A Definition of Speechlessness

This is another in our series on ‘What my city means for me’. Here Patrick Wilden responds to the collapse of the Carola bridge on the Elbe river in Dresden. (The Elbe is over a thousand kilometres longs and crosses through Dresden as it makes its way from the Giant Mountains of the Czech Republic to the port of Cuxhaven in Northern Germany on the North Sea). The Carola bridge was built 1967–71 during the DDR period and was a replacement for an earlier one. A large section of the bridge collapsed on 11 September 2024.

Dresden, Nine Eleven. It’s the third report on the news at half past seven on Deutschlandfunk. Partial collapse? The first pictures are circulating, the first information, speculation. I accompany a poet from the English twin city of Coventry to her performance in a school. Later, a guided tour and discussion in the Frauenkirche, once collapsed after the firestorm in February ’45. There is also talk of the current ‘Einsturz’. The English makes it more human: why does someone collapse? From stress, from overwork or from fatigue? In Genoa, a motorway bridge collapses while the motorway is still in operation, taking dozens of people with it to their deaths. In the Sauerland region on the A45 motorway near Lüdenscheid, this is apparently prevented at the last minute. The Dresden Carola Bridge collapses in the middle of the night, the emergency call is triggered at 3.08 am. Nobody is injured. I had photographed the city skyline with its lights reflecting in the Elbe just three hours earlier.

It is only a few steps from the Frauenkirche to the point on Brühl’s Terrace where the Belvedere stood until the war. Nomen est omen – it’s a good view. Between the central crossbeam and the pillar on the Altstadt shore below the synagogue, the bridge for the tramway looks as if it has been folded into the river. The rails and overhead lines seem to float above it. In the direction of Neustadt shore, a longer section is sagging. Later, before the approaching flood, it will be blown up in a controlled night-and-fog operation and the debris dredged away. The sky is overcast. Upstream on the Elbe, behind the freshly renovated part of the bridge that has been left standing, sad ships lie at anchor. Two hundred years ago, Caspar David Friedrich lived somewhere below. The Catholic Court Church, watched over by the Pontifex, the supreme bridge builder in Rome, is located one Elbe crossing downstream.

It is a mockery. Hadn’t an almost absurd dispute over the construction of a new bridge cost Dresden its World Heritage status years earlier and divided the city’s population long before the right wing Pegida movement, before Covid and the Russian war had come up? Dresden always knows how to make itself interesting. Even if it came very close to disaster. The Carola Bridge was once considered the largest prestressed concrete structure in the GDR. Now the pride of domestic engineering, opened in 1971, lies before me in the river and is rapidly becoming the new landmark for the country’s renovation backlog. I wish the poet Thomas Rosenlöcher were back from the afterlife, I would love to listen to him rant about his beloved hometown while sitting on the Balcony of Europe – nickname of Brühlsche Terrasse – for another three times three rounds of beer.

People are not exactly crowding round the railings. It is more of a calm movement, a frozen shake of the head than the fascination of horror. The silence is conspicuous. At most, there is a murmur as soon as someone turns round and walks away. If I was asked for a definition of speechlessness, I would describe this situation to them. It has a lot to do with living by the river. It occurs to me that the name Dresden probably derives from an old Sorbian term for people who settle in alluvial forests. The reference to the marshy ground is not certain. Bridges have spanned the Elbe here for almost eight hundred years. The shock runs deep.

Swamp Dwellers
We 
Look down from our fortress 
Beautiful view
To the remains 
Of the crossing the bridge debris 
Must be removed before
The water is everywhere 
And our basic conviction 
Washed out we could 
At any time 
Change sides
A huge wave is rolling in
A part of life 
Has collapsed
The city’s face is expressionless
With grief 
And silent dismay
What justification does a city
On the river have
Without a bridge

Patrick Wilden September, 2024