Resurrected Ruins: "The Canaletto View" of Dresden Today

I  had always wanted to travel to Dresden, a city I had over the years come to associate principally with the ravages of the Second World War. Finally, I arrived in Dresden in the summer of 2013, expecting to witness a wounded city standing amidst the ruins and remains of the World War. What my eyes beheld instead was a glorious city reincarnate, standing much like a monument to itself. Here I was, walking not through rubble and ruins, but across an endless carpet of summer-green dotted with tiny flowers in yellow and white. A brief Google search later in the day confirmed that I had indeed arrived in one of Europe’s greenest cities and a former World Heritage site.

Dresden, the capital city of the Free State of Saxony in Germany, is situated in a valley on the river Elbe, 62 miles south of Berlin. Dresden is a city of fairly recent origin. In the 18th and 19th centuries Augustus the Strong, the Elector of the Kingdom of Saxony and King of Poland, and his successors transformed Dresden into the ultimate capital of art and technology. Augustus the Strong particularly patronised the arts and architecture and is known for giving Dresden its first museum as early as the 18th century. His extraordinary collections of paintings and fine porcelain are on display in various museums in the city today. Most of the landmark monuments that make up Dresden’s historical centre today — like the Zwinger Palace, the Dresden Castle, the Catholic Court Church, and others — were commissioned by Augustus the Strong. It was not long before Dresden became one of Europe’s prime cultural destinations and came to be sometimes described as the “Florence on the Elbe”. 

All of this magnificent past of Dresden, it’s grandiose palaces, churches, museums and opera houses, fell silent forever on the midnight of February 13, 1945 when British and American forces indulged in indiscriminate “carpet bombing” of the city in a bid to close in upon Hitler, the Führer (leader) of the Third Reich or Nazi Germany. Between 13 and 15 February 1945, 1,249 heavy bomber planes of the British Royal Air Force and of the United States Air Forces dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices (fire bombs) that set off a firestorm with temperatures above 1,500 degree Celsius and rocketed smoke and ashes close to 15,000 feet into the sky. Considered “militarily unjustified” by most critics of the bombing the aerial attacks claimed the lives of nearly 25,000 civilians, reducing most to mere cinders within minutes. And within a few hours, the city’s historical centre remained transformed into a sea of rubble and ruins engulfed in smoke, fire, darkness and death — the only remains of a once powerful, rich and flourishing cultural capital. 

Studies reveal that a whopping one and half million tons of bombs were dropped in aerial raids on German cities between 1942 and 1945 in what in warfare terminology is described as “area bombing” (as against “precision bombing”) that claimed the lives of an estimated 3.6 million civilians and 3.3 million soldiers. Notwithstanding this, by the end of the war, the Allied Forces had 11 million German soldiers in capture as Prisoners of War. Acknowledged as one of the most dreadful devastations in mankind’s war history, both, in terms of geographical extent as well as loss of life and property, the bombing of Dresden in many ways marked the beginning of the end of the Second World War in Europe that finally ended in May the same year, only days after Hitler’s suicide on 30 April, 1945 in his Führerbunker even as the Allied shelling razed Berlin and the enemy closed in upon him. 

The thundering defeat of Germany’s Nazi Regime finally culminated in the formation of two German states — East Germany and West Germany; the former controlled by Soviet Russia and the latter by the United States. The impact of the Cold War between Soviet Russia and the United States peaked in Germany in the year 1961 in the form of the Berlin Wall that physically not only cut apart East and West Berlin but the whole of Germany and checked the inflow of refugees from a stagnant Communist East Germany to a more thriving Capitalist West Germany. In 1990, the collapse of Soviet Russia and the end of the Cold War resulted in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reunion of East and West Germany. 

Dresden’s post-war recovery process spanning across almost half a century is an epic tale of endurance and resolve. With a substantial fraction of the male population dead or held Prisoners of War, the formidable task of rebuilding the city rested now with the women (as was the case with most of Germany). From clearing war debris to participating in building works, the contribution of the Truemmerfrauen or “rubble women” in reconstructing post-war Germany is a fact not many of us know. The rubble women cleared an estimated 400 million cubic meters of debris that lay everywhere as high as the first floor with bare hands and just basic tools. They also nursed the wounded and buried the dead. Simply put, these women had salvaged the nation. Rightly then, Dresden, like most other German cities, has monuments erected to these women! And quite often people leave flowers at the pedestal. What an irony then that the very women who Hitler believed need only think of making homes had gone out and made, nay, re-made the nation. Indeed, the return of Germany as one of the most developed and technologically advanced nations of the world owes much to the women force of the country.

The impossible task of resurrecting from the war ruins the Dresden of the past — its churches, palaces, opera houses, museums and scores of other historical structures — began, surprisingly, not very late. The Kreuzkirche (Church of the Holy Cross), originally built in 1388, was one of the earliest sites of reconstruction. It was restored as early as 1955. The Zwinger Palace built in the 18th century by Augustus the Strong (inspired by Louis XIV’s court at Versailles) served as an orangery, exhibition gallery and festival arena of the Royal court. Restored in 1963, the Zwinger today houses the Old Masters Picture Gallery whose rare collections include Italian Renaissance master Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus (dated around 1509), the great master of High Renaissance Raphael’s The Sistine Madonna (dated 1512/13), and the Venetian landscape artist Bernardo Bellotto’s (also called Canaletto) vedute or panoramic views of Venice and Dresden. The Katholische Hofkirche (Catholic Court Church), built in 1751, as well as the Semperoper (Semper Opera House), designed by the famous architect and Richard Wagner’s friend Gottfried Semper in 1841 were completely restored by the mid-1980s. That the opera house re-opened with the same opera that was last performed before the bombing, speaks volumes of the never-say-die spirit of the citizens of Dresden. In the summer of 2013, the Semperoper celebrated 200 years of Richard Wagner undeterred by the flooded Elbe at its back door. The Dresdner Schloss (Royal Castle), originally constructed in 1535, was restored and converted into a museum complex in 2013. It houses the famous Green Vault and the Turkish Chamber.

The restoration of the Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady), originally built in the 18th century, and one of the most imposing and luminous church buildings in Dresden today, is a story in itself. In the early nineties, when life in Dresden had more or less returned to “normal” and the unification of Germany was complete, a group of like-minded citizens consisting of artists, academicians, archeologists, historians, engineers and others resolved to undertake the impossible. They pledged to reclaim the remains of the Frauenkirche; to literally salvage the nation’s faith in God from the ruins that had remained walled out from the city’s main thoroughfare for more than forty years. No mean task this; because it meant rebuilding the monument to its exact original point and scale; and not to mention that a project of this magnitude obviously prefigured massive research into the architectural details of not just the individual monument but the cityscape as a whole. 

The gargantuan task of restoring the historical structure, of recovering and cataloguing every fragment and putting back every stone where it originally belonged was executed with unprecedented workmanship and precision. Fresh blocks of sandstone were used wherever the original blocks were beyond retrieval or sometimes found simply too weak to be reused. This unusual coming together of the old and the new, this endless juxtaposing of squares of weathered stone against fresh beige blocks, is what lends the historic centre of Dresden its unique, what I would like to call “stonescape”. The church was re-consecrated in October 2005. A golden cross, donated by the English and made by an English silversmith whose father had taken part in bombing the city on February 13, 1945, stands atop the church now as a mark of redemption for all the wrong that was done to Dresden on that fateful night.

Though much of the city’s restoration process now stands completed, work is still on at some of the sites; especially at the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister (the Old Masters Gallery) and the Albertinum Museum where curators continue to restore and save priceless paintings of the likes of Paul Rubens, Rembrandt, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Caspar David Friedrich, Christian Dahl, Picasso, and others. I sat through a Sunday Service at the Kreuzkirche once with my host Prof. Thomas Keuhn and was consumed by mixed feelings of despair and hope that only a place like that could rouse. I comprehended nothing or very little of the Service in German. But I was intrigued by the repeated use of a particular word throughout the Service. I asked Prof. Keuhn about it later and he explained: “Himmel means the Heavens.” Having virtually witnessed the resurrection of the city, I left the church with renewed faith in the Heavens.

The incredible restoration process, the process of reclaiming a city ravaged by war, is evidently a process in healing and in more ways than one a lesson in affirmation to all of mankind. Today, the baroque cityscape of Dresden stands tall once again in its old, and new, glory. One has only to walk across the Augustus Bridge to the right banks of the river Elbe for a seamless panoramic view of the city taken right out of Bellotto’s 1748 painting famously called The Canaletto View wherein the Frauenkirche, the Katholische Hofkirche and the Kreuzkirche in the distant background adorn the Dresden skyline in their original splendour!

 

Every souvenir shop in Dresden sells this particular picture of the city centre as photographed on February 13/14, 1945 after the bombing; it’s a must-pick for the lesson in hope it encompasses today. As Dresden commemorated 71 years of its painful past on February 13 this year, the picture once again restored my faith in the indomitable spirit of mankind — that we shall rise: after each fall, every fall.