Dresden grew slowly along the south bank of the Elbe from a Sorbian fishing village - the name itself is Slavic, meaning roughly people of the lowland forest. The Margraviate of Meissen made it a trading post, and by 1547 it had become the capital of the Electorate of Saxony under the Wettin dynasty. The two centuries that followed were the city's golden age. Augustus II the Strong, who ruled from 1694 and converted to Catholicism in 1697 to claim the Polish throne, transformed Dresden into one of Europe's great courts. He gathered architects, painters, and musicians from across the continent and gave them work: the Zwinger palace complex, the Taschenbergpalais, Pillnitz Castle on the river, and the parallel rise of the Catholic Hofkirche and the Lutheran Frauenkirche - one church for the king, one for the city. Friedrich Schiller wrote his Ode to Joy here in 1785, and Mickiewicz, exiled from Poland, wrote part of his masterpiece Dziady in Dresden in 1832.

By 1945 Dresden was sheltering perhaps 600,000 refugees fleeing the advancing Soviet army - the city's normal population of 650,000 nearly doubled by the desperate wave of civilians moving west. On the night of February 13, 773 RAF Lancasters dropped 1,181 tons of incendiary bombs and 1,477 tons of high explosives on the city center. The American Eighth Air Force returned in daylight on the 14th and again on the 15th. Firestorms consumed the old town. The German Dresden Historians' Commission, after five years of research, published its official 2010 report concluding that 22,500 to 25,000 people died - lower than the 200,000 figure invented by Goebbels but high enough to mark the raids as one of the most lethal of the war. Kurt Vonnegut, an American POW held in a meat locker beneath a Dresden slaughterhouse, survived to write Slaughterhouse-Five about what he saw when he came up for air.

After the war Dresden became part of the Soviet occupation zone and then of East Germany. The communist authorities made an uneasy peace with the city's baroque inheritance - some buildings restored, others left as ruins, the bombed Frauenkirche preserved as a memorial against Western aggression. Drab Plattenbau apartment blocks went up in the empty spaces. The Semperoper opera house was rebuilt in time for its 1985 reopening. But Dresden became known in the GDR as the Tal der Ahnungslosen - the Valley of the Clueless - because Western television signals could not reach the city, sheltered as it is by the Elbe Sandstone Mountains. East Germans elsewhere watched ZDF and ARD nightly. Dresdeners watched only what the state offered them, and joked bitterly about it.

Reunification turned Dresden into a building site. The Frauenkirche reconstruction, funded largely by donations from around the world including significant British and American contributions, became the centerpiece of a wider rebuilding of the Neumarkt square in eight separate quarters. The 2002 European floods broke through the city's defenses; the Weisseritz, normally a small river, ran directly into the central railway station. Floods returned in 2006 and 2013. Through it all the city kept rebuilding. Dresden today is one of the most visited cities in Germany with 4.7 million overnight stays a year, home to one of the country's largest universities of technology, and the center of what locals call Silicon Saxony - a high-tech corridor of microchip plants. The Striezelmarkt, held in the Altmarkt since 1434, is generally considered the oldest Christmas market in the world. The bombs are 80 years gone. The scars and the gold leaf remain.