Dresden: The Porcelain City

“Hope is the feathered thing,” said Emily Dickinson, “And sore must be the storm/ That could abash the little bird/ That kept so many warm.” The storm was sore indeed for the German city of Dresden in February 1945 when about 1,300 American and British bombers dropped 3,900 tons of incendiary bombs creating a fire storm so intense that high velocity winds were sucked into its core to feed its fire.

When all was said and done, just 6 percent of the Old Town was left standing. It was payback for what the Luftwaffe had done to London. It’s been reported that the last thing dropped on Dresden in 1945 was literally a kitchen sink. When it was all over, American prisoner of war Kurt Vonnegut Jr. wandered out of Schlachthof 5, the slaughterhouse that had served as his bomb shelter.

It’s one of the most moving memories in the novel Slaughterhouse 5, when the shell shocked protagonist Billy Pilgrim tries to comprehend the devastating fire that had rained down on Dresden transforming it from a Baroque urban jewelry box to a lifeless plain of smoking rubble plain of rubble. The only thing standing was the statue of Martin Luther in front of the Frauenkirche.

Metamorphosis has been a persistent theme throughout Dresden’s 800-year history, but this transformation had reduced gold to rubble. Luckily it would not be the city’s last metamorphosis. Dresden was the city of August the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland. He told his architects to turn “music into stone,” and they did, erecting Baroque monuments such as the Zwinger and the Bruhl Terrace. This was the age of Voltaire, J.S. Bach and the young Frederick the Great. The king held elaborate masques and balls. He observed no restraint. His mistresses were legion. He drank and ate prodigiously and sired more than 300 children.

He also hired alchemists to find a way to turn base metals into gold. Though alchemists are remembered today more as fakirs than scientists, they were none-the-less meddling with chemistry and metallurgy in their labs. In 1707, August’s alchemists bumbled in their quest for gold and mistakenly uncovered the long sought after secret of porcelain production. Europe had tried to pry that secret from their Chinese trading partners for centuries and with no luck.

It wasn’t the yellow gold that August had been seeking, but it turned out to be white gold. Dresden was producing Europe’s first porcelain just in time to create the china for the new hot drinks that were coming in from the exotic Indies, East and West such as tea from India, coffee and hot chocolate from the New World.

Not content with just cups, saucers and tea pots, the Baroque imagination seized the new porcelain medium to create thousands of figurines of lute playing satyrs, forest nymphs, courtiers in powdered wigs, cupid archers, winged horses and more. And it still goes on. A few miles outside of Dresden in the town of Meissen, visitors explore the galleries of the town’s famous porcelain manufactory. August the Strong opened it in 1710 and it’s been producing hand-made porcelain ever since.

Every year about a half million visitors tour the Meissen Manufactory, watching craftsmen assemble angels, paint flowers on dishes and spin potters wheels. Some 2,000 molds and 10,000 colors are still being used from Meissen’s more than three centuries of original motifs and molds as some 600 artists go daily to their work benches, their wheels and their kilns.

The high heat produced in these kilns would come to the streets of the city in 1945 as the bombing attack created a fire storm that literally fed on its own energy. Despite the high temperatures reached, a ceramic mural of some 35 Princes from the House of Wettin along the Procession of Princes in the Old Town survived it all. Born in fire, the ceramic substance of the mural was immune to high heat and so porcelain and ceramic had become the indestructible core spirit of the city.

It’s said that the leaders of the German Democratic Republic were content to leave Dresden’s Old Town in rubble. Apparently, they wanted to use the devastation for Cold War propaganda purposes, to nurture contempt for the Western powers that had destroyed the city. Some reconstruction was done, but the pace was really picked up after the Iron Curtain came down.

Ten years ago the reconstruction of the Frauenkirche was completed. The church, originally built in 1743, became the symbol of Dresden’s resurrection and contributions came from around the world. The final task was the crowning of its dome with a golden cross and that job was done by the grandson of one of the RAF pilots who participated in the bombing.

When you look at the Frauenkirche and other rebuilt structures you can tell the original bricks from the new ones because the originals are still black from the firebombing. It may take a century for them all to become one color. Memory is like that.

When I first came to Dresden in 2003, the city felt like Europe’s Hiroshima, but today it feels more like what it had always been called before the war, “Germany’s Florence.”

Once again, the stone is making music in Dresden and the Elbe is home to river cruisers instead of gun boats.

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