12 June: Thwarted!

This day was scheduled for our trip to Dresden, and our much-anticipated visits to the reconstructed Frauenkirche, the exquisite porcelain collection of the Zwinger Palace, and the imaginatively-displayed collection of arms and armour, going back to the 17th-century Ottoman invasions , at the Dresden Fortress. Not an ICE this time, whizzing along at 167kph, but a local train taking two hours each way.

Alas, it was not to be. Come the morning, Neil suffered a severe attack of vertigo. We spent the morning walking in as straight a line as possible to find a local doctor.

The practice recommended by the hotel staff turned out to be a dermatology clinic. However, the English-speaking doctor pointed us to a Community GP two blocks away. They were about to close for lunch, but gave us a form to fill in and told us to return at 2pm.

After a simple lunch of potato soup at the hotel (surprisingly good), we headed back at 2. Dr Anton Kugler, a pleasant young man with excellent English from
his time in New York, made his diagnosis and prescribed physio exercises to help. A half-hour consultation for less than it would have cost at home!

We felt we deserved a coffee after all this, so treated ourselves to two macchiatos and a chocolate-filled Berliner donut. The elegant pink logo on the café window read “ We Love Coffee.”

Inside was a large wall-poster from the 1920’s , showing the nearby Anhalter Bahnhof in the days of its glory, when it was Berlin’s Gateway to the South, with services via Dresden not only to Prague and Vienna, but to places as far away as Rome, Naples and Athens.

Opened in 1880 by Kaiser Wilhelm I and Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the station had a huge roof covering 10,600 m2, and had a separate (and frequently used) reception area for visiting royalty.

By the 1920’s it was linked by a 100m tunnel to the biggest hotel in Europe, the Hotel Europa, the epitome of glamour.

Next to the passenger terminus, was the Anhalter Güterbahnhof (freight station). Three arches led to a loading road, 20 m wide, with matching covered goods-handling areas some 210 m long.

All this was to change. The Nazis flirted with the idea of turning it into a giant swimming pool (Hitler and his architect Albert Speer had grandiose ideas of rebuilding the Berlin train system on a north-south axis.)

World War II brought darkness and ruin. As the Final Solution picked up speed Anhalter was used to deport 9600 Jews to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia, - thence to the concentration camps.

Massive raids in 1943 damaged the station severely; two more in February 1945 left it wrecked and unusable. Today it is just a memory, a portico leading to nowhere.Leia mais