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History of Pirna
1. Flints, Slavs and the name Pirna
Pirna lies at a special spot: here the Elbe leaves the narrow valley of the Elbe Sandstone Mountains and emerges into the broad Dresden Elbe basin. Anyone travelling upstream left the flat country behind at Pirna; anyone coming downstream had just put the rocks and gorges behind them. That is why Pirna is still called the Gateway to Saxon Switzerland. People appreciated this location very early on. The oldest traces are flint tools left behind by hunter-gatherers at the end of the last Ice Age, ten to fourteen thousand years ago. When people settled down, the first farmers – the people of the Linear Pottery culture – made their homes on the fertile loess soils around Pirna more than seven thousand years ago. Later, Bronze Age and Iron Age peoples lived here, and in the fourth century BC Germanic tribes came into the Elbe valley, moving on again during the Migration Period. Around AD 600 Slavic families moved in, the ancestors of the Sorbs. They cleared the forest, founded villages and gave many places their names – Dohna, Zehista, Copitz, Pratzschwitz and many other place names around Pirna still sound Slavic today. The name Pirna itself also dates from this period. Linguists today mostly trace it back to an Old Sorbian word to do with glowing ashes or fire. Perhaps this was a spot where the forest had been cleared by burning, perhaps a place where fires burnt. It is not entirely certain, as is so often the case with old place names. The people of Pirna have been telling another, much prettier explanation for centuries: the name, they say, comes from Birne, the pear. There really is a pear tree in the town’s coat of arms, and there is an old legend about it that I’ll happily tell you if you ask about the legends of Pirna. Scholars, however, regard this interpretation as a later, romantic invention – the pear probably only found its way into the coat of arms because the name sounded so similar. For a long time the Slavs lived without lords from the west. That changed when the German king Henry I founded the castle of Meissen in 929 and the land along the Elbe came step by step under the rule of the Empire. Gradually castles, churches and German settlements appeared in the Gau Nisan, as the area around Dresden and Pirna was called. On the rock above the Elbe, where Schloss Sonnenstein stands today, there was probably a castle as early as the eleventh century. From up there the river could easily be watched – and with it the trade that passed back and forth along it between Bohemia and the Meissen lands. Below the castle, on the riverbank, a place grew up where merchants exchanged their goods. In the thirteenth century this marketplace beneath the castle was to become the town of Pirna. So when you stand on Pirna’s market square today and look up at the Sonnenstein, you can still see the two seeds from which the town grew: the castle above, the market below.
2. Castle, market and town charter
In 1233 Pirna appears in a document for the first time. The document settles rights between the Emperor and the territorial lords in the Margraviate of Meissen, and Pirna is mentioned in it as a place that already had a certain importance. A little later, around 1245, Pirna was a town with its own charter; its overlord was the Margrave of Meissen. The castle on the rock is first explicitly mentioned in 1269. In the Middle Ages a town charter meant a great deal: the citizens were allowed to govern themselves, elect a council, hold markets and have their own courts. In return they protected their town with walls and gates and paid dues to their overlord. Pirna was laid out to a plan, with a large rectangular market square in the middle and streets arranged around it in a regular grid. You can still read this basic pattern in the old town today: from the market, the Lange Straße, the Schmiedestraße and the Dohnaische Straße lead off in different directions, just as they have done for more than seven hundred years. The town lived from the river. At that time the Elbe was the most important artery between Bohemia and the lands to the north, all the way down to Hamburg. Grain, timber and other goods came from Bohemia, and salt, fish and cloth went the other way. Pirna lay exactly where the boatmen, having passed through the mountains, found a safe harbour and a market. The town soon acquired a privilege that laid the foundation of its wealth: the staple right. It obliged boatmen passing Pirna to unload their goods here for a certain period and offer them for sale to the citizens of Pirna. Only then were they allowed to continue. For the town’s merchants this was splendid business: they had first pick of everything that came down the river and could trade it on at a profit. For the boatmen it was a nuisance, and quarrels with Dresden and other towns were inevitable. During the thirteenth century Pirna changed hands several times. At times the Bishop of Meissen held rights over the town and castle, then the Margrave again. In 1293 came a change that was to shape Pirna’s history for more than a century: King Wenceslas II of Bohemia acquired the town and castle. Pirna became Bohemian – and remained so until 1405. For the people of Pirna this was no misfortune. Under its kings of the Přemyslid dynasty and later the House of Luxembourg, Bohemia was a rich and powerful country, and Prague was one of the great cities of Europe. A trading town on the border of this country, on its most important river, had good prospects. How Pirna fared during this Bohemian period I’ll tell you in the next chapter.
3. A Bohemian town on the Elbe
For a good hundred years, from 1293 to 1405, Pirna belonged to the Kingdom of Bohemia. The Bohemian kings knew what they had in this town and supported it. In 1325 King John of Bohemia, known as John the Blind, expressly confirmed the town’s privileges, above all the valuable staple right. John is one of the most colourful figures of the Middle Ages: a knightly king who roamed all over Europe and who, although he had gone blind in later life, fell in the front line at the Battle of Crécy in France in 1346. His son Charles became Holy Roman Emperor as Charles IV and made Prague a glittering residence. In 1351 Pirna even hosted a diet of princes, a gathering of princes under Charles’s leadership at which disputes over the Margraviate of Brandenburg were negotiated. For a country town on the Elbe that was a great honour. The Dominican friary also dates from this period. Around 1300 friars of the Order of Preachers settled in Pirna, and the friary is first mentioned in 1307. The Dominicans were a mendicant order that preached and taught in the towns. Their friary church of St. Heinrich is a simple two-aisled hall church with valuable wall paintings from the early fifteenth century. Of the friary buildings, the chapter house and the summer refectory have survived; the friary courtyard is now home to the town museum. A school in Pirna is also mentioned as early as 1317. Around 1400 the area entered a violent period. The Burgraves of Dohna, an old noble family whose seat was the castle above the Müglitz valley, were locked in a bitter feud with the Margrave of Meissen. According to tradition, this Dohna Feud began with a quarrel at a dance in Dresden and escalated into a veritable little war of raids and sieges. In the end the Dohnas lost everything: their castle was taken and their lordship broken up. The Margrave of Meissen seized the opportunity to extend his power throughout the region, and in 1404 and 1405 Pirna too passed to the Margraviate of Meissen. From then on Pirna was a Meissen and later a Saxon town. But the matter was not quite settled yet: formally, Pirna remained a fief of the Bohemian crown, and only the Treaty of Eger in 1459 fixed the border between Saxony and Bohemia for good – broadly as it still runs today. The border you cross on a trip to the Czech Republic goes back in large part to this treaty. If you like, I’ll gladly tell you more about it. Bohemia’s past left its traces in Pirna, and not only in the documents. The close connection across the river remained, and trade and family ties reached deep into Bohemia. And when Protestant Bohemians were forced to leave their homeland in the seventeenth century, thousands of them found refuge in, of all places, Pirna – but that is a story for a later chapter.
4. Staple right, boatmen and sandstone
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Pirna enjoyed its richest period. The town was a first-rate trading centre on the Elbe, and its merchants grew prosperous. The staple right forced passing boats to moor in Pirna and offer their goods. On top of that came tolls, markets and the money that carters, raftsmen and boatmen spent in the town’s inns. In 1409 the sovereign permitted a free weekly market on Saturdays. In those days cargo barges plied the Elbe, drifting downstream with the current and having to be laboriously hauled upstream. This work was done by people, the haulers or Bomätscher, who walked along the bank with ropes over their shoulders, dragging the heavy barges upstream step by step. It was one of the hardest jobs there was. Later, horses took over this task. The paths they walked along, the towpaths, can still be made out in many places along the Elbe Cycle Route. Besides trade, a second commodity brought Pirna wealth: sandstone. In the quarries upstream, at Posta, Wehlen, Rathen and around Pirna itself, the firm and easily worked Elbe sandstone was quarried. From Pirna it went by boat to Dresden, Meissen, Magdeburg and even as far as Hamburg and beyond. Many famous buildings in northern Germany and even abroad are built of sandstone from the area around Pirna. The quarrymen and stonemasons enjoyed a special standing in Pirna, and the town became a centre of architecture. There was a Bauhütte here, a lodge or workshop community of stonemasons and master builders, whose masters were in demand far beyond Pirna. The best known of them was Peter Ulrich, known as Peter von Pirna, who began the great town church – I’ll tell you about it in a chapter of its own. You can still see the wealth of this period in the old town today. The merchants built themselves splendid houses with tall gables, oriel windows and, above all, seat-niche portals: doorways whose stone jambs have small benches built in to the left and right, set in artfully designed shell-shaped niches. The master of the house and his family would sit there, chatting with the neighbours and keeping an eye on what was going on in the street. Pirna has one of the largest collections of such portals in the whole of Saxony. A particularly fine one is at the Peter-Ulrich-Haus on the market square, which the master builder built for himself in 1506 – it is considered one of the oldest and most perfectly formed seat-niche portals in Saxony. From 1572 the town’s first pharmacy was on the ground floor of this house. Another beautiful portal belongs to the house at Niedere Burgstraße 1, which the master builder Wolf Blechschmidt remodelled around 1544, with a bust of the master above the entrance. When you stroll through Pirna, take a look at the doorways: in almost every lane you will find such stone seats, some with coats of arms, dates or inscriptions. They tell of a time when Pirna was a confident, wealthy town that was quite prepared to measure itself against Dresden.
5. Pirnisch Eisen – Pirna and the Bielatal
One chapter of Pirna’s history leads straight to your accommodation here in the Bielatal. In the hills south of Pirna, around Berggießhübel, Bad Gottleuba and in the valley of the Biela, iron ore had been mined since the Middle Ages – a particularly rich magnetite ore. From it grew a whole landscape of hammer mills, blast furnaces and charcoal burners’ sites. The iron from this area was called Pirnisch Eisen, “Pirna iron”, after the town through which it was traded and administered. In Berggießhübel ore mining is first documented in 1388. In the valleys of the Gottleuba, Seidewitz and Biela, numerous hammer mills were built in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The principle was the same everywhere: a waterwheel on the stream drove heavy hammers via a long shaft, forging the glowing iron and freeing it from slag. In addition, charcoal was needed in huge quantities, which the charcoal burners produced in the forests. And people were needed: miners, hammersmiths, carters, charcoal burners. To administer and tax all this, in 1472 the sovereign set up an Eisenkammer, an iron chamber, in Pirna – an authority responsible for the entire Pirna iron district. It existed until 1686. So Pirna was not only a trading town and a centre of stonemasonry, but also the capital of an early industrial region. The Hammergut Neidberg, where you are staying, is very much part of this history. It is first mentioned in 1470 as smedeberg, that is Schmiedeberg, “called der Neytbergk”. In 1548 and still in the eighteenth century it is recorded as an Amtshammer – a hammer mill under the supervision of the Pirna district office. In 1661 Neidberg received a blast furnace and thus became one of the blast-furnace sites of the Pirnisch Eisen. The Biela, which today flows so peacefully past the house, drove the wheels back then, and the noise of the hammers could be heard throughout the valley. The iron from the district went on sale in the form of bar iron, sheet metal and tools, and some of it also went to the armourers. Success had its downside: the blast furnaces and hammers devoured so much wood that the surrounding forests were stripped bare. In the eighteenth century the shortage of wood was one of the area’s biggest problems. On top of that came competition from cheaper iron from other regions, and in the nineteenth century modern ironworks using hard coal displaced the old charcoal blast furnaces. The hammer mills in the Bielatal gradually became mills, sawmills and finally homes. But traces remain to this day: the old Brausenstein blast furnace in the valley, remnants of slag on the banks, mill races and the names of many houses. If you would like to know more, ask me about the history of the Hammergut or the Bielatal – there are many more stories to tell, from the hammer masters to the Otter King.
6. Johann Tetzel and the Dominicans
Around the year 1465 a boy was born in Pirna whose name would later appear in every history book: Johann Tetzel. He was probably the son of a goldsmith; on the Schmiedestraße stands the so-called Tetzelhaus, which is regarded as his birthplace, although this is not entirely certain. Tetzel studied in Leipzig and joined the Dominican order there – the same order that also had a friary in Pirna. He was a gifted and eloquent preacher, and the Church employed him for a special task: preaching indulgences. According to the teaching of the time, an indulgence was a remission of temporal punishment for sins, that is, of punishments that a soul had to serve in purgatory after death. It could be obtained through prayers, pilgrimages, good works – and also for money, which flowed into the Church’s coffers. In 1517, on behalf of Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz, Tetzel travelled through central Germany promoting the great St Peter’s indulgence, which was intended, among other things, to finance the rebuilding of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. His sermons were graphic: he painted vivid pictures of the torments of the dead in purgatory and promised redemption. The famous saying is attributed to him: “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.” Whether he said it in exactly those words we don’t know – but it went to the heart of what outraged many people about this trade. One of them was a monk and professor in Wittenberg: Martin Luther. When people from Wittenberg went to Tetzel to buy letters of indulgence and then believed they no longer needed to do penance, Luther wrote his 95 Theses against indulgences on 31 October 1517. This began the Reformation, which changed Europe for ever. Tetzel defended indulgences in counter-pamphlets, but he soon became a target of ridicule and was even dropped by his own Church. He withdrew to the friary in Leipzig and died there in 1519, lonely and broken. According to tradition, Luther is said to have written him a consoling letter shortly before his death. Pirna did not like to remember the town’s most famous son. After the Reformation there were even murals in the town church mocking the trade in indulgences; they were not painted over until 1708. Today the town is more relaxed about Tetzel: the Tetzelhaus is shown as a historic building, and guided tours tell his story as part of the great history of the Reformation. Pirna’s Dominican friary also came in for criticism even before the Reformation. Citizens and sovereigns complained about the way some of the friars lived, and around 1500 there was a long dispute between the friary and a widow from Pirna that went as far as excommunication. When the Reformation came, the friary had hardly any support left in the town. How that came about I’ll tell you in the next chapter.
7. The Reformation comes to Pirna
Although Luther had published his theses in 1517 only a few days’ journey away, the Reformation did not reach Pirna until a good twenty years later. The reason was the sovereign: Duke George of Saxony, known as the Bearded, ruled in Dresden and was a determined opponent of Luther. As long as he lived, Albertine Saxony officially remained Catholic, and anyone who professed Luther’s teaching risked trouble. Many people in Pirna, however, sympathised with the new ideas. As early as 1511 a preacher named Johann Styel had publicly criticised the prior of the friary. In 1537 the town council secretly looked in Wittenberg for a Protestant pastor – for the day when circumstances would change. At the same time, monks from the dissolved monastery of Altzella were quartered in the Pirna friary, which did nothing to ease the tension. On 17 April 1539 Duke George died. His brother and successor, Henry the Pious, was Protestant, and now everything happened very quickly. The town chose Anton Lauterbach from Wittenberg as its pastor. Lauterbach was a close confidant of Luther – he was one of the men who sat at Luther’s table and wrote down his conversations. These Table Talks are still an important source on Luther’s thinking, and Lauterbach was one of their most diligent recorders. In July 1539 visitors came to Pirna – envoys who reorganised church life along the new lines. The Latin Mass and auricular confession were abolished, and Communion was given in both kinds, that is, with bread and wine for all the faithful. On 25 July 1539 Lauterbach baptised for the first time according to the Lutheran order. He became superintendent, the senior clergyman for the whole surrounding area, and remained so until his death in 1569 – thirty years in which he shaped church life in Pirna. For the Dominican friary this was the end. In 1540 the estates of the land decided to confiscate the monastic property. The friars were allowed to stay, but no new ones joined. By 1542 only four friars were still living in the friary, and by 1548 the last had died or left. In 1552 the buildings were sold to citizens of Pirna. The friary church then served secular purposes for a long time and only became a place of worship again in the twentieth century – since 1957 it has once more been a Catholic church. The Reformation changed more than just the services. Schools were reorganised; in 1555 a girls’ school was founded in Pirna, the Mägdleinschule on the Kirchplatz, whose building still stands. Poor relief and care for the sick, which had previously been the responsibility of monasteries and confraternities, passed to the town. And the great town church, which had been begun as a Catholic church, was now completed as a Protestant one – with a pictorial programme in which Lauterbach himself had a hand. I’ll tell you about that in the next chapter.
8. The Marienkirche – a heaven of stone
Anyone who enters Pirna’s town church of St. Marien instinctively tips their head back. Above the space stretches a vault that looks like a net of stone, like tendrils and branches growing out of the pillars. The Marienkirche is one of the most beautiful Late Gothic churches in Saxony, and it says a great deal about the town’s wealth and ambition around 1500. A church already stood here in the thirteenth century. The tower was built between 1466 and 1479; it is older than the present hall, and because the plans were later changed, parts of the tower are now inside the church. In 1502 the Pirna master mason Peter Ulrich, known as Peter von Pirna, began building a large new hall church. In a hall church all the aisles are the same height, creating a wide, light-filled space. Peter Ulrich died in 1513 or 1514, and his successor Markus Ribisch carried on building until the money ran out around 1523. Then the building site lay idle for more than a decade. Only from 1537 was work resumed under Wolf Blechschmidt; the vault was closed in 1544 and 1545, and in 1546 the church was complete. At 65 metres long and 35 metres wide, it is one of the largest hall churches in Saxony, after those in Görlitz and Annaberg-Buchholz. Eight slender, octagonal pillars support the vault. Above the choir you can see a vault with fish-bladder tracery, elsewhere ribs that twist in spirals or look like wood shavings, and even ribs in the shape of branches. Hidden beneath these branch ribs are two stone figures, a Wild Man and a Wild Woman – a little discovery for observant visitors. But what is really special is the painting of the vault. It was done in 1545 and 1546, precisely at the time when the Reformation had been introduced in Pirna. The painters, probably including Jobst Dorndorff, used the woodcuts of the 1532 Luther Bible as models and painted biblical scenes on the ceiling, together with virtues, children at play and mythical creatures. The first Protestant pastor, Anton Lauterbach, helped devise the pictorial programme. Some of the pictures carry a clear message: Luther and Melanchthon appear as evangelists, and wolves in bishops’ mitres stand for the papacy as the reformers saw it. So the ceiling can also be read as a confession of the new faith in stone and paint. The furnishings are magnificent too. The pulpit dates from around 1520. The font of 1561 has a base around which twenty-six little figures of children play, climb and tussle – many visitors stop in front of it with a smile. The great sandstone altar was created by the brothers Michael and David Schwenke at the beginning of the seventeenth century; it is about ten metres high and shows the Resurrection of Christ at its centre. The tower is topped by a Baroque cupola. Until the early twentieth century a tower keeper lived up there, keeping a lookout for fires and sounding the hours on his horn; his lodgings can be visited today. And since 1994 the tower has housed the only seven-bell peal in the Saxon regional church. When you are in Pirna, take your time over this church – and over the view from the tower across the rooftops of the old town to the Elbe Sandstone Mountains.
9. The Sonnenstein fortress and the Pirnaische Elend
High above the old town towers Schloss Sonnenstein. From 1544 Duke Moritz of Saxony turned the medieval castle into a modern state fortress, with bastions and ramparts designed to withstand the cannon of the new age. Only a few years later it had to prove itself: in 1547, during the Schmalkaldic War, the Sonnenstein withstood a siege. In the seventeenth century the fortress was strengthened further. Then came the Thirty Years’ War. At first Pirna was spared the fighting, but the war reached the town in another way. In Bohemia, after his victory over the Protestant estates, the Emperor had the Protestant faithful given a choice: become Catholic or leave the country. Many thousands went into exile, and nearby Protestant Saxony was the first destination. Around 1629 more than two thousand Bohemian religious refugees were living in Pirna, an enormous number for a town of its size. Among them were nobles, clergy, craftsmen and farmers. They brought skills and connections with them, but also hardship, and the town had to provide for them. Pirna suffered its heaviest blow in 1639. In 1635 Saxony had changed sides and made peace with the Emperor – which suddenly turned the Swedes, its former allies, into enemies. A Swedish army under Field Marshal Johan Banér marched into Saxony. On 23 April 1639 the Swedes stormed the town. What followed went down in history as the Pirnaische Elend, the “Misery of Pirna”: plundering, violence, torture, fires. Around six hundred inhabitants lost their lives. The fortress on the Sonnenstein, however, held out; the Swedes besieged it in vain for months. One man became the town’s hero during this time: the apothecary Theophilus Jacobäer. He negotiated with the occupiers and ensured that the town was not burnt down completely. Pirna still honours him as its saviour, and a local historical play tells his story. I’ll gladly tell you the whole story of the Pirnaische Elend in detail – the storming, the siege and the saviour – if you ask me about it; it is one of the most moving chapters in the region’s history. After the war Pirna was on its knees. The population had fallen sharply, many houses stood empty or were destroyed, and the town was heavily in debt. Reconstruction took decades. From around 1670 the Sonnenstein fortress was further extended in line with the latest principles of fortification. A flood on the Elbe in January 1651, which inundated the market square, did not make life any easier. And no sooner had the town recovered than the wars of the early eighteenth century, above all Augustus the Strong’s Great Northern War, again cost a great deal of money: around 1707 Pirna had debts of more than a hundred thousand thalers. But the Baroque age also brought splendour to the town – more about that in the next chapter.
10. Baroque Pirna
a princely wedding and Canaletto: In the late summer of 1719 Pirna was, for a few days, the setting for one of the greatest celebrations Saxony had ever seen. The Electoral Prince Friedrich August, son of Augustus the Strong, had married the Emperor’s daughter Maria Josepha in Vienna. The marriage was intended to seal the bond between Saxony and the House of Habsburg and to strengthen Augustus’s claims. When the bride arrived in Saxony, the festivities began in Pirna. From here the young couple travelled down the Elbe to Dresden in a magnificent gondola, accompanied by a whole fleet of decorated boats – a water parade that opened weeks of wedding celebrations. In Dresden there followed fireworks, operas, hunts and tournaments named after the planets. In 2019, three hundred years later, this journey from Pirna to Dresden was re-enacted with historic gondolas. A little over thirty years later a guest came to Pirna to whom the town owes its most famous picture. Bernardo Bellotto, the nephew of the Venetian painter Canaletto and himself known by that name, was court painter in Dresden. Between 1753 and 1755 he painted eleven large views of Pirna and the Sonnenstein. He showed the town with a precision comparable to a photograph: the houses on the market square down to every window, the Marienkirche, the fortress on the rock, the Elbe with its boats, the people going about their business. The most famous of these pictures shows Pirna’s market square. If you stand on the market square today, you can recognise the painting almost house by house. That is why the building at Markt 7, which now houses the tourist information office, is called the Canalettohaus. It dates from the first half of the sixteenth century and has a tall three-storey gable, Gothic tracery on the windows and Gothic wall paintings inside. Bellotto’s paintings now hang in Dresden in the Old Masters Picture Gallery and in other museums. In Pirna a Canalettoweg leads to the spots from which he painted, and information boards let you compare the picture with today’s view. Eighteenth-century Pirna was no longer the rich trading town it had been two hundred years earlier. Trade on the Elbe had declined, the staple right was losing its importance, and the wars had left debts behind. In their place new trades emerged. In the 1750s work also began on equipping the town with an underground sewer, the so-called Stadtschleuse, which eventually reached two kilometres in length – a remarkable achievement for a small town. In 1774 the first manufactories appeared, calico printing works where cotton fabrics were printed. But the peaceful times that Bellotto had painted so cheerfully were already over by the time he finished his pictures: in the late summer of 1756 the Prussian army stood at the gates, and on the plateaus above Pirna one of the most dramatic chapters in Saxon military history began.
11. The camp at Pirna in 1756 and Napoleon in 1813
At the end of August 1756 the Prussian king Frederick II invaded Saxony without a declaration of war. The Saxon army was small, about eighteen thousand men, and stood no chance in an open battle. So it withdrew into a natural fortress: the plateau between Pirna and Königstein, near Struppen and Thürmsdorf, an upland protected on three sides by steep cliffs and the Elbe. The fortresses of Sonnenstein and Königstein covered the flanks. There, it was hoped, the army could hold out until Austrian troops came to its aid. The camp at Pirna became a trap. The Prussians surrounded it, and the supplies lasted only a few weeks. The soldiers starved and the horses died. An Austrian army that was supposed to come to the rescue was held up at Lobositz in Bohemia. On the night of 12 to 13 October the Saxons tried to break out to the other side of the Elbe over a pontoon bridge, but in the rain and mud below the Lilienstein the attempt got bogged down. On 14 October the Sonnenstein fortress surrendered. On 16 October 1756 the whole army capitulated. Frederick had the Saxon soldiers forcibly put into Prussian regiments – a measure that was considered outrageous even at the time. Many deserted at the next opportunity and made their way to the Austrians. The Saxon king Augustus III was allowed to leave for Poland. Today memorial stones on the plateau commemorate the camp. Two years later, in 1758, Austrian and Imperial troops besieged the Prussian garrison on the Sonnenstein, which surrendered on 5 September. After that the fortress was slighted, that is, rendered unusable. Half a century later war came to Pirna again, with the most powerful man in Europe. In 1813, after the failed Russian campaign, Napoleon was fighting in Saxony to hold on to his power. Pirna lay on the road to Bohemia, from where the allied armies were approaching. Napoleon stayed in Pirna himself in September 1813 and had the Sonnenstein made ready as a fortress once more. For the people up there this was a catastrophe – more about that in a moment. Around Pirna, at Kulm and Nollendorf across the border, there was fierce fighting during these weeks, and soldiers and Cossacks also passed through the Bielatal. Napoleon himself is said to have been at the Napoleonstein near Langenhennersdorf, very close to where you are staying – legend has it that a cannonball narrowly missed him there. Incidentally, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe also visited the town in the autumn of 1813. After the Battle of the Nations at Leipzig in October 1813, Napoleon’s rule over Germany was over. For Pirna a quieter time began – and on the Sonnenstein an entirely new chapter, which had in fact already begun in 1811.
13. An industrial town on the Elbe
In the nineteenth century Pirna changed from a quiet country town of farming burghers into an industrial town. It all began with transport. In 1837 the first steamships sailed on the Elbe, and on 31 July 1848 the railway from Dresden to Pirna opened, soon extended through the Elbe valley into Bohemia. The neoclassical station bore witness to the town’s self-confidence. For the first time, day-trippers now came in large numbers: Pirna became the starting point for walks in Saxon Switzerland. Politically it was a turbulent time. In the revolutionary year of 1848 the naturalist Emil Adolf Roßmäßler represented the Pirna constituency in the first German parliament in St Paul’s Church in Frankfurt. When the May Uprising broke out in Dresden in 1849, citizens of Pirna went there too; one of them was killed by Prussian soldiers. The Elbe flood of March 1845, the so-called Saxon Deluge, put the old town under water. Then came the factories. An enamelling works was built in 1862, followed by mechanical engineering, a glassworks, a pulp mill and, in 1909, an artificial silk factory that remained one of the town’s biggest employers for decades. The sandstone quarries continued to supply stone all over the world, and cargo barges floated on the Elbe. In 1875 Pirna’s first permanent bridge over the Elbe was completed, a sandstone bridge linking Pirna with Copitz on the other side. In 1859 the first gas lamp was lit on the market square, in 1861 the town museum was founded, and in 1912 the public electricity supply began. Pirna also became a garrison town. Between 1887 and 1906 large barracks were built, the Grey and the Red Barracks, and soldiers became part of the townscape. The population grew strongly: around 1800 some five thousand people lived in Pirna, by 1890 there were almost fourteen thousand. With the incorporations of 1922 and 1923, above all of Copitz on the right bank of the Elbe, the figure rose to more than thirty thousand. From 1924 Pirna was an independent town outside the district. The working class was numerous and politically alert. In October 1923, at a time of great hardship and inflation, the Reichswehr put down a strike; two young workers were shot dead. A serious disaster came with the flood of 1927, when the Gottleuba and the Seidewitz burst their banks after a storm; in Neundorf alone nine people died, thirteen in all. From 1928 the first town buses ran. In these years Pirna was a typical Saxon industrial town: busy, noisy, with smoking chimneys along the Elbe and an old town that was slowly falling into the shadow of the new districts. I’ll tell you about the hard years that now followed in the last chapter.
14. War, the GDR, the Wende and the flood
In March 1933 the NSDAP won over forty per cent of the vote in the Pirna area. As early as 9 March books were burnt in the Breite Straße, and the persecution of political opponents began. During the pogrom night in November 1938 Jewish shops in Pirna were also destroyed. What happened on the Sonnenstein in 1940 and 1941 I told you in the chapter about the killing centre. In the last year of the war the bombs came. On 19 April 1945 bombers specifically targeted the Elbe bridge and the railway installations; more than two hundred people died. On 8 May 1945 the Red Army entered Pirna. In all, the town mourned around three thousand five hundred dead in the war, most of them soldiers at the fronts. The old town, however, unlike Dresden’s, had largely survived. After the war Pirna belonged to the Soviet occupation zone and then to the GDR. The large companies were expropriated and turned into state-owned enterprises, the artificial silk works for example. Nearby, at Königstein, the Wismut company began mining uranium, and thousands of workers moved to the area. For them, between 1965 and 1983, the large new Sonnenstein estate of prefabricated blocks was built on the heights above the town. The old town, on the other hand, fell into decay. There was neither money nor material to maintain the old houses; many stood empty, roofs began to leak, and some buildings had to be demolished. By the end of the 1980s the situation was dramatic: part of the historic building stock seemed lost. The peaceful revolution of 1989 came just in time. From 1990 a comprehensive restoration began, with public funding, a great deal of civic commitment and craftsmen who learnt the old techniques anew. House by house, the old town was saved. Today Pirna’s old town is considered one of the most beautiful ensembles in Saxony. In 1997 Pirna became a Große Kreisstadt, a major district town, in 1999 the second Elbe bridge opened, and in 2005 the town was connected to the motorway to Prague. Since 2008 Pirna has been the seat of the district of Sächsische Schweiz-Osterzgebirge – the district office is partly housed on the Sonnenstein. But the Elbe also reminded the town of its power. In August 2002 the river rose to a record level that surpassed all previous floods. The old town stood metres deep in water, shops, homes and workshops were destroyed, and houses that had only just been restored were damaged again. In June 2013 came the next major flood. On many houses marks show how high the water rose – it is worth looking out for them on your walk. Each time, Pirna has got back on its feet. Today around forty thousand people live here. The old town with its seat-niche portals, the Marienkirche, the Canalettohaus and the view from the Sonnenstein over the Elbe make Pirna a place where you can experience almost eight hundred years of history within a few hundred metres. And for you in the Bielatal it is very close: barely twenty minutes by car or by the bus that stops right outside the house.
As of: 10/2026
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