Before my usual Christmas in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, I decided to commemorate the 25th anniversary of German reunification by making a couple of quick stops in the former (GDR) East Germany. I am in Dresden, the capital city of the Free State of Saxony. The city was the royal residence for the Electors and Kings of Saxony which brought cultural and artistic splendor to the city. It was know as the Jewel Box because of the baroque and rococo city center and was also called Florence on the Elbe River. The city is best known in modern times for the fire bombing by British and American forces in February 1945 which destroyed the city center and killed approximately 25,000 people. But the city has restored much of it’s former glory since the reunification of Germany in 1990 and I will give you a brief tour.
Dresdener Striezelmarkt (that's Saxon for Christmas Market)
The photos above show some of the scenes from the Dresden Christmas market. The top photo is a supersized German pyramid windmill with music provided by a grand piano and a trumpet. The stars on the bottom right are common in Saxony, originally started by the Moravian Church and are hung from Advent through Epiphany.
Dresdener Frauenkirche, A Symbol of Peace and Hope Reborn
The Frauenkirche is an amazing story. The Church of our Lady was originally Roman Catholic but became a Lutheran Church during the Protestant Reformation. It was replaced in the 18th century by a baroque building and features one of the largest domes in Europe.
On 13 February 1945, Anglo-American allied forces began the bombing of Dresden. 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 650,000 incendiary bombs that were dropped on the city. The temperature surrounding and inside the church eventually reached 1,830 °F. 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.
The building vanished from Dresden's skyline, and the blackened stones would lie in a pile in the city center for the next 45 years during the Communist occupation of East Germany. After the end of World War II, the residents of Dresden began 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 1994, a German-born American, Günter Blobel became the founder and president of the nonprofit "Friends of Dresden, Inc.", a United States organization dedicated to supporting the reconstruction, restoration and preservation of Dresden's artistic and architectural legacy. He remembered seeing the church as a child when he was a refugee. In 1999, Blobel won the Nobel Prize for medicine and donated the entire amount of his award money (nearly $1 million) to the organization for the restoration of Dresden, to the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche and the building of a new synagogue. It was the single largest individual donation to the project.
The cost of rebuilding the church was €180 million. The new golden tower cross was funded officially by "the British people and the House of Windsor". It was made by a British blacksmith whose father was one of the bomber pilots who were responsible for the destruction of the church.
The intensive efforts to rebuild the church were completed in 2005, in time for the 800-year anniversary of the city of Dresden in 2006.
Guten Nacht.