Dresden (5 page)

But the greatest, most defining religious building of Dresden's Baroque era was not built by either of the king electors. There had been disquiet at the monarch's conversion to Catholicism in 1697. In 1722 began the construction, on the site of a demolished Gothic church, of the Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady), which would become Dresden's Protestant cathedral, proof that Luther's faith was still dominant in Saxony. The building was paid for not by the king but out of city funds. Its designer, George Bähr, was official city master builder. Under his supervision arose an extraordinary design, unlike anything built elsewhere in Europe before or since. Plain on the outside, brilliantly ornate within, the church may have been cruciform in shape in the traditional way, but the actual area of worship was circular, with eight high, astonishingly slender columns supporting not just balconies where worshippers were seated but a great cupola of Saxon
sandstone that would, when finally finished twenty years later, soar to a height of well over three hundred feet.

The Frauenkirche was consecrated in 1734, the year after Augustus the Strong's death. The acoustics were superb. In 1736 Johann Sebastian Bach traveled from his home in Leipzig and gave the first public performance on the church's organ. It had been built by Gottfried Silbermann—the Stradivarius of organ building—who evenhandedly also created a marvelous—some say unsurpassable—instrument for the nearby Court Church. The Frauenkirche, this great, bright domed masterpiece, like St. Paul's in London dominated the new skyline of the city for more than two hundred years, a symbol both of Protestant self-assertion and municipal wealth.

Dresden became a fixture on the European grand tour. The paintings of the Venetian Bernardo Bellotto showed the glorious architectural vista along the Elbe, the smart squares and thriving markets. By the 1750s, with a Wettin still on the thrones of both Saxony and Poland in the form of Augustus III, the Catholic succession secured, and Dresden solidly established as one of Europe's finest capitals and most prominent centers of culture, it seemed that a golden future beckoned for the erstwhile “forest dwellers in the swamp.”

Nothing, however, could have been further from the truth. And the danger came not from the Turks, or the Cossack hordes, or any of the other “enemies of civilization.” The man who was about to order the large-scale destruction of the Wettins' newly built jewel on the Elbe was a fellow German, renowned as a patron of the arts and friend of French philosophers—the flute-playing king of Prussia, Frederick II, later known to those who admired him, from a safe distance, as “the Great.”

The date was July 19, 1760. The horrified letter was written by a senior civil servant and author, Gottlieb Wilhelm Rabener, to his friend, cabinet secretary Ferber, in the king's other capital, Warsaw. There Augustus III, son of Augustus the Strong, and his entourage had for some time been enjoying immunity from the immediate effects of the conflict that would be known to history as the Seven Years' War. And a fearsome conflict it was. Those who think of the eighteenth century as a time of elegant dynastic maneuverings punctuated by set-piece battles between men in wigs and highly colored uniforms, leaving the average citizen little affected, should look at the destruction of Dresden. Or, perhaps it should be said, one of the destructions of Dresden.

Frederick II of Prussia was extremely clever, highly if selectively sensitive, and a dyed-in-the-wool child of the European enlightenment. The French philosopher Voltaire was his regular houseguest, as were other famous thinkers and scientists. The Prussian king was also an emotionally warped, ruthless plunderer and wrecker of kingdoms who let nothing stand in the way of his military needs or his territorial ambitions. Frederick had first cast an eye over his wealthy, glittering neighbor during the first of his wars. He cynically compared Saxony with “a sack of flour. You can thump it as often as you like, and something will always come out.”

Taking advantage of disputes over the Hapsburg succession, Frederick seized the prosperous neighboring province of Silesia from the Austrians. At first Augustus III, hoping for easy gains, supported the Prussians. Unfortunately, peace gave the Prussians Silesia but the Saxons nothing.

New diplomatic cards were dealt. When war broke out again in 1745, Augustus III and his Saxon forces turned up on the Austrian side. It was winter. Fighting in subzero temperatures on a frozen plain just a few miles from the Saxon capital, the Prussians annihilated Augustus III's army at the Battle of Kesselsdorf, and in short order occupied Dresden. Saxony's Austrian allies had thoroughly plundered the city themselves before leaving his capital to the mercy of the enemy. The Prussians looted what was left, then levied a huge reparations bill, causing galloping inflation and widespread hunger among civilians—an unpleasant taste of the “philosopher-king's” methods. But the next time, it would be bitterer still.

The Seven Years' War broke out in August 1756. Meanwhile the strength of the Saxon army had been reduced by almost half, to mend a huge hole in the state's finances, though the king elector's expenditure on pleasure, building, and ceremonies had not been correspondingly cut. He and his ministers had planned a policy of strict neutrality—as if this was within their choice. On August 28 the Saxon chief minister Count von Brühl received a note from Frederick the Great demanding free passage through Saxon territory. The next day, without waiting for a reply, Prussian troops crossed the border. The powers that be were reportedly astonished by Frederick's characteristic use of surprise.

Within two weeks the Prussians were back in Dresden, treating the capital as a Prussian city and Saxony itself as a conquered province. After first abandoning Dresden, then his army, Augustus III had shut himself inside the fortress at Königstein on the right bank of the Elbe—to which many of the royal house's most precious treasures and paintings had already been removed. In October he made a deal with the Prussians that gave Frederick the use of the Saxon army and in return allowed the Saxon king elector and his ministers safe passage through to his other realm, Poland. There he was obliged to stay for the duration. And he did.

Saxony's mineral wealth, trading riches, and agricultural plenty were ruthlessly siphoned into Frederick the Great's war effort. Young Dresdeners were press-ganged into the Prussian army.

The artists, craftsmen, performers, and singers who had flocked to Dresden to fulfill the Wettins' seemingly inexhaustible need for pleasure during the boom years now disappeared as quickly as they had come. At one point the Prussian commandant of the city ordered hundreds of houses razed to the ground to provide a free field of fire in case of siege. The homeless were forced to beg shelter and support from their already hard-pressed fellow citizens. Disease and ruin stalked the city. In 1757 in Dresden, 4,454 burials were registered, and only 1,647 baptisms.

So the fortunes of war ebbed and flowed. In 1759 the Prussians left in a hurry. An Austrian army descended on Dresden. More requisitions. More taxes. More unruly soldiery billeted in already overcrowded dwellings. And the next year, the return of those persistent, unkillable Prussians.

The siege, in the summer of 1760, saw fourteen thousand Austrian troops holding out against a large Prussian army. On July 19 began the massive, relentless bombardment described by Rabener in his letter. The Prussians fired not just thirty-pound cannon balls but, as Rabener described, oil-filled incendiary bombs, in a grim premonition of Dresden's fate in the twentieth century. Prussian grenadiers tossed hand-held bombs into upper rooms. Whole streets were set on fire.

Half the city's built-up area was destroyed. Many of the city's finest palaces—the Turkish Palace, where Augustus III had celebrated his wedding, the mansion of the king elector's clever, corrupt chief minister, Count Brühl—and a host of fine burghers' houses, were reduced to rubble and ash. The Frauenkirche survived—the Prussians' projectiles bounced off its cupola “like peas off a tortoise's back”—but the treasured, and more ancient, Church of the Cross (Kreuzkirche) succumbed as its great wooden pinnacle caught fire and toppled over, pouring flame onto the surrounding buildings and spreading the conflagration still further.

The Austrian defenders, grimly dug in under fire and subjected to the usual brutal eighteenth-century discipline, held out. Not so the Dresdeners. Panic-stricken refugees poured northward across the Elbe. Once again, starving citizens were cast on the charity of their luckier or more prosperous neighbors for food, clothing, and shelter. From Warsaw, King Augustus III sent yet another helpful message urging all Dresden's citizens to take courage, continue their business, and not to desert the city in its time of need.

Clearing the ruins was a slow, painful process. An average of fifty cartloads of rubble per day passed through the city gates after they were reopened in 1761, and things continued that way for years. Crippling inflation, food shortages, endemic street crime, and debasement of the coinage disfigured the once-proud capital. The Seven Years' War ended in 1763. A hundred thousand subjects of Augustus III had died during the years of war and occupation. The population of Dresden itself had been drastically reduced, from sixty-two thousand to thirty-six thousand.

Augustus III returned to his shattered residence in the summer of 1763. He was deeply shocked by the destruction he saw. The city that had been among the wonders of Europe was no more. Within months
the king elector and Count Brühl were both dead. The throne of Poland passed out of Saxon possession to Catherine the Great's former lover Stanislaw Poniatowski. The Wettin heir, Friedrich Christian, died a few months later of smallpox at the age of forty-one, to be succeeded by his thirteen-year-old son, another Frederick Augustus. He was to reign for more than sixty years.

Five years later a keen-eyed young visitor from Frankfurt climbed the spire of the Church of the Three Kings in the Dresden Neustadt. He looked out over what was left of the city, and later reported what he saw:

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany's greatest writer and humanist, was not yet twenty years old when he wrote this letter. Not for nothing did he make famous the story of the brilliant Faust, who to gain the world made a pact with the devil. Young Goethe was there to witness Dresden's fall from the heights of wealth and glory to the depths of poverty and despair. Its rulers had reached for glory, only to be left with a handful of dust.

Who said the past is but a distant mirror?

ASTONISHINGLY,
within a few short decades Dresden was more famous and more favored that ever. Starting from the mid-eighteenth century, the old late-medieval fortifications that had protected Dresden in the religious wars of the previous era began to be dismantled. A whole swathe along the Elbe was donated by Augustus III to his chief minister, Count Brühl, who leveled the walls and turned the area into a private riverside terrace and pleasure garden. Fifty years later, when the Russians occupied Dresden, the czar's governor of the city, Prince Repnin-Volokovski, insisted on opening up the terrace gardens along the river for public use. Soon cafés and restaurants had opened there, with sculpted staircases connecting it to the Altstadt. The garden walk, known to this day as the Brühl Terrace (Brühlsche Terrasse) became one of the great promenades of Europe, like the Bois de Bologne or Hyde Park or Unter den Linden, where dandies and doxies, families and flâneurs alike, could take the air and their pleasure.

So, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Goethe's friend, the writer Johann Gottfried Herder, was able to remark: “In respect of its cultural treasures, Dresden has become a German Florence.” The description stuck. Elbflorenz—Florence on the Elbe—became the accepted version, found everywhere from tourist guides to political speeches

It was not only the buildings that earned Dresden its flattering title. The middle of the nineteenth century saw such cultural giants as Carl Maria von Weber, Schumann, Wagner, Caspar David Friedrich, and Ibsen settle on the Elbe, many with salaried jobs paid for by the crown. Dresden came back from the depths of 1760.

If anything, the loss of the Polish kingship turned the attention of the electors (kings in Saxony since 1806) back to their ancestral turf, with positive results. There was an aberration during Napoleonic times, when the Wettin addiction to bad alliances infected the new generation. For a few years, in pale echo of his father and grandfather, Frederick Augustus of Saxony (ruled 1768–1827) also became grand duke of Warsaw, a kind of mini-Poland. This title he held by grace of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose loyal ally he remained to the end.

As punishment, when France surrendered in 1814, Frederick Augustus lost not only his short-lived Polish grand duchy but also almost half of his ancestral kingdom to the new Prussian superstate that emerged from the French revolutionary wars. He was lucky not to lose it all.

The first half of the nineteenth century in Dresden, as elsewhere in Germany, was a time of gradual but decisive economic and social change, against which the established rulers defended their prerogatives with a grim, doomed determination. Nevertheless, after 1830 a two-chamber parliament (voted for by a select electorate that excluded the dangerous masses) came into being. Dresden's small Jewish community was granted civil rights. A few years later began the building of the famous Dresden synagogue, one of several masterpieces in the city designed by the great Gottfried Semper, architect and passionate democrat. The first paddle steamer, the
Queen Maria,
took to the Elbe in 1837. Others followed, the foundation of a fleet that still plies the river today. In 1839 the railway line between Leipzig and Dresden was finished, the first between two major German cities.

In many respects, however, Saxony remained backward. It was not until 1861, long after Prussia and other more dynamic states had done so, that the Saxon government allowed freedom of profession. This finally abolished the medieval caste restrictions and guilds that had for centuries secured a living for craftsmen but held back the innovation, enterprise, and personal mobility essential to real economic development.

The chief aim of Saxon external policy remained, as before, to limit Prussian encroachment. One more disastrous alliance followed before such matters were, in effect, taken out of Wettin hands. The brief and decisive 1866 war between Prussia and Austria for control of Germany found Saxony siding with Austria, along with most of the
other states, large and small. Saxony ended up on the losing side. Again. But soon there followed a transformation. The war of 1870–71 between Prussia and France, into which the other German armies were also dragged, led not only to a decisive victory, but to a wave of national patriotic fervor that finally swept away the historic divisions between the states.

On January 18, 1871, in the Hall of Mirrors at conquered Versailles, the assembled representatives of the German states acclaimed the grizzled, seventy-three-year-old King Wilhelm of Prussia as their emperor. The new Germany contained four kingdoms, six grand duchies, five duchies, seven principalities, and three free cities. They kept their thrones or senates and many of their ancient rights, but overall power moved decisively to Berlin. The larger states, including Saxony, were allowed to keep their own armies, uniforms, and traditions, but in case of war were duty bound to answer the Reich (read: Prussian) commander in chief's call. The emperor and his chancellor dictated foreign policy and shaped much of the new Reich's economic, military, and political direction.

Suddenly, where for centuries there had been weakness and discord and jealous particularism, there was a united nation of more than sixty million placed in the heart of Europe. Rapidly industrializing, its sovereignty stretching from Alsace-Lorraine in the west to Posen (Poznan) in the east, the new German Empire could also boast an army that had recently proved itself invincible against France and Austria, two of the three other continental superpowers of the time.

True, the Reich had been united through blood and iron rather than persuasion and porcelain—the following three-quarters of a century would play out the consequences of that with almost sadistic attention to detail. All the same, this was a moment of real rejoicing. Past hostilities and failures were forgotten (or reinterpreted) and the novel sense of power, of possibility, enjoyed without reservation.

The contest between Saxony and its old rival, Prussia, had finally been decided in Prussia's favor. Since the Battle of Kesselsdorf more than a century previously, this had been an increasingly unequal struggle. For the moment, though, the effects of “defeat” for Saxony, and especially Dresden, seemed entirely positive. The lingering responsibility of being the capital of a state with warlike ambitions finally fell away, and as a result the city became a much more easygoing place,
known all over Europe and in the Americas for its beauty, its civilized amenities, and a general style of life that would toward the end of the twentieth century be described as “laid back.”

 

THE FOUR DECADES
between German unification and the outbreak of the First World War witnessed a new blooming of Augustus the Strong's historic city that paralleled, even exceeded, the development of other parts of the Reich. A fourfold increase in population was mostly accommodated in carefully proportioned apartment blocks and fast-growing but spacious and rustic suburbs. With railways now crisscrossing Europe like vital arteries and veins, there was a boom in mass tourist traffic that put Dresden even more firmly at the heart of European artistic and cultural life. And the time witnessed a rapid expansion of the modern consumer industries, which Dresden not only adopted but also, in a disproportionate number of cases, actually originated.

The brassiere was invented in Dresden by a Fräulein Christine Hardt in 1889. (Even more piquantly, the first and last ruling Gauleiter of Nazi Saxony was a failed lingerie manufacturer.) The city could also claim to have been the first place in Europe to manufacture the cigarette (initially by hand, later by machine), the coffee filter, the tea bag, squeezable toothpaste (“Chlorodont”)—and the latex condom. Oh, and it became a key center of the typewriter and the camera industries. Seidel and Naumann's classic Erika portable typewriter became world famous. Carl Zeiss may have ground his special lenses and mirrors in Jena, but when it came to producing cameras for the public, it was the nimble fingers and sharp eyes of thousands of Dresden workers he relied on. Many other companies would build camera factories in Dresden, not just Zeiss, making it the city's most important single industry.

The common element was affordable luxury, artifacts conceived to provide pleasure to the vastly increased number of relatively ordinary people who had money, leisure, and taste—or at least aspiration. The dominance of royal court requirements had shaped the workforce. Patient, delicate making of objects was the forte of the Dresden journeyman or woman.
Feinarbeit
, as the Germans say. Precision work. Dresden's skillful workers had served the whims of kings and nobles
for centuries; now they catered to a prosperous middle class that wanted nice things and comfort with a passion that, in its way, matched that of Augustus the Strong. But by the end of the nineteenth century the sovereign was no longer the consumer. The consumer was sovereign.

So came the turn of the twentieth century. Dresden seemed symbolic of the best of old and new.

Largely owing to the early imposition of strict planning—Dresden was the first city in the world to accept the notion of zoned development—it had grown to a metropolis of four hundred thousand (half a million by 1920) while still retaining its reputation as a garden spot among European cities. New factories were not allowed in the oldest part of the city, though some workshops and yards quietly survived, and business went on. Some of the newer buildings—the new royal ministries on the north bank of the Elbe, the neo-classical museum and archive building known as the Albertinum after the king who ordered its construction in the 1880s—were criticized as disproportionately massive in the Prussian style and made from hard alien stones, but generally Dresden was not ruined or made ugly in the process of accommodating its increased population and supplying it with employment.

Although the heart of the city had been densely built upon, the royal parks and the municipal green spaces had survived. It was decided back in the 1840s that the new railways would not be allowed either to drive through the historic city center or to ring Dresden and deform its suburbs as they had elsewhere. Of course there were poor people. Of course there was plenty of housing that a few decades later would be considered unhealthy and primitive—respiratory and lung problems were a quiet scourge in historic Dresden—but there were no exclusively working-class ghettos, no dehumanizing slums to match those in Glasgow or New York—or, for that matter, booming, sprawling, ugly Berlin, where even by the most favored measure the population density was twice that in Dresden.

Particularly in the heart of Dresden, the prosperous and the struggling citizen coexisted side by side to a remarkable degree, as they had since the Middle Ages, but in far more salubrious conditions. This was a good place to live. By the standards of the early twentieth century elsewhere in Europe and North America, very good indeed.

So Dresden became a popular tourist destination, leading to the building of a host of comfortable hotels and boardinghouses, as well as places of entertainment and restaurants. Moreover, many well-off Europeans and Americans came for long visits, or even settled permanently. With its enviable architecture and lively (but not too avant-garde) cultural traditions, pleasant climate, magnificent surrounding countryside, and relatively low cost of living, the Saxon capital attracted thousands of such foreigners as long-term residents. There were—as Pastor Hoch pointed out—British, American, and Russian churches. There were also international finishing schools for young ladies. This was connected to the fact that in winter, much of the central European haute bourgeoisie and aristocracy visited Dresden for society balls—which doubled as discreet marriage markets.

But again, just as Dresden seemed to have found its way onto a sunlit plateau of best-of-all-worlds pleasure, the dark horsemen who last galloped this way in the 1760s were once more turning their steeds' heads toward the Florence on the Elbe.