Letter from Europe

Out of the ruins: in search of the old Magdeburg

Issue no. 01/2025

Picture above: View of Magdeburg's Johanniskirche and the embankment of the River Elbe (photo © Neurobite / dreamstime.com)

Summary

Paul Scraton explores the German city of Magdeburg armed with a map from 1910. Largely rebuilt after the Second World War, Magdeburg's streetscape has greatly changed. The old map is not ideal for navigating the city, but it offers rich insights into the history of Magdeburg.

Dear fellow travellers,

How many ways are there to explore a city? In Magdeburg, I arrived at the main railway station on a regional train. I had a modern map on my phone. More interestingly, I also had a faded city plan, a map of Magdeburg dating from before the First World War. When that old map was created in 1910, Kaiser Wilhelm II still ruled Germany. And the Magdeburg Hauptbahnhof was in exactly the same spot as it is today. The course of the River Elbe, so recognisable on the early 20th century map, was just the same as it is today. But as I walked from the station to the river, it soon became clear to me how much the cityscape had changed.

As I walked, there was barely a building that I passed that would have been standing at the time the 1910 map was printed. The Magdeburg of my first impressions was a city built out of the ruins of a massive Allied bombing raid in early 1945, a city shaped by the imaginations of East Germany’s city planners, with some remaining gaps filled by the postmodern glass-and-steel structures of the reunification years.

In one night, the bombing destroyed eighty percent of Magdeburg’s city centre, with centuries of accumulated history turned into mounds of shattered stone and twisted metal. Some of the street names on my old map were still the same, but in some places even the layout of the streets had been altered. As a navigation device the old map in my hand was of not much use.

Or was it? How do you discover the history of a city when almost everything in sight is less than eighty years old? Down by the river I came to Altes Fischerufer, one of streets that still corresponded in both name and location with 1910. Back then, it had faced the river as the heart of the Knattergebirge, a cramped, overcrowded neighbourhood known before the war for having the highest population density in all of Europe.

Officially the district had been called the Fischeruferviertel, but was given its colloquial name because in Magdeburg the word Knatter was used to describe the sound of carts and freight vehicles as they rumbled across the quayside cobblestones. There was another theory too, suggesting that dockworkers the world over have a similar reputation, linking the name to an old local saying. If you said about someone that “er hat einen im Knatter”, it suggested that someone had drunk one too many.

Standing by the river, it was hard to imagine. My map showed a cluster of narrow streets and alleyways running off the Altes Fischerufer towards Jakobstraße that contrasted greatly with the green open spaces and prefabricated housing blocks of the East German city. In the destruction of Magdeburg, the Knattergebirge was simply wiped from the map. The combination of the high density of housing along narrow streets and alleyways, and the fact that most of the buildings were half-timbered, meant the devastation was total.

I tried to orientate myself. The main bridges over the Elbe were in the right place, but had been rebuilt. The railway lines which followed the embankment could still be seen, now part of the promenade along the river that was once a place that echoed to the sound of cranes and pulleys, goods wagons and, yes, those carts rumbling over the cobblestones.

The only other direct links between the map and the city before me were some of the street names, the churches and the old town hall. These did not somehow miraculously escape the bombing, but instead were rebuilt in the decades that followed the war. Some, like the town hall, were restored in the 1950s and 1960s. Others had to wait a little longer.

The reconstruction of the Johanniskirche, the church which once marked the southern end of the Knattergebirge, was completed in the 1990s, so only after German reunification. But rebuilding was already part of the church’s history, long before the British bombers arrived in 1945. The version of the church that was named on my 1910 map was already the fourth that had stood on the site. Since the Johanniskirche was first built around 941, it had succumbed to a fire in 1207, another caused by a lightning strike in 1451, and the arsonists of the Thirty Years War who stormed the church in 1631.

Inside the church, there was a simple bronze sculpture. Titled Mourning Magdeburg, it was originally created to remember the destruction of the city during the Thirty Years War. After 1945, it gained added meaning when preserved in the rubble of the church, as a symbol of the new destruction and reconstruction of the city.

Later, in the city museum, I came across photographs of Magdeburg from the 1920s, helping me imagine what the city of my map looked like; the green spaces around the Johanniskirche filled in. It is sometimes said that the stories of a city are written in stone, but in Magdeburg, as human memories of the old city fade, they were told instead by those photographs and other artefacts that survived the destruction, and in the lines on an old map.

Paul Scraton

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