DRESDEN, Germany - Pleasure boats that cruise down the Elbe River in this historic city meander through a fairy-tale landscape of tree-shaded castles, graceful villas, and peaceful glades and vineyards. Photo-snapping passengers don’t need to be told why the United Nations designated this 11-mile stretch of the Elbe Valley a World Heritage Site in 2004.
But what the UN giveth, the UN taketh away.
Dresden officials are forging ahead with construction of a four-lane bridge across the Elbe, which they say will solve the city’s traffic woes. But for UNESCO, the UN’s cultural arm, it’s a bridge that threatens to destroy the famous views of the area.
And in June, the agency did something it had never done: It stripped the Dresden Elbe Valley of its World Heritage title, striking it off the list of such marvels as the Taj Mahal, the Acropolis, and the Grand Canyon.
The expulsion was an embarrassing blot on the reputation of a city praised for conservation efforts. Once synonymous with the fine china that bore its name, Dresden was nearly obliterated by Allied bombs during World War II, then clawed its way back to life, its splendid restoration of the Baroque city center a monument to triumph over adversity.
“Dresden was bombed, but the vineyards and meadows and the valleys were not destroyed - until now,’’ said Gunter Blobel, a German-born Nobel laureate scientist in New York and an outspoken critic of the bridge. “It’s like self-immolation.’’
The bridge, under construction since 2007, represents the will of the people, say opponents, who approved it in a referendum.
“We are not living in a dictatorship. We are a democracy, and I want to decide for myself how I go from A to B,’’ said Nikolaus Koehler-Totzki, a lawyer. “It may be by train, it may be by bicycle, it may be by car, but I want to have the freedom to decide.’’
Koehler-Totzki heads the state of Saxony’s automobile club, an organization that supports the bridge. Ask him when the span was proposed and he likes to reply, “In 1868,’’ when Dresden’s planners first suggested a new crossing for the Elbe that would connect the city’s university, on one side, with the community of Waldschloesschen on the other.
In reality, the design for the current bridge, a modern structure made of iron, was chosen by the city at the beginning of this decade. Motorists weary of worsening congestion had clamored for a new span to fill the gap between two crossings a mile away on both sides, Koehler-Totzki said.
In 2005, residents voted overwhelmingly in favor of the $232 million project. But as critics note, they did not know that the bridge could cost them World Heritage status, an accolade that brings no concrete reward but can affect the tourist industry.
Officials with UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, complained that the city had not submitted a blueprint of the bridge in its application for World Heritage status for its stretch of the Elbe Valley. Dresden’s restored city center was not eligible because the buildings are reconstructions, not originals. The portfolio contained only a discussion of possibilities for a new crossing, without the design eventually adopted.
“Every time a major project is going on, the parties have to inform UNESCO,’’ said Mechtild Roessler, chief of the European and North American unit of UNESCO’s World Heritage Center. “They didn’t do that. We learned about it from the press.’’
As a warning, the center slapped an “endangered’’ label on the Dresden Elbe Valley in 2006 - the only site in Western Europe to go on the danger list. Defiant, the city began construction of the bridge two years ago.
It has added up to an atmosphere of dissension over a region famous for the harmony of its verdant countryside and palaces and monuments from the 18th and 19th centuries. UNESCO extolled the site as “an outstanding cultural landscape, an ensemble that integrates the celebrated baroque setting and suburban garden city into an artistic whole within the river valley.’’
The Elbe, one of Europe’s major waterways, connecting Germany and the Czech Republic, flows beneath other modern bridges, some not particularly attractive, on its journey through Dresden. But the new span under construction is particularly problematic, Roessler said.
“We got an independent study that this specific bridge would cut the valley into two parts and would obstruct some of the most important views across the valley,’’ she said. “Following that, we advised the government of Germany to look for other options, and they did not.’’
Detractors of the bridge favor a tunnel beneath the river instead. But Koehler-Totzki says it would cost far more and require complicated engineering.
