Manfred Berger

I first visited Dresden some five years after German re-unification, in 1996. The city was just emerging from some forty years of austerity and beginning to get to grips with reconstruction; but much of it still looked as it did in the East German era. There was a particular patina of soot and dust that I quickly came to associate with the former East Germany, and the railway stations of Dresden had it in spades.

I saw three stations; Dresden Hauptbahnhof was a massive station on two levels, with an impressive overall roof and public circulating areas that were lofty halls, made more mysterious by the dim DDR-era lighting in the December darkness. Dresden Neustadt was a smaller station, but still with an impressive overall roof. And we passed through Dresden Mitte (formerly Wettinerstraße), which consisted only of open platforms at first-storey level, with sufficient remains to suggest the earlier overall roof that had not survived the bombing of Dresden in February 1945.

Or did it? I found out from this publication that although Wettinerstraße suffered in the bombing, its overall roof structure survived despite losing all its glass. But it was in one of the parts of the city devastated in the bombing, and it was decided that it was easier and cheaper to demolish the structure than leave it in its skeletal form.

Dresden was one of the earliest centres of the German railway system, with the first line to Leipzig, being opened in 1838. The Leipzig station was joined in fairly quick succession as other lines opened, by the Silesian station, the Bohemian station and the Berlin station. In the throes of an earlier process of German unification, starting from 1890 the Saxon state decided that the railway arrangements for their capital should be rationalised. Dresden's role as an interchange was becoming more important, but the separation of the passenger stations made interchange difficult. And if it was difficult for passengers, for goods it was almost intolerable. So the Kingdom of Saxony commissioned new stations befitting their fine city.

The rebuilding of Dresden's railway stations left its mark on the city; and the stations came through the bombing reasonably intact. When I last visited in 2011, the Hauptbahnhof was looking well fettled and the city prosperous; though in a way, this felt less grounded, more corporate. Outside the station, there used to be a large open space, which I had always assumed was a consequence of the bombing. But this book showed me that the open space was the site of the Bohemian station; it had been projected as a public open space in the original plans of 1892; but in 2011, it had been built over in corporate chrome and steel and glass.

This book dates from the immediate aftermath of reunification; the contemporay photographs show the Dresden of 1991, This world has vanished; this book is a valuable record of that time as well as a useful history of the development of a major transport hub..… (mehr)