Dresden

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Dresden
It’s been 64 years and Dresden is still rising from the ashes of the Allied bombing that obliterated its core in February 1945. Buildings have vanished and people still leave to find work, but Dresden’s treasure has returned and what treasure it is. We would have found the two day drive from our house in France worth it just to see the Amber Room in the Historic Green Vault, but then there were the 1,080 astonishing objects in the New Green Vault upstairs. Baroque pearls adorned as figures by goldsmiths and enamelists, ivory whimsies, goblets and a sail-rigged ship, a cherry pit carved with 185 faces, an Indian mogul’s throne room in silver miniature, a pear wood moor carrying a tortoiseshell tray of emeralds and a gold coffee and tea service only skim the surface of the glories within. August the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, collected with abandon and taste three centuries ago. Fortunately most of his art and objects were evacuated before Dresden’s nights of terror and many were returned even after the city was consigned by the Allies to the Soviet rule which lasted 40 more years. August built the Zwinger Palace and began filling it in 1719 with art, armor, scientific instruments and porcelain, much of it Chinese. He filled his castle across the way with amber, silver, gold, bronzes, ivory and garnitures — suites of sapphires, emeralds, rubies and diamonds sparkling right down to their very last buttons in a series of highly ornamented rooms called the vault. It has taken decades to rebuild, restore and restock both the Castle and Palace, a feat almost as daunting as the rebuilding of the nearby Frauenkirche, the city’s Protestant temple which survived the bombings only to collapse after three days from the heat of surrounding fires. The newly opened Frauenkirche was pieced together from a pile of stones. The remains of the cross which fell when the building collapsed is placed to the side under the new light, creamy and delicately decorated bell dome. It is an understated and wholly appropriate memorial. Walking the terraces above the Elbe, the narrow streets of stately Baroque buildings and the square of Newmarket today it is easy not to recognize that almost everything is a reconstruction and that the clearing near the church is not just another archeological dig, but one more remnant of a war only old people remember. The revitalization of Dresden’s cultural center aided by detailed Canaletto views contrasts sharply with the rest of the core city – a flatland of severe Soviet era blocks, wide avenues, efficient trams and trees not much older than 20 years. The Hygiene Museum, which gave the world the first transparent man and gave the Nazis unqualified support before its Bauhaus inspired building was destroyed, has been reborn as well. We couldn’t translate most of the educational prescriptions, but we could read the twitters on the faces of the of pre-teen boys lingering long enough to light up parts of transparent woman. Earlier generations would have gawked at “cantankerous woman” whose civic punishment caused her to wear a weighty stone “infamy flask” around town. It is preserved along with a model of the “fool’s cage” (undoubtedly for men) in Dresden’s Municipal History Museum. It holds a delightful and sometimes disturbing collection of artifacts from Saxon pre-history to now. The Nazi years are treated matter of factly with acknowledgment that some in Dresden followed the Nazis and profited from the import of prison laborers into the factories and then silently cooperated with deportation. A slideshow intersperses the destruction of Dresden by American and British bombers with photos of the destruction of Guernica. the blitz of London and the battering of Rotterdam by Nazis. A shiny shoe painstakingly tapped out of a tin cans sits under glass as a poignant reminder of deprivations under Soviet rule. Not far away is Dresden’s new synagogue, an interestingly nearly windowless affair built on the site of the original by Gottfried Semper which was destroyed on Kristallnacht in 1938. It is a modern and bold statement in a community which now has but a few hundred Jewish residents. Semper also designed the city’s beautiful opera house which not only fell to bits in 1945 but when rebuilt was nearly ruined by flood in 2002. It stands restored in Theatre Square across from the Zwinger. We toured under the tutelage of pretty, petit woman of a certain age with perfect posture and stunning silver hair tucked in a dancer’s twist. She began with a heavy sigh and launched with authority. We couldn’t understand a word, but she talked for 45 minutes non-stop leading us up a side staircase into the house where we were seated for the duration until commanded onto the marbled grand staircase. Spring was fighting to come when we visited. Visitors queued for timed tickets to the Historic Grunes Gewolbe rooms, but the streets were quiet – more so at night when we seldom saw others. “Where are they?” I asked a first time visitor from Bavaria. “They’re gone. You see here in the hotel lobby there may be 20 workers. Ten of them will be trainees. When they finish training there may be jobs for only three of them. The rest leave. It’s a problem,” he said. He shook his head and added, “I’m not confident we’ll ever be able to absorb the East.” Our stay in Dresden was enhanced by our lodging, the Dorint Hotel located very close to all the main attractions and with…
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