Today we got to spend a couple of hours visiting #Dresden #Germany. The historic center of this beautiful city was completely leveled by Allied bombing during the second world war. As Dresden fell under communist rule in the postwar era, little to no effort was made to reconstruct it.
After the fall of the Berlin wall, reconstruction finally was able to begin. Many of the historic buildings have been recreated using modern materials as well as reclaimed rubble that was never cleared. In fact Dresden is still full of cranes which aren’t building new buildings, but still rebuilding the old ones. Essentially everything you see in these photos is a recent reconstruction.
The bombing of the center of Dresden – a true jewel of a city – was a terrible loss and caused considerable controversy. Worse, it was and is still used by the Nazis as a propaganda piece (they claimed 10x the official number of deaths). Every year there is a neo-Nazi march to protest the “unjustified” bombing of the city. However in recent years, antifa (antifascist) protestors gather around the city center in vast numbers (over 10,000 people) to form a human chain encircling the city to keep the Nazi protestors out. The message is clear: “you (Nazis) are responsible for this war and the destruction it caused, and we will not allow you to do it again.” And thus the message “Never Again Fascism” (Nie Wierder Faschismus)