Stadtmuseum Dresden

Dresden Stadtmuseum (city museum) ( if you know German ) - darkometer rating : 2 - A museum about Dresden , mainly its history, including the fateful Allied bombing in 1945, located in the city centre. The dark aspects are only one part, but worth seeing when in town. > What there is to see > Location > Access and costs > Time required > Combinations with other dark destinations > Combinations with non-dark destinations > Photos What there is to see: The museum consists of two rather distinct parts. The first few rooms/halls chronicle various older aspects of Dresden 's 800 years of history. Since hardly anything of that is relevant to dark tourism, I just sped through those parts – and won't waste space reporting on it here. The section of interest to the dark tourist is the third hall on modern history which is entitled "Demokratie & Diktatur" (you guessed it – it means: 'democracy and dictatorship'). It is also in this section that the bombing of Dresden is covered. Before it comes to that, however, there are bits about WWI and the time of the Weimar Republic before the Nazis when the city flourished culturally and economically. Some interesting aspects include the bizarre "Kugelhaus" a completely spherical steel house, a then unique piece of modern architecture from 1928. It was demolished in 1938 – apparently because it offended the Nazis' infamously narrow-minded sense of aesthetics. Then of course things get much darker: the Nazis' rise to power, their propaganda and eventually the persecution and extermination of Jews in the Third Reich are covered, including film footage of deportations and camps, diaries and a pocket calendar of a Theresienstadt prisoner.