es sah einmal wie das aus...

Dresden is one of my favorite cities in Germany, and I think the reason I have hesitated to write anything about it is because I want my words to do it justice.  People go to Berlin and people go to Munich, but for me, no trip to Germany would be complete if I didn't spend time in Dresden.  It's where I have friends, where I know the streets, where I feel comfortable.  In a sea of uncertainty, it was my rock, and here's why: it's been with me since eighth grade.

My first experience of Dresden came from a little book by Kurt Vonnegut called Slaughter-House 5.  Due to "innapropriate" content, it was removed from our English reading list the summer going into ninth grade, but I read it anyway.  I thought it would be really gory, about death and destruction, the kind of things I pretended to be into at that age so I could be "hardxcore"...  Well, it turns out, it really is gory, in a subtle way, and it really is about death and destruction, but not in that glorified, romantic way I liked in all my vampire books.  It's an anti-war book (which, is kind of as pointless as writing an anti-glacier book, Vonnegut notes, since there will always be glaciers [ha ha, that's what they thought in the 60s!], and there will always be wars) about a boy, not a man, who was a prisoner of war during the firebombing of Dresden in February 1945.

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A year later, I did my first homestay in Dresden with Frau Della Flora.  I was fourteen and still too young to drink and really understand much of what was happening.  I looked around with wide-eyed wonder and let Wenke lead me through the streets without really comprehending, without connecting it to anything else in my life.  Everything was so new to me, and I could barely speak German at the time, so as an experience, it just floated around by itself until the next time I was in Dresden, two years later, and the Frauenkirche was open to the public.  Previously, Wenke had taken me by the Frauenkirche, but she had explained that they were still rebuilding it.  Like I said, I didn't connect it to anything, but two years later, two years older, I realized... walking through those doors and looking up into that beautiful dome was really something special.  Later, I purchased a copy of Vonnegut's book in German and I've been attempting to read it ever since...

(On p. 100 now!  Reading German is really cool because every word is like uncovering a new piece to the puzzle and once you've finally put it together, you know what the sentence says, and you're like "Wow..." for a few seconds before you put together the next sentence... I'm getting so good at it!  Not to brag or anything...)

This time around, I was lounging in the sun in the Großer Garten when it suddenly started to rain.  Without a back-up plan since I'd opted to skip out on Pirates of the Caribbean auf Deutsch due to the awesome weather (ironic, I know), I decided to hop on the train and check out the Stadtmuseum instead since it was free entry on Fridays after noon.  With an almost sick anticipation, I nearly blazed through all the information on the city during the Reformation and all the baroque architecture to the floor about WWII.  But when I entered the room, I suddenly felt cold.  I was soaking wet and the building was air-conditioned, but this was something deeper.  There were pictures of burned bodies, collapsed buildings, lonely people wandering, lost.  I sat down at a station where German actors read letters from the month after the bombing.  One was headed "Mir fehlt nur Opium..." (trans: I only miss opium...) and it was about this man who was separated from his wife and child.  I couldn't understand quite what happened but he went into the shelter for something and he told her to wait, that he would come for her in a few minutes.  When he came back out she was gone and he found her body on a doorstep later, lying as sweetly as though she were sleeping.  Call me a sap, but I get so that I really start to feel a history, and I had to bite my lip to keep from crying in public.

Anyway, I like to buy postcards of historical pictures if they're cheap enough, and as I was holding my recent purchase up to create this image, a man walking a dog came up behind me and said very slowly, "Ja, es sah einmal wie das aus," a deep, relaxed voice thick with the gravity and melancholy of the statement.  And then he just walked away, leaving me bewildered, and my arms fell heavily to my sides.  Once I'd worked out exactly what he'd said, I sat there on the square with my postcard lying face-up in my lap, looking at the city through yet another filter, now six years older than the first time I saw Dresden in person.  Later that day, I had dinner with a friend from Dresden outside the Frauenkirche and there was a fireworks show to mark the opening of the Dixie music festival.  We talked about how four years had passed since the last time I was in Dresden, and how that's just too long.  

I think that's when I decided that Dresden was my favorite city in Germany.  Every time I visit, I grow a little before I leave.  The first time, I was about to turn fifteen and I'd made my first almost-twenty-year-old friend who didn't think I was some dorky little kid (or maybe that is what Wenke thought of me, but she was polite enough to treat me like a friend the entire time I was there).  I'd walked around a city at night after nine p.m. and I'd seen a live outdoor music performance that wasn't Classical music.  Oh, yeah, and I'd grown two inches.  The second time I left, I had stories to tell about overcoming language barriers and I started to feel old.  I had been more independent than the first time.  They'd given me a phone and a key just in case I got lost and I was a real Schlüsselkinder for the first time in my life.  And this time, when I left, I knew it was to come back.  I can speak German now, and I'm no longer afraid of it.  I planned things on my own, and when those plans fell through, I had to fix it, not my teacher.  I am almost twenty-one.  I'm exploring Europe on my own, and I left Dresden feeling confident that I can do it.

So, here's to Dresden--a beautiful, resilient, often-overlooked city that has taught me so much about life and how to live it.