He could have gone to the obvious place – the TV tower, with its observation platform and restaurant. But that hadn’t been there in 1945. The place he chose instead had been – the viewing platform at the top of the ancient Schwebebahn.

He parked his hired Lada near the entrance in Loschwitz, and then made his way across to the grand entrance. The lower terminus building had the same feel as the spa in Scarborough – the grand nineteenth-century architecture beloved of the Victorians, or indeed the Germany of Kaiser Wilhelm II. After purchasing his ticket – which seemed unfeasibly cheap – he got in the carriage and waited for it to take him up the hill. He got the impression that he was the only tourist – or at least, the only person taking the trip for the experience, rather than as part of daily life. His fellow passengers looked slightly dour and grey – but then that seemed true of the whole of East Germany. They might have the highest standard of living of the whole of the Soviet bloc, but greyness predominated. At least here in Dresden some of the historic treasures and their flamboyance, such as the Schwebebahn itself, had survived, although much had been preserved only as symbolic ruins.

*

Once the carriage reached the top station, he made his way up the rickety steps to the viewing platform. The East German authorities might have deliberately kept some of Dresden’s treasures as ruins as a reminder of the 1945 attack, but they didn’t seem very adept at the upkeep of other – undamaged – heirlooms of past regimes, such as this one.

But although the structure itself had obviously seen better days, nothing could undermine the heart-stopping nature of the view – especially on a day like today. The vista of the Elbe Valley – stretching far to the north-west one way, and the south-east the other – was surely unparalleled. He could even make out the Altstadt, and from the rump of the ruins of the Frauenkirche, the position of the historic Neumarkt.