In 2005 Durs Grünbein’s Porzellan: Poem vom Untergang meiner Stadt (Porcelain: poem about the demise of my city) appeared. The renowned Dresden-born poet re imagined in this cycle of forty-nine poems the destruction of the city from the position of the postwar generations, who have no personal connection to the event but nevertheless have been exposed to an omnipresent murmur about cultural loss. Its publication coincided with the consecration of the famous Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady), probably the single most potent architectural symbol of civic democracy, unification, and international reconciliation in the German cultural imagination. Originally designed by George Bähr and built in the mid-eighteenth century, the church collapsed on 15 Feb. 1945 after the firestorm of the previous day. The ruin was not rebuilt during GDR times because the state had no interest in church property and the Lutheran church in the GDR had other priorities, above all to stabilize its precarious position in relation to the state. In 1990 a group of dedicated Dresdners founded the Förderkreis zum Wiederaufbau der Frauenkirche Dresden e.V (Society to Support the Reconstruction of the Frauenkirche Dresden), which launched a very effective national and international campaign to rebuild the church by emphasizing, above all, the redemptive function of the project. Accordingly, the response was overwhelming, and donations began to flow in from all over the world. In contrast to other building projects in unified Germany, the reconstruction of the Frauenkirche was not steered by the city, the Lutheran Church, the state of Saxony, or the Federal parliament: while all these institutions eventually supported the reconstruction, it remained first and foremost a citizens’ initiative. Because of this, the rebuilt church is now widely recognized as a fitting symbol of the enactment of a civic democracy dedicated to a politics of national and international reconciliation. The opening of the church on 30 October 2005 was broadcast live on German TV and watched by millions of (mostly older) Germans, who perceived this event in terms of the symbolic recuperation of their fractured cultural identity. A dramaturgy of remembrance unfolded that aimed to reconcile the memory of a traumatic past with the exaltation of a new beginning.