Leseprobe

6  About this Book This book tells the stories of three Dresden villas and one family. Two of the three villas are still standing. They are monuments of Dresden architecture in the 19th and early 20th century. Above all, though, they are bearers of memory. Yet for the past seventy years, their histories seem to have been effaced from the city’s collective memory. The history of these houses and their erstwhile owners is like a puzzle with various missing pieces. Despite this, a wealth of information gathered over al- most thirty years of intermittent research offers an insight into a lost world. The example of the Salzburgs, the family at the heart of this book, many of whose branches are traced in these pages over four generations, is just one of countless stories of Jewish citizens and the villas they built, not just in Dresden but across Germany. In most cases, their fates have remained unknown. In this book, the outcome of analysis of private sources combined with histor- ical information conveys an atmospheric impression of bourgeois Jewish life in Dresden from the early 1870s and the Nazi era. The content of letters, diaries, written reflections, historical photographs, and a fragment of a memoir—pub- lished for the first time at the end of this volume—has been verified by infor- mation from archives, government files, and libraries, and from the journals of the German scholar and diarist Victor Klemperer. The private documents reveal, for example, the central role that these villas played in the lived experiences of their owners and inhabitants. Also published for the first time in this book is a villa design by the architect Karl Eberhard, a well-known proponent of the Semper-Nicolai School. Although his designs were drafted in full in preparation for planning approval, it was never realized. Nevertheless, it can confidently be added to Karl Eberhard’s portfolio, of which three villa constructions were published in the unbound collection Dresdener Architektur-Album .1