FIRE & ICE DRESDEN 1945
Dresden is a jewel of Baroque architecture so perfect it could be a movie set. The city, with its delicate beauty, shimmers in the calm waters of the Elbe River in eastern Germany. ‘Baroque’ is curls and curly cues, fat cherubs and oval windows, playful decorations without purpose, an extra leaf or a stray cloud, and paintings with an angel’s leg or arm hanging over the frame. It’s a style that probably fits an over-the-top Las Vegas hotel but would be really hard to clean in your living room. You’d need a team of maids just to clean the fat cherubs.
The style began in the late 1500s in Italy to lure the masses back to the Catholic church after the Reformation of Martin Luther had pulled so many away. From palaces to private homes, ‘Baroque’ dominated the era with its domed colonnades, swirling columns, sensuous richness, passion and intensity. Add a few slot machines and it could be the Strip.
The dukes and kings of Dresden in the 1600s built their city in this style. Cathedrals, palaces, and opera houses dominated the city like enormous, elaborate wedding cakes. 300 years ago, the Dresden Castle was the home of the Royal Albertine family and even the Kings of Poland. The nearby Zwinger Museum, a giant cupcake with swirled frosting on top, has a collection of fine Meissen porcelain and Old Masters paintings. If you squint, you can imagine women in giant dresses too big to fit through doorways and men in too-tight, too-short britches, strolling about the lawns with their teacups of delicate porcelain, little finger raised, occasionally straightening their white wigs. The wigs must have been hot as hell in summer and it’s a wonder the men ever fathered children after wearing those pants. Regardless of restrictive clothing, Dresden was the architectural wonder of Europe for over 300 years. The beauty and awe lasted until 1945 when it all came to a crashing end.
The city’s visitor center is in the basement of a small shopping mall, almost as if it were hiding, tucked away underground. It is an odd location but it may be appropriate since the only survivors of the mid February 1945 bombings had been underground or in the river.
Around a display hall were 5-by-3 foot posters, arranged in pairs. The photos on the left of each pair displayed a stunningly beautiful town chock full of graceful Baroque buildings, streets with strollers, and trams and shops and cafes. These people lived in one of the most beautiful cities on earth, shopped in the grand department stores, enjoyed coffee and torte in the sidewalk cafes under umbrellas, tipped their hats to acquaintances on the street, and dined in the elegant hotels on the city squares. The scenes were of a comfortable, upper middle class, serene and stable life.
The photos on the right, the ‘after’ photos, were moonscapes, desolate and forbidding, with jagged ruins thrusting up from the rubble-filled streets, apartment blocks missing an outside wall, revealing pianos and bathtubs and wardrobes still in place. Everything appeared scorched, blackened by some immense blow torch that had swept over the city, incinerating humans, dogs, cats, and rats. Even the cockroaches didn’t survive.
The demarcation point between the ‘before’ and the ‘after’ photos, was the night of February 13, 1945, less than 3 months before WWII ended. By January of that year the tide of WWII had turned against the Nazis. The allies closed in on Germany from all sides. Refugees from the East fled west toward the American or British forces to escape the onslaught of the vengeful Russians. Tens of thousands of refugees, Germans, Poles, Hungarians, and Romanians, poured into Dresden, which they hoped would be safe, since it seemed far from the advancing Soviets. According to wartime rumors, as reliable as conspiracy theories today, Dresden would not be touched. Churchill’s aunt lived nearby. The art treasures were too important. There was no military reason to bomb the city. Such gossip sailed through the populace and into the refugee camps. The rumors were all wrong.
One account by a survivor described the horrors of the fire bombings that continued over 3 days.
‘My father died in that blaze. He exploded before my mother’s eyes. The bombers came that night, wave after wave, for hours. Fire rained on the city. Windows melted, stone turned to dust, humans vaporized in the heat. Tens of thousands, maybe more.’
‘My family had fled from the East when the Red Army burned our village and crops. We stayed near the Church of our Lady in the center of town. My mother and father were 20, I was 9 months old. The bombs began to fall and before my parents could dress, the fires were all around them. My mother wrapped me in a blanket and ran toward the river, towards hope. My dad was a few feet behind her. The pavement had begun to melt and his shoes got stuck. He stopped to tug them out. When my mother heard him scream and turned, he was swallowed in a ball of flame. Evaporated. Ash’.
‘My mother ran into the river to escape the flames even though it was filled with ice. She squatted down and soaked us both. She said the stink of sulphur and oil and burning flesh was everywhere. The screams were like sirens. She saw others run toward the water but they were too slow. They exploded, burst like balloons. Hundreds made it to the river but thousands didn’t.’
His mother carried him to the West.
When the bombing stopped, the city was gone. The stone Church of our Lady, the elegant, graceful, bell shaped cathedral, glowed red from the flames. The windows had dissolved and the copper eavestroughs had melted and run in little rivulets across the cobblestones. The next morning the Church walls cooled, made mighty cracking sounds, heaved and collapsed. Countless gelatinous, scorched bodies, unrecognizable lumps, lay in the street. The incendiary bombs had created a firestorm of hurricane proportions, winds that sucked people in and creamated them, howling blasts of white hot air that consumed all before it, a living Hell. The famous American author Kurt Vonnegut was a prisoner of war who survived because he had been deep underground during the firestorm. As part of a clean up crew after the bombing, he dug into shelters and wrote, it ‘looked like a streetcar full of people who simultaneously had heart failure. Just people sitting in their chairs, all dead,’ robbed of oxygen by the fire.
The 3 day carpet bombing of Dresden had been intended to overwhelm the Nazis and force them to surrender. It came shortly after 19,000 Allied troops had been killed in the Battle of the Bulge and the horrors of Auschwitz, death site for perhaps 2 million Jews, had been discovered. During the Blitz earlier in the war, 43,000 Londoners had been killed by various Nazi bombings. The destruction of Dresden, which had been called the ‘German Florence on the Elba’, was not without an understandable motivation of revenge.
Three months after the bombing, Germany capitulated and was divided by the victors into four parts. Dresden was, ironically, in the zone occupied by the Soviets. In an odd way, this saved the city from being rebuilt in the ‘How Ugly Can We Make This Building’, type of modernism, a style inflicted on so many other cities at the time. The communists left the heart of the city in ruin, never bothering even to clean up the rubble. Had they had the money or enough young men of construction age alive, they probably would have hauled away the blackened remnants of the old city and rebuilt Dresden in that unique style of ‘Stalin’s Revenge on the Proletariat’. All you need to do is to look at the way East Berlin or other ‘Workers Paradise’ cities were designed by the Soviets after the war to know what Dresden would have looked like: a bleak, gray, soulless collection of concrete block cubbyholes, with out of order elevators, plumbing without water, sewage systems that perfumed the building with a tinge of unmistakable ‘outhouse’, and tiny balconies that collapsed after a few years because of shoddy concrete. These weed choked wastelands still dot the landscape in some Russian and formerly Soviet cities today. Not that the style of buildings London chose after WWII was a damn site better. They too had that curious ‘thrown up overnight nasty gray and aluminum’ look. It was as if every architect of the time suddenly lost all sense of beauty and form and instead, with the intention of creating the most efficient buildings they could, created the most inefficient, uninspiring, soul-deadening, hideous buildings history had ever seen. The mudbrick abodes of the workers who had built the pyramids had more pizzazz.
The rebirth of Dresden had to wait a half century until the communist regime fell in 1989. The best thing the commies did was to leave the ruins of the old town in place while they built a new downtown nearby in their favorite Stalinist designs. Stalin must have secretly loathed the proletariat. These structures have been spruced up a bit today but you can still see Old Joe’s influence beneath, like lipstick on a pig. You can still see the pig. When that yoke of oppression was lifted and Germany unified in 1990, a sort of inspired architectural renaissance took hold of Dresden.
Frankfurt and parts of Hamburg, as well as London, had been reconstructed with skyscrapers separated by caverns, much like New York City and Chicago. With the money and expertise of West Germany, Dresden could have gone the same way. But something happened on the way to the design table. The city decided to bring back its former glory, to look like the ‘before’ photos rather than a mini Chicago.
The Dresdeners rejected modernism and rebuilt the city as it had looked in the 1700s, in the grand Baroque style that had first brought the city on the Elbe fame hundreds of years ago. As they cleared the rubble of the Church of Our Lady, the iconic bell shaped cathedral, workers preserved some pieces, blocks of granite and limestone, to reuse in the rebuilding.
Throughout the 1990s the old cathedral rose into the sky, a mix of old and new blocks, the old left with scorch marks in memory of the old church. The rest of the town took its cue from this and rebuilt in the Baroque style as well. The result is stunning. The town appears quite similar to the ‘before’ photos in the visitor’s center, a remarkable achievement.
The Church of Our Lady was finished in 2005 and the graceful bell shape is once again dominant in the main city square. The Royal Palace and the Zwinger Museum have been restored to their former glory as well, with the swirls and curves, angels and clouds, delicate frosting tops, and grand arched windows, all in the Baroque style.
Maybe the architects and the inspiration will move on to work similar miracles in Kherson Oblast, Luhansk, Donetsk and other regions of Ukraine. That is, after the Russians have gone.
