I’d just finished Cal Flyn’s Islands of Abandonment before this trip and, in many ways, the novel would have been a better fit for my time in Dresden. Even after thirty years, you can still see the imprint that the Soviet Union has left on the city. There’s the post-war mass construction block apartments, the pockets of caved-in abandoned buildings, and the clean yet vaguely clinical look of the Kulturpalast. You can tell that it’s a city of industry, though not industry in the sense of shiny tech or colossal banking giants. Rather, it’s the over-grown grass storage container fields of construction, shipping, and factory working. It’s funny how cities that build are often closest to nature, since there’s trees and vines creeping into everything on Dresden’s outskirts, where workers have much more to focus on than lawn care.
I spent three days in Dresden, ten hours of which consisted of a train ride across the heartland of Germany. It left me with plenty of time for reading and I finished Sady Doyle’s Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers halfway through my return trip back to Frankfurt. Doyle’s thoughtful analysis of the Horror transcends a commentary on trope and instead presents itself as a well-researched and often times inspiring collection of feminist essays. I love an essay collection that can somehow surprise me with a new instance of sexism in everyday life. It creates a short burst of rage that almost delights me, because I remember that I’m not as entirely jaded as I present myself as. It’s a great book. Any chapter could be lovingly selected, photocopied at a weird angle, and mass stapled in a stack of handouts for a class of highschoolers to dissect.
Trying to relate the book to Dresden, however, was difficult. I don’t know enough about Dresden’s history with FemLit or social movements to make any deep or meaningful tie-ins. However, as Doyle’s book did go deep into the stain of the Patriarchy on Western civilization, I did find myself thinking quite a bit about its role on the city.
Naturally, elements of the Patriarchy are in every monument you see in Europe, with Dresden being no exception. You can see it in Dresden’s looming statues of great (and often terrible) men built by men and for men, in the procession of all-male rulers on the Fürstenzug wall (where the only women on the mural sits hunched with the children in the corner), and most notably in the plaza of the Frauenkirche (or, Our Lady church. No, not The Lady, but rather Our Lady), where a giant statue of Martin Luther stands before her with his head raised proudly to heaven, as though telling God ‘Yes, I have hammered and nailed my decree upon her door. I have told her exactly what we want Our Religion and Our Women to be.’
Sexism bleeds into art, into buildings, and into the very soul of these old cities. There are plenty of images of women throughout Dresden, don’t get me wrong, but they are not real women. They’re symbols and concepts given form, posed with a neat tit out for the grasping hand of a child and their bodies plump with prosperity. They decorate, they adorn, and they support the monuments. They smile and look coy. They aren’t anybody; they’re merely the ideal that some man thought to carve in place of a pillar.
This isn’t to call out Dresden in particular. As an American, it really isn’t my place to condemn the use of statues, not when the US can’t take down monuments to confederates without having an all-out war about it. Dresden merely had the bad luck of being the city I read FemLit in.
It’s also a city that was destroyed because of the ambitions of Patriarchal leaders. It’s also a city that still struggles with an Alt-Right presence, up until this day.
And yet, about an hour outside of this industrial city is a nature park, which I visited on my second day there. You have to ride a train forty minutes past block housing, then abandoned housing, then garden colonies, and take a ferry to reach it (mine had a mother duck sitting in a nest at the bow), but its unmistakably beautiful. The nature park is far from untouched by man or truly wild, but still it is growing and reclaiming everything that was carved out from it.
The Bastei once held a mountain castle that is now little more than some pick-axe marks in rocks. Even the bridge and its hundreds of steps are moss-laden and overgrown. Nature is reclaiming what was built, the way that Mother Nature always does. No matter how enterprising or industrial a city might be, nature claws, roots, and climbs her way in. She breaks the windows of old abandoned factories. She cracks apart pavement, no matter how deep we try to bury her.
She grows, no matter how much man tries to shadow her.
She’s always there, clawing back.
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