Dresden’s Frauenkirche anchors Saxony’s rebuilt showpiece
Dresden is Saxony’s capital and second city, sprawling along the Elbe—Germany’s second Elbe city after Hamburg. Electors and kings piled artistic splendour here for centuries. Since 1990 reunification it again centres culture and politics; TU Dresden ranks among Germany’s large universities, and about 4.7 million overnight stays mark heavy tourism.
The name comes from Sorbian Drežďany, meaning woods or lowland forest-dwellers. Margrave Dietrich of Meissen used the settlement as an interim residence in 1206, when a 31 March record calls it Dresdene, and a stone bridge crossed the Elbe by 1220 on the line of today’s Augustus Bridge. Under the 1485 Treaty of Leipzig the Wettin brother Albert made it capital of the Duchy of Saxony. Elector Frederick Augustus I, crowned King of Poland as Augustus the Strong in 1697, drew Europe’s best artists and built the Zwinger, the Japanese Palace and Pillnitz.
The Treaty of Dresden ended the Second Silesian War in 1745, but the Seven Years’ War brought capture, recapture and a failed Prussian siege in 1760. Schiller finished his Ode to Joy here in 1785. Napoleon made it capital of a new Kingdom of Saxony in 1806 and won the Battle of Dresden on 27 August 1813. A technical school founded in 1828 grew into TU Dresden, and a railway to Leipzig opened in 1839. The May Uprising of 1849 burned the first opera house and left over 150 dead. Polish exiles including Chopin and Mickiewicz found refuge here.
The Jewish community of over 6,000 shrank to 41 by 1945, and the Semper Synagogue was burned on Kristallnacht. Over 1,300 people were executed at the Münchner Platz courthouse. During the RAF raid that began late on 13 February 1945, 773 Lancasters dropped more than 2,600 tons of bombs on a city crowded with about 300,000 refugees, killing roughly 25,000 people and destroying the Baroque centre once called the Jewel Box.
The ruined Frauenkirche stood as a memorial for fifty years before being rebuilt between 1994 and 2005. Today high-tech firms have earned the region the nickname Silicon Saxony.
Source: Dresden
