Dresden

Dresden is regenerating.

Please click here to see photos.

I visited Dresden in 1994 along with my friend Colin and our Colgate/Freiburg University Study Group. It was cold and gray and the city seemed desolate in March. The giant concrete buildings seemed like dead monuments to Communism even though there were new stores along the main pedestrian boulevards. There was only a pile of rubble where the Church of Our Lady once stood, but there were also tall construction cranes swaying all over the place and wonderful artistic collections in the museums and performance halls in the city center along the Elbe. Dresden had retained those old hints of classical Greece, the Enlightenment and Baroque, but I could find dilapidation everywhere. The city of Dresden in Canaletto paintings would never exist again, at least not like that. The traces of its destruction are writ large here, but not necessarily easily recognizable. Its experiences have been left lingering like testimonies in the voices of those like Kurt Vonnegut, Victor Klemperer or several generations of many other people.

In my return, I found plenty of activity. People had painstakingly rebuilt the Church of Our Lady and there are many new commercial projects. I also found a good energy and interesting people and things going on across the river in Dresden Neustadt (The "New City" which is actually pretty old too). Continuing to build on David Emory's suggestion to write about the people whom I meet, I include more sketches below. For more sketches from my travels, please see the friends link here on my blog.

In the Lollis Hostel:

I met Julianne (Jule) at the front desk. She seemed to be in charge and knew how to get me pointed in the right direction.

I met Jeremy and Will in the lounge off to the left of the front desk। Will was working on his I-Phone. His sketch books were laid out on the table.

Jeremy Gardner was at the chess board and he was waiting for a ride to Berlin. He recently graduated from college with a concentration in literature. He styles himself a young poet, novelist and musician and he is traveling around Europe and the Mediterranean coast for about a year depending how the money runs out. Jeremy plans to go to Jordan to meet displaced Iraqis, convey their stories and develop his journalism. He wants to return to the US and get involved in national politics for a Democratic US President, someone who knows how to lead us in national politics. He speaks passionately about the US even as he runs off a list of all our problems from foreign policy to intellectual freedom, war, consumption, the environment, capitalism and his own art. He is also the best chest player in the hostel’s guest lounge. I told Jeremy that groups like American Voices Abroad in Berlin may be interested in his work with Iraqis since they want to build up cooperative projects with both US veterans and Iraqi citizens and maybe even build some bridges. If you are interested in his work in its various forms and stages, check out http://geocities.com/thehartwick for his writing, http://www.myspace.com/themisms for his Hip-Hop music and http://www.myspace.com/jermgardner for his solo music.

Will is in the other corner. Everyone thinks he is crazy. Then again, there are several people in this room who can oddly strike an impression. Will admits that he is crazy, but not crazy like everyone else thinks he is crazy. I think Will is crazy in that good way of good people with good souls, burning. For Will, it is in the music and the moment. He is constantly thinking about his music and exploring everywhere for it. For Will, music is not simply to be found in the forms of the past, though he has nothing against history and what it has given us. He just wants people to consider the present and the future and bust out of the past. He looks everywhere among the world's canyons and mountains for its sounds and its players. He is concerned about the commercialization of art as compared to the actual act of making art. More importantly, he is constantly sketching and his composing seems to be leading him to some very interesting places, people and music.

I spent a Saturday walking around Dresden with Will looking for food, gifts and supplies for his digital camera. Will was born in 1965 in Cleveland but grew up in Florida. He oversees construction contracts for his father's company, but he is finding his groove with avant-garde music composition. He has been in Dresden for about a week as the guest of local musicians. On Saturday evening in Hellerau at the European Center for the Arts, the elole piano trio (http://www.elole.de) premiered Will’s piece, “Calabi-Yau” (2005/07) as part of a larger program including contemporary works from Tom Johnson, Juan Maria Solare, Hartmut Dorschner and Carsten Hennig. All of these composers still go back to the old forms and instruments, but they explore them for their range of experience in different ways from variations and structures to the performance itself. My favorite was the piece in which the trio visually took turns going through the motion of playing while the others kept fragments of the piece's sounds coming - sometimes it felt angry; at other times the silence was full of earlier variations in the listener's mind. Will was impressed with his peers' composition work, which motivates him to work even harder. He is not a bad chess player either; maybe just a little "unorthodox". He hopes to have a better designed webpage up and running some time soon for people to see.

Later in the evening, a local guy named Joe, popped in to the hostel to see Jule and hang out with people in the guests lounge. He likes to talk and show his wide range of knowledge on history, language and politics. He found me all ears. Having lived in the Neustadt for almost 20 years, he feels that Dresden has unfortunately become more commercialized. Neustadt, the place I find so cool, has lost its bohemian qualities from his view. Instead, the Neustadt has become more of a club and party atmosphere (God save the Kinks and the Village Green Preservation Society). However, Joe also notes the increasing diversity of people, although he also thinks there is still a lot of closed mindedness (Spiessbuergerlichkeit) around the Neustadt itself.

Gustavo Vieyra enters the lounge looking for people to play chess. He is from Mexico and studied German language and literature at UCLA. He has worked as a teacher in Los Angeles’ schools for years, but is frustrated with the curriculum and pedagogy involving Spanish-speaking children and bilingual language education in general. He has been to Germany many times and has been staying here at the hostel for an extended period. Most people in the lounge know him as the guy who has been in Germany for weeks at the computer checking his stocks and researching investment opportunities on the internet. Gustavo explains that he grew up poor. So he wants to have enough money to live well. However, Gustavo is also working on a new learning program that uses music as a core approach to teaching children. He claims a large degree of success in using the singing songs to help achieve a bilingual level by the age of eight or nine, if children start at the preschool level with his teaching model. He has found some support in German schools and is currently developing his model in Goerlitz. Still, Gustavo is frustrated with the bureaucracy and resistance to his project in general and is interested in finding people, both parents and teachers interested in applying his approach or even starting their own charter preschools. Gustavo is also a brilliant chess player, who seriously kicked my butt in three moves, although Jeremy beat him two out of three times. When I left him, Gustavo was researching the precious metal Tellurium, which is found in traces as an alloy of copper, gold and lead, and widely sought by the computer chip industry for its conductive quality. Gustavo told me that he is going to buy a house here in Dresden-Neustadt with his investments. Housing prices are still low and nice old apartments readily available. Yet I hear a sense of loneliness in his voice when he tells me that he likes Dresden. If you are interested in his project, please check out this link:

http://www.gestaltdialektik.com

I drank tea with Jule and Jeremy in the kitchen on Saturday morning. Jule loves her city, but she wants to go away every couple years for a healthy dose of change. When we asked her about Dresden and her family's past, she told us that her grandparents never really talked much it except for a few stories about her grandmother during the war.

That night several of us gathered at the lounge to accompany Will to elole's concert. Nicole Neeley is from Austin, TX. She is a good young artist and thinking about grad school. However, she wanted to travel first and think things over. Travel has meant feeling the uncomfortable and she is looking forward to returning to the comfort of home, although returning to Austin has her also thinking about the healthy change of place. Nicole has been traveling around to some of the premier art festivals in Italy and Germany this fall and heads home via Paris. If you are interested in her work, check out her myspace page: http://www.myspace.com/bespeeched and the link: “Things I Make” for her artwork.

Abram Foley is from way up in northern Wisconsin. All the lake effect snow up there lands in western Michigan, he tells me when I ask where up there. Abe has graduated from Wisconsin and is teaching English as a Fulbright Fellow in a little German town called Perleberg in Brandenburg. He speaks very good German and wants to go to grad school for English literature or maybe 20^th century American literature in another year or so. On Friday, he will be in Berlin to sing with a choir, and I may see him again soon.

When I asked a music composer after a concert, if Dresden was the new experimental music capital of Germany, he shook his head no and mentioned Berlin in the same breath. Yes, there is a small and interesting community of artists and musicians here in Dresden, he conceded. It may be provincial, he added, but it has a nice laid back pace that he appreciates.

As for me, I am heading home soon and I hope this finds you all well.