MARK KURLANSKY
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Dresden, it has been unpopular with the Ossies. But where they have
reconstructed eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings, Dresdeners
have approved, and even demanded more rebuilding.
Stoof is the public relations manager for Hotel Taschenbergpalais.
The Taschenbergpalais was an eighteenth-century mansion that had
been reduced to crumbling stone walls and weed-covered rock piles
until, after reunification, a group of private investors with $130 million
rebuilt it into a 213-room luxury hotel. While I was staying there, the
President of Nigeria, Olusegun Obasanjo, and his considerable
entourage spent a night, periodically emerging for a motorcycle police
escort through old Germany.
Stoof said that much of the money for the Taschenbergpalais had
come "from West Germans who have too much money."
Too much
money
is clearly an Ossie, not a Wessie, concept. A decade after "reuni–
fication," Ossies and Wessies still look and think so differently that they
are immediately recognizable in a bar or on a street corner. The Ossies
look defeated and the Wessies strut like conquerors. The demeanor, the
body language would betray them even if the clothes and words did not.
One look at Ludwig Coulin-a tall man in an expensive trench coat
and fashionable knit tie-and I knew he was a Wessie. "I am from
Stuttgart. I have been here for four years and it is still a foreign country
to me," he said. Coulin is an architect working on the reconstruction of
the Dresden Castle, the roofless maze of collapsing renaissance walls
that the Saxon state has already spent $100 million resurrecting.
If
Ludwig Coulin's clothes had not revea led him to be a Wessie, his
enthusiasm for the new reunited Germany would have. Ossies are not
so sure. I am not so sure. And interestingly, this was all tied in with his
enthusiasm for rebuilding Dresden. "This is a great thing for Germany.
We didn't hope to see unification this century," he said pointing to scaf–
folding that was crisscrossing the courtyard of the castle. "This is a sym–
bol of Germany's good fortune."
He volunteered later in our conversation, apropos of nothing, "I am
very sure I came from the good part of Germany." When I pointed out
that many East Germans feel the same way he said, "Yes, but they just
don't remember."
Memory, of course, is the central German issue. The Dresden debate
becomes more tense when discussing one of the last baroque buildings.
In 1838, Gottfried Semper, the man who designed the opera house and
the adjacent O ld Masters Picture Gallery also designed a synagogue.
The Jews prayed in Semper's Baroque palace that looked like the Chris–
tians' Baroque palaces, holding services that resembled those of the
