Museum fortress Dresden

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View from the Brühl Terrace into the fortress

The Dresden Fortress Museum , also known as Dresden Casemates , is a museum opened in 1992 in the preserved part of the Dresden fortifications at the Elbe-facing end of the old town of Dresden .

Location

The museum is located under the Brühl Terrace in the inner city of Dresden. It takes up part of the accessible area inside the northern city ​​wall , which still surrounds this district towards the Elbe . The entrance to the museum is in the area of ​​the Jungfernbastei on Georg-Treu-Platz , between the art academy and the Albertinum . This is a rather inconspicuous door to the left of the outside staircase that leads to the terrace. The entrances to the terrace bank are permanently locked. In the museum, whose dark bunker-like vaults form a remarkable contrast to the magnificent baroque buildings in the area, the impression of an underground cellar is created, but in fact its two floors are above the surface of the earth.

Are located in the immediate vicinity with the Kunsthalle in Lipsius building , the Galerie Neue Meister and the sculpture collection of the State Art Collections Dresden another Dresden museums .

museum

Entrance to the Dresden Fortress Museum under the left flight of stairs on Georg-Treu-Platz

In the museum rooms, information is provided about the history of the Dresden city fortress, the interior of which has been made accessible again for this purpose.

Among other things, the more than 450 year old brick gate can be visited. It is the last remaining city ​​gate in Dresden. It has been built over by other fortifications, but is still accessible. It consists of a central passage for wagons , which is surrounded on both sides by small gates for pedestrians. Among other things, the old guard rooms , the iron hinges for the gate wings and the bridge over the former city ​​moat , which is also the city's oldest stone bridge, have been preserved here .

The facilities of the local bastions were also partially preserved. These include the cannon yards , from which the Dresden Elbe bridge and the brick gate were secured, as well as old spiral stairs , battlements and loopholes of the fortress . In the direction of the Elbe, there are three vaulted passages 40 meters long and 8 meters wide, which served as a weapons store. At the Kleiner Bastion there is a courtyard that is open to the top and into which one can see from the Brühl's terrace, and at the entrance there are Elbe high water marks from three centuries.

We also remember a foundry workshop that was operated in the Small Bastion between 1567 and the end of the 16th century by Wolfgang Hilliger , as well as Johann Friedrich Böttger and Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus , who worked in a laboratory at the Maiden Bastion around 1707/1708 invented European hard-paste porcelain .

View into the vault, on the right the original Moritz monument

After the Moritzmonument from 1555 was replaced by a copy in 2000, the original could be seen in the fortress until the Elbe flood in 2013 . Then it was salvaged and preserved. It has been on display in the Residenzschloss since 2017 .

history

Construction of the Dresden fortifications in the area of ​​today's museum began in 1546. At that time, under the guidance of Caspar Voigt von Wierandt and Melchior Trost, Dresden was one of the first German cities to have a fortress in the bastion system . In the course of this construction work, the brick gate, which is still in the museum today, was erected around 1550, and then the small bastion around 1553, which is still visible today as a small protrusion of the outer wall of the Brühl Terrace. The work was completed around 1555. Nearby there was also a previously navigable and then sanded and finally walled passage from the Elbe to the then Dresden armory , which is still marked today by a stone arch in the masonry.

According to plans by Paul Buchner , the Small Bastion was expanded to the east from 1590 to 1592. The maiden bastion, later called "Bastion Venus", was built, and the brick gate that had only been built a few decades earlier was built over. Weapons were stored in the casemates of the new bastion, soldiers were safely housed in times of war and enemies were fought from there.

On December 22nd, 1747 a powder magazine of the maiden bastion exploded , which led to the destruction of the first belvedere . At about the same time, the Saxon Prime Minister Heinrich von Brühl received this fortress area, which had lost its military importance, from Elector Friedrich August II. He had a second Belvedere and the Brühl Garden and other Brühl splendors built there. In this context, the casemates below were largely backfilled.

During the air raids on Dresden in 1945, parts of the fortress were used as an air raid shelter , and until the 1960s as an urban cooling room . Since 1965, among other things, archaeologists and preservationists have been working to uncover the filled fortifications. In 1968, for example, the bear kennel was opened in the neighborhood . After the fall of the Wall , the work was intensified. In 1991 the “Dresdner Verein Brühlsche Terrasse e. V. ”, whose members uncovered large parts of the fortress and set up the Dresden Fortress Museum, which opened a year later. From 1996 the facilities were further expanded.

The museum closed in January 2017 as a result of renovation work, including flood protection . The reopening under the name fortress Xperience with the exhibition Festivals, Dramas and Disasters took place on November 30, 2019. An improved audiovisual presentation is expected to attract 40,000 visitors rise to 100,000.

literature

  • Andrea Dietrich, Iris Kretschmann, Palaces and Gardens Dresden (Ed.): 450 Years Dresden Fortress. Proceedings of the symposium on November 11, 2005 in the Dresden Fortress , Sandstein Verlag Dresden 2006, ISBN 978-3-937602-92-9

Web links

Commons : Dresden Fortress  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Footnotes

  1. ^ Museums in Dresden: Dresden Fortress. State capital Dresden, archived from the original on January 29, 2009 ; Retrieved January 10, 2009 .
  2. ^ Dresden Fortress - casemates below the Brühl Terrace. In: Dresden-Bilder.de. Archived from the original on September 29, 2008 ; Retrieved January 10, 2009 .
  3. ^ Dresden Fortress. In: Dresden online - The unofficial city portal. Retrieved January 10, 2009 .
  4. ^ Museum fortress Dresden. In: Dresden-und-Sachsen.de. Archived from the original on February 10, 2013 ; Retrieved January 10, 2009 .
  5. ↑ Fortress Xperience. Schlösserland Sachsen , 2019, accessed September 20, 2019 .
  6. ↑ Dresden Fortress reopened - history very modern. MDR Saxony , November 30, 2019, accessed on December 2, 2019 .
  7. ↑ Sächsische Zeitung, November 18, 2019, p. 13.

Coordinates: 51 ° 3 '9.9 "  N , 13 ° 44' 37.8"  E