Before visiting Dresden, my only points of reference were fine porcelain and saturation bombing. Between the 13th and 15th of February 1945, the RAF and US Army Air Force dropped more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices on the city. The resultant firestorm is estimated to have killed up to 25,000 people. To give some context to those figures, in the main raid on Coventry, which took place on 14/15 November 1940, and led the Nazis to coin the verb Koventrieren (to Coventrate) meaning "to annihilate or reduce to rubble", the Luftwaffe dropped approximately 500 tons of high explosives and 36,000 incendiary bombs, killing an estimated 568 people. The Coventration of Dresden was near total, including 80% of the historic old town.
After the war, the East German authorities made efforts to rebuild some of Dresden's former landmarks, including the Semperoper (the Saxony state opera house), Dresden Cathedral and the Zwinger Palace. However, most of the city was remade from a clean slate, as a model of socialist efficiency. Following reunification, work started to rebuild some of the old town in all its Baroque glory. The Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady), a large Lutheran church which had been left as a memorial ruin by the DDR, was reconstructed between 1994 and 2005. The Neumarkt (New Market), a large square surrounding the Frauenkirche has been further reconstructed since 2005. There have been criticisms that the reconstruction lacks authenticity. It certainly had to be far more extensive than was done for Notre-Dame, where the walls and even some windows remained intact. The Frauenkirche reconstruction used the old burnt stones on the skin of the building. However, as the builders couldn't know where these stones originally went, they used a computer program to randomize the burnt stones in the façade. The result is striking, but it is not the old church restored.
My hotel was on the Neumarkt at the heart of the old town, making it very easy for me to shoot the area at the both ends of the day. Like in Berlin, I was also very lucky with the weather. The low light showed the reconstructed Baroque architecture at its best. I did also see some porcelain, in the form of the Fürstenzug (Procession of Princes), a monumental porcelain tile mural depicting a mounted procession of the rulers of Saxony.
