Calendar

Introduction to the project: What is a Torah? Why has it been written by hand for over 2,500 years?

In around 35 minutes, Jahna Dahms explains the project and discusses the origins, tradition and significance of the Torah as humanity’s oldest continuous cultural practice. There will be an opportunity to ask questions afterwards. The scribe will be present during the event.

• Duration: 35 minutes
• You do not need a museum ticket for this guided tour.

In the city museum we discover prefabricated buildings - these are houses that consist of many identical concrete slabs and were built in many cities. Then, using LEGO® bricks and a lot of imagination, you will transform such a prefabricated building and its surroundings into new, good living environments! All the ideas will then be shown in a small exhibition.

• Age: 8 to 11 years
• Duration: 3 h
• Cost: €6 per child
• Registration online or at the Visitor Service of the Museums of the City of Dresden on +49 351 488 7272 (Mon - Fri)

What role did Jewish citizens play in the economic life of our city? How did they shape trade, finance and industry during the German Empire and the Weimar Republic?

Selected items from our collection, now displayed in a new context, shed light on the contribution made by Jewish manufacturers, bankers and businesspeople to Dresden’s economic development and tell the story of a life firmly rooted in the heart of society.

The tour takes place in the museum café – with a view of the display case for new acquisitions. Light refreshments are provided; coffee can be obtained from the vending machine if required. In this relaxed setting, the City Museum is launching a new tour format that brings history to life through conversation.

• Guided tour free of charge (plus museum admission)
• Duration: 1.5 hours
• Book online or via the visitor service of the Museums of the City of Dresden on +49 351 488 7272 (Mon – Fri)

In the city museum we discover prefabricated buildings - these are houses that consist of many identical concrete slabs and were built in many cities. Then, using LEGO® bricks and a lot of imagination, you will transform such a prefabricated building and its surroundings into new, good living environments! All the ideas will then be shown in a small exhibition.

• Age: 8 to 11 years
• Duration: 3 h
• Cost: €6 per child
• Registration online or at the Visitor Service of the Museums of the City of Dresden on +49 351 488 7272 (Mon - Fri)

• Duration: 1.5 hours
• Meeting point at the ticket office
• Guided tour free of charge plus museum admission
• without registration

Introduction to the project: What is a Torah? Why has it been written by hand for over 2,500 years?

In around 35 minutes, Jahna Dahms explains the project and discusses the origins, tradition and significance of the Torah as humanity’s oldest continuous cultural practice. There will be an opportunity to ask questions afterwards. The scribe will be present during the event.

• Duration: 35 minutes
• You do not need a museum ticket for this guided tour.

The special exhibition at the Dresden City Museum focuses on industrially prefabricated block-of-flats, which continue to shape the appearance of many major German cities to this day.

Using selected examples, the exhibition traces the development of industrial housing construction from 1900 to the present day. It highlights the similarities and differences between East and West and explores the potential and limitations of the technology.

The exhibition centres on questions about housing. A diverse range of exhibits, including furniture, furnishings and photographs, as well as autobiographical contributions in audio and video form, provide answers to the questions: For whom were prefabricated flats built? How much living space was available and how was it used? Who lives in prefabricated blocks today? How has living here changed?

We will take you on an exclusive guided tour of the exhibition and then introduce you to our educational programme for all year groups.

With Franziska Schmidt and Dr Robert Mund (Education and Outreach)

The training course is listed under event number EXT06089 in the online training catalogue on the Saxony School Portal.

• Duration: 2 hours
• School types: Primary school, secondary school, grammar school, vocational schools
• Subjects covered: History, German, Geography, Social Studies, Art
• Register online or via the visitor services department of the Museums of the City of Dresden on +49 351 488 7272 (Mon–Fri)

Short guided tour with Christoph Hanzig and Sebastian Rab, Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Research e. V.

The lecture uses the Nazi daily newspaper "Der Freiheitskampf" to illustrate the takeover of municipal rule in Dresden by the National Socialists and explains how the newspaper itself benefited from this. The starting point is the front page of 15 March 1933, which triumphantly announces the dismissal of Lord Mayor Wilhelm Külz with a headline and caricature.

Every first Friday of the month, we focus on an object from our permanent exhibition: in short guided tours lasting a maximum of 20 minutes, museum staff, members of co-operation partners or people from the city community present the special features of a selected piece of Dresden's history.

• Duration: 1.5 hours
• Meeting point at the ticket office
• Guided tour free of charge plus museum admission
• without registration

Introduction to the project: What is a Torah? Why has it been written by hand for over 2,500 years?

In around 35 minutes, Jahna Dahms explains the project and discusses the origins, tradition and significance of the Torah as humanity’s oldest continuous cultural practice. There will be an opportunity to ask questions afterwards. The scribe will be present during the event.

• Duration: 35 minutes
• You do not need a museum ticket for this guided tour.

Olga Martynova, Dresden’s city writer, is a phenomenon. She writes novels, poems, essays and reviews, and works as a translator and editor. And she sets high standards in all these fields.

Her novels *Even Parrots Outlive Us* (2010, nominated for the German Book Prize), *Mörike’s Collarbone* (2013, excerpt: Ingeborg Bachmann Prize 2012; for the full novel: Berlin Literature Prize 2015) and *Der Engelherd* (2016, honoured with, amongst others, the Villa Massimo Prize in Rome) are literary worlds of experience that will delight any reader who picks up these novels.

As part of the ‘Focus on Olga Martynova’ series of events, the author will present her poetry collection *In Search of the Name of the Wind* (Peter Huchel Prize 2025) in more detail.

With language that is both gentle and stirring, the collection once again evokes the loss of her husband (Oleg Jurjew died in 2018), a theme that resonates throughout almost every poem. Her defiance of death and the spirits of the underworld, whom she encounters in dreams and daydreams, is stirring and at times mocking.

Olga Martynova attempts to gain some distance. She descends into the underworld with Dante and Virgil, traces the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and visits Kabbalists in Jerusalem. To gain some distance, she traces what has been lost in dialogue with Friedrich Hölderlin and Paul Celan (‘Celan picked in Hölderlin’s garden, bred the rose of no one from the nothingness of roses’).

‘Vu nemt men a bisele Glik’, the opening poem, sketches out the contours of the collection like an overture. The poem engages in dialogue with Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem ‘Hälfte des Lebens’ (‘Half of Life’) whilst also addressing the Jewish condition and echoes of Jean Amery and Oleg Jurjew.

In the second of the seven chapters – ‘La Speranza’ (Hope) – the magpie (Speranza) appears for the first time, subsequently serving as the poet’s wise companion and admonishing corrective: ‘Intoxicated by sobriety, people can neither think clearly nor truly feel,’ says the magpie.

In the fourth chapter, stories of death are evoked: ‘Tolstoy’s Death’, ‘Pasolini’s Death’, and also Kleist’s suicide at the Wannsee. All of this takes place in dialogue with Oleg Jurjew.

In the fifth chapter – ‘Death does not part us, but life does’ – the beloved is invoked in a series of lines: ‘We were to one another moon and stars, wine and bread, earth and fire, water and air, minutes and clock face, rain and worm, flies and frogs, crow and eye …’

Anyone who, having read this, thinks the volume is difficult to read can rest assured. Martynova’s poems are written in a calm, delicate language and speak through memorable images and metaphors.

• Presenter: Volker Sielaff

The Gorbitz prefabricated housing estate, which was built in the 1980s, has changed bit by bit over the past 25 years. Where once one block resembled another, today there is diversity, not only in the form of colourful facades, but also inside the buildings. Lifts, bathrooms with showers and windows, spacious kitchens, new balconies, tenants' gardens - all this can now be found in the "Platte" thanks to modernisations and conversions.

One outstanding and well-known conversion project is the Kräutersiedlung, which was realised between 2002 and 2004 by the Eisenbahner-Wohnungsbaugenossenschaft Dresden eG. But a lot has also happened in Gorbitz since then, and construction is still ongoing in several places.

The guiding principle has always been to preserve the strengths of prefabricated housing (e.g. spacious, green inner courtyards and compact structures) while at the same time eliminating disadvantages (e.g. small kitchens and bathrooms, six-storey buildings without lifts).

The tour leads to selected converted residential buildings and is intended to illustrate the potential of prefabricated housing and its future viability using the example of Gorbitz.

With Konstanze Mally

• Duration: 2 hours
• Meeting point at the Merianplatz tram stop (out-of-town side)
• Participation free of charge
• Registration online or at the visitor service of the Museums of the City of Dresden on +49 351 488 7272 (Mon - Fri)