Although The Reconstruction of Berlin garnered the bulk of the international attention paid to contemporary German architecture and urbanism, it was not the only city in the newly reunited country whose appearance changed radically during these years. How to reinvent the past to serve as the badge of a proud past and possibly progressive — but firmly capitalist — future was a common theme from the Ruhrgebiet in the western corner of the country to Saxony in the far east. While in Berlin and the Ruhrgebiet most of the history employed in this effort was relatively recent, dating back no further than the second quarter of the nineteenth century, in Dresden the magical moment was roughly a century earlier and so more completely divorced from debates over current styles. And while Berliners dallied about reconstructing the Schloss that had once stood at the center of their city, Dresdeners were far less timid. Their reconstruction of the Frauenkirche and its surroundings defied modernism and Communism’s shared commitment to destroying the past and attempted as well to simultaneously recall a cherished past and create a prosperous future.

The transformation of the heart of Dresden is of enormous importance for the way in which Germans viewed their country’s history in the two decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall. First, in the reconstruction of the Frauenkirche it supplied the most important old-new German architectural symbol of the period located outside Berlin. Here, as in Munich in the 1950s, the erection of replicas and near-replicas of buildings destroyed during the Second World War was more important than the development of new architectural styles. Although questions have been raised about the authenticity of the results, they appear to have satisfied most Dresdners, not to mention tourists. Second, the latter are key, as although necessarily focused on the unique past of a particular city, the way in which Dresden has been rebuilt since 1989 was shaped not only by its own poignant history but also by international trends in urban image-making, largely in the service of this lucrative industry.

Dresden was, with about 500,000 residents, the third largest city in the GDR, after East Berlin and Leipzig. Before the Second World War, with 650 000 residents, it had been the sixth largest city in the German Reich.