I just left Dresden a couple of days ago. Admittedly, I didn’t see as much of it as I did of Leipzig or even Berlin, but I definitely saw a good amount of what I wanted. The travel there was a bit difficult—if it wasn’t for the fact that my bus from Leipzig was late, I would’ve missed it. As it was, I made it with time to spare, and a bunch of grumpy people waiting for the late bus. Once I got to Dresden I had to take the S-Bahn from the main station to the Mitte station, and walk the rest of the way. Well, as can be expected, I instantly got lost. It never fails: When I have an option of going two ways—left or right, up or down, etc—I always take the wrong way. I had three street names written down, which were meant to take me from the station to the apartment. Couldn’t find the first street. I had to ask four people, and none of them had heard of any of the three streets. Finally, I stopped a nice guy who actually took the time to look it up on his phone and point me the right way. Thank you, random stranger! Also, bonus points—the entire exchange with him was in German. Yay!
My arms felt like they were gonna tear out of their sockets by the time I actually got to the apartment. And oh, then I had to carry my suitcase/portfolio up two flights of stairs. I’ve been in four different places in Germany so far. Not one of them has had an elevator. Just steep-ass stairs. The actual apartment was awesome. A big bedroom that had its own couch, a big desk, and good space for storage. WiFi worked, all of that good stuff.
Dresden itself is really cool (at least the small-ish portion of it that I actually saw). It’s called the jewel-box of Germany. For most of the city, this is kind of a joke, considering how much grey Dresden has. GDR-era Plattenbau are everywhere, stretching away from the jewel box district. However, the town center is super colourful, both in the old section of the city and the “Neustadt” section. I mostly only hung out around the old section, though, where you could still clearly see the ash-stained facades of the buildings. Some towers resembled sticks of charcoal. In the second world war, Dresden was firebombed with casualties reaching 25,000. Dresden was not a military target, and near everyone who died there was a civilian. At least 90% of Dresden’s buildings were leveled. Only a few of those destroyed were rebuilt, including the Frauenkirche, which had bricks from the original building re-used in its new façade. It’s easy to spot the fire-blackened originals. The famous Zwinger was destroyed and rebuilt as well, and the original pieces are in stark contrast with the newer pieces.
The old buildings that are still standing are also ash-black, making those parts of the city look much older than they are. The Dresden Palace in its current form, for example, was completed in 1899, making it ten years older than the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Yet it looks totally medieval because of the obvious damage and discolouration on the façade. The only thing totally destroyed on this building was the roof and the interior. The exterior survived and is original.
Another thing that was shockingly left practically intact from the firebombing in Dresden is the porcelain mural called the Procession of Princes, which is over 335 ft (105 metres) long. It only went through minimal damages during the bombings of the area, and because it was made of porcelain, I assume it was easy to wash the soot off? Anyway, it’s quite an incredible sight, because it stretches so far and has so much detail in it. It’s also a good insight into the mentality of the time—a less-than-flattering depiction of colonial “superiority” and only one depiction of a female (a young girl) shows that the society that counted at the time was of white men, held to their rigid cultural/political hierarchy.
I walked around, took some pictures, did some sketches, and went to the museum of old master painters. The ticket for this gallery also let me check out the porcelain collection of Dresden. Apparently one of the Saxon rulers named Augustus something-or-other had an obsession with the “orient” and the porcelain that came out of it, so he got quite the collection going. Then a bunch of Saxons got into making their own porcelain to get into the craze and make some money off of it. Capitalism, woo! I wasn’t overly interested in the porcelain, but checked it out anyway. I’m much more interested in painting, especially since the old master gallery had paintings by groundbreakers like Giotto, Botticelli, Rembrandt, and more.
Oh, and on the day I went to the galleries, there was also a massive public piece of installation art featuring dozens of metal dog-like people, holding guns, making Hitler salutes, etc. It seemed to be a massive dig at the hard-right, anti-Islamic political group PEGIDA, who I had a brief encounter with while in Leipzig. Dresden got international news coverage with massive anti-immigrant protests by the group that turned violent, but I've come to understand that, even in political-right areas of the country, the hardliners in PEGIDA are generally seen as a vocal minority. The artist's name is Rainer Opolka. The art seems to warn onf the danger of allowing anti-democratic and anti-foreigner groups to take charge of the streets during marches, protests and speeches aimed at stirring xenophobic hate. Quite an impressive diplay! I got a booklet talking about the idea and process behind the work, and I'll take them time to try and read it later (it's all in German, so I'll have to take my time with it).
The Bastei
Oddly, the highlight of my time in Dresden didn’t actually happen in Dresden. I had heard something in passing about great natural formations of sandstone ‘nearby’ the city. I looked it up and found out about the Malerweg (painter's way), a 112 kilometer stretch of paths and trails that cut through mind-blowing German/Czech landscape, with some really amazing sights. I saw Google images of the Bastei Bridge, a man-made structure hung over these sandstone cliffs back from pre-German unification. Back when Saxony was its own sovereign state. There was a castle there also. The only problem was, I had to figure out how to access these epic sights. That took a lot of Googling. A lot of the people who visit these places aren’t English speaking, so much of the info was in German. Secondly, there were a ton of places to access this trail, since it connects many villages along its route, mostly along the Elbe River. I had to figure out what parts I wanted to see, and which town corresponded with those sights the easiest. I was told that the trail ‘started’ at Pirna, but I could also connect to it from Bad Schandau, Stadt Wehlen, or Rathen. These are all towns with under 4,000 people each. Rathen, the town I chose to use to access the trail, only had around 500 people. For a suburb city-dweller like me, those numbers baffle me. Why live in such an underpopulated area?
Anyway, the reason I chose Rathen was because it simply seemed easiest to get from the town to the trail. Just a train, a ferry ride, and a quick hike up the left side of the valley that hugged the town. I was afraid of getting lost, but the only problem I had getting out there was switching trains at Pirna, which I didn’t realize I had to do. I jumped up realizing the train was about to start going back towards Dresden and had to wait another twenty minutes for the connecting train. I killed a lot of daylight getting there—for one thing, I forgot my memory card and realized only when I got to Dresden’s Mitte station, so I had to do back for that and kill forty minutes because I missed the first train and had to wait for the next. Then it was a good hour and a half until I made it to Rathen. Yeah, if I could do it again, I would have made sure to get all the way out there by 11:00. As it was, I got there at around 1:30pm. Not ideal, but I still had a lot of time.
Getting close to Rathen, I started to see very tiny towns along the river that the train ran beside. They were nestled in hills and valleys, sometimes with their backs to large retaining walls to prevent the valley from burying them. It was gorgeous. When Rathen came up, I was shocked. Instead of grassy hills, the west bank of its valley was sandstone cliffs poking up out of the trees. I could just barely see the Bastei Bridge, but the fact that I could see it at all from that distance told me I was in for some epic Lord of the Rings-esque sights. I could also see the Altrathen castle overlooking the town. The castle is from the middle ages, though most of it has been rebuilt. It’s a hotel-restaurant now, meaning it can still be privately owned.
I should also say that the day was the warmest I’ve had in Germany so far, reaching around 17 degrees. I was wearing three pairs of pants, a hoodie and a winter jacket. I was so used to it being at least a little bit cool that I overdressed. There was also not a cloud in the sky. I’d been anticipating at least a few clouds to make streaky, artsy-looking long exposure photos of clouds flowing by, using the natural beauty as a foreground. I’d brought my heavy tripod for that purpose. When I arrived in Rathen, I quickly walked to the ferry (which is just by the river, you’ll see that as soon as you get out of the train station), and paid to go across. The ferry was stamped with Rathen’s coat of arms, which features a lamb. Not very intimidating! The ferry ticket also has the coat of arms on it. Pretty cool souvenir.
Getting across the Elbe River, I saw a comically tall signpost showing where everything was. Based on a YouTube video I saw, I took an immediate left by the sign and just started walking up the paved trail. It wasn’t advertised as the entry route to the Malerweg, but it ended up shaving a good ten minutes off the walk, and went past the castle. It was really steep, though! Unfortunately because of the way the growth came up around the castle, I didn’t get any decent photos of it, and of course because it was built right on a cliff I couldn’t get in front of it to take proper photos. It’s most easily seen from below, on the opposite bank of the river.
Getting across the Elbe River, I saw a comically tall signpost showing where everything was. Based on a YouTube video I saw, I took an immediate left by the sign and just started walking up the paved trail. It wasn’t advertised as the entry route to the Malerweg, but it ended up shaving a good ten minutes off the walk, and went past the castle. It was really steep, though! Unfortunately because of the way the growth came up around the castle, I didn’t get any decent photos of it, and of course because it was built right on a cliff I couldn’t get in front of it to take proper photos. It’s most easily seen from below, on the opposite bank of the river.
Soon I was so hot from walking such a steep hill that I decided to ditch my hoodie. I found a place where I could go off the trail a bit, where a sandstone boulder was. I stuffed my hoodie in one of the outcrop’s alcoves, hoping it wouldn’t get stolen, and kept going. It actually helped a lot to take that off. I was sweating a lot! The trail just kept going up and up, through trees and along a ridge that overlooked the river from high above. Soon the sandstone outcroppings got bigger and more grandiose. Sometimes the trail cut through them via stone stairs, and occasionally there were look-off points that were amazing. Not a friendly place for those with fears of heights! Some of the rocks were carved up with centuries-old engravings marking the trail in an exploratory way. Only a few hundred years ago, this area was first painted by famous artists like Casper David Friedrich who were trying to express a sense of German national culture through its natural landscape (much like the Canadian Group of Seven). It was also mapped and marked during this time. I took a ton of pictures on the way up to the “Bastei” (bastion) formations, and many more once I made it to the Bastei Bridge, the main attraction for tourists of the area. Given that the Malerweg trail cuts into the Czech Republic, some of them seemed to be speaking Czech, and a lot of the sign posts were in that language as well. There weren’t too many tourists relative to places like the Brandenburg Gate—only a few dozen—so it wasn’t too distracting. A lot of people were just by for a hike. And then I walked under two precariously-standing sandstones (positioned like a house of cards), and found myself on the bridge.
It was absolutely amazing up there, though also a bit nerve-wracking. I couldn’t believe that something like this is so unheard of outside of Germany. I’d only found out it existed a few nights ago while on the internet. It was standing strong between cliffs of sandstone, with its pillars and supports connected purely to those geological formations. I almost didn’t wanna leave the area just around the bridge because I was so taken aback by it. Eventually I realized I needed to move on and see some other stuff before it got dark. Getting to the bridge from Rathen only took about an hour, and if I’d skipped the look-off points or pressed through without taking pictures it would’ve only taken a half hour.
I kept going along the trail, coming up to a hotel that was all the way up there, with its own lookout point! The hotel was technically part of the neighboring town of Bad Schandau, and could be accessed by car. I guess someone afraid of heights might have an easier time accessing the bridge from there, since they’d avoid all the narrow ridges and precarious look-out points. I looked at signs and maps and decided I wanted to see something called the Amselfall, a waterfall that connected to the Amsel river running out of the mountains. For that, I had to trek through some more forest and go through the Schwedenlocher. I had no idea what that was. I just went that way to see what I’d come across. During this, I was thinking that at some point I’d need to turn back to make it back into Rathen in time, so I wanted to get as far as I could. I was just walking in the somewhat hilly forest paths when I saw another sign pointing to the Amselfall, which went rapidly downhill. This was the entrance to the Schwedenlocher. There was nobody out here—I’d pass a person or two occasionally, but that was it. I started going down this path, and saw that it cut through more sandstone. As the cliffs of sandstone pressed in, things got more and more narrow. The temperature dropped to the point that I could see my breath, the sunlight was cut off by shadows of the rock, and the humidity was high enough to cover most surfaces in moss completely. The narrow passages in the rock had a climate of their own. In retrospect I wish I’d lingered there longer, but oh well. It was still a great experience, and I got some really decent pictures of the place.
The passage of the Schwedenlocher, like something out of Lord of the Rings (I was thinking about Emyn Muil, for LOTR nerds out there), conveniently let out not only by the Amselfall, but also near the town of Rathen. In other words, I wouldn’t have to double back through everything. Which was just as well, because the Schwedenlocher was so steep that I didn’t wanna have to go back up through it. I followed the river along to the waterfall, where there were some huts that had something to do with the park service. They were closed, though. I was alone by the waterfall, and got to take a few cool long exposure photos of it. There was a cave behind it, too. I would’ve liked to explore it, but aside from getting my clothes and camera stuff soaked, I’m sure it would’ve been slippery and dangerous.
I followed the river the other way into town. There were little houses along this stretch, which I thought was super cool. It was still technically not inside the town. Instead, the houses seemed to have sprung up out of the ground, covered in moss and spaced far away from each other. Even all the way down here, one large sandstone formation, hit with late afternoon sun, glowed over the shadowy valley area.
I walked into town and went back up the trail where I started, to get my hoodie (it was still there!) and see the bridge again to try and take some photos of the view while the sun was setting. This time I walked straight there without stopping, so I didn’t lose much time. I also took a different way around to view the bridge from a distance, which was especially nerve-wracking. Steel platforms were cinched on naturally-formed sandstone pillars, with grated bottoms that allowed you to look through your own feet, down to the extreme plummet to the forest below. Sometimes the gap between two sandstone rocks was closed by steel stairs rather than a flat platform, which was even freakier. Still, I got some pictures of these areas. I got nervous standing still on those steel supports for long. Finally, I made it onto the top of a sandstone pillar and got the tripod out, hoping the wind wouldn’t carry the whole thing off the cliff. I took some more photos from there, and even had the guts to lie down on the top of this pillar. Quite exhilarating.
I couldn’t savour the sights enough. But eventually I realized that I was rapidly losing light, and didn’t much want to stumble back into town in the dark. I cut it incredibly close. Before I reached Rathen again, I was going purely by moonlight. Then it was just a ferry ride across the river, and a long wait for the train (these super rural towns don’t get much night service!) and I was on my way back to Dresden.
I am so happy I had the perseverance to read about this place and do a few hours of Google searching to figure out how to get out here. This was certainly one of the best times I had in Germany, and it makes me wish I had stuff like this in my own backyard in Canada. I’m sure the Rocky Mountains have similar sights, but I’ve only seen small portions of them. One day I’d love to do the entire Malerweg, stopping in the numerous small towns at night and making it from the starting point in Germany to the end point in the Czech Republic. Looking at Google images and the official Malerweg website (here: http://www.saechsische-schweiz.de/en/home-malerweg/malerweg-stages/malerweg-stages-1-8/stage-1.html) it seems there’s a ton of stuff to see around every area on this trail. Considering I walked an area of the trail that was less than 5% of the Malerweg, I’d say I have a lot more to see there! The relatively low level of tourists (they all seemed to swarm around the bridge, but weren’t near the other landmarks) also made things quite relaxing despite the physical effort of hiking up and down so many hills. I’m sure it’s not the last time I come here, even if I may be on a different part of the trail next time.
So, that’s Dresden! Weimar’s my next place! Though I’m a little behind—as I write this, I’ve been in Weimar two days already! I’m leaving the day after next for Nuremberg!