Former CWU professor to debut new book at May 22 library event

Beverly Heckart’s dual passions for history and teaching led her to a 37-year career as a professor of European history at Central Washington University, beginning in 1967.

Since her retirement in 2004, she has remained an active member of the Ellensburg community, and in 2009, she realized that she wanted to revisit those passions, simply because she could.

“The question became ‘what am I going to do with my retirement?’ because that turned out to be more time than I thought,” Heckart said. “I realized that my experience in life had set me up to write a great book about a German city, and outside of Berlin, Dresden is probably the German city that most Americans are familiar with.”

Heckart’s new book, Dresden: Portrait of a City, came out of a lifelong fascination with German local history. The city of Dresden has a long history of reinvention, marked by the brutality of World War II and its subsequent seclusion behind the Iron Curtain. Heckart’s career in history has given her a unique perspective on what gives cities their identity, which she found fertile ground to explore further within Dresden’s past.

“It has this reputation of being this marvelously artistic, innocent, Nazi-free city that was bombed to smithereens right at the end of the war in 1945,” she said. “In all the research I have done on local history, I have come to believe that each city has its own individual personality, so I wanted to write about the city as a complete organism, rather than boiling it down to the part it played in the war. I call it a portrait of a city because, in my experience, cities are very much like people.”

To this end, Dresden explores the city’s history in its entirety, from its roots in Baroque culture to its destruction by Allied bombers and subsequent recovery rooted in resilience.

On Thursday, May 22, CWU Libraries will host Heckart for a special talk about the book, followed by a Q&A session and book signing. The event, scheduled for 5-6:30 p.m. in the Brooks Library Student Commons, is free and open to the public. A virtual option is also available via Zoom.

Heckart is excited to show off the end product of 14 years of work.

“This project was never about the money,” she said. “It’s about pursuing my profession as a historian, and so this book represents a return to my passion. Although I must say my hat is off to what the publisher has done with the cover.”