GERMANY: A RECEPTION, NEW (OLD) COUSINS, AND A STOLPERSTEIN CEREMONY

May 23, 2025

One of the few buildings that was restored after the February 25, 1945, bombing was the Old Town Hall. It was originally built in 1911-1912 in the Art Nouveau style but was burned out in the air raid. It was repaired and expanded in 1999-2001. A plaque on the wall states, "As a lasting reminder, the Old Town Hall commemorates the destruction of old Pforzheim." 

This is the building where there was a reception for the Stolpersteine families that we--and the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of our grandfather and his first wife--had been been invited to attend. We had known our grandfather was married before he was married to our grandmother, but we knew nothing of his life with the first wife or if there were living descendants. Alex, our incredible researcher, found their names, and my brother Dave used Facebook to track them down. They too were invited to the Stolpersteine events.

It turns out there were three children of that earlier marriage, two of whom survived to adulthood, and one of whom married and had two children (born in 1948 and 1951) who would also be grandchildren of our grandfather. We met the widow of the oldest son (who died in 1981) and the second son himself, who is still living and is our half-first cousin. Between them, those two children had five children. We met three of those children, who are our half first-cousins once removed. One of them brought her 11-year-old daughter, our half first-cousin twice removed.

We got there a little early, nervously checking out every small group of people who came in. We had not seen photos of any of the relatives, and as far as we could tell, each person that entered could have been a cousin. When you don't know what you are looking for, you see similarities in every smile, every nose, every setting of the eyes.

While we waited, I admired this powerful metal relief that portrays Pforzheim's streets and buildings in the Cubist style.

GERMANY: DRESDEN

 Sunday, May 18, 2025

We were up at 7:00 AM, ate breakfast in our hotel at 8:00, and left at 8:45 to catch a 9:00 church service.

Except . . . I failed as navigator and took us to the wrong church. Somehow we ended up at Christ Church, a Lutheran church whose claim to fame is that it is Dresden's only remaining church with two steeples and was the first Art Nouveau church in Germany. It was built in 1903-1905 and was badly damaged by bombs during the bombing in February 1945 that destroyed much of the city. (More on the bombing in a minute.) It was repaired enough to make it usuable in 1950-1951 and thoroughly restored in 1973-1980.

We walked all around the church searching for an unlocked door, but we didn't find one. We did discover this beautiful sculpture of Christ with a lovely green patina. It made it worth the stop.

We finally found the church we had been looking for, the Frauenkirche, or Church of Our Lady. 

The church was destroyed during the infamous February 1945 firebombing of Dresden, a joint RAF and USAF operation that included four attacks over three days, destroying more than 1,600 acres of the city's center and killing approximately 25,000 people. This bombing preceded the bombing of my mother's hometown of Pforzheim by ten days, and she would often weep on the anniversary of this event as well as on the anniversary of the bombing of Pforzheim.

Dresden after the bombing. From Wikipedia.

A bronze plaque in the square shares this memory from Church Inspector Weinert (translated here from the German): "On Thursday, February 15th, around 11 a.m., as I was entering the dead city, searching for the cathedral dome in the milky fog, I was shocked to see nothing. An hour earlier, my wife, searching for me, had witnessed this tragedy: after an initial, quiet crackling, the dome slowly collapsed, and then, with a tremendous bang, the outer walls of the church burst, and a pitch-black cloud of dust filled the entire area."

View from City Hall after the bombing. 

GERMANY 2000: PFORZHEIM

December 16, 2000

The first year I took travel pictures with a digital camera was 2009. We had some great trips before that, and I documented them by creating traditional scrapbooks. I have decided to try to digitize those memories by scanning the photos and writing up the trips here. This is my first attempt. While I have already written about much of what is in this first post, I include an expanded version here as the first part of our trip in 2000.

Our daughter, a French major at Brigham Young University at the time, completed a study abroad semester in Paris in Fall 2000. We decided that we and her two younger brothers would meet her in Europe in December and spend some time touring around France together. My mother, a German immigrant who traveled to Germany quite often, suggested that we tack on a trip to Germany with her as our guide, something I had always wanted to do. The trip was set. My husband and I had traveled to Great Britain the previous year, but this was our first trip to mainland Europe.

We flew into Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris where we met our daughter (who looked tres chic in her black leather coat, black pants, black boots, and a red French scarf) and picked up a rental van. We drove about 350 miles from Paris to the German city of Pforzheim, which is about 20 miles over the border, where we met up with my mother. We did make one stop at Verdun after making our way out of Paris, a stop memorable not for the sites that we saw but for the loaf of French bread and cheese that we bought at a convenience store. It was the first time we had tasted Boursin cheese, and we were wowed. We knew that our belts were in for some serious stretching on this trip.

It felt almost surreal to cross the border from France into Germany, and later into Austria, then back into Germany before ending up in France again. My husband had been in Europe as a pre-teen and remembers difficulty crossing the borders, and we had had our own experiences crossing the U.S./Mexico border that involved long waits.  We just breezed past the old border-crossing station near the Rhine river and Baden-Baden on our way into Germany, although we did get a little lost at that point as we struggled with the change in signage.