th century, but it was torn down to build a bigger one in the 1700s. The new church had a bell-shaped dome that was a remarkable feat of engineering (read the linked Wikipedia page for details) and which gave the city its distinctive skyline. It withstood the firebombing until the end of the second day, when the dome finally collapsed, leaving only two support pillars standing.
The East German government wanted to tear it down and turn it into a parking lot, but the people protested, so they left it standing as a “memorial against war.”
After reunification, on the initiative of historians and interested citizens, reconstruction began. People sifted through the rubble and catalogued the stones they could find, then began the painstaking work of putting the puzzle back together when you only have ten thousand pieces of a million-piece puzzle.
Reconstruction wasn’t completed until 2005. Today, 250-year-old sandstone, blackened with time and soot, is juxtaposed against fresh, beige sandstone.
The banner that's hanging over the front window says, "We have the choice" (Wahl, which also means 'election' in German; there are many elections coming up this year). It is an exhortation, in the face of a recent resurgence in far-right rhetoric, to choose democracy.
==
I might make these extra "life in Germany" issues a paid feature, with the reasoning that people signed up for a newsletter about writing and language, not my random musings and travel photos, so it should be opt in. I'm undecided and also unsure about how often I'd write one of these, anyway.
This one will remain free, however.
Did you enjoy this essay? You can put a tip in the jar here.
If you would like to support this newsletter on an ongoing basis, you can subscribe for 1€, 3€, or 5€ a month.