First off, I’d like to apologize for the long, long lag time since my last posts. The last eight or nine months have been quite challenging for me in a number of ways, but I’m back with A Dispatch From Dresden!
As many of you know, for six out of the last seven years I have traveled to Germany for a month of German language and culture classes at the Goethe Institue in Munich (Europe was closed in fall 2020). When I learned last year that the Munich branch had closed its Gasthaus, the only reasonably-priced option for a month’s stay, and also discontinued the four-week intensive course, I started looking for alternatives. I learned that not only did the Dresden school still have the four-week option, but they had also opened a brand new Gastaus in 2021.
So here I am, exactly halfway through my month-long visit to the beautiful city of Dresden.
Several things have come together over these last two weeks that are pretty darn incredible. Before I left for Germany, I picked up the newly-released, highly-rated 800+ page biography of Vladimir Putin, penned by the acclaimed biographer Philip Short. It is unique in that it not only traces Putin’s life from birth, but also stretches all the way to the present, including the Ukraine invasion and war. Early last week I got to the part where Putin, a veteran KGB officer by that point, is sent to Dresden to be second in command to the KGB station chief, who traveled frequently, leaving Putin in charge most of the time. The descriptions of his life in Dresden with his young family and his KGB and East German Stasi colleagues was made all the more interesting by my actually being here in Dresden. Short even lists some of the addresses, including that of the KGB headquarters at Angelikastraße 4, in an upscale residential neighborhood near the river Elbe called Waldschlosschen (“Little Castle in the Woods”). It was an historic mansion “leased” – free of charge – to the Soviet government from the DDR (Deutsche Demokratische Republik or communist East Germany). I Google Mapped the address and discovered that it was about 20 minutes by bus from my Gasthaus, so on a very rainy Tuesday after class I went to have a look. It is pictured below.
There is a legendary story, likely much exaggerated according to Short, of Putin and an armed Soviet soldier walking out to the front courtyard and confronting East German protesters who had just received the news of the fall of the Berlin wall. According to the tale, Putin calmly told them that Angelikastraße 4 was Soviet military territory and that the Soviet occupants had nothing to do with the politics of the DDR. The first part was true, but the second was a preposterous lie, one worthy of his pal The Donald many years later. To stand in these historic locales has been an experience I will not soon forget, and it has added incredible depth to my understanding of the biography.
Along the same lines, all of the above took place at the same time Mikhail Gorbachev was initiating Glasnost (Openness) and Perestroika (Restructuring), which led to Gorbachev’s ouster and the eventual collapse of the Soviet system. Over a hundred pages of the biography are dedicated to this period, with great insights into Putin’s mixed and sometimes contradictory feelings about those strange times for Russia. Again, to be here while reading all of this is pretty mind-blowing, not to mention that the Gorbachev story is all over the press due to his very recent death.
But the most fascinating part of my week was at its end.
Last Friday night I was celebrating the completion of my first week of classes at Augustiner am Frauenkirche with a few Vollbier Hell’s and ein halbes Bauernhendl (half a free-range chicken). The common outdoor tables filled up quickly, and I was at a table for 10, with two couples at one end and yours truly on the far corner. A German gent approached and asked if the seat across from me was free. Of course I welcomed him, and he ordered a beer.
After a few minutes, I figured I’d try to start a conversation in German, as I typically do. He seemed around my age. To break the ice, I asked him if he lived in Dresden. He said yes, he lived in an apartment just a few blocks away in the Altstadt. What happened next was one of the most incredible conversations I have ever had, and it was so relevant to everything you have already read in this post as to be almost scary.
We went through all the normal stuff: where I was from; why I was speaking German, etc. Then he very earnestly apologized for speaking only a few words of English, when pretty much everyone younger learned English starting in grade school. We spoke for well over an hour, which was fairly challenging for me as it was all in German, but we shared our life stories, his much more than mine. Walter was born within six months of me in 1952, in a small town called Cottbus, between Berlin and Dresden and close to the Polish border, deep in the former East Germany. He told me that when he was in school, English was a forbidden language; they were taught Russian. The look of pain in his eyes when he recounted his youth and teen years, the citizens’ debilitating fear of and hatred for the Stasi, the incentives to rat out your neighbors and even family members for non-communist statements and thoughts. At this point I wasn’t sure I had understood correctly; I said, “Did you say non-communist thoughts?” He said yes, exactly.
He worked as a senior technician on the electrical power grid in East Germany, and after the German reunification in 1990 he worked to upgrade the grid to Western standards until his retirement five years ago. He was actually working on a project in East Berlin on November 9, 1989, when the Berlin wall fell.
It was a very emotional conversation. Towards the end I told him I felt guilty for the life I have led in the west, understanding until now only in an intellectual sense what the Iron Curtain, the Cold War, and the Soviet Empire actually forced regular folks of my age to endure. He responded without hesitation. He said he would not be sitting in the beautiful square looking at the rebuilt and restored Frauenkirche if it were not for the United States. I told him that I had read a great deal about Dresden’s history, including the amazing story of the Frauenkirche, the international fundraising for which was instigated by former RAF and USAF flyers, most in their late eighties or nineties, who had bombed German cities. He continued: “As a people, we were defeated, we were tired, and we were starving. Any other victor would have occupied Germany, or at least left it to perish, but the USA rebuilt not only Germany, but all of Europe, with their own money, and Europe would otherwise be completely different today.” We concluded our conversation on this high note, and parted with smiles and mutual best wishes.
This conversation has awakened me to the human costs of war and tyranny. I will never forget looking into Walter’s eyes as he related the realities of life in the former DDR.
Dresden, Saxony, Germany
September 11, 2022
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