The Garden of Learning

Geography

Which German city was rebuilt around the Frauenkirche after 1945's firestorm?

  • Dresden
  • Cologne
  • Hamburg

The answer is Dresden. The church was rebuilt by 2005.

Dresden, bombed in February 1945 in raids that created a firestorm and destroyed the historic centre. The death toll was propagandised in both directions for decades - Nazi authorities inflated it immediately, and figures of 100,000 or more circulated for years - until a commission of historians reported in 2010 that the likely number was around 25,000, which is horrifying and considerably lower than the number the argument had been conducted with.

The Frauenkirche did not fall in the raid. Its stone dome stood through the fire and collapsed two days later as the heated sandstone failed, and the East German government left the rubble as a war memorial for forty-five years. It was rebuilt after reunification, largely by donations including substantial British ones, using thousands of original blocks recovered from the pile and catalogued by computer - so the finished church is patched with dark, fire-blackened stones set among new pale ones.

The orb and cross on top were made by a British goldsmith whose father had flown in the raids. The building is now the most frequently cited example of reconstruction as reconciliation, and the darker stones are deliberately visible - the point being not to make the damage disappear.