Germany: Dresden

When we arrived in Dresden, we checked into the Holiday Inn Express and changed our clothes before wandering through this cool city.  I wasn't feeling too well due to some severe stomach pains that I had been feeling off and on for the last couple of days so I took a quick nap while the rest of the group started touring Dresden.  An hour later, they came back to pick me up and I felt so much better.


Joe also served his mission here.  When he was called to serve, it was listed as the Germany Dresden mission.  Months into his service, it became the Germany Leipzig mission.   Joe told us that we would love this city and that the missionaries always prayed that they would be able to serve here.

Dresden is a beautiful and extremely old city.  It is the capital of the Free State of Saxony in Germany.  It is situated in a valley on the River Elbe, near the Czech border.   Dresden has a long history as the capital and royal residence for the Electors and Kings of Saxony, who for centuries furnished the city with cultural and artistic splendor. The city was known as the Jewel Box, because of its baroque and rococo city center.

 

 

 

During the final months of World War II, Dresden became a safe haven to some 600,000 refugees, including women, children, and wounded soldiers, with a total population of 1.2 million.  Dresden was attacked seven times between 1944 and 1945, and was occupied by the Red Army.  Controversial Allied aerial bombing towards the end of World War II killed thousands of civilians and completely destroyed the entire city.

 

The impact of the bombing and 40 years of urban development during the East German communist era have considerably changed the face of the city.  Some restoration work has helped to reconstruct parts of the historic inner city, including the Katholische Hofkirche (Catholic Cathedral), the Semper Oper (Opera House) and the Dresdner Frauenkirche (Church of the Lady (Protestant)) finally completed in 2005.  Since the German reunification in 1990, Dresden has regained importance as one of the cultural, educational, political and economic centers of Germany.

 

 

 

How do you ride this bike?

Joe remembers the buildings still in ruins from when he served there and now some have been renovated and re-built.  We really enjoyed walking around this city.  It was beautiful and there is a lot of history there.

We stopped under this tree canopy for a picture.  We could stay dry from the rain because the branches were so closely intertwined.

The Kreuzkirche (Church of the Cross) is the largest Protestant church in Saxony, and home to the Dresdner Kreuzchor boy choir.  Known since the early 12th century, it was officially dedicated on June 10, 1388 to the Holy Cross.  Since 1491, it has burned down five times.  In its current form, it was re-opened in 1955.

The Frauenkirche (Church of the Lady) is a Lutheran church built in the 18th century.  This church was destroyed in the firebombing of Dresden during World War II.   The church withstood two days and nights of the attacks and the eight interior sandstone pillars supporting the large dome held up long enough for the evacuation of 300 people who had sought shelter in the church crypt, before succumbing to the heat generated by some 650,000 incendiary bombs that were dropped on the city. The temperature surrounding and inside the church eventually reached 1,000 degrees Celsius.  The dome finally collapsed at 10 a.m. on 15 February. The pillars glowed bright red and exploded; the outer walls shattered and nearly 6,000 tons of stone plunged to earth, penetrating the massive floor as it fell.

This is what the Frauenkirche looked like when Joe was serving in this area.  Of course, there weren't any sheep!

Here is the restored Frauenkirche

The altar was only partially damaged during the bombing raid and fire that destroyed the church. The altar and the structure behind it were among the remnants left standing.  Features of most of the figures were lopped off by falling debris and the fragments lay under the rubble.

In 1736, famed organ maker Gottfried Silbermann built a three-manual, 43-stop instrument for the church. The organ was dedicated on November 25 and Johann Sebastian Bach gave a recital on the instrument on December 1.

The building vanished from Dresden's skyline, and the blackened stones would lie in wait in a pile in the center of the city for the next 45 years as Communist rule enveloped what was now East Germany. Shortly after the end of World War II, residents of Dresden had already begun salvaging unique stone fragments from the Church of Our Lady and numbering them for future use in reconstruction. Popular sentiment discouraged the authorities from clearing the ruins away to make a car park. In 1966, the remnants were officially declared a "memorial against war", and state-controlled commemorations were held there on the anniversaries of the destruction of Dresden.

In 1982, the ruins began to be the site of a peace movement combined with peaceful protests against the East German regime.  On the anniversary of the bombing, 400 Dresdeners came to the ruins in silence with flowers and candles, part of a growing East German civil rights movement.  It has been reconstructed as a landmark symbol of reconciliation between former warring enemies. The reconstruction of its exterior was completed in 2004, its interior in 2005, and, after 13 years of rebuilding, the church was reconsecrated on October 30, 2005.

This is a piece of the missing chunk from the picture below.  It is now a memorial in remembrance of the fire and bomb raids.  

 

The church's most distinctive feature was its unconventional 96 m-high dome, called die Steinerne Glocke or "Stone Bell". An engineering feat comparable to Michelangelo's dome for St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, the Frauenkirche's 12,000-ton sandstone dome stood high resting on eight slender supports. Despite initial doubts, the dome proved to be extremely stable. Witnesses in 1760 said that the dome had been hit by more than 100 cannonballs fired by the Prussian army led by Friedrich II during the Seven Years' War. The projectiles bounced off and the church survived.

The Katholische Hofkirche is a Roman Catholic Cathedral, located in the heart of Dresden.  It was built by architect Gaetano Chiaveri from 1738 to 1751.  The church was commissioned by Frederick Augustus II, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland.  In the crypt the heart of King August the Strong is buried along with the last King of Saxony and the remains of 49 other members of the Wettin family.

The church was badly damaged during World War II and was restored during the mid-1980s under the East German regime.  Today it is the cathedral of the diocese.

 

It has Silbermann's last and biggest organ

The Semper Oper is the opera house of the Sächsische Staatsoper Dresden (Saxon State Opera Dresden) and the concert hall of the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden (Saxon State Orchestra Dresden).  It was originally built, in 1841, by architect Gottfried Semper.

The building was reconstructed after a fire destroyed it in 1869. The citizenry demanded that Gottfried Semper do the reconstruction, even though he was in exile at the time because of his activities in the May Uprising in Dresden in 1849. So the architect had his son Manfred Semper complete the second opera house with his father's plans. This second one was constructed in Neo-Renaissance style in 1878. 

The building is considered to be a prime example of "Dresden-Baroque" architecture. It is situated on the Theater Square in central Dresden on the bank of the Elbe River. On top of the portal there is a Panther quadriga with a statue of Dionysos.

During the last weeks of World War II in 1945 the building was destroyed again - this time by Allied bombing and the subsequent fire storms. Exactly 40 years later, on February 13, 1985 the opera was rebuilt almost the same as it was before the war.  It reopened with the same opera that was performed last before the destruction in 1945: Weber's Der Freischütz.

During the flood of the Elbe in 2002 the building suffered heavy water damage. With substantial help from around the world, it reopened in December.

The Zwinger is a palace built in Baroque style.  Augustus the Strong, elector of Saxony, returned from a grand tour through France and Italy in 1687–89, just at the moment that Louis XIV moved his court to Versailles.  On his return to Dresden, having arranged his election as King of Poland (1697), he wanted something similarly spectacular for himself.  The original plans, before 1711, covered the space of the present complex of palace and garden, and also included the space down to the Elbe River for gardens, upon which the Semper opera house and its square were built in the nineteenth century.

The Zwinger was constructed in stages from 1710 to 1728.  The death of Augustus in 1733 put a halt to the construction because the funds were needed elsewhere. The palace area was left open towards the Semperoper square and the river. Later the plans were changed to a smaller scale, and in 1847–1855 the area was closed by the construction of the gallery wing now separating the Zwinger from the opera place; the architect was Gottfried Semper, who designed the opera house.

 The building was mostly destroyed by the fires but the art collection had been evacuated before.  After the war, the people of Dresden voted to restore the building and generally preferred to rebuild the glories of the city.

Here are our boys in the "Garden of the Naked Women" as they termed it.  Lots of cherubs and statues of curvy women.  No wonder they are smiling genuinely for this picture!

The most famous sculpture in Dresden is the golden equestrian sculpture of August the Strong called the Goldener Reiter (Golden Cavalier) on the Neustädter Market square.  It shows August at the beginning of the Hauptstraße (Main Street) on his way to Warsaw where he was King of Poland.

The Fürstenzug (Procession of Princes) is a large mural of a mounted procession of the princes of Saxony, made out of 25,000 Meißner porcelain tiles.  It is 102 meters (335 ft) long and 9.5 meters (31 ft) high, and is one of the largest porcelain artworks in the world. It shows the thousand year history of the Princely house of Wettin with 35 Saxony kings.  The picture was only minimally damaged in World War II. Today it is one of the most visited attractions in Dresden.

Just before dark, we grabbed some dinner at Forster's.  I had a delicious caprese salad and Joe got a meat, cheese, and brötchen plate.  Sam had a terrible plum kuchen and had to keep it down with some delicious gelato at the store across the way.  It was our first of many gelatos on this trip.  So delicious!  We ran in the rain for our dessert and stood inside where it was warm to finish eating it.  When the rain slowed, we walked across the bridge over the Elbe river and took night pictures of the city in the sprinkling rain.  (The pictures didn't turn out very well with the lights and droplets of rain but we had a great time trying to get them right.)

 

 

Everyone was getting tired so we started towards our hotel but Joe wanted to look around the city a little more to take in all the changes, renovations, and restoration.  He and I decided to go look at the train station and walk by the outdoor shopping mall.  The mall was completely modernized and there was some construction of new apartment buildings and additional retail stores.  Joe was amazed at the city improvements that were underway.  It is really interesting to see city architecture that is so ornate, detailed, and aged with history mixed in with new, simple, modern developments. 

Dresden Hauptbahnhof (Dresden Central Train Station) is one of two main inter-city transit hubs that was built between 1892 and 1897 at the southern border of the inner city and was important in the growth and development of the city.

Dresden Hauptbahnhof has 18 tracks.  Eleven carry traffic through the station whilst the remaining seven, all from the west and located in the middle of the station, are terminal tracks.  This layout makes Dresden Hbf unique among German central railway stations. The station is divided into three halls, the central one of which is the biggest and covers the terminating tracks.


The station was damaged by the bombing of Dresden.  The station was repaired but had suffered significant damage to the train sheds.  The glazing that had previously covered the train sheds was replaced by timber.

In the postwar era Dresden Hauptbahnhof became one of the important railway stations in East Germany. However, the legacy or wartime damage subsequently compounded by poor maintenance saw the structure deteriorate to the point where remedial conservation was required.
Assessments of the structure during its 1997-2006 refurbishment project further revealed that the steel arches of the train shed had even been distorted out of alignment by wartime damage. It was also discovered that the structure had been damaged by corrosion since the war, rendering it unsuitable to carry the weight of a glazed roof and leading architects to use lightweight fabric instead.

During the floods in August 2002, the station hall was badly damaged by flooding. The entrance hall and the lower platforms were flooded up to one meter by muddy water from the left tributary of the river Elbe.  Major damage to several tracks around Dresden closed the station for a month. The main reconstruction project was only temporarily interrupted.  The reconstruction was completed in 2007.

We walked back to the hotel and turned in for the night around midnight.  It had been a whirlwind tour of an amazing city.  Days could have been spent here visiting museums, taking tours of the buildings, and enjoying all that Dresden has to offer.  It truly was a beautiful city full of incredible history.