The former East German state of Saxony has a wealth of history as Mark Bibby Jackson discovers on his trip to Dresden and Radebeul.
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here is a scene in Trigger Happy TV when the show’s creator, Dom Jolly, dressed as a Belgian tour guide, takes a couple of unsuspecting American tourists on a tour of Bruges in a horse-drawn carriage. If you haven’t seen the show then the allusion will most probably escape you, but please bear with me. Only it isn’t any old tour of Bruges – well, it isn’t a tour of Bruges at all – but rather of the city’s square. It’s on about the third time round the square that the tourists eventually lose their rag, as Jolly keeps on saying “on your right is the town hall”, and demand to be let off. Both show and sketch have lived with me and in part explains my aversion to escorted tours, especially those that involve transport. This explains my reticence as I get on a hop-on hop-off bus in Dresden, courtesy of the local tourism department, one Saturday morning. Dresden is the UK’s Coventry. Not the metaphorical place where you are sent to when you have betrayed your fellow workers, but the city that was most heavily bombed in the latter stages of World War II in a game of cataclysmic tit for tat that Trump and Jong-Un might envy. It is also a city that I have both longed to and dreaded visiting, not knowing what the reaction would be to a British tourist even all these years later. I need not have worried. The recorded English-language tape on the hop-on hop-off bus hardly mentions the war. An oblique reference to a business person who made a fortune under the Third Reich and a statue that bears a passing reference to a Nazi salute but predates Hitler aside, the guide informs us of the history of baroque Zwinger in the centre of Dresden, its castle, opera house, cathedral and museums, the majority of which were restored in the decades following the Allied bombing. Zwinger literally translates as cave, for bears used to be kept here, now cars are largely banned as the city aims to reduce its carbon footprint. However, as we follow a circuitous route around the centre through which I walked the previous afternoon, after checking into the Hotel Am Terrassenufer, I do find myself wondering whether it’s Mr Jolly behind the wheels. The previous evening I had no such misgivings as I was led on an “anti-pub crawl” by the eccentric Danillo, a former teacher and hostel owner, who runs tours of the Neustadt by night. The “new town” on the other side of the River Elbe to Dresden, Neustadt is in fact the original settlement, with the baroque Disneyland on the other side a relative newcomer. This
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