THE DRESDEN FRAUENKIRCHE

​Frank Smith didn’t know he would become well-known for an act of violence he had committed fifty-five years before.
 
The first church in Dresden was built in the 11th century. In an old yard that lay outside the city, surrounded by a cemetery, the church was the center of the earliest village settlement on a small hill alongside the Elbe River. By 1722, it was in danger of collapsing and was torn down, which was okay with the city council, because the church had been historically Catholic, whereas the citizenry of Dresden had experienced the Reformation and was now fervently Lutheran. Plans were drawn up for a new church by the city master carpenter, George Bahr, that would better reflect the new spirit of the Protestant liturgy by placing the altar, pulpit, and baptismal font directly in the center of the congregation’s view.
 
The Dresden Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady) was enormous. Made of Saxony sandstone, it was an engineering marvel for its time, with an unconventional high dome (220 feet), four diagonally set corner towers in the outline of a Greek cross, and with staggered galleries inside that resembled a European opera house. It would hold 3,400 believers. When finished, it would include a famed Silbermann organ that was dedicated on November 25, 1736, and served as a recital organ by Johann Sebastian Bach on December 1.
 
For more than 200 years, the bell-shaped dome dominated the skyline of the city of Dresden. The church was highly important for the spiritual life in the city, for church music, and a focal point of political history.
 
On February 13 and 14, 1945, allied forces carried out a firebombing campaign against the city. In two days, the planes dropped some 650,000 incendiary bombs that would eventually lead to the city being 85% destroyed. The church held up well for the two days, but at 10 am on February 15, the eight interior sandstone pillars that held up the immense dome reacted to the heat of fires raging inside, glowed bright red, and exploded; the outer wall shattered and nearly 6,000 tons of stone plunged to the earth, collapsing the church’s floors into the crypts below.
 
After the end of the war, there were immediate calls for the landmark church to be rebuilt but by then, Dresden was not in Germany, anymore. It was in East Germany and was now governed by the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin. The Soviets agreed to leave the immense pile of rubble as a war memorial, but they were not interested in erecting any new buildings that did not conform to the principles of the stark and proletariat Soviet architecture.
 
The rubble would remain for almost fifty years before miracles happened: the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union collapsed, and Germany was reunited.
 
If you go to Market Square in Dresden today, you will not see the Frauenkirche as a historical structure of the city because the building itself was begun in 1993 and completed in 2005. It was built using computers, including a 3D program created by IBM that allowed visual placement of the stones; used modern engineering methods, machines, and materials; and featured immensely clever stone masonry. It was also built primarily by donations from around the world. It ultimately cost about $180 million.
 
But it looks just like it did in 1736. The building goal was not to make a replacement, but to achieve an architectural restoration. The original building plans used by George Bahr, plus various additions and corrections over the previous two centuries, formed the core drawings for the engineers and architects. Of the millions of stones used in the rebuilding, more than 8,500 original stones were salvaged from the original church and approximately 3,800 stones were used in the reconstruction. Two thousand pieces of the original altar were cleaned and incorporated in the new structure. The organ is new, but is constructed such that it can mimic the music of the original. The statue out front is of Martin Luther and was put into place before the war.
 
Where you see darker squares or rectangles in the pictures, those are original stones. Because Saxony sandstone has a small metal content, the appearance of all of the stones will eventually stain to the same color.
 
And Frank Smith? He was one the crewmen on the B-17 that targeted the Frauenkirche in 1945. While clearing the rubble, the original cross of the dome was discovered; it was on the top of the dome the night that Frank Smith flew over. In the early 2000s, Frank’s son, Alan Smith, was a goldsmith that lived in London and worked for Grant McDonald Silversmiths in London. Alan was selected to make the new gilded cross that now stands on top of the dome.
 
The old cross is on display next to the new altar inside.
 
The photographs are from my visit to Dresden in September of last year. The whole town, much of which was also restored after 1989, was a highlight of my trip.

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