Dresden - hauntingly beautiful

Dresden is a Romantic’s city, with ghosts as hauntingly beautiful as the baroque masterpieces that have re-emerged from the ashes since the fire bombings of February 1945. The eerie spaces between buildings and the faint whispers of the ruins that still dominate the city are as much an attraction as the thriving cultural Mecca Dresden has worked so hard to become once again.

Enter the city by car and you will pass the gas stations, chain grocery stores, and concrete block apartment buildings that skirt almost every German city, gazing anxiously out of the passenger-side window, and waiting for a sign of the city once heralded as the German Vienna. Then suddenly you’ll find yourself right in the heart of the city, beige stone buildings lining cobblestone streets and the shy skyline peering at you over low Neustadt buildings.

The old city skyline—which has been completely rebuilt in the last fifty years—sits quietly by the river, stoically gazing over the serenely wild banks of the Elbe into dark memories. In spite of the scars and perhaps because of them, Dresden is breathtakingly beautiful. You’ll love the city for its stony-stoicism, for its distant, tragic air, even for its abandoned buildings and her shrapnel-pocked facades. You’ll love Dresden because you’ll never really be able to wrap your mind around what has happened to here. The city remains, like the dark, quiet stranger at a party, untouchable, mysterious, alluring, and beautiful. And that’s just by night.

By day Dresden is a friendly city, with a month’s worth of personalities to explore. There is the historical side where you can stroll down quaint cobbled streets flitting between churches, the castle, and the Zwinger’s ornate courtyard. There’s a classy side, where you can spend the day perusing the galleries of old masters and then, tipsy from a local vineyard’s wine, take in a night of opera. There is a hip young Dresden that can be found in one of the small locally owned pubs on the graffiti-smeared Neustadt streets. There is a burly, traditional side where you can spend the day hiking in the nearby Saxon Switzerland and the evening eating hot bratwurst, knödel and red cabbage with a large, cold glass of Radeberger beer, fresh from the tap.

Dresden is a city of contrasts. Where refined culture, baroque architecture, delicious wine, and fine art live comfortably among empty buildings, rambunctious idealistic bohemians, and fifty-year old scars. A capital city that combines a distinctly East-German attitude and ambience with an economy racing ahead to meet that of the West. An enchanting city, with a history as tenable as it’s rich cultural present. They even claim to have invented toothpaste.