Dresden Rebuilt

In five years of war, only a handful of bombs fell on Dresden, a city celebrated by the Poet-Philosopher Herder as Germany's "Florence on the Elbe." Devoted to art and architecture and free of all but a few light industries, the city came to be known as "the safest air-raid shelter in the Reich." On Feb. 13, 1945, Dresden's virtual immunity ended in one of the worst holocausts of World War II.*

Before the last note of Der Rosenkavalier could be sung at Architect Gottfried Semper's century-old opera house that night, the first wave of bombers thundered over the lovely cupolas, towers and spires of the doomed city. In the next 14 hours, 1,400 British Lancasters and American Flying Fortresses dropped 3,749 tons of explosives. Some 650,000 incendiary bombs created a swirling "firestorm" that sucked everything around it into the inferno's center. Columns of smoke plumed three miles into the glowing sky as the city burned for eight nights. Corpses, some shrunk to 3 ft. by the intense, fiery heat, littered the ground. Anywhere from 35,000 to 135,000 civilians perished.

The city's center was 75% destroyed. Gutted ruins and smoldering rubble were all that remained of Dresden's justly renowned Baroque and Renaissance gems. Close to 200 paintings by Dutch and Italian masters were lost. Last week 150,000 people sadly commemorated the 25th anniversary of the raid with speeches in the city's Altmarkt. At 10 p.m., the exact hour the bombing began, Dresden's church bells tolled a mournful peal.

Cultural Memorial. Today Dresden's artistic monuments are finally rising again. Despite critical food and housing shortages right after the war, the East German Communist government made the restoration of Germany's Florence a top priority. Ultimately, the project will cost $27.3 million.

After revisiting Dresden, TIME Correspondent George Taber reported: "Standing in the Theaterplatz, you see the rebuilt Hofkirche and the art gallery with the Zwinger Museum in the back. But you also see the bombed-out skeletons of the opera and the royal palace. It is not a morose but an ambivalent feeling one has in Dresden. The restoration of the old masterpieces is encouraging and uplifting, but the sight of the unreconstructed ones reminds one of the senselessness of the attack.

"Though local publications always refer to it as 'the Anglo-American bombing,' there really seems to be very little resentment against either nation. 'No, there's no hatred. We just try to forget about that whole bombing, and when you do that, you forget about who did it,' said a retired engineer. But a local journalist commented: 'We can understand the British more than the Americans because we bombed their cities.' "

The first task in the reconstruction was restoring the Baroque 18th century Zwinger (literally, the Keep). In 1946, 150 master stonemasons went to work; it took them 16 years to complete the job. Alongside the Zwinger, Semper's famous Gemaldegalerie (Art Gallery) once again exhibits Raphael's Sistine Madonna, twelve Rembrandts (including his Portrait of Saskia), 1 6 Rubenses, five Titians and two Vermeers. Gaetano Chiaveri's Baroque 18th century Hofkirche (Court Church) is finished and used regularly for Catholic services. The old Landhaus (Statehouse), an imposing mansion reminiscent of Versailles, has been turned into a museum (see color pag?). The exquisite Kronentor (Crown Gate) on the moated Zwinger has been restored to its original splendor. The royal palace and the opera house are to be rebuilt by 1980.

Then there is the Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady), whose majestic 310-ft. dome once dominated the center of Dresden. Like Hiroshima's Industrial Promotion Hall, it will be left in ruins, a mute reminder of the thought expressed by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. in his Dresden novel, Slaughterhouse 5: "There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre."

*Why this seemingly pointless air raid? In his history of World War II, Churchill argues somewhat dubiously that Dresden was a "center of communications of Germany's Eastern Front." The official Royal Air Force war history says the bombing was necessary to disrupt the German retreat before the onrushing Red Army. The U.S. State Department has said that it was in response to Stalin's request for "increased aerial support." British Historian David Irving, maintains, however, that the attack was a purely political act, designed "to impress the Soviet delegation" after the Yalta talks on postwar political problems. And many Germans still feel the bombing was vengeance for the destruction of Coventry, England, on Nov. 14, 1940.

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