Old and new in Dresden

On a train trip from Frankfurt to Dresden. At some point, about an hour or so from the beginning of the journey, we cross the now-invisible border between old East and West. I gaze out of the window at the forest, the fields, streams, quiet roads. Nothing to indicate where the border used to be, although perhaps the lack of any villages might be a clue? Something definite from the divided past, a concrete lookout tower now looking at nothing more than fields and copses. But I get no more than a glimpse before it is carried backwards away from us and we continue to Dresden. The main station has an exhibition of photography; pictures of the demonstrations in the late ‘80s remind us that people in this city (and not just in the more celebrated demonstrations of Leipzig) demonstrated regularly against the Communist power structures.

Our first walk around the Altstadt is breath-taking. The buildings have been restored using a mixture of old and new stones. The old ones, rescued from the destruction of February 1945, are still fire-blackened, their surfaces distorted by their ordeal. They have been placed side by side with the brand new stones, whose crisp clean edges and surfaces only emphasise the damage done to the old ones. Each restored building has a plaque on it; ‘Zerstört im Februar 1944’.

We wander over the bridge to the Neustadt and pass an impressive building site, the square façade of an old building now shelters nothing but weeds. The Neustadt reminds me of parts of Berlin (such as Prenzlauer Berg) several years ago. The tourists do not come here, yet. The only building that was destroyed and not rebuilt as it was in former times, is the synagogue. Of course, its destruction wasn’t due to the Allied bombing raid, but happened several years beforehand on the night of Kristallnacht/November Pogrom. The new synagogue has broken with the past, and is a simple Modernist building. It has one important twist – literally; each successive layer of stones is twisted slightly from the previous layer so that the whole building looks out of kilter, precarious. The synagogue is just outside the city wall surrounding the Altstadt, which gives it a feeling of being alone here, and still isolated. When we walk past it in the evening we see something small and dark huddled on the stone path just ahead of us. Up close we see that it’s a swift, somehow landed on the ground and now unable to fly away. G gently picks it up and throws it upwards, hoping it will get enough air underneath to fly off, but it plummets to the ground. All we can do is move it away from the exposed path and to the top of an embankment. We’re not hopeful.

The Kulturpalast in the Altstadt is a hangover from DDR-times, with a Soviet mural showing grateful Germans giving thanks to the liberators from the Red Army. It feels more antiquated than the surrounding Baroque buildings, partly because it is so much less in tune with the prevailing politics. The mural might have always been a lie, but until the late 1980s it was a lie with force behind it. In another important way the Kulturpalast is more antiquated than the rest of the Altstadt, and that is because it is physically older. It was built in the 1960s when much of the surrounding Baroque buildings were still piles of rubble. But the Kulturpalast still functions as a public space for culture and even in the time of corona, the library inside is open.

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