Dresden is a very interesting city for a number of reasons. It is located in East Germany and was part of the German Democratic Republic (DDR) until reunification. It was decimated at the end of World War II by Allied bombing raids in one of the most devastating non-nuclear attacks in world history. Its population was also greatly harmed during and after World War I since its population was drafted heavily. I intend to focus on the buildings and streets if of Dresden in an attempt to highlight the infrastructure that survived the twentieth century and what did not.
This image shows a part of Dresden where not one building was left undamaged by the firebombing at of February, 1945. This is representative of the fate of most of the city with an allied eyewitness estimating that there was fire of around forty square miles in the city (Lt. Col. Richard A. Conroy, Operation Thunderclap: The Bombing of Dresden, U.S. Army War College Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, 31 March, 1989, pdf, https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA209271.pdf). While documenting what did and did not survive the bombing and other events will be a monumental task, I see it as important to show just how much physical history was lost to the horrors of war.