Feeling Fragmented

Dresden, Germany
For the next few weeks I'll be travelling Europe - attending the International Communication Association conference in Dresden and CATaC (Cultural Attitudes towards Technology and Communication) in Tartu, Estonia, as well as taking the opportunity to visit some old friends and family. The first leg of the journey is now finally complete - after 30 hours flight and four hours on the train we've arrived in Dresden. This is my first time in Germany in six years, and only the second time I'm back here since I left for Australia in 2006, so I'm interested to see how the place has changed - and of course the World Cup is on as well so there's plenty else happening right now.

It's also my first time in Dresden, and really anywhere in what used to be East Germany, which makes this a doubly fascinating visit. Having had a few hours to walk around the city centre (albeit in a fairly fragmented, jetlagged state), what surprises me is how much this place remains a work in progress: Dresden was of course practically flattened by a murderous British bombing raid late in WW2, a senseless and spiteful revenge attack for similarly murderous German attacks on Coventry and other U.K. cities, and some 90% of the city were destroyed, including many of its well-known baroque sites. Afterwards, in the East German state, there was little energy or enthusiasm for restoring heritage buildings, and instead the focus was on functional, large-scale housing developments, so that it is only now that there are serious attempts to restore the city to its former beauty.

In the Altstadt or old town of Dresden, in fact, there's an entire group of blocks around the newly-rebuilt Frauenkirche church which is now being redeveloped in the original baroque style, while in many other places around town there's a strange mix of some few surviving original buildings, some 1950s East German concrete monstrosities which largely seem slated for demolition, many building sites, and some open grasslands which were clearly never reused after the war. And there are even starker reminders of wartime devastation: most of the few remaining historical structures are still blackened (and I mean blackened) by soot from the 1944 firestorms, while others, like the Frauenkirche which mixes some of the original foundations with the brand-new rebuilt parts, appear as a pock-marked patchwork of the new and the old.

The result, on a micro as well as a macro level, is one of fragmentation. Individual structures feel somehow unsure of themselves, as well as isolated from one another; while there clearly remains a city centre at least in spirit, in reality it is broken up by open areas ready to be rebuilt; and overall I felt surprised at how deserted the city felt - but then, it is Sunday afternoon in the summer holiday (and World Cup) season, and the story may well be different during the week.

As we walked home from dinner to the hotel tonight (well done to the Socceroos, by the way - the 0:2 scoreline does not reflect the quality of their performance against Brazil), there were some hot air balloons overhead. I'd love to see what the city looks like from their perspective: a patchwork gradually being restitched, perhaps? I can't help but wonder if the painstaking recreation of pre-war Dresden, almost three quarters of a century later, can possibly be successful, though - but then again, for a city whose development was so thoroughly interrupted by war and the stagnation under East German rule which followed, what else is there to do?

We'll be in Berlin for a day at the end of this week - I'll be interested to see how it has fared by comparison.

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