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History of Dresden
1. From swamp forest to the town by the bridge
Long before there was a Dresden, the broad valley of the Elbe was already sought-after land for settlement. More than seven thousand years ago, the fertile loess slopes on the left bank of the river attracted the first farmers – people of the so-called Linear Pottery culture, named after the bands with which they decorated their clay vessels. In Nickern, today a district in the south-east of the city, they built large circular enclosures in the fifth millennium BC: ring-shaped ditches with palisades, perhaps places of assembly or worship. Archaeologists see them as the first monumental structures on Dresden soil. Later came people of the Bronze and Iron Ages; on a rocky spur above the Plauenscher Grund near Coschütz, the Heidenschanze grew up, a fortified settlement that almost seemed like a small town. During the Migration Period the valley grew quieter, until towards the end of the sixth century Slavic families came down the Elbe from Bohemia and settled here. It is to them that the city owes its name: Drežďany means something like “the people of the swamp forest” or “of the floodplain forest”. Anyone walking across the dry, paved squares of the old town today may find it hard to believe – but back then the Elbe floodplain was a damp woodland criss-crossed by old river channels. In the tenth and eleventh centuries the area was called the Gau Nisan, and its inhabitants the Nisani. After the German kings had built Meissen into a castle in the year 929, the rule and the Church of the Empire gradually pushed into the district. Castle wards such as Briesnitz and Niederwartha secured the land. From the twelfth century the Wettins, the Margraves of Meissen, established themselves in the Elbe valley – the princely house that was to shape Saxony for more than eight centuries. Exactly when the settlement became a town is not revealed by any founding charter. There is much to suggest that the town was laid out to a plan around 1173 or a little later: at the spot where the Elbe could easily be crossed and where trade routes met. A first wooden castle protected the river crossing; by around 1230 it had been replaced by stone buildings. On 31 March 1206 Dresden then appears in a document for the first time – the date on which, in 2006, the city celebrated its eight hundredth anniversary. Ten years later, in 1216, Dresden is explicitly described as a civitas, that is, a town. Margrave Dietrich the Oppressed stayed here from time to time, but Meissen was still the centre of the Margraviate. Young Dresden was a town of merchants and craftsmen, laid out on the model of the wealthy mining town of Freiberg: a grid of lanes around a market, a wall, gates. Outside the wall stood the Frauenkirche, the oldest parish church in the area and a destination for pilgrimages from early on. And then there was the bridge. As early as the thirteenth century a stone bridge spanned the Elbe – one of the oldest in the whole of Central Europe. It made Dresden the place where you could safely cross the broad river, and that is precisely where the city’s importance came from. On the other side of the river a separate settlement grew up, Altendresden – the nucleus of today’s Neustadt. So the picture you still see today from the Brühlsche Terrasse – the river, the bridge, the two banks – was already laid down in these beginnings. When you stand on the Augustusbrücke, then, you are standing on the spot where Dresden’s history really began.
2. Kreuzkirche, plague and Hussites – medieval Dresden
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Dresden was one country town among many, but one with a special treasure. The Nikolaikirche on the Altmarkt received a splinter of the Cross of Christ – or so, at least, people believed at the time. The relic attracted pilgrims, the church was given a new name – Kreuzkirche (Church of the Holy Cross) – and a school with a boys’ choir grew up beside it. This Dresden Kreuzchor still sings today; in 2016 it celebrated its eight hundredth anniversary, making it one of the oldest boys’ choirs in the world. So if you go to Vespers in the Kreuzkirche on a Saturday afternoon, you are listening to a tradition older than almost anything else in the city. Politically, Dresden went through turbulent times. After the death of Margrave Henry the Illustrious in 1288, Wettin rule fell apart for some years. Dresden changed hands several times: a Wettin heir sold the land in 1289 to King Wenceslas II of Bohemia, later the Margrave of Brandenburg seized it, until finally Frederick the Brave won the town back for the Wettins. The oldest town seal has survived on a document from 1309 – Dresden’s first coat of arms. Around 1300 a schoolmaster is mentioned, and towards the end of the thirteenth century there was a Franciscan friary; its church, later the Sophienkirche, stood on the Postplatz until the 1960s. As everywhere in Europe, epidemics, fires and floods brought suffering time and again. The Elbe was both lifeline and danger: it carried timber, salt and grain, but it also regularly burst its banks. On the right bank of the Elbe, Altendresden grew up and received its own town charter in 1403 – two towns, then, linked by the bridge, each with its own council and its own interests. Only in 1549 were they united into one town. A severe catastrophe came in 1429. The Hussites, followers of the Bohemian reformer Jan Hus, who had been burned at Constance, marched on campaigns through the neighbouring lands that had fought against them. Their feared armies with their wagon forts reached Dresden too and destroyed large parts of the town, especially Altendresden. For the inhabitants it was a shock whose effects lasted a long time; afterwards the walls were strengthened. In the fifteenth century the Weißeritzmühlgraben was also dug, an artificial canal that drove mills and supplied the town with water – a piece of medieval engineering whose course you can still guess at today from some of the street names. Around 1500, perhaps six thousand people lived in Dresden, Altendresden and the suburbs combined. That may not sound like many, but it made Dresden a sizeable town in Saxony. Leipzig was the bigger trading centre, Freiberg the richer mining town, and Meissen had the bishop and the old castle. What Dresden lacked was a permanent princely court. That was to change in the second half of the fifteenth century. After the death of Elector Frederick the Gentle in 1464, his two sons Ernest and Albert ruled the land together – and they moved their residence from Meissen to Dresden. This marked the beginning of the rise from little country town by the bridge to capital city. How it came about that Dresden kept this role for good, I will tell you in the next chapter.
3. The residence of the Albertines
In 1485 the two Wettin brothers Ernest and Albert divided their lands – an event that went down in the history books as the Leipzig Partition and shaped Saxony for centuries. Ernest, the elder, was allowed to propose the division, and Albert chose. He took the Meissen lands with Dresden; Ernest received Thuringia and the electoral dignity, that is, the right to take part in electing the German king. From then on Dresden was, without interruption, the residence of the Albertine line of the Wettins – until the end of the monarchy in 1918. Hardly had the town become a residence when it was dealt a heavy blow. In June 1491 a great fire broke out and destroyed most of the houses. The town was rebuilt, now with more stone and less timber, and the court had the town’s boundaries marked with boundary stones. Under Duke George, known as the Bearded, Dresden was more strongly fortified from 1521 and acquired a face worthy of a residence. In the 1530s George had a magnificent wing with a gateway built on the Elbe side of the palace – the Georgentor. It is regarded as one of the earliest Renaissance buildings in Germany. On this gate hung a long stone frieze with a Dance of Death: Death leads people of every rank along with him in a round dance – the Pope, the Emperor, the burgher, the child. The relief has survived fires and wars and can be seen today in the Dreikönigskirche in the Neustadt – a quiet, impressive place that many visitors overlook. Duke George was a staunch opponent of Martin Luther. While the Reformation was getting under way in neighbouring Ernestine Electoral Saxony, with Wittenberg, he kept his land in the old faith. Only after his death in 1539 did his brother Henry, known as the Pious, introduce the Reformation in Dresden as well. Protestant sermons were now preached in the Kreuzkirche, the monasteries were dissolved, and their property passed to the sovereign and the towns. Then came the great turning point. Henry’s son Moritz was an ambitious, clever and unscrupulous politician. Although a Protestant himself, in the Schmalkaldic War he allied himself with the Catholic Emperor Charles V against the Protestant princes – among them his own cousin, the Ernestine Elector John Frederick. After the Battle of Mühlberg in 1547 the cousin was defeated and taken prisoner. As his reward, Moritz received the electoral dignity and large parts of the Ernestine lands. The Protestants called him the Judas of Meissen. But for Dresden this meant rising to the front rank: the city was now the capital of an Electorate, one of the most powerful states in the Empire. Moritz expanded the palace into one of the largest residences of his day and had the city surrounded by modern bastions. Part of these fortifications can still be visited today, in the casemates beneath the Brühlsche Terrasse. In 1548, a year after gaining the electoral dignity, Moritz founded a court Kantorei, that is, a choir and a band of musicians for the court. From it grew the Sächsische Staatskapelle, one of the oldest orchestras in the world, which today plays in the Semperoper. Moritz himself did not have much time left: he died as early as 1553 of a wound he had suffered at the Battle of Sievershausen. His memorial, the Moritzmonument, the oldest monument in the city, stands on the Brühlsche Terrasse: on it, Moritz hands the electoral sword to his brother August.
4. Elector August, the Kunstkammer and the long war
Moritz was succeeded in 1553 by his brother August – not a military commander but an administrator, collector and father of his country. Under him Electoral Saxony became prosperous, and Dresden acquired many of its most important institutions. August had a large arsenal built in which the country’s weapons were stored; centuries later this building became the Albertinum, which today shows art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 1556 he set up a mint, founded a library from which today’s Saxon State and University Library grew, and had the Annenkirche built, named after his wife. Electress Anna, a daughter of the King of Denmark, was known throughout Saxony: she ran her own apothecary, collected recipes and looked after gardens and agriculture. People called her Mother Anna. Perhaps the most momentous foundation of all, however, was the Kunstkammer (cabinet of art and curiosities) of 1560. In a few rooms of the palace, August collected tools, scientific instruments, clocks, curiosities, works of art and natural specimens. Over the centuries, the great Dresden museums grew out of this princely cabinet of wonders – the Grünes Gewölbe (Green Vault), the Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon, the Rüstkammer (Armoury) and many more. So when you visit the State Art Collections today, you are following a trail that began in 1560. Under August’s successors the Stallhof was built, where knightly tournaments and ring-tilting contests were held; the bronze columns at which the riders aimed their lances at a ring still stand there today. The outer wall of the Stallhof is the wall on which the famous Fürstenzug was later placed. Then, in 1618, the Thirty Years’ War began, and Saxony was drawn into it. Elector Johann Georg I wavered between the sides: sometimes he fought with the Emperor, sometimes with the Swedes. Dresden itself was never captured, but the war brought hunger, soaring prices and the plague to the city. Many inhabitants died, and trade and crafts lay in ruins. At the same time, a man was working at the court who is now regarded as the most important German composer before Bach: Heinrich Schütz. He became court Kapellmeister in Dresden in 1617 and remained so, with interruptions, for more than half a century, until his death in 1672. In the worst years of the war his ensemble shrank to just a few musicians; Schütz wrote for this small line-up, begged the Elector in letters for money for his singers, and yet kept music alive through the war. After the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 the city slowly recovered. Under Johann Georg II, splendour and festivities returned to the court. From 1670 the Friedrichstadt district grew up with the first manufactories, and in 1676 the Großer Garten was laid out, with its Baroque palace in the middle – today Dresden’s green lung. In 1685 Altendresden, on the other side of the Elbe, burned down almost completely. It was then rebuilt according to a uniform plan, with broad, straight streets – and soon got a new name: the Neue Königliche Stadt (New Royal Town), Neustadt for short. If you walk today from the Augustusbrücke up the Hauptstraße to the Goldener Reiter and on to Albertplatz, you are following exactly this Baroque layout. And with that we have arrived at the man who shaped Dresden like no other.
5. Augustus the Strong, the Zwinger and the white gold
Friedrich August I became Elector of Saxony in 1694, rather unexpectedly, after his elder brother had died of smallpox. Posterity calls him Augustus the Strong – because of his legendary physical strength, about which many stories are told, such as that he could bend horseshoes with his bare hands. His real strength, though, was his ambition. In 1697 he had himself elected King of Poland, and for that he even converted to the Catholic faith – the ruler of an almost entirely Protestant land. From then on he was Elector in Dresden and King in Warsaw, and he wanted his residence to show it. Dresden was to rival Versailles, Vienna and Rome. From 1710 his master builder Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann and the sculptor Balthasar Permoser created the Zwinger. It was originally conceived as an orangery and a magnificent festival ground where the court held its celebrations – tournaments, masquerades, fireworks. When his son married the Emperor’s daughter Maria Josepha in 1719, Dresden celebrated for weeks, and the Zwinger was one of the stages. The Crown Gate with the Polish royal crown on its roof, the Wall Pavilion and the Nymphs’ Bath are still among the finest buildings of the European Baroque. A second great project was porcelain. All over Europe people admired Chinese and Japanese porcelain and paid fortunes for it – they called it white gold. Augustus had a veritable “porcelain sickness”, as he wrote himself. At the same time he was holding a young man prisoner in Dresden who had claimed he could make gold: the apothecary’s assistant Johann Friedrich Böttger. Böttger never made gold. But together with the scholar Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus and miners from the Ore Mountains he experimented with clays and firing temperatures – and in 1708, in a laboratory in Dresden, the first European hard-paste porcelain was produced. In 1710 Augustus founded the porcelain manufactory in the Albrechtsburg in Meissen, where the secret could be guarded more easily. Today you can still get a sense of Böttger’s laboratory rooms beneath the Jungfernbastei in the casemates. Augustus collected porcelain in enormous quantities. He even traded soldiers for porcelain: he gave the King of Prussia a regiment of dragoons and received in return large Chinese lidded vases that are still called the Dragoon Vases today. For his collection he had the Japanese Palace in the Neustadt remodelled. He reorganised his house’s art treasures: from 1723 he had the Green Vault set up in the palace, a treasure chamber of mirrors, gold and precious stones that he showed to selected visitors during his own lifetime – one of the oldest museums in Europe. His goldsmiths, led by Johann Melchior Dinglinger, created marvels for it such as the Court of Delhi on the Birthday of the Great Mogul, with more than a hundred tiny, jewel-studded figures. Under Augustus Dresden grew vigorously, the Augustusbrücke was widened, and Moritzburg and Pillnitz became palaces for hunting and pleasure. And of course people still talk today about his many mistresses, above all Countess Cosel, who was later held at Burg Stolpen for almost fifty years. Augustus died in Warsaw in 1733. His heart, however, lies – as he wished – in a capsule in the Catholic Court Church in Dresden. And on the Neustädter Markt he still rides today as the Golden Rider, gilded and in the pose of a Roman emperor.
6. The Frauenkirche, the Court Church and Canaletto’s view
At the same time as the Catholic king was beautifying his residence, the Protestant citizens of Dresden were making their own statement. The old Frauenkirche had become dilapidated and too small. The council commissioned the master carpenter George Bähr to build a new one, and Bähr designed something that had never existed before: a Protestant preaching church on a central plan, in which everyone could see and hear the preacher, crowned by a mighty dome made entirely of sandstone. The people of Dresden called it the Stone Bell. It was built from 1726 to 1743; Bähr himself did not live to see it completed. Many experts doubted whether the heavy dome would hold – it held, for more than two hundred years. For Johann Sebastian Bach the Frauenkirche’s new Silbermann organ was an event; in 1736 he gave a recital on it before a large audience. Augustus’s son, Friedrich August II, King Augustus III of Poland, was less a builder than an art collector. He bought masterpieces from all over Europe for his picture gallery, among them, in 1754, Raphael’s Sistine Madonna from Piacenza – the painting with the two pensive little angels at the bottom edge who now appear on countless postcards. And because the court was Catholic while the country was Protestant, the king needed a large church of his own. From 1739 to 1755 the Italian architect Gaetano Chiaveri built the Catholic Court Church right beside the palace, with a slender tower as a counterpart to the dome of the Frauenkirche. It was linked to the palace by a passage so that the royal family could get to Mass without getting their feet wet. Today it is the cathedral of the Diocese of Dresden-Meissen. Augustus III largely left the business of government to his minister Heinrich von Brühl, one of the most powerful and extravagant men of his age. Brühl supposedly owned hundreds of suits and wigs – an anecdote people still love to tell. On the old fortress ramparts by the Elbe he had a palace, a library and a garden laid out for himself. This became the Brühl’s Terrace, later called the Balcony of Europe. In these years a young Venetian painter also came to the court: Bernardo Bellotto, who, like his famous uncle, called himself Canaletto. He painted Dresden with an accuracy that astonishes people to this day. His best-known picture shows the city from the Neustadt bank of the Elbe: the Augustusbrücke, the Court Church, the dome of the Frauenkirche, the light over the river. Ever since, this view has been called the Canaletto view, and you can still enjoy it today from the right bank of the Elbe. After the Second World War Bellotto’s paintings even helped with the reconstruction, because they show what squares and façades once looked like. In this period Dresden was one of Europe’s great cities of art, with music, opera, theatre and collections. Later, around 1802, the poet Johann Gottfried Herder spoke of a German Florence – and so the city got the nickname “Florence on the Elbe”, which it still bears today. But the splendour came at a price: the treasury was empty, the army small, and in Prussia sat a neighbour who was waiting for exactly this weakness.
7. Dresden in the wars of the 18th century
That neighbour was Frederick II of Prussia, later called the Great. Saxony was already caught between the fronts in the War of the Austrian Succession. On 15 December 1745 the Prussians defeated the Saxon army at Kesselsdorf, just a few kilometres west of the city, and marched into Dresden. On Christmas Day the Peace of Dresden was concluded here; Frederick kept Silesia. Eleven years later things got worse. In August 1756 Frederick invaded Saxony without a declaration of war – the beginning of the Seven Years’ War. On 9 September he entered Dresden. The small Saxon army had withdrawn to a fortified camp between Pirna and the Festung Königstein. There it was encircled, starved for weeks and in October 1756 had to surrender below the Lilienstein. The soldiers were forced to join the Prussian army; many deserted at the first opportunity. I’ll happily tell you this story in more detail if you ask me about Pirna. King Augustus III fled to Warsaw, while the queen stayed behind in Dresden. The war dragged on, and Dresden changed hands several times. In 1758 the Prussian city commandant had parts of the suburbs set on fire to clear a field of fire. In September 1759 Austrian and Imperial troops recaptured the city. In July 1760 Frederick returned and tried to take Dresden back by force. He had the city bombarded with heavy guns for days. Whole streets went up in flames, and hundreds of houses were destroyed. The Kreuzkirche burnt out and collapsed. Bellotto, the painter, later captured its ruins in a harrowing picture – with people wandering among the rubble. The Frauenkirche, by contrast, held firm. People said the cannonballs had simply bounced off the stone dome. Whether that is true we don’t know for certain, but the church really did survive the bombardment – which established its reputation as an indestructible landmark. Frederick failed to take the city and withdrew. The war ended in 1763 with the Peace of Hubertusburg, a hunting lodge in Saxony. For Dresden the outcome was bitter: destroyed suburbs, a devastated old town, a ruined country. It took decades for the population to return to its pre-war level. And yet it turned out that the city’s love of art outlasted the catastrophe. Under the young Elector Friedrich August III, who came to the throne as a child in 1763 and at first ruled under a regency, the Academy of Fine Arts was founded in 1764. Thrift and orderly administration replaced the extravagance of the Brühl era; the new ruler was later called Friedrich August the Just. The Kreuzkirche was rebuilt in a new form, and Dresden slowly began to recover. But barely a generation had passed before foreign armies once again stood at the gates – and this time the most powerful man in Europe came in person.
9. Romantics, revolution and the railway
After the wars Dresden became a place of longing for the Romantics. The painter Caspar David Friedrich had lived in the city since 1798 and painted his most famous pictures here, many of them after walks in Saxon Switzerland. His friend was the physician and painter Carl Gustav Carus; the Norwegian Johan Christian Clausen Dahl lived under the same roof as Friedrich by the Elbe. Ludwig Richter drew the villages, children and landscapes of the surrounding area. The poet Heinrich von Kleist spent productive years here, and from 1817 Carl Maria von Weber directed the German opera at court. In a summer house in Hosterwitz he worked on music that has thrilled generations. The city was changing politically too. In 1830 there was unrest, and in 1831 Saxony received a constitution. Under King Anton came gas lighting, a municipal postal service and, in 1828, a Technical Training Institute – the origin of today’s Technical University. In 1839 the first train ran from Leipzig to Dresden: Germany’s first long-distance railway. The first locomotive built in Germany, the Saxonia, came from the Übigau engineering works in Dresden. In the same decade Gottfried Semper built the first court theatre on the Theaterplatz, which opened in 1841. Semper also built the synagogue for the Jewish community. From 1843 a young, rebellious conductor was working at court: Richard Wagner. His operas Rienzi, The Flying Dutchman and Tannhäuser were staged in Dresden. Wagner was enthusiastic about the ideas of freedom and unity that were fermenting in Europe at the time. In the revolutionary year of 1848 citizens all over Germany demanded constitutions and a common parliament. When the Saxon king rejected the Imperial Constitution in the spring of 1849, the May Uprising broke out in Dresden. From 3 to 9 May 1849 barricades stood in the streets. Among the insurgents were Wagner, the architect Semper, who is said to have designed a particularly good barricade, and the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin. Saxon and Prussian troops crushed the uprising bloodily. Wagner and Semper had to flee and lived in exile for many years; Wagner was a wanted man. After 1850 Dresden grew rapidly. In 1852 the population passed the hundred thousand mark – Dresden was a city. New suburbs sprang up and factories moved in. In 1869 Semper’s court theatre burnt down. Semper, who by then was living in Switzerland and Vienna, designed a new and even more magnificent house; his son Manfred oversaw the construction. It opened in 1878 – the Semperoper as we know it today. After the founding of the German Empire in 1871 Saxony remained a kingdom of its own with its own army, and Dresden became a large garrison town. In the north the Albertstadt grew up, a whole town of barracks, arsenals and parade grounds. The city of the Romantics had become a confident modern city – and around the turn of the century it was to reach a splendour that could rival the Baroque age.
10. The Elbe, the steamers and the vineyards
Without the Elbe there would be no Dresden. For centuries the river was the city’s most important road. Along it came timber from the Ore Mountains and from Bohemia, grain, salt and, above all, sandstone from Saxon Switzerland. The Frauenkirche, the Zwinger, the Court Church – almost all the city’s great buildings are made of Elbe sandstone, which was quarried around Pirna, Wehlen and Rathen and carried downstream on barges. Going upstream, the boats were hauled on long ropes by people and later by horses along the towpaths, which you can still make out at many points along the Elbe Cycle Route. In 1837 a new era began: the first steamships sailed on the Saxon Elbe. From these beginnings grew the Sächsische Dampfschiffahrt, which today owns the oldest and largest fleet of paddle steamers in the world. Most of its historic ships are over a hundred years old; in summer they sail from Dresden through the Elbe valley into Saxon Switzerland. So if you take a steamer from here to Pirna, Wehlen, Rathen or Bad Schandau, you are travelling exactly the route along which the stones for Dresden once came. Around 1870 chain shipping added a curious technique: a long chain lay on the bed of the Elbe, and chain steamers hauled themselves upstream along it, towing cargo barges as they went. But the Elbe was not only a transport route – it was also a danger. Floods are part of the city’s history, from the great floods of the Middle Ages and the Saxon Deluge of 1845 to the flood of the century in 2002. Marks on the Brühl’s Terrace and on some houses show how high the water rose. That is also one reason why Dresden’s Elbe meadows have stayed so broad and green: people wisely did not build on the floodplain. These meadows, running right through the city, are today among the things visitors love most about Dresden. Upstream, three palaces stand in a row on the slope at Loschwitz, the Albrecht Palaces and Schloss Eckberg, built in the nineteenth century for princes and wealthy merchants. Further up lies Pillnitz with the kings’ summer palace, right by the water, with steps where the court’s gondolas used to moor. And everywhere on the sunny south-facing slopes vines grow. Wine-growing in the Elbe valley is documented since the Middle Ages; the area between Pirna, Dresden, Meissen and Diesbar-Seußlitz is one of the northernmost wine regions in Europe. Electors and kings owned their own vineyards, and in Wachwitz, Pillnitz and Radebeul winegrowers’ houses and vineyard walls are reminders of this. In the nineteenth century phylloxera destroyed almost all the vines; only gradually were the slopes replanted. Today you can walk through the vineyards on the Saxon Wine Trail from Pirna to Diesbar-Seußlitz and taste the local wine in small seasonal wine taverns. So when you sit on a steamer on a summer evening, watching the vineyards glide past as the dome of the Frauenkirche draws nearer, you are experiencing Dresden just as generations of travellers before you did – from the river that created the city.
11. A city around 1900
Odol, the Procession of Princes and the Blue Wonder: Around the year 1900 Dresden was one of the richest and most beautiful cities in Europe. Through growth and the incorporation of neighbouring communities, the population rose to more than half a million; Dresden was among the largest cities of the German Empire. Wealthy industrialists, officers, artists and people of independent means settled above all in the villa districts on the slopes of the Elbe, in Blasewitz, Loschwitz and on the Weißer Hirsch. Heinrich Lahmann’s sanatorium on the Weißer Hirsch attracted guests from all over the world. Dresden was a city of inventors and tinkerers. Cigarettes, chocolate, sewing machines, cameras and much more were made here. Karl August Lingner became a millionaire with the mouthwash Odol. In 1908 Melitta Bentz invented the coffee filter in Dresden, and Chlorodont toothpaste came from here too. In 1909 the Yenidze tobacco company had a factory built in the style of a mosque – with a colourful glass dome beneath which fairy tales are told today. Lingner, the Odol king, wanted more than to make money: he wanted to educate people about health. In 1911 he organised the International Hygiene Exhibition, which drew millions of visitors, and founded the German Hygiene Museum, which got its large building by the Großer Garten in 1930. Its most famous exhibit was the Transparent Man. Technology changed the face of the city too. In 1893 a daring steel bridge without piers in the river was opened between Blasewitz and Loschwitz. The people of Dresden christened it the Blue Wonder – because of its paintwork and because they could hardly believe it would hold. Shortly afterwards a funicular began running up to the Loschwitz heights, followed in 1901 by a suspension railway that is today considered the oldest suspended mountain railway in the world. Electric trams replaced the horse-drawn trams. In 1910 the New Town Hall was inaugurated, with the gilded Rathausmann keeping watch over the city from its tower. And on the long wall of the Stallhof a work of art came into being that every visitor knows: the Fürstenzug, the Procession of Princes. In the 1870s the painter Wilhelm Walther put a mounted procession of Saxony’s rulers, more than a hundred metres long, on the wall, from Konrad the Great to King Georg. Because the painting was weathering, between 1904 and 1907 the picture was transferred onto some 23,000 tiles of Meissen porcelain. They even survived the firestorm of 1945 almost unscathed. Incidentally, at the edge of the procession Walther immortalised himself, together with other artists and craftsmen. In the north of the city, in 1909, the furniture manufacturer Karl Schmidt founded the garden city of Hellerau, the first German garden city: a place where workers were to live in healthy houses with gardens, with a festival theatre for dance and music. And in 1905 four young architecture students founded the artists’ group Brücke in Dresden – Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and Fritz Bleyl. With bright, wild colours they launched Expressionism. So around 1900 Dresden was both: a royal residence steeped in tradition and a workshop of modernity.
12. Dresden, city of music
Dresden is a city of music, and has been without interruption for almost five hundred years. At the beginning stand two ensembles that both still exist today: the Kreuzchor, whose history goes back to the thirteenth century, and the court orchestra, founded by Elector Moritz in 1548. It became the Staatskapelle Dresden, one of the oldest orchestras in the world. Richard Wagner once called it a “miraculous harp”. Over the centuries composers whose names everyone knows worked in Dresden. In the seventeenth century Heinrich Schütz shaped Protestant church music. In the eighteenth century Johann Adolph Hasse made the Dresden court opera famous with Italian operas; Johann Sebastian Bach visited several times, applied for a court title and played on the city’s new organs. In the nineteenth century Carl Maria von Weber, with the German opera at the Dresden court, laid the foundations for a German operatic tradition of its own. As court conductor, Richard Wagner premiered several of his works here before he had to flee after the May Uprising of 1849. Robert and Clara Schumann lived in Dresden for some years. Then came Richard Strauss. Between 1901 and 1938 nine of his operas had their premieres in Dresden, among them Salome in 1905, Elektra in 1909 and above all Der Rosenkavalier in 1911. For Der Rosenkavalier the railway put on special trains from Berlin to Dresden, so great was the demand. All his life Strauss felt closely bound to the Dresden orchestra and the opera house. Dresden remained an important place in twentieth-century music too. The Dresdner Philharmonie became the city’s second great orchestra. In the Hellerau Festival Theatre Émile Jaques-Dalcroze developed a new approach to music and movement that attracted dancers and teachers from all over Europe; Mary Wigman and Gret Palucca built on it with modern dance. The war destroyed the Semperoper and the Kreuzkirche, but the music never completely stopped. Only a few months after February 1945 the Kreuzchor was singing again, at first in makeshift quarters. Under the impact of the destruction, its cantor Rudolf Mauersberger wrote a motet of mourning to words from the Lamentations of Jeremiah – “How doth the city sit solitary” – which is still sung every year in remembrance. After the war the Staatskapelle played in temporary venues for decades, until the Semperoper reopened in 1985. Today Dresden’s musical life is richer than ever. The Semperoper, the Kulturpalast with its new concert hall, the Kreuzkirche with its vespers and motets, the Frauenkirche with its concerts, the Dresden Music Festival in early summer and the Dixieland Festival, one of the largest of its kind in Europe – if you spend a few days in the Bielatal, you will find a concert in Dresden almost every evening. A tip for an outing: the Kreuzchor’s vespers on Saturday afternoon is a wonderful experience even for guests without expensive tickets – just be sure to arrive early, because the seats are much sought after.
13. Between modernity and dictatorship (1918–1945)
In November 1918, at the end of the First World War, the monarchy in Saxony came to an end. King Friedrich August III abdicated; according to tradition he is said to have remarked, more or less, that people could now do their own dirty work – whether he really said it is uncertain, but the phrase became proverbial in Saxony. The kingdom became the Free State of Saxony, with Dresden as its capital. In the 1920s the city experienced a new flowering of the arts. Oskar Kokoschka and later Otto Dix taught at the Academy, and it was here that Dix painted his great anti-war picture The War. The dancers Mary Wigman and Gret Palucca made Dresden a centre of modern expressive dance. Erich Kästner had been born in the Neustadt in 1899, and in his memoirs he lovingly described the Dresden of his childhood. Dresden kept growing: in 1933 the city had around 640,000 inhabitants, more than ever before and ever since. But with the year 1933 this open, modern era came to an end. The National Socialists seized power in Saxony too. As early as spring 1933 books were burnt in Dresden. In the autumn of that year the city staged one of the first exhibitions in which the new rulers derided modern art as “degenerate”; works by Dix and other Dresden artists were removed from the museums. Dix lost his professorship. For Dresden’s Jews a time of exclusion, expropriation and persecution began. One of them was the scholar of Romance languages Victor Klemperer, a professor at the Technical University. He lost his post in 1935 and secretly kept a diary throughout all those years. Today these diaries are among the most powerful testimonies of everyday life under the dictatorship – keenly observed, sober and deeply moving. On the night of the November pogroms in 1938, SA men set fire to the synagogue that Gottfried Semper had built. A fireman rescued the Star of David from the dome and hid it. Today this star adorns the New Synagogue, consecrated on the same site in 2001. Of the roughly 4400 Jews living in Dresden in 1933, only a few dozen were still in the city at the end of the war; most had fled, been driven out or been murdered in the camps. During the war Dresden was a garrison, a transport hub and the site of armaments factories in which forced labourers also had to toil. For a long time the city was spared major air raids, and many believed Dresden would not be attacked because of its art treasures. With the columns of refugees from the east, the city filled with people in the winter of 1944/45. What happened next I will tell you in the next chapter – it is the hardest part of this story.
15. Ruins and reconstruction in the GDR
After the war Dresden lay in ruins. Women and men cleared away the rubble stone by stone, and a rubble railway carried the debris out of the city centre. Many ruins were blown up, and whole streets disappeared. Dresden now belonged to the Soviet occupation zone and, from 1949, to the GDR. There were fierce arguments about the reconstruction: should the old city be restored, or a new, socialist city be built? In the end both happened. Some of the great buildings were saved at enormous effort. The Zwinger was rebuilt step by step under the architect Hubert Ermisch, as were the Court Church, the Albertinum and the Kreuzkirche. The paintings of the Old Masters Picture Gallery had been hidden in tunnels and mines during the war; the Red Army took them to the Soviet Union. In the mid-1950s most of them came back, including the Sistine Madonna, and the gallery reopened. Other buildings fell victim to the new plan. The ruins of the Gothic Sophienkirche on the Postplatz were demolished in 1962 and 1963, even though many people in Dresden protested. The old town was given wide streets and new buildings. From the mid-1960s the Prager Straße was laid out as a spacious pedestrian zone with hotels and long blocks of flats, and in 1969 the Kulturpalast on the Altmarkt opened. On the edge of the city large new estates of prefabricated tower blocks grew up, for example in Prohlis and Gorbitz, where tens of thousands of people were given modern flats. The ruin of the Frauenkirche was left where it lay. The mound of rubble with its two remaining fragments of wall was declared a memorial against war. In the 1980s young people came to the ruin with candles on 13 February to demonstrate for peace and disarmament – a courageous step in a state that did not tolerate such gatherings. A great event was 13 February 1985: exactly forty years after its destruction, the rebuilt Semperoper reopened with Weber’s Der Freischütz. Many people in Dresden still remember that evening today. In the GDR Dresden was a city of science and technology. Research and development went on at the Technical University and in the factories; Dresden was far ahead when it came to patents. With the Robotron combine and microelectronics, foundations were laid here on which the city was later able to build. At the same time Dresden was known as the “Valley of the Clueless”: because of its position in the Elbe valley, West German television could hardly be received here, unlike in most parts of the GDR. That gave rise to many a joke – and to a special curiosity about everything that came from “over there”. In the late 1980s discontent grew in Dresden too: about crumbling old buildings, polluted air, the lack of freedom to travel and being told what to do. In the autumn of 1989 it would become clear just how great people’s courage had grown.
16. The Wende, the Frauenkirche and the Dresden of today
At the beginning of October 1989 special trains carrying thousands of GDR citizens who had fled to the West German embassy in Prague passed through Dresden on their way to the West. People who wanted to go with them gathered at the main station, and on 4 October there were violent clashes with the police. In the days that followed, more and more people in Dresden took to the streets. On 8 October, from a crowd kettled on the Prager Straße, a group of twenty people was chosen – the Group of 20 – who negotiated with the mayor, Wolfgang Berghofer: one of the first dialogues between citizens and state power in the GDR. After the fall of the Wall, Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl spoke to around a hundred thousand people in front of the ruins of the Frauenkirche on 19 December 1989. With reunification on 3 October 1990, Dresden became the capital of the re-established Free State of Saxony. Soon afterwards a citizens’ initiative launched an appeal for the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche, the “Call from Dresden”. What many had thought impossible succeeded: donors from all over the world gave money, and archaeologists recovered the stones from the rubble and measured every single one. Thousands of the old stones were built back in; they are easy to make out as dark patches in the pale façade. The golden cross on the top was made by a British goldsmith whose father had taken part as a bomber pilot in the raids on German cities – a gift from Britain and a sign of reconciliation. On 30 October 2005 the Frauenkirche was consecrated. Since then many of the old townhouses around the Neumarkt have also been rebuilt on historical models. Dresden also faced severe trials in these years. In August 2002 the Elbe rose to more than nine metres; the old town, the Zwinger and the Semperoper were under water, and the main station was flooded by the Weißeritz. After the next great flood in 2013 the damage was considerably less, thanks to new flood defences. The Dresden Elbe Valley became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2004 – and lost the title again in 2009, the first in Europe to do so, because the city built the Waldschlößchenbrücke. The citizens had voted for the bridge in a referendum; the dispute over it divided the city. In the night of 10 to 11 September 2024 part of the Carolabrücke collapsed into the Elbe – fortunately on a night when no one was on it. Today Dresden, with more than half a million inhabitants, is once again a lively city. Microelectronics has settled here, and the region likes to call itself Silicon Saxony. The Technical University is one of Germany’s major universities. The Green Vault has returned to the palace, and the Staatskapelle plays in the Semperoper as it has done for centuries. The city argues, too – about politics, about remembrance, about bridges. But anyone who stands on the Brühl’s Terrace in the evening, looking out over the Elbe, the bridges and the dome of the Frauenkirche, understands why people have rebuilt this city again and again for eight hundred years.
As of: 10/2026
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