Felled by war, Dresden church rises again

DRESDEN, Germany -- In the days before bombs broke the city, Hedwig Sygulla would seek out the quiet of Frauenkirche -- Dresden's famed Church of Our Lady -- whose Baroque dome was for more than two centuries the most magnificent landmark along the Elbe river.

Sygulla, then 27, was among hundreds of thousands of refugees jamming into Dresden in early 1945 as the Red Army drove relentlessly toward Germany. Her husband was away fighting on the eastern battlefront; she carried her infant son.

In a city of desperation, noise, and confusion, the young woman found precious moments of tranquility in the Lutheran worship place. The choirs still sang, and their voices melded with the strains of the great pipe organ to form what seemed a bulwark of sweet sound against the chaos of a world at war.

''Perhaps I prayed, I can't remember," Sygulla said. ''What I do remember is the feeling of safety and peace that the church provided."

The Church of Our Lady -- rebuilt almost precisely to its original 18th-century specifications using classic materials and techniques guided by advanced computer technology -- will be formally reconsecrated today in a service that will join former enemies. Most of the nations that fought in World War II are sending emissaries.

Reduced to smoldering rubble by one of the war's most apocalyptic bombings, the beloved Frauenkirche has been resurrected as centerpiece of an eight-centuries-old city so lovely it has long been called the ''Florence of the Elbe."

On the night of Feb. 13, 1945, three waves of British Lancasters and American B-17 heavy bombers pounded Dresden with incendiaries and high explosives. More than 35,000 people perished in the firestorm that annihilated 75 percent of the city.

In a terrible twist, the Church of Our Lady initially seemed to have endured the attack -- survivors recall taking heart on that cruel dawn at seeing the dome still rising above the smoke -- only to suddenly implode because of structural damage caused by the hellish temperatures.

''We placed flowers by the wreckage of Frauenkirche to commemorate the lost," said Sygulla, whose baby, Klaus Peter, died in her arms from smoke inhalation suffered in the attack. ''But no one imagined that the church would rise again. It was gone -- shattered stone."

The reconstruction of Frauenkirche is more than an almost miraculous feat of engineering and architecture. It is also an extraordinary affirmation of the resilience of the human spirit.

''The will to reconstruct the church burned even more fiercely than the firestorm that destroyed it," said Gerhard Glaser, who recently retired as head of the Office for Preservation of Historical Monuments in the German state of Saxony. ''It has been the work of a lifetime for many people. First there was overcoming opposition from those who fought the idea of reconstruction as utterly futile. Then there was the incredible labor of actually rebuilding."

The cost: $160 million, including millions raised by the Friends of Dresden, an organization of Americans with ties -- of blood or simple sympathy -- to the city. Among them is Guenther Blobel, a native of the city and professor of cell biology at Rockefeller University who received the 1999 Nobel Prize for medicine and donated his entire $960,000 award to the project. ''It seemed the proper thing to do," he said.

Calls to rebuild the church, located in the former East Germany, started almost immediately after the fall of the communist regime in 1989.

The effort got underway in 1993, but it took more than a year of careful sifting through the ruins, cataloguing of every stone, and complex analysis of every bit of material, before the physical work of rebuilding started with the laying of an original stone block -- catalogued No. 04721. It was set against a doorjamb marked ''A" in May of 1994.

''It was like putting together a giant jigsaw puzzle with many pieces missing," said Ulrich R. Schoenfeld, lead architect for the firm IPRO-Dresden, which carried out the project. ''At times the work was joyous; other times it was agony. Every day we laughed with one eye, cried with the other."

The aim was to replicate as closely as possible the design, materials, and construction of the original Frauenkirche, with its ornate 14,326-ton sandstone dome that soared skyward without internal supports. Built between 1726 and 1743, the Church of Our Lady was the crowning achievement of architect George Baehr. An elaborate confection of high Baroque, the church is regarded by some as the most architecturally significant Protestant edifice in Europe -- and certainly the most important in Germany.

Johann Sebastian Bach performed an organ concert in Frauenkirche, and Richard Wagner was so attracted by its fine acoustics that he chose it for the premiere of his monumental chorale ''Love Feast of the Apostles."

''We started with rubble, with broken fragments of building, with scraps of stone," said Karl-Heinz Schuetzhold, leader of the engineering team. ''We had to study every piece and fragment to ensure we understood not only where it fit but what function it served, whether for bearing weight or for enhancing sound or for ornamentation."

Altogether, 9,286 carved stones were recovered from the ruins, ranging from dressed building blocks to fragments of staircases, walls, towers, pillars, and the dome. Gravestones were also recovered from the subterranean chambers that served as burial place for some of the city's affluent burghers and other notables. Of 7,110 stones from the exterior facade, only 3,539 were deemed ''usable" for the reconstruction. The rest were too badly cracked, corroded, or weakened by heat.

''But every stone was catalogued, measured, precisely described, and numbered," Schoenfeld said. ''We had to understand where the unusable ones belonged in order to cut new sandstone to fit exactly with the old."

The project employed a small army of architects, engineers, stress analysts, acoustics designers, woodworkers, art restorers, surveyors, musicologists, computer modelers, and other specialists. Team leaders had only three incomplete -- and maddeningly imprecise -- sets of schematic drawings of the church to serve as rough building guides.

Otherwise, they relied on thousands of old photographs, memories of worshipers and church officials, and crumbling old purchase orders that detailed the quality of the mortar or pigments of the paint (as in the 1700s, copious quantities of eggs were used to make the pastels that provide the interior its almost luminescent glow).

Every step of reconstruction posed a fresh challenge.

''We wanted to duplicate the oaken doors of the entrance but had only vague descriptions of the detailed carving," Schoenfeld said. ''So we issued an appeal to anyone who might have married in the church, because couples often pose for photos outside the church doors. People sent their wedding albums or photographs of their grandparents as newlyweds. We went from ignorance to knowing exactly the designs that allowed the wood artisans to create new doors exactly in the image of the old."

Every photograph, every measurement of reclaimed stone, every angle of curve, every smile of cherub or sweep of wing of carved angel was fed into computers. The software, in turn, created more than 10,000 richly detailed three-dimensional images that revealed how missing sections of dome, for example, must have fitted to surviving portions.

''Without very advanced computer techniques, we could never have rebuilt this 18th-century church so exactly," Schuetzhold said. ''Frauenkirche incorporates the tradition of the original, but in some areas we've improved it to ensure safety and greater longevity."

For instance, a steel ''thrust ring," invisible to view, has been fitted under the support blocks of the dome to more evenly spread its weight to the eight main pillars and outer walls. Design flaws in the original had led to cracking and leaks that required major repair work in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Seven of the original eight bells had been melted into weapons during the Nazi era. Only ''Hannah," cast in 1515 for another church, survived the war, because it was hidden outside Dresden.

Each of the new bells, like the old, bears the name of a biblical figure and was cast to replicate the sound of the originals. But there have been embellishments: The booming 2-ton ''Isaiah" -- named after the prophet who foresaw swords pounded into plowshares -- bears a relief of the collapsing towers of New York's World Trade Center.

Some Dresdeners see Frauenkirche as a memorial to war. Remnants of sections still blackened by the 1945 inferno have been incorporated into the rebuilt cathedral to preserve that memory.

But most seem to view the re-created church as proof that life can bloom again from even the most terrible devastation.

''The rebuilding of the church is a miracle beyond belief," said Sygulla, who, after the crowds of the day's celebration dispersed, planned to visit the church, light a candle, and say a simple prayer. ''It is an act of beauty and love that shows we can still dream of the future, not dwell only in the dark past."