Pirna on the Elbe River in Germany

This is Pirna, a very attractive town on the Elbe river of some 37,000 people in Saxony and I think fair to say the gateway to Saxon Switzerland. I arrived in late June and was sad to have got there so late in the day. I had driven from Bamberg but taken so long about a journey I could have done in a couple of hours that I regretted my decision, particularly as I had an early appointment the next day. What stood out to me as I was crossing the Elbe bridge was the location of the free stellplatz for motorhomes and with such a fantastic view how could I not stay there. This was not my first visit to Pirna. I have friends there who I see quite often in Nuremberg and Dusseldorf but they are from Pirna. In 2008 I went to their house and being a historian of WW2 I interviewed my friends’ mother who was a survivor of the bombing of Dresden. I then went and had a walk around the town and in particular discussed how the Nazis had murdered the handicapped in the Sonnenstein mental facility. Both of these videos are on YouTube although the quality of the equipment I had then is not the same as I have today and the films are very wobbly to say the least. But the information is there! I had wanted to visit the region of Saxon Switzerland, sometimes called the the Sandstone Mountains in the Elbe valley since seeing a programme on the television about painters of the Romantic period. At last I had the opportunity! The area has been inhabited for at least 14,000 years according to archaeological finds. Indeed the word Pirna derives from the Sorbian phrase, na pernem, meaning on the hard (stone) and could also be related to the Slavic deity Perun (which I think is the equivalent of the Norse god Thor), whose cult was present in this area. The representation of a pear tree in the coat of arms was a later cryptic representation of the Perun cult, covered up by a fanciful, German-language notion about the town's name ("pear" is Birne in German, which sounds rather like "Pirna" . The Germans came to the area in around the eighth century, Henry the Fowler founded the nearby castle of Meissen in 929CE. The castle in Pirna, which was mentioned for the first time in 1269, probably dates to the 11th century. In 1233, Pirna was mentioned for the first time in a document. In 1293, King Václav II. of Bohemia bought the town and the castle from the Bishop of Meissen. Thus Pirna belonged to Bohemia until 1405. In 1544 the castle was upgraded to a fortress by Maurice, Elector of Saxony. Three years later it withstood a siege by elector John Frederick, Elector of Saxony in the Schmalkaldic War. From 23 April1639, the town was besieged by Swedish troops, a siege that lasted five months and devastated the town. After the war the Sonnenstein fortress was built with modern military insights and the commanding stonework still exists today. Further conflict occurred in the eighteenth century, it was captured on 29 August 1756 by the Prussians and two years later there was another siege, this time from the Austrians. On 14 September 1813 it was taken by Napoleon who temporarily lived at the Marienhaus at the market until the French surrendered Dresden on 11 November 1813. Transport links in the nineteenth century were provided by steamship travel, a tradition that continues to this day The railway came later and nowadays we can use the magnificent Dresden S Bahn to travel along the Elbe river through the National Park to the Czech border. I need to say a few words about the Nazi period and the mental health facility at Sonnenstein Castle overlooking Pirna which was used to kill around 15,000 people through the use of poison gas – some of the murderers later being used in the death camps in Poland. As one walks around Pirna today, there are many signs which remind one of what happened here. Whereas the Elbe is in part the reason for Pirna and what gives it its charm, it is also a danger in disguise and has flooded several times, in part due to the railway as the embankment stops water escaping. The town was badly flooded in 2002 and this is something which is likely to happen again. There is a distinctive style to the streets in Pirna. The streets are aligned from east to west and from north to south forming a chessboard-like system. Only the streets east of the church are not in this shape because of the nearby Burgberg (Castle Hill). Museums and exhibitions worthy of note can be found in the Sonnenstein exhibition which relates to the Nazi period, the city museum, the botanical collection, the Richard Wagner Museum and the DDR museum which has a collection of DDR memorabilia.

• #autos_vehicles
• #pirna
• #elbe
• #germany
• #saxon_switzerland