Dresden

Two weeks ago (already!) I had the pleasure to spend a day in Dresden with Marko Hehl, a German photographer whom I met over the Internet. Actually he was one of the people who found out about the Rangefinder book we published last year and ever since then we have been in contact. Marko has a blog which was originally focused on rangefinder photography too, but recently he has discovered the joy of medium format and as a result he has sold all his rangefinder gear.

It was the first time I visited this part of Germany. I took the train from Prague to Chemnitz, where Marko lives. It’s close to the Czech border and an hour from Leipzig and Dresden. Marko has vivid memories of the DDR era when his hometown was called Karl-Marx-Stadt. His stories about those days sound surreal to Western ears but I always remind myself that what happens in our part of the world is probably equally weird (and for that matter morally reprehensible) to outsiders.

We spent the day shooting in Dresden. I had only packed the little Leica IIIf with the Voigtländer 25mm Skopar, but in addition Marco lent me his Leica CM. The CM is a delightful film-based Leica compact camera with a fixed Summarit 40/2.8. Indeed, I was quickly sold on this handy and handsome camera and I ended up buying the thing from Marko (oh well!).

We were lucky with the weather: best part of the day the city was showered with the most enchanting winterly light imaginable: blindingly luminous and yet soft. The recently restored Frauenkirche glowed like a tiara. But my most lasting impression had nothing to do with the splendour of German baroque. Of course I knew that Dresden had been bombed in the war. In fact, I didn’t know much more about Dresden than that. The remarkable thing is that, in one way or another, the fabric of Dresdener city life is still imbued with this sense of pain and tragedy. The magnificently renovated facades cannot hide that something unspeakable has happened there on those fateful days in February 1945. During our walk, I looked at street vendors peddling panoramic postcards showing the apocalyptic destructions at the end of the war and was deeply touched. I leafed through books in the “Haus der Bücher” showing harrowing pictures of those days. I remembered the few things I read about the effects of Allied strategic bombing: Ernst Jünger’s Paris diaries and Gerd Ledig’s “Vergeltung”. I also remembered Liebeskind’s “Jüdisches Museum” in Berlin, which thematises the suffering of the Jewish people very movingly with a dark, empty tower and I thought they should build a similar memorial for the casualties of firebombing in Dresden too. In fact, the whole city feels like this tower. There is a giant hole that punctures the energy field of the city. One can sense the void. In any case, I have become much more interested in this episode now and I am planning to read Jörg Friedrich’s seminal study “Das Feuer” in the next couple of weeks.

So we wandered around in the windy and fairly cold old part of town, Marko with his Rolleiflex 3.5 and I with the two Leicas. By early afternoon a cloud cover drifted in and from 4pm onwards we started to move back into the direction of the station, traversing once more the sprawling Xmas market. We spent a good half hour in the “Hause der Bücher” and then made our way through the new, dusky commercial part of town to the Bahnhof. The sun dipped a last time under the cloud cover. Around 6pm we bid each other farewell. Marko jumped on the train to Chemnitz, whilst I made may way to Berlin where I changed to the night train to Brussels. A sleepless and uncomfortable journey brought me back home, just in time for breakfast with the family.

In terms of pictures: I brought home two rolls of Rollei IR 400 film, one exposed with the Leica IIIf and the other with the CM. The picture shown above – obviously cropped - is taken with the IIIf. It shows the square in front of the Frauenkirche.

I'll be posting some more pictures from Dresden soon.