Prague Journal

Saturday, February 26, 2005.

Waking up at 5am was not easy, especially after only four hours’ sleep. But I rallied and was on the 6am bus, along with only about 6 others. No cars were in sight until we reached the metro station. Six people were waiting to board the bus at the Hradcanska end. Once inside the metro, however, there were many people headed somewhere early Saturday morning. The newsstand was already doing a brisk business, although other kiosks had not yet been set up. The metro to the train station was quite packed, mostly with people carrying skis, but the train station was fairly empty and quiet. Veena and I had a whole car to ourselves most of the way to Dresden. We were both tired and should have slept, but instead talked for most of the 2 ½ hour trip, gazing occasionally at the lovely scenery.
This particular morning Veena and I were headed to Dresden, former capital of the Electorate of Saxony. The city suffered terrible destruction during WWII, and, although there is still a lot of construction going on, most of the old buildings have been rebuilt, even in the historical part of town. We arrived in Dresden shortly before 10 am and by 10:30 had checked into a hotel near the train station. We felt like we had the whole day ahead of us, but the time passed quickly. We sat down in a little café to plan our itinerary and by the time we set out to the sculpture museum it was already 11:30!
Our first stop was the Church of the Holy Cross in the center of the square, the largest protestant church in Central Europe. Originally built in 1743, this church is a splendid but austere building, with rough cement walls as a reminder of its many destructions, the last of which was in 1945. We headed toward Theater Square to the Semper Opera House, but it was closed.
We walked through the center of town to the Residenzschloss, the former Dresden Royal Palace, now a museum, to visit the New Green Vault, an extraordinary collection of clocks, goldwork, and jeweled decorative objets d’art from the mogul emperors. Former seat of the Saxon royal family, Residenzschloss Palace was built between the 12th-19th centuries and exhibits a magnificent array of different architectural features from the Romantic, Renaissance, Baroque and neo-Renaissance eras. As with most historical buildings in Dresden, this too was heavily damaged during World War II, but is gradually being reconstructed. The Crown Jewels, Coin Museum and Copperplate Engraving Collection will move to the palace when the building is complete. We did see the world’s largest green diamond, and some of the collections of classic and modern art, but we didn’t take time to visit the Old Masters Gallery, since we had a long list of sites we wanted to see, all of which closed at 6pm.
As we headed across the square at 2:30, we noticed a line at the opera house, so we stood in line to get in. This would be our only chance to see the opera house, since we had found out that there was no opera to go to this evening. Unfortunately, once inside we were ushered around as part of a group with a German-speaking guide and were forced to spend an hour and a half through lengthy explanations that had absolutely no meaning for either of us. By the time we left the opera house it was 4pm. We both wanted lunch, but instead we walked along the terrace above the riverside ramparts toward the Albertinum, a gallery of 19th and 20th-century paintings and sculptures. Since we only had two hours before everything would be closed, we took a whirlwind trip through the sculpture wing and some of the painting exhibits, and ran across town to the state museum shortly after 5pm, only to find out that it was closed for repairs.
So we went to the Synagogue – a very modern building at the end of the old city area – but of course we could not get in. This synagogue, completed in November 2001, was the first new synagogue to be built in the former East Germany since World War II. The old synagogue was burned to the ground in the 1938 pogrom known as Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass. The synagogue is intended to be a physical reminder of some 6,000 Jews who lived in Dresden in 1932, reduced to 70 by the end of World War II. A community of several hundred Jews has gathered in recent decades.
Apparently, the synagogue was constructed largely through the efforts of Dr. Henry Landsberger, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill professor of sociology emeritus, who helped raise funds for the $10 million building, on the same spot as the original landmark in his hometown. There, Jakob Winter, Landsberger’s grandfather, was senior rabbi for 50 years. In 1939, Landsberger’s mother, fearing for his safety, shipped him to England when he was 12 on one of the Children’s Transports to save Jewish youngsters. His father had just been discharged from the Buchenwald concentration camp. Later, his parents emigrated to Chile. Landsberger went on to American graduate schools and to the UNC faculty in 1968. Landsberger’s work for the synagogue helped foster that understanding partly because of the broad range of people he helped recruit to support the project, including Lutheran pastor Siegfried Reimann, an Episcopal minister in Pittsboro, the wife of a British air force pilot who helped bomb Dresden and now lives in Wilson, the Durham-Chapel Hill Jewish Federation, and American and Dresden businesses, political, and cultural groups. The city of Dresden and the state of Saxony contributed about $8 million to the total project cost. Landsberger receive an Order of Merit in Dresden from the State of Saxony, of which Dresden is the capital city, for “outstanding service in fostering Jewish-non-Jewish understanding.”
Finally, walking in the windy snowy dreary weather, we retired to Ladencafe Aha, a café that Veena had picked out from her guidebook, to have a light dinner. This turned out to be a wonderful choice. We had a lovely vegetarian meal, with a fresh-berry/yogurt cream with almonds for dessert, and took a leisurely stroll back to our hotel, exhausted but refreshed, at 8:30pm.

posted by JWinn @ 10:00 PM