Dresden...An Experience.

So impulsively this weekend my roommates and I decided that we'd like to take a day trip to Dresden, as we had the entire weekend free from scheduled events. Most apartments took longer trips, but we've been planning some bigger trips and I wanted to save my money. We got really inexpensive round trip tickets ($26) on Friday and left this morning (Saturday) at 8:40.

The day began pretty epic-ly, when we were within 30 seconds of missing our train and had to sprint and jump on it practically as it was leaving. We though this would be the most traumatic experience of the day...we were wrong.

The two hour train ride went smoothly with a little last minute brushing up on our German and quick naps. When we arrived, however, we were greeted with a train station full of police in full riot gear. Initially we thought that Germany might be stepping up border control...again, we were wrong. Our program directors told us that a passport wasn't really necessary in traveling between Germany and the Czech republic. They were so, so, so wrong! Luckily we didn't listen to them and all had our passports.

We exited the train station and there were still more riot police EVERYWHERE. One greeted me with a customary "Guten tag," one of the few words in my German arsenal, so of course I responded enthusiastically with a return "Guten tag." Upon this greeting we were surrounded by riot police yelling in German, pretttttttty intimidating. To this, I started saying "English? English???? Englishhhhhh!??!?!" and they backed off and laughed a little and checked our passports.

At this point we were pretty confused and I couldn't stop laughing hysterically at the sheer ridiculous-ness of our position, stuck in Dresden until the end of the day, with no language skills (other than "Ich bin in der Bibliothek") and completely ignorant to what was going on. Beyond these obstacles, it was freezing. Like, so freezing that at the end of the day when we returned to Prague, I felt like I was coming home to a tropical paradise. We figured the best plan of action was to get to a cafe and figure out what the hell was going on. To do this we text our Czech buddy, Petr, a message that might be summarized as "What the F is going down in Dresden today? We're surrounded by riot police." To this text, he responded, verbatim "Holy shit! Apparently the neo-Nazis are marching through town today. Make sure you look non-aligned (no anti-fascist chants, etc) and you should be fine."

So we go to Germany on a day trip and walk into the center of a Neo-Nazi gathering. What. The. Hell. (sorry about the language, but this is literally what was going through our minds).

At this point we're all a little spooked, but figure we have to see what's going down. We walk back towards the train station where the fascist groups are gathering and hear some Nazi guy screaming in German about something (horrible, I'm sure). This is sobering and gross and horrible and awful and the tension in the air is palpable. There are hundreds of Neo-Nazi's wearing all black and carrying Third Reich banners and flags standing around cheering (see horrible far away picture above). This is something I never thought I would see.

We decide that we should peace out before stuff gets really bad and we get lost in a crowd or worse. It's freezing so we walk around a bit, halfheartedly taking pictures, before we decide to go to the Staatliche Kunstsammlugen (Dresden State Art Museum). The museum is gorgeous and filled with all sorts of amazing paintings, like Vermeer's and Raphael's and Titian's, but its pretty hard to concentrate when you hear drums banging outside, in what we assumed was some sort of Nazi gathering. We stayed at the museum for about two hours, but eventually decided to brave the cold and the fascists to go walk around again.

When we left we were immediately in the center of some sort of black clad crowd listening to a concert with an angry sounding German metal band, complete with the electric flute. This accident, however, was a godsend as we had ended up in the middle of the counter demonstration to the Nazi march (see the picture with red banners). We stayed for awhile, taking pictures and listening to the band, but soon started walking back towards the train station, as we had decided to leave a bit early due to obvious unforeseen conflicts.

As we walked back, however, we basically walked directly across the line between the anti-facists and the Nazis; this was obvious as we walked into a group of boot-wearing skinheads blasting traditional German music out of a black van and waving skull-covered flags around. At this point we tried to hightail it out of there, but were soon surrounded by riot police AGAIN yelling at us in German. By this point we had seen hundreds of different groups of police wearing different uniforms and all wielding tear gas and night sticks, but it wasn't until now that we were completely surrounded and unable to get out. I tried to explain that we were tourists and we needed to go to the train station but they were having none of it, so we basically ran away and navigated an alternate route to the train station.

I should mention that ALL day people had mistaken me for one of the agitators (hopefully the counter-fascists). I was stopped no less than three times by the police while all my roommates were able to walk by unnoticed. We decided this was because I look German (people in Prague speak to me in German constantly) which was obnoxious. I sincerely hope they didn't think I was a Nazi. Gross.

Finally, we managed to make it back to the train station, which, of course, was surrounded by dozens of card carrying Nazis. Walking through crowds of violent a-holes with backwards moral attitudes was really scary and foul, but when we finally made it to the train it was such a relief.

During the day I really never felt unsafe, because the crowds were well controlled. The experience was sobering, however, because although similar attitudes exist in the US they're not as close to the surface. Also, it was a little ridiculous that we had such a stereotypical German experience; I'm willing to give the country another chance, though, because I still really want to go to Berlin but maybe in the spring when its less cold. At the end of the day I was really, really happy to get back to regularly grumpy Czech people, instead of violently racist, grumpy German people.