Weng Weijie, who studied in Germany and now works for an infrastructure development company in China, has participated in an ancient building restoration project in Dresden. She shared with CBN her personal experience of working at that time, as well as her feelings of living in Dresden and interacting with local residents.
CBN: From your personal experience, what kind of work is the restoration of ancient buildings in Dresden?
Weng Weijie: I studied and worked in Dresden from 2006 to 2013. From the end of 2008 to the beginning of 2009, I joined the ancient building restoration project and worked until the end of 2012, about 4 years. At the Technical University of Dresden, where I was studying at the time, there was a professor who did a lot of ancient building conservation projects, and I was invited to participate in the research project he led.
The buildings of dresden's entire old town are in the field of restoration and protection, and the municipality has dedicated funds to this work, a special foundation to operate these funds, and commissioned professors from the Technical University of Dresden to organize scientific research projects.
The immediate purpose of the restoration of Dresden's ancient buildings was to compensate for the damage caused to the city by World War II, the most important of which was to restore the old city area that had been completely destroyed by large-scale Allied air raids.
Restoration work began in the 1950s and has been going on for a very long time now. I think it can be roughly divided into three stages.
The first was the massive post-war reconstruction that the East German government had organized. At that time, funding was insufficient and progress was very slow.
After the merger of germany and Germany in 1989, government funding increased dramatically, and a large number of projects began to be really repaired. This is the second and most critical stage of the restoration of dresden's ancient buildings. From 2004 to 2005, a very important time, the renovation of the Church of Our Lady was completed, marking the completion of the complete restoration of the core area of the ancient city.
The restoration project thus entered the third phase, which was handed over to the university level and continued by the academic community. I also started to participate at this stage. The scope of the project has been expanding, not only to the restoration of the royal palace area and the old town of the former Kingdom of Saxony, but also to buildings that have been damaged by the war but have not collapsed and remained partially. We will re-evaluate these buildings to see how best they can be restored.
In my opinion, the restoration of ancient buildings in Dresden has a clear time clue.
Originally, it was mainly to rebuild buildings that were destroyed in World War II. After the merger of East and West Germany, with the assistance of the West German government to the former East German region, the restoration work received more economic and technical support, and the progress was significantly accelerated. At the same time, the restoration work should reflect the "depoliticization", for example, on some older buildings, leaving some traces of the East German period, which need to be cleaned up and restored to the original appearance.
I was involved in a project to restore the east wing of the Dresden City Hall. On this building, the traces left by the East German era are particularly heavy, including some traces and slogans from the Soviet occupation period. This kind of restoration is also very important for the local area. Dresden was long the capital of the Kingdom of Saxony, and during the East German era, many of the remains of the ancient royal family were destroyed or obscured.
CBN: Some people regard the restoration of ancient buildings in Dresden as a particularly successful case, as a participant, how do you evaluate its achievements?
Weng Weijie: Many people think that the restoration of Dresden's ancient buildings has been particularly successful, and I think their recognition stems from the fact that Dresden has achieved a 1:1 restoration of a large number of important old buildings.
From my experience, the restoration of ancient buildings in Dresden is very special. First, it suffered few similar cases of war damage. Secondly, this work is extremely difficult and must take a very long time to work hard.
There are still a large number of large old buildings that have been badly damaged or have no roofs, and the common practice is to build trusses, build a tin roof, cover the ruins, turn it into a warehouse, and pile all the bombed pieces inside. The work team "plays a jigsaw puzzle" inside, and all the pieces are put back in place.
For more than two of the four years I worked on the restoration project for ancient buildings, I was doing research in the archives. To repair buildings, it is necessary to collect old photos, drawings and other materials as a reference as much as possible. Affected by the war, architectural materials are lost a lot, and it is very common to find the original drawings and pictures that directly reflect the original appearance of the building, and can only be compared and restored with other materials. Through these studies, the building fragments can be correctly put back in place.
I went to four or five of these "fragment warehouses" at the time, and there were many others I hadn't been to. That's how Dresden was rebuilt little by little by finding pieces and puzzles. When the fragments cannot be found, they will be supplemented with new stone, and the ultimate goal is to reproduce the original urban structure and architectural form exactly before the explosion, without any artificial changes.
The restoration of Dresden is a very long-term project. From the launch of the 1950s to the beginning of the 1980s, until the achievement of phased results in 2005, there were about 20 years of very concentrated advancement, and the speed slowly slowed down later. Because the further you go, the more difficult it is to repair the project, and the consumption of manpower and material resources is also greater.
So, not every city has the ability to replicate Dresden's approach. Dresden's ancient building restoration project has a strong political background and financial support from the economic development of Germany. It is important for a strong government and other organizations to take the lead, and after such a long time, dresden's ancient building restoration team has been very flexible in the deployment and restructuring to ensure that the project can be sustained in the long run.
CBN: Do you think there is a deep connection between the restoration of Dresden and the local cultural traditions? Is history and culture one of the driving forces supporting the long-term sustainability of ancient building restoration projects?
Weng Weijie: Dresden is the place where I have studied abroad for a long time, and it has a special meaning for me. Germany has many favorite cities, but I was most impressed by Dresden's deep culture. A very strong local culture can make such an ancient city stand, otherwise any so-called restoration will be a wood without roots, which is not much sense.
At the beginning of 2020, I returned to Dresden and saw that the Auguste Bridge, a famous ancient bridge across the Elbe that connects the old and new towns, is being restored, which is also one of the largest projects in a series of restoration projects in recent years, and this bridge is 300 years old (built in 1727-1931 and rebuilt in 1907-1910). After the completion of this big project, it will definitely have a very big impact. If the impact of the epidemic is excluded, it will be almost completed this year.
In the Baroque era, the city was financially powerful, and the large-scale construction of the city by the Kingdom of Saxony laid a solid foundation for it, and further made it a place where wealth gathered. The Wang family even bought a tree from China and shipped it back to plant in the garden. The accumulation of wealth in history has been transformed into the city's deep cultural heritage.
CBN: Did special historical experiences have an impact on the character of the people of Dresden? In the process of gradual restoration of ancient buildings, what is the attitude of the local residents?
Weng Weijie: The current Dresden people have a more imprint of the East German era in personality. Compared with big cities such as Berlin and Hamburg, it is slightly dignified, closed, and less lively and open.
Some people think that the right wing in Dresden is relatively strong, but in my opinion this is not the case. Shortly after the anniversary of the Bombing of Dresden on 13 February, on the day of the right-wing march (19 February), the Nazis marched every year, but the local left also made its attitude clear and competed fiercely with each other.
The impact of major historical pain on the mentality of the Dresden people is obvious, but their mentality is also very special, it is an isolated case.
Germany was the initiator of the world war, and finally defeated, Dresden was bombed by the Allies, and after the war, German territory was split, such cases have not appeared in other parts of the world, there is no reference for horizontal comparison.
Intuitively, I think the impact of World War II on the Germans was very deep. After the war, germans did not have the spirit of the iron-blooded Chancellor Bismarck, before World War I or before World War II. On the surface, he was depressed, and his heart was secretly dissatisfied, but he was powerless to struggle, which was very contradictory.
I have been involved in the restoration of ancient buildings in Dresden, and I have met many residents, and I can feel this characteristic strongly from them. I'll tell two stories.
In 2012, a café opened in the corner of a square in the center of Dresden. An elderly German couple I know invited me for coffee. Sitting in the café, they told me about the history of the café.
Founded in Dresden, the café moved to Munich during World War II and took more than half a century to move back to its original location. The old couple can finally invite friends to come here again for coffee and relive the old things. From them, I saw that the old people of Dresden were unforgettable to the city that was once very brilliant before the war.
They felt that they had been bombed in World War II and had become victims themselves, but Germany was the defeated side, and they could not say anything, and there were many emotions that could not be expressed. Their nostalgia for old buildings and old streets and alleys, and the return to the old cafes they once loved, are the best embodiment of their true mood.
I also visited an old lawyer who lived in a wealthy area of Dresden. Because his house was classified as a cultural security unit, we went to visit him, and the 90-year-old man was very happy. He loved the house so much that after hosting us at home, he told us about the history of the family, about what Dresden was like when he was young, before World War II, and what a glorious sight it was.
From the old man's words, I felt his nostalgia for the glory of the past, and the feeling of being suppressed after the defeat. The old gentleman works as a lawyer, can buy a historic building in his 30s, and is the elite of the city. But during the East German period, he also had little capital to speak for his own mood, and the contradictory mentality was not easy to tell. For the people of Dresden, emotional scars do not exist only in the moment of bombing, but also in the defeat, division and loss of political discourse, which lasted for a long time and formed a very heavy wound in the heart.
Looking back on my years in Dresden, seeing the city destroyed by the war, and seeing the state of the people who later lived here, I deeply felt that from the perspective of cultural relics protection, the war was a disaster.