Soon we’ll be on our way to Germany… no way! When everything fell through at the eleventh hour last year, Jim & I looked at each other and said “hey, everything happens for a reason.”… and like good little soldiers we dutifully did our time in Colorado Springs (shitty little town by the way…) but never… not for a day… did our determination to go euro-trippen ( < — great name for a blog, don’t you think?) waver.

We didn’t much care where in europe we went, we just knew we were going to get there one way or another. Actually, I suppose that’s not entirely true… I leaned a little toward ireland or italy, while Jim stuck steadfastly with deutschland… although, I think for him this was more an artifact of already having invested lots ‘o $$ on german books/language cd’s/transformers/misc… heh, he’ll be the first to tell you he’s a cheap bastard.

But, when the call came in from Dresden, we both took note. First off, this was Infineon’s flagship fab… and it was a development position at that! A chance for Jim to get his hands on the smallest, fastest and coolest technology around. He was like a kid in a candy shop. Add to that the fact that this was former east germany… that up until November 9th of 1989 we couldn’t have stepped foot on east german soil if we’d wanted to. Well, we were hooked.

And Dresden’s got so much history to share… we (by we I mean the ‘allied forces’) bombed the crap out of them in 1941 AFTER the was was declared over:

—”In 1941 Charles Portal of the British Air Staff advocated that entire cities and towns should be bombed. Portal claimed that this would quickly bring about the collapse of civilian morale in Germany. Air Marshall Arthur Harris agreed and when he became head of RAF Bomber Command in February 1942, he introduced a policy of area bombing (known in Germany as terror bombing) where entire cities and towns were targeted.

One tactic used by the Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Force was the creation of firestorms. This was achieved by dropping incendiary bombs, filled with highly combustible chemicals such as magnesium, phosphorus or petroleum jelly (napalm), in clusters over a specific target. After the area caught fire, the air above the bombed area, become extremely hot and rose rapidly. Cold air then rushed in at ground level from the outside and people were sucked into the fire.

In 1945, Arthur Harris decided to create a firestorm in the medieval city of Dresden. He considered it a good target as it had not been attacked during the war and was virtually undefended by anti-aircraft guns. The population of the city was now far greater than the normal 650,000 due to the large numbers of refugees fleeing from the advancing Red Army.

On the 13th February 1945, 773 Avro Lancasters bombed Dresden. During the next two days the USAAF sent over 527 heavy bombers to follow up the RAF attack. Dresden was nearly totally destroyed. As a result of the firestorm it was afterwards impossible to count the number of victims. Recent research suggest that 35,000 were killed but some German sources have argued that it was over 100,000. “—

They rebuilt…. and this year even celebrated their 800th year, despite plenty of adversity. As I mentioned earlier, Dresden also spent 28 years behind the iron curtain. I vividly remember as a little girl in germany visiting berlin and staring at that wall…. imagining how terrible it must be to want to flee something…. to dream of something, anything that was better… and feel completely and utterly unable to do anything about it; to be trapped. (which, ironically, is a theme that’s followed me throughout my life… but that’s another blog entry altogether). Never would I have imagined that roughly 30 years later I’d be living far beyond & behind good ol’ checkpoint charlie. In the words of Jerry Garcia… what a long, strange trip it’s been.

Ok, enough for now…. it’s late and you’re no doubt bored. More to come!

On this day..

• True confessions-R-us. - 2008
• Quick, say something nice! - 2007
• Goodbye America! - 2006