We went to Nuremberg on an impulse but I immediately loved it. It
is all pedestrianised, and if you arrived by car you would be looking for a car
park first of all, so we had the best first impression because we came out of
the station and immediately saw the towers of the city wall and walked along
the main strasse and took in the fine traditional but tall and elegant
buildings, each with its statue of a saint or angel, the interesting mixture of old and new architecture and the buzz of
the city life. Our hotel was right in the centre of town. Guide book Steve gave
the castle a good write-up and after a very steep climb we found the views were
well worthwhile, I enjoyed the gardens - flowers of any colours all together in a tapestry - and the romantic towers and courtyards were exactly like
illustrations in the story books.
Somewhere along the way we had seen that Nuremberg had been destroyed in
the war so we were looking at a reconstruction and again, I felt that bombing
the place to rubble had been such a terrible act of violence, seeking to
eradicate people's history and identity as well as the people themselves.
I have to say here that I used to live in Plymouth and that City
too was completely destroyed by German bombs; I cried over the old film of
rubble stretching as far as you could see, and the young people still going out
to dance to a band on the Hoe (the promenade) quite cheerfully because they
were still alive - not that many people died because they fled to the hills. So
I know perfectly well the bombing was all reciprocated but at this point it hardly makes any
difference to anyone but the petty-minded who did what to whom.
Nuremberg is the birthplace of Albrecht Durer whose work is
miraculous; sheer time travel. I love his studies of wildflowers, irises, squirrels, - the hare. And so we
went around his house guided by a recording purporting to be of his wife who
told us about the activity in the house, which was more than a home, it was a
workshop of different craftsmen - engravers, painters and printers - and Durer
was the boss. His self-portrait shows him with very pretty long hair. How did he wear it when he was working, I wonder? Push it under his hat?
 |
| Part of the city wall showing wooden walkway |
That day was very hot; it rained in the night and hasn't been
quite so hot since. That evening we went to a restaurant-cum-cocktail bar that
was very popular and we couldn't get served so we went and had the local
sausages and pretzels instead. There were buskers all along the street, some of
them very good; like the standing up sitar player.
The next day we caught a tram to the outskirts of town to see the
Nazi Documentation Centre (museum) and we felt quite bad about wanting to go;
as though the Germans would think we weren't willing to let bygones be bygones,
but we wanted to see the Nazi parade grounds and the museum is there too. The
museum is sited in one of the Nazi monuments: a giant coliseum made of brick
fronted by stone. The new steel entrance pierces the building at an angle like
a knife stabbing at its heart. The atmosphere is thoroughly serious and
unhappy. The story of the rise of the Nazi party, the cult of Hitler, the
militarisation and the war is told in by pictures and audio commentary relieved
by the occasional film. It seemed to take a very long time to get through it
all. I found most memorable the first person accounts by two old boys who had
worked as slave labourers in the quarry where the stone came for building the
great stadium at Nuremberg. They were questioned about the work they had done
and they both focused on the feeling that the stones were beautiful, rather than the suffering but one went back to that place where they had worked like brutalised slaves day after day, and talked about starving on thin soup; their young lives were blighted by violence and imprisonment and that none of them had done nothing
to deserve that.
Then there are a few pictures of terrible atrocities - like the
pile of starved skeletons looking like so much old junk, or young naked girls
lying dead after having dug their graves, and you look at the uniformed figure
in the photo curiously and wonder why he thought, and continued to think, that
all this cruelty was justified. But this is old news and you already know why;
explaining it is the function of the
museum and it does this well.
There are films of Hitler's processions through Nuremberg City
where the buildings behind the shouting, singing crowds are clearly in poor
repair; a dirty remnant of its medieval heyday; and that fact is eloquent too.
The old women who were young girls at the time just remembered all the
excitement of having parades in their city and loving being involved and
hanging out flags and best of all, seeing Hitler.
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing else remains. Round the decay
of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792-1822
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