The Anti-War War Museum
The Anti-War War Museum

Summary/Abstract: Back when I was a student at the Dresden Institute of Technology in the 1970s, I rarely felt comfortable actually going to an area, ominously dominated as it was by derelict barracks and Russian military vehicles in the streets. There was one exception: the building of the former Saxon Cadet School. This was used as an officers’ mess for the Soviet troops, and civilians were sometimes granted entry in the evening, perhaps by means of bribes or other unorthodox practices. Sitting in the gallery, listening to Russian sixties and seventies hits and drinking cheap vodka, my fellow students and I would keenly scout the dance floor and whenever we spotted a pretty Russian or Asianlooking girl, we would dash across and ask her for the next dance. Yes, hard as it is to believe, such fraternisation even took place in the barracks quarter of Dresden, which, by a twist of fate, somehow survived the terrible bomb attacks in February 1945. As a reserve officer of the German army, I was not so long ago asked to take part in a military training programme in Dresden. The training was held in the same building, now functioning as the German Army Officers’ School, well restored and refurbished with a new, elegant officers’ mess building. A far cry from the communist days, when if someone had told me how the building would turn out I would called them a fool.

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