“Dresden 1951 – 2006: Time travel through a battered city”

Five decades of city history with previously unpublished photos and drawings are contained in the book, which is currently being published by Dresden’s Elbhang-Kurier-Verlag. Dr. Roland Ander, who helped clear out the old market as a bricklayer’s apprentice, documented his city and its development between ruins, demolition, decay and one of the greatest reconstruction efforts after the Second World War. They are images that you have never seen before.

It was probably the most drastic event in the history of Dresden: the air raid in February 1945, which will be 80 years old next year. Towards the end of the Second World War, the old town was almost completely destroyed. What remained was rubble of around 18 million m³ and, after it had been cleared by the Dresden rubble men and women, huge undeveloped areas, a tremendous emptiness. It would take several decades until it became the city that we knew and know today. Dr. Roland Ander, now 88 years old, experienced it all. As an apprentice bricklayer, he helped clear out the old market. Later, as a construction specialist and monument preservationist, he was at the forefront of construction work in Dresden. He captured it in his pictures and drawings. Building by building, he captured how the city changed and reinvented itself.

View of the unknown Dresden

Dr. Roland Ander is a silent contemporary witness. He tells his Dresden stories with a camera and a pencil. They are about the great will to rebuild, from the beginnings of reconstruction influenced by Stalinist dogmas, from the gradual decline of his city in the GDR’s scarcity economy to the turmoil of the reunification period and the rebirth of real estate as an investment. With an unadorned eye, he looks at the lows and highs of the city’s development, at what has been irretrievably lost and what has been saved, such as the Church of the Epiphany and the Church of Our Lady. With this book he gives us a collection of unique, never-seen photos from around 50 years of Dresden history. Dr. Berger provided them with originally handwritten comments that recall many almost forgotten facts, but also the sarcastic humor of the people of Dresden at that time.

Puzzle pieces in visual memory

The book, which focuses on images from the 1950s and 1960s, closes a gap in the city’s visual memory: the time of clearing of rubble and the beginnings of reconstruction in the city center from 1951. The images were a surprise even for Dresden residents such as publisher Holger Friebel . “The most exciting thing for me was the period from 1951 onwards, which was completely new to me. To experience the city as it is alive again, but in principle completely empty.” So Dr. Anders book is also a continuation of the “Dresden before 1945 books” such as Fritz Löffler’s “The Old Dresden”.

City history and cautionary tale

Even if the memory is not a pleasant one: it is important, it is part of it. You should think about them when you stand in the middle of the baroque splendor of the old town or look at the golden tower cross on the Frauenkirche, financed by the British “Dresden Trust”. Dresden, whose last vacant lots were only closed last year with the redesign of the Neumarkt, is a model example of successful reconstruction and at the same time a memorial where nationalism, imperialism and hatred end: in ruins. The book “Dresden 1951 – 2006: Time travel through a battered city” is more than just a piece of city history. It is a warning that something like this must never happen again.

Dresden 1951–2006 – a journey through time through a battered city: by Dr. Roland Ander

• Format 21,5 x 30,2 cm
• Hardcover, 232 pages with 472 illustrations
• Elbhang-Kurier-Verlag, price EUR 29.90
• ISBN 978-3-936240-38-2
• Available from November 29, 2023

Book presentation