Heinz Czechowski

© Grupello Verlag

In the no. 11 tram that goes to Weisser Hirsch, two very old aristocratic gentlemen remember how they once served in the same regiment. Elderly ladies complain about care packages from the West that haven’t arrived. Aging spinsters lay wreaths in the Hofkirche’s crypt, the resting place of the house of Wettin’s last reigning August, who is said to have stood down in the year 1918 with the words, rather unbefitting of royalty: ‘Deal with this mess yourselves’.

And the man who once ensured that Dresden had one of Germany’s best trams (the famous ‘Pike’ model used by the no. 11, still today proving their worth on the steep Hirschberg), he is rumoured to have moved to Stuttgart. Class war on the edge of town?

The shadows of the past, still not visible to the nineteen year old, lie over the city, and mix with the fleeting haze cast by the light over the Elbe Valley. Shadows of the past – not only of that St. Remo house up on Weisser Hirsch from where an American agent is said to have co-ordinated the bombing raid by wireless. In any case, the city is starting to remember itself once more. In the Altmarkt square the first scaffoldings are being taken down from the new buildings: a hesitantly uncertain attempt at a synthesis between old and new, between courtly and working class architecture – a Neo-Neo-Baroque, with portals and cornices as on any Saxonian castle and a ridge turret that recalls the one that once stood on the town hall here in the historic centre, the Altstadt.

Germania has gone. Under the cobblestones of the Altmarkt – the same cobbles on which the corpses were piled up to be cremated with petrol and flame-throwers – only the public conveniences still have an iron railing that reveals the style of the Gründerzeit period in which the mail-armoured lady was made.

The Zwinger is being given form again by a handful of diligent stonemasons. The two-headed Polish eagle’s serpentine necks will soon stretch upwards on the Crown Gate.

In the Staats Theater’s main hall Lovro von Matačić is performing Hasse. For one Mark we are sitting on the stone terraces in the Hygiene Museum’s main auditorium and listening to Smetana and Stravinsky.

The Old and New Masters’ Galleries have re-opened. Crowds form in front of the entrance halls. In the contemporary exhibitions the careful Dresden style of painting dominates: landscapes in green and blue, white clouds sailing by, vineyard houses near Loschwitz and Meissen, alongside these Kretzschmar’s rubble-strewn landscapes and Grundig’s portrait of a person missing, presumed dead.

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Dresden – a childhood landscape?

We have grown up and away from that time, have studied, settled in other cities, started families.

What is reflected in our memories doesn’t want to coalesce into a kaleidoscopic image, it remains part of a mosaic, but not a particularly colourful one, grey dominates, in spite of the long summer evenings in Loschwitz’s Körnergarten and at jazz sessions on the other side of the Elbe in Blasewitz.

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We returned on a summer’s day.

At Neustädter Bahnhof we have to decide. Nothing has changed here, not even the numbers on the new trams, their fresh yellow brought from Gotha or imported from the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic. The 9 and the 16 leave here for Wilder Mann just as they always did. The Grossenhainer Strasse, treeless, reveals the factories’ façades: the typewriter factory has converted to electronics, the type foundry, formerly of the Butter Brothers, has just completed its twentieth year under state ownership. In front of the haulier’s firm Hugo Hirsch a lonely horse follows the moving tram sadly with its eyes. At the Grossenhainer Platz the Dresden - Leipzig train line, one of Germany’s oldest, runs over the street. This route is being electrified, the masts are already in place.

If you are lucky enough to sit right behind the driver you can see the wooded hills behind Wilder Mann.

We have decided not to entrust ourselves to the tram, going instead on foot towards Unity Square. We turn into a side street and find we are back in the Rähnitz Gasse. In an apparent miracle, here out of the way of cars and trams one of Dresden’s old Baroque alleys has survived. The heritage office has done its bit. A Prague pub makes it clear that not only is Pilsner and Staropramen drunk here, but Czech can be spoken too.

Admittedly, the tourists from Prague, Litoměřice and Pardubice don’t visit this pub, instead they flood the Brühlsche Terrasse, swarm into the department stores and shops around Altmarkt or on Thälmann Strasse, sniff out their brotherland’s higher standard of living in the form of nylon fabrics and plastic goods, rush past Rembrandt and Rubens, linger in front of Rafael’s Madonna (many of them are Catholic), and scramble to get a sausage at the stand near the Italian Village.

We look in vain for a view to match those we had of a Theater Platz deserted by cars and people, of a Brühlsche Terrasse where in the midst of a panorama of rubble and ruins you only met a few bearded art students and their pony-tailed sisters. Dresden has changed, it has joined the age of tourism, it doesn’t want to be any less attractive than Prague, Warsaw or Budapest. […]

[…] Not only has the dust settled, but houses have been erected here, lacking all ornamentation and imagination.

From the tower of the Catholic church, the Altstadt behind the Brühlsche Terrasse, around the Frauenkirche’s ruins, is still a scene of dark cracks and fissures. Sandstone, split and worn by fire and weather.

The old city of Dresden may not be built completely on sand, but certainly with sandstone. Its ramparts, bastions, palaces, churches and the burghers’ houses. Transported by barge right up to the construction sites from the downriver quarries of Postelwitz and Cotta, Elbe sandstone was easy to work, although admittedly also less resistant to weathering than other stone. It made no small contribution to the elegance of Dresden’s Baroque era.

All the architecture in Dresden of any fame or importance is of sandstone, whether Pöppelmann’s Zwinger, Permoser’s putti, Chiaveri’s joyful use of stone, or the Frauenkirche by the city’s master carpenter Bähr, all put together with quark and eggs to form Dresden’s unmistakeable silhouette. Not only that, but the ornaments and objets d’art that August the Strong’s court jeweller, Dinglinger, formed out of golden and silver tin, would have been unimaginable without the moulds that skilled men made from sandstone.

Today the creamy yellow mineral has become rarer. While still used in the first phase of Dresden’s reconstruction, for the Altmarkt buildings for example, it has now been replaced by brick chippings or industrially manufactured concrete blocks. For Dresden is now making an effort, after a few hybrid transitional phases, to show a modern, functional face. Unadorned. Undramatic.

As well as ten-storey blocks of flats around the main train station, blocks of flats and shops line the Prager Strasse. Mass-produced blocks, quickly erected, with a splash of paint that is already starting to fade, characterless. Gable roofs stranded somewhere between brutalism and Baroque.

Towers still dominate the city between the Kreuzkirche and Hofkirche, and between Thälmann Strasse and the Altmarkt. Off Thälmann Strasse, behind the reconstructed cloth hall, the architects have managed to create a more intimate Dresden: little streets of shops away from the traffic, a milk bar with bright sunshades, a fountain of a man and geese – not a European art treasure but replanted here from a destroyed part of town. Its waters bubble to the delight of children and adults.

Only the site around the Frauenkirche’s ruins is still a scene of devastation. Rampische Gasse and Salz Gasse without their Baroque façades, birches and rubble in the courtyard of the Coselscher Palais. The iron railings around the ruins of the Frauenkirche are painted red and white: No Entry! Danger of Collapse! Parents are responsible for their children!

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We turn away, however, walk past the procession in mosaic of the dukes of Saxe-Wettin, take the no. 6 tram towards Unity Square and then ride with the no. 16 back to Wilder Mann. In this suburb time seems to have stood still. You still see the same faces: the family doctor, an old teacher, a retired prize-winning musician from the Staatskapelle orchestra. Time creates a pregnant pause, to which the mind can return later. Childhood landscape. Out here people always say: I’m going into town, we’re going into town. Childhood stands on its own like a splinter of a whole. A sense of being suburban. A feeling of being peripheral. Grandchildren play in their grandfathers’ gardens. Dahlias bloom. The school on the Aachener Strasse stands shrouded in grey, behind the school grounds’ larches and poplars. Only the Aachener Strasse’s ice-rink has gone. From the hillside restaurant in the evening the city looks distant, calm and untouched. The Elbe flows in a gentle curve through the valley. The street lights have been lit. Pearl necklaces, if this image is permitted once more. The town hall and Hofkirche’s towers are floodlit. The cupola of the Frauenkirche can’t be seen, as if it had never existed. The new high-rises don’t stand out against the background of the Loschwitz and Rähnitz hills. Only the television tower up at Wachwitz and its lights can compete with the evening star in an autumnal sky in which both southern and snow-laden winds draw near.