Nuremberg: The Imaginary Capital

Stephen Brockmann is professor of German at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the managing editor of the Brecht Yearbook...

Author: Stephen Brockmann

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Stephen Brockmann is professor of German at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the managing editor of the Brecht Yearbook and has edited or co-edited special issues of New German Critique and Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Literature. He has written numerous books and articles on German cultural and literary history, including German Literary Culture at the Zero Hour (2004) and Literature and German Reunification (1999).

Nuremberg

“A magnificently conceived, impeccably executed, and deeply moving book about much more than a city. . . . From a disciplinary or rather interdisciplinary perspective, Nuremberg is exemplary. Taking German Studies to the very limits, Brockmann virtuosically draws not only from literature, history, music, film, both ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, museum studies, even French, English, and American literature, but also seems conversant with interdisciplinary issues obtaining from geography, sociology, psychoanalysis, even legal studies. . . . Brockmann deftly manages to keep his book at the highest level of intellectual sophistication while also taking care to explain everything in the greatest detail. . . . This is indeed a work that can be read and enjoyed by undergraduates and interested lay readers while also providing a wealth of information, ideas, and arguments for the expert.” — Nicholas Vazsonyi, University of South Carolina

ISBN 1- 57113 -34 5-3

The Imaginary Capital

Stephen Brockmann

Jacket design: Lisa Mauro

Camden House

668 Mt. Hope Avenue Rochester, NY 14620-2731 and P.O. Box 9 Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com and www.camden-house.com

Nuremberg: The Imaginary Capital is a broad study of German cultural and intellectual history since 1500, with a particular emphasis on the period from 1800 to the present. The book explores the ways in which Germans, over the past two centuries, have imagined Nuremberg as a cultural and spiritual capital, focusing feelings of national identity and belonging on the city — or on their images of it. The book devotes chapters to the Nuremberg of Albrecht Dürer and Hans Sachs at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern era, a city whose nostalgically remembered glory became the basis for the development of all the other imaginary Nurembergs; to the Romantic rediscovery of Nuremberg at the end of the eighteenth century and the institutionalization of Nuremberg discourse in the Germanic National Museum in the middle of the nineteenth century; to Richard Wagner’s Meistersinger von Nürnberg, the most famous artistic invocation of the Nuremberg myth; to the Nazi use and misuse of the Nuremberg myth, along with Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph desWillens, the best-known of all Nuremberg films and also the most significant documentary of Hitler’s “Third Reich”; and finally to the postwar development of Nuremberg discourse along an internationalist trajectory, with “Nuremberg” becoming the symbol for a new kind of international law and justice. Nuremberg:The Imaginary Capital analyzes the way in which a particular city came to be seen, in Germany and elsewhere, as representative of the national whole. The book goes beyond the analysis of particular historical periods by showing how successive epochs’ images of Nuremberg built on those preceding them; thus German cultural and intellectual history is shown as an intelligible unity centered around fascination with and veneration for a particular city.

Jacket image: On Schütt Island in the middle of the Pegnitz (probably during the 1935 Nazi Party rally). Courtesy of Stadtarchiv Nürnberg.

9 781571 133458

STEPHEN BROCKMANN

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Nuremberg: The Imaginary Capital

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Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture

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Nuremberg The Imaginary Capital

Stephen Brockmann

CAMDEN HOUSE

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Copyright © 2006 Stephen Brockmann All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2006 by Camden House Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.camden-house.com and of Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN: 1–57113–345–3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brockmann, Stephen. Nuremberg: the imaginary capital / Stephen Brockmann. p. cm. — (Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–57113–345–3 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Nuremberg (Germany)—Civilization. 2. Capitals (Cities)—Germany. 3. National characteristics, German—Public opinion. 4. Public opinion— Germany. I. Title. II. Series: Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture (Unnumbered) DD901.N92B76 2006 943’.324 — dc22 2006013510 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America.

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view these images please refer to the printed version of this book.

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to my brother Paul Henry Brockmann

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Contents List of Illustrations

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Acknowledgments

x

Introduction: “Nuremberg”

1

1: A Small Town in Germany

13

2: The Capital of Nostalgia

32

3: Metropolitan Monument

94

4: Empire of Longing

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5: Representing Rapture

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6: Nuremberg Goes Global

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Conclusion: Ab Urbe ad Orbem

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Works Cited

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Index

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view these images please refer to the printed version of this book.

Illustrations Konrad Schreiber and Theodor Rothbarth, Nürnberg, circa 1850

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View of Nuremberg in Hartmann Schedel’s world chronicle of 1493

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Hans Sachs in 1545 at the age of 51

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Albrecht Dürer, self-portrait, age 26, 1498

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The monument for Albrecht Dürer, unveiled in 1840

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Ludwig Emil Grimm, morning celebration at Dürer’s grave, Easter Sunday, 6 April 1828

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Hans von und zu Aufseß at the age of 63 wearing a knight’s armor and carrying a crossbow made around 1650

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The Sängerfestzug in Nuremberg, 1861

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Gustav Singer’s set design for the final scene of the third act of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

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Hans Sachs monument, 1909

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Albrecht Dürer, Knight, Death, and Devil

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The Nazis march through the old town of Nuremberg, 1933

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Postcard of the Reich party rally grounds

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Commemoration of the dead, Luitpoldarena, 1934

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The “cathedral of light”

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Hitler during the “consecration” of the flags, 1929

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Poster for the exhibition “Nürnberg, die deutsche Stadt” (Nuremberg, the German City)

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A Hitler Youth boy as Riefenstahl wanted Hitler Youth boys to be seen in her film Triumph des Willens

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Riefenstahl coaching a Hitler Youth boy to look better for her camera

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LIST

OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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Adolf Hitler and Ernst Röhm after laying down a wreath at the memorial for the dead, 1933

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Harold L. Hershey, attached to the Seventh Army, using a comb as a mustache and giving his impression of Adolf Hitler making a speech on the Zeppelin tribune in Nuremberg

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Streets near the castle in Nuremberg (1946)

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Business signs in the rubble near the main train station (April 1948)

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Albrecht Dürer, Melancholia

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The courtroom in Nuremberg

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World congress of Jehovas Witnesses at the Zeppelin field (August 1953)

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Motor sport event around the Zeppelin tribune (mid 1950s)

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View of the Straße der Menschenrechte (Street of Human Rights)

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Dokumentationszentrum (Documentation Center) by Mile Cindric

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Dokumentationszentrum (Documentation Center) by Heiko Stahl

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On Schütt island in the middle of the Pegnitz

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Erhard Etzlaub: Map of Germany and Europe, 1501

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Acknowledgments

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scholarly project can be accomplished without help, and this project is no exception. I owe a great debt of gratitude to more people than I can reasonably name here. First and foremost, I want to express my appreciation to Erhard Schütz of Berlin’s HumboldtUniversität, who has offered active advice and guidance throughout the gestation and growth of this book, and who graciously extended his help to me during no fewer than four research visits that I made to Berlin. I am also grateful to the staff of the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv in Berlin, who helped me with my research on film documentaries about Nuremberg, and to the staff of Berlin’s Staatsbibliothek, where I was able to complete much of my research on nineteenth-century texts. I am also grateful to Lisa Wandt for sharing with me her research on postwar Nuremberg’s attempts to come to terms with its Nazi past. In Nuremberg I owe a debt of gratitude to Eckart Dietzfelbinger, who kindly helped me with information about the postwar history of Nuremberg’s Nazi rally grounds. I am also grateful to Nuremberg’s former cultural commissioner Hermann Glaser, who, in the summer of 2005, agreed to meet with me and discuss postwar Nuremberg and his own involvement in Nuremberg’s transformation. The staff of Nuremberg’s Stadtarchiv and Stadtbibliothek, and of the library at the Germanisches Nationalmuseum, were also generous with their time and assistance, and I want to express my thanks to all three institutions and to the people who work in them. In Erlangen, not far from Nuremberg, Professor Christine Lubkoll welcomed and supported me during two research visits that I made to the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in 2003 and 2005, and I owe a debt of gratitude to her and her staff. Without the help of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, my research in Berlin and Nuremberg would not have been possible, and I am profoundly grateful for the Humboldt Foundation’s generous support. In the United States I wish to thank Nicholas Vazsonyi for his unusually careful and critical reading of my manuscript, and for numerous helpful suggestions. Frank Trommler and Jim Steakley also offered me useful advice during the course of my work on this book; and Sabine Hake gave me important insight into film theory and history. I also wish to acknowledge David Bathrick, who got me thinking about the Nazi party rallies, and about Leni Riefenstahl’s films, two decades ago at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Mary-Beth O’Brien not only gave me useful tips OT EVEN THE SMALLEST

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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about film research in Berlin but also represented me and my work on Nuremberg at a conference in Morgantown, West Virginia in September 2003. At Carnegie Mellon University I gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the staff of the Hunt Library, particularly Gloriana St. Clair, the head librarian, and also Jean Alexander and Joan Stein. My thanks also go out to Dick Tucker and John Lehoczky of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, who have been consistently supportive of my research and teaching. At the nearby University of Pittsburgh, Clark Muenzer and Sabine von Dirke made it possible for me to share some of my research with them in a presentation at the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures in April of 2004, and I am grateful for the productive dialogue that ensued. I would once again like to thank my students at Carnegie Mellon for their active and enthusiastic participation in several seminars and courses that have directly contributed to the development of this project. In particular I thank the many students who have taken my course “Introduction to German Studies” over the years and patiently endured not only Richard Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg but also my thinking about that opera. My need to interpret and explain Wagner to my students has helped me to explain him to myself. Over the years I have also occasionally taught a course entitled “Nazi and Resistance Culture,” and grappling with that topic, and with students’ engagement in it, has greatly enriched the work that went into chapters 4 and 5 of this book. I am remarkably lucky to have such intelligent and eager students; they are a large part of what makes my professional life such a joy. I dedicate this book to my brother Paul Brockmann, a volunteer for the medical relief organization Doctors Without Borders, who provided me with a much-needed break during the crucial final phase of my work on this book. In Beijing and elsewhere in China, I was able to get precisely the distance that I needed. S. M. B. June 2006

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Konrad Schreiber and Theodor Rothbarth, Nürnberg, circa 1850. Lithograph. The many views of pre-industrial Nuremberg always show the old imperial castle. Provided by the Germanisches Nationalmuseum.

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Introduction: “Nuremberg”

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UREMBERG”?

WHY “NUREMBERG”? The question actually has two parts: one about a word designating a city in Germany, and the other about a set of quotation marks around that word. Almost as important as the word that designates the city are the quotation marks around it. So let me start at the beginning: why the quotation marks? After all, Nuremberg is not just something that somebody said once or twice or even many times. It is a real place filled with real people doing real things. That place has no need of quotation marks. True enough, but my book is not primarily about Nuremberg as an urban conglomeration, as real and as worthy of study as it is. By putting quotation marks around Nuremberg I am not trying to cast the city’s existence in doubt. Nuremberg does exist, and it has every right to exist. It also has every right to be written about. In fact there are a great many books about Nuremberg’s politics, history, and social structure. There is even a very thick Stadtlexikon Nürnberg, an encyclopedia of Nuremberg, which provides anyone interested in the city with alphabetically ordered access to a vast store of information, most of it about things that are now or once were real, not just assertions or assumptions.1 This is not one of those books. Instead, this is a book about another kind of city, a shadow city that from the beginning has existed alongside the real one. It is a city that is made of myths and dreams and above all words. If I had titled my book Atlantis or Eldorado, it would be clear enough that I am not writing about a real city but rather about an imaginary city, a city that exists primarily or exclusively in people’s discourse about it. The confusion comes from the fact that Nuremberg exists on both planes, as a real metropolis and as a city of dreams. It is very much a real place, but it is also a dream that a great many people had about it. One can think of the physical city as Nuremberg1 and of the dream city as Nuremberg2. There are other real cities that share Nuremberg’s dual status. Venice, for instance, is as famous in literature and film as it is in reality. We know about Venice almost as much from Thomas Mann, Luchino Visconti, Nicolas Roeg, and others, as we do from the city itself. Timbuktu is a real city, but it is far more famous as a mythical place than as a real metropolis. In fact there are probably people out there who do not even know that Timbuktu actually exists somewhere in Africa. Even in Germany there are other cities that are as famous in myth as they are in reality. Heidelberg, for instance, is a mythical city, and tourists visit it primarily for the myth, not for the reality.


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INTRODUCTION: “NUREMBERG”

In one of his essays Sebastian Haffner, one of the most acute observers of twentieth-century German history, makes the following statement about Germany’s mythical cities: There are places that even those who have never been there believe they know. Their names have become somewhat like magical formulas; one needs only to say them aloud: Potsdam? Weimar? Nuremberg, and everyone who hears them will see very precise images, will imagine himself to be breathing a specific kind of air. In addition to their real, physical, concrete existence, these cities have acquired a second existence, one woven from a thicker, more unbreakable fabric than stone; they live as sound and image, impervious to destruction, with no regard for how their reality changes. The Potsdam of the guard parade and the Hohenfriedberg march will continue to live long after the real Potsdam has become a suburb of greater Berlin; and the Nuremberg of the mastersingers is more alive than the Nuremberg of the toy manufacturers and the soccer clubs. These cities are only peripherally, only in a random and unimportant way geographical-political realities; primarily and essentially they are legends.2

Haffner’s contention that the true essence of these cities lies not in their corporeal reality but in their myths is an affront to the city’s real-life inhabitants. After all, they have every right to believe that they are living in a real city, and that city, the site of their lives, is surely more than just a coincidental or subordinate reality — at least for them. But for those of us on the outside of Nuremberg — and that is most of the world’s population — Haffner’s reflections are less problematic. We know the city not as the site of the real lives of real people but rather as the mythical space of imagined lives. We may know Wagner’s operatic mastersingers, but it is unlikely that we know much about the mastersingers who actually lived in the city in the sixteenth century, or even about the activities of Nuremberg’s city opera house now. We may know about E. T. A. Hoffmann’s nutcracker and mouse king, and we may even have spent many Christmas seasons going to Tchaikovsky’s ballet as children or grown-ups — but few of us have actually been to Nuremberg at Christmastime. Nuremberg2 is more famous than Nuremberg1. And yet the real city where people live their lives is not just a victim of the city’s mythologization. It is not simply swallowed up by quotation marks. It also profits from them. The tourist industry, a product of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, markets particular places like Nuremberg and Heidelberg for their exciting dreamlike qualities, and visitors come from around the world to enter into the dream and bring their lived reality closer to it. For many of these places tourism becomes a major factor in the local economy. This has certainly been the case in Nuremberg for the last two centuries: hotels, restaurants, and stores still rely heavily on tourists’ ongoing desire to enter the dream world of the shadow city. Nuremberg1 is heavily dependent on Nuremberg2. What the city has to


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INTRODUTION: “NUREMBERG”

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offer is a certain authenticity, whether real or imagined. Tourists who go to Disney World or even to mad King Ludwig’s Neuschwanstein castle usually know that what they are seeing is inauthentic or secondary; but tourists who go to places like Nuremberg or Heidelberg or Rothenburg ob der Tauber are visiting real cities that have developed over the course of many centuries. Nuremberg’s city wall and its imperial castle on a hill really did serve as defensive fortifications hundreds of years ago, whereas Neuschwanstein was simply designed by a nostalgic king in the middle of Germany’s industrial revolution to look like an ideal-typical medieval castle on a hill. And Disney World simply copied King Ludwig’s idea, making it available to millions. We go to Disney World because we like the copy; we go to Rothenburg because we want the real thing. In this sense Nuremberg2 is dependent on Nuremberg1. It is not a free-floating fantasy but rather in need of confirmation from the physical city. “This city is unique in its kind, because it is not a copy but the original,” wrote the German liberal Julius Rodenberg in 1874.3 “To the childish imagination Nuremberg appears to be a never-ending library full of the most colorful picture books, like an Eldorado with the quaintest houses, trees, horses, and people, which one can unpack and then put away again,” he asserted. But what made Nuremberg distinctive was that here the fantasies of children were confirmed by adult reality: “then one will say that what one has in front of one is a reality that is even more colorful and more like a fairy tale for the eye of the adult than all the splendor and glory of building blocks ever were for the child.”4 Of course the distinction between Nuremberg and Neuschwanstein is not quite as simple as one between authentic and inauthentic, because once cities like Nuremberg and Heidelberg are discovered as objects of myth they are also preserved, improved upon, and redesigned. By no means everything in Nuremberg is authentic in the sense of being centuries old. The Schöner Brunnen (Beautiful Fountain) in the old town square, for instance, is simply a copy of the original, whose remnants are now located in the Germanic National Museum. In the nineteenth century Nuremberg’s city planners consciously sought to preserve and enhance the city’s medieval qualities — to make Nuremberg1 conform to Nuremberg2 — and hence the impression the city gave to tourists was not just a matter of time and chance but also part of a calculated program of beautification and authentication. There is no way to avoid this. Once a city’s authenticity and its oldness acquire a market value, the city and its planners try to preserve that value by renewing its oldness and reinforcing its authenticity. This is particularly true in Nuremberg after 1945, since most of the old city — the original Nuremberg1 — was destroyed in the course of the Second World War. Most of contemporary Nuremberg was built after the war and is therefore in a very real sense new. Nevertheless the new city was recreated largely on the basis of the old city, with a mixture of authentically


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old, imitative, and modern architecture. But tourists still go to Nuremberg imagining it to be authentic and old, and the center of town is still called the “Altstadt,” the old town. As Haffner says, cities like Nuremberg are made of a material that is more permanent and indestructible than mere stone: they are made of dreams. Nuremberg’s old town is dead; long live the old town. In addition to stating that mythical cities have a dual existence, Haffner suggests that in each urban pair one city is historical and evanescent while the other is ahistorical and permanent. No matter what happens in the real city, the dream city remains unchanged. Nuremberg2 is impervious to destruction, whereas Nuremberg1 can be destroyed. There is some truth to this. Nuremberg’s postwar reconstruction is a testament to the persistence of the dream city. The physical city lay in ruins, but the dream city lived on in people’s imaginations. Ultimately, the physical city was reconstructed in order to conform to the layout and architecture of the dream city. In Frankfurt, where Goethe’s childhood home had been destroyed in the war, the city simply rebuilt the house after a spirited debate about authenticity and inauthenticity.5 Now visitors to the Goethe house imagine they are visiting the real thing. In Nuremberg an entire city was rebuilt, but visitors still imagine that what they are seeing is real. And in at least one sense it is: it physically exists in the real world. One of the primary points of this book is to demonstrate that, contrary to Haffner’s contention that dream cities are indestructible, Nuremberg2 is just as historical as Nuremberg1. The dream city is to a surprising extent independent of the physical city, and yet just as the physical city undergoes change, so too the dream city changes and evolves. At different times and in different places “Nuremberg” has evoked different kinds of dreams and images. Nuremberg2 is not a constant but rather a variable. In this sense Nuremberg is different from Rothenburg ob der Tauber and Heidelberg, whose dream-images have remained relatively stable over centuries. Heidelberg is still the mythical town of romantic German student life, partially because, unlike Nuremberg, it was not destroyed in the Second World War; and Rothenburg, which was also spared, is and was a well-preserved late-medieval German city renowned throughout the world. In contrast the dream-image of Nuremberg has evolved and changed. It is now very different from what it was two centuries ago. The instability in the meaning of “Nuremberg” was brought home to me forcefully when I was discussing my Nuremberg project with an acquaintance in Berlin as we were riding on the S-Bahn to a birthday celebration in Berlin’s outer suburbs. Why, my acquaintance wondered, would I want to spend years doing research on a “brown” — that is, Nazi — city like Nuremberg? Instead of immediately responding the way a Nuremberger probably would have — namely by pointing out that for


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much of its modern history Nuremberg has been a Social Democratic city with a liberal government, and that Hitler spent considerably more time in Berlin and Munich than he did in Nuremberg — I did what scholars all too frequently, and annoyingly, do: I began asking questions. Why was it that my acquaintance thought of Nuremberg as a Nazi city? Was that impression confined to the past, or did it prevail in the present, too? What other associations did she have with Nuremberg? It was only then that I pointed out what a Nuremberger would have pointed out at the very beginning, countering my acquaintance’s dream image of Nuremberg2 as a Nazi city with an assertion about the real Nuremberg1. I was, after all, only secondarily interested in a particular city in northern Bavaria; I was primarily interested in Germans’ thoughts and dreams about that city. And my acquaintance was very much a source of information about that dream city. There may be as many Nuremberg2s as there are Germans. Thus I found myself doing field work on Nuremberg2 in a great many places, not just in Nuremberg1. When I discussed the project with acquaintances in the United States, the response was generally different from the one I encountered in Berlin. For my American acquaintances the strongest association with Nuremberg tends to be the International Military Tribunal (IMT) of 1945–46: the Nazis not as rulers of Germany or even Nuremberg but rather as defeated enemies receiving the justice they deserved. For them Nuremberg is not a Nazi city but rather a city of Allied victory over Nazism. Curiously enough, the weakest association in both Germany and the United States was the one that would doubtlessly have been strongest a century ago, namely the Romantic apotheosis of the late-medieval German city in all its glory. Nuremberg’s mid-twentieth century associations with the Nazis on the one hand and with the Allied victors in the Second World War on the other seem largely to have erased the Romantic image of Nuremberg from the American mind and to have weakened it in the German mind. And yet it is the Romantic Nuremberg that is in many ways the mother and grandmother of the two other Nurembergs. Both the real city and the dream city are subject to historical change. Both evolve over time. Moreover, the real city and the dream city cannot be completely separated. Haffner is right in pointing out the existence of the two cities. However Nuremberg1 and Nuremberg2 communicate with each other in various ways. Tourism is a way of harnessing the dream city in order to improve the economy of the real city. The Nazi party rallies also were a complex and ambitious effort to utilize the dream city for political and ideological purposes in the real world. The Nazis changed both Nuremberg1 — by adding a completely new segment of the city that was several times larger than Nuremberg’s old town — and Nuremberg2 — by connecting Romantic Nuremberg to the Greco-Roman-Germanic grandiosity celebrated at the party rally grounds in the southwestern part


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of the city. The British and American bombing of Nuremberg, likewise, was very much a response to the Nazi redefinition of the city. It was as if Nuremberg2 had finally destroyed the Nuremberg1 with which it was connected. Projects like Dani Karavan’s Street of Human Rights in Nuremberg’s old town continue to transform both the real Nuremberg and its dream double. One must imagine the dream city and the real city as connected to each other by a multitude of passageways. Reality and dream are in constant communication with each other. In most of the chapters of this book I deal with Nuremberg primarily as a dream city and only secondarily as a real city connected to it. In the first chapter, however, I try to do both: to address both the real historical Nuremberg of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries — before the Romantic rediscovery of the city and the nineteenth-century invention of the tourist industry — and also the dream images that were already being constructed about Nuremberg. In this chapter I deal not just with discourse about the city but also with the city itself. Hence one can imagine Nuremberg in this chapter both with and without quotation marks. It would perhaps be tempting to try to get rid of the quotation marks and simply address Nuremberg as it actually was. However two factors militate against such an attempt: first, it has already been done successfully, particularly by Gerald Strauss in his book Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century; and, second, even such an attempt depends heavily on written documents, that is, on discourse about the city, as Strauss’s book amply demonstrates.6 Many of these written documents are unreliable. Nevertheless, in the first chapter I seek to go beyond discourse to something that precedes it and makes it possible — to move from Nuremberg2 to Nuremberg1. In formulating the first chapter in this way I am not, at least in the first instance, making a claim to some sort of Platonic, absolute reality beyond discourse — a noumenal Nuremberg of which all other Nurembergs are mere copies. Rather, I am making a point about discourse itself. Nuremberg discourse emerges not as a celebration of free-floating discursivity independent of any referent; rather, it emerges as a specific claim about a specific city and its historicity. It is only after Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder has been to the real Nuremberg that he commits his dream Nuremberg to paper. That dream of Nuremberg is a response to a particular physical experience of the city with all its sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and tactile sensations. It is of course entirely possible, and indeed probable, that Wackenroder was predisposed to experience the city in the way that he did; had the city been different, he might still have responded to it in the same way. It is even possible that if Nuremberg had not existed the Germans would have had to invent it. Alexander Lips, a professor at the nearby University of Erlangen, suggested as much in an 1815 essay.7 However Nuremberg did exist, and Germans’ acts of invention occurred in connection with a city that was already there. If Nuremberg in


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the nineteenth century became a city in quotation marks, the quotation marks nevertheless signified a conversation about something that was imagined to be — or to once have been — real. The Nuremberg myth became formidable precisely because of its supposed authenticity. The physical city provided a kind of architectural, palpable confirmation of the myth. Nuremberg1 was imagined to be the referent of all the other Nurembergs that followed it. Because authenticity and historical accuracy are so important in later discussions of Nuremberg, I will not evade the issue in this book. Therefore the first chapter is intended as a kind of benchmark against which to measure the later development of Nuremberg discourse. There is a parlor game in which one person whispers a secret message to another person, who whispers the message to a third person, and so on until the message comes back to the first person, usually so completely transformed that the inventor of the message hardly recognizes it. Nuremberg discourse has never been a secret, but it has functioned in a similar way. We can think of late medieval Nuremberg as the real content of the first whisper, a content that changed and evolved over time as various other whisperers appropriated the message for themselves and passed it on — from Wackenroder to Hoffmann to Wagner to Hitler to Robert Jackson, the American prosecutor at the IMT, to Dani Karavan. So much for the quotation marks. The second part of my initial question remains: why Nuremberg? Why not Heidelberg or Rothenburg or Potsdam — any of the various German cities about which powerful myths have evolved? There are two answers to this question, one structural and one unique to Nuremberg. The structural answer is that in order to examine the workings of myth generally one has to examine the workings of myth specifically, and that means examining a specific myth. A careful examination of any one myth provides insights into the workings of all myths. Much of what I write about Nuremberg can be generalized to other mythical German cities, and indeed to other mythical cities around the world, such as Williamsburg in Virginia or Toledo in Spain. Freud analyzed the structure of the Oedipus complex by studying the individual case histories of his patients. Knowledge of the general comes first and foremost from knowledge of the specific. Hence, structurally, I had to choose one mythic city. It could have been any city. I chose Nuremberg. That is the structural answer. However my choice of Nuremberg was anything but random. It was quite calculated. I chose Nuremberg because over the course of the last two centuries it has been the most powerful and prominent of German mythic cities, with the greatest number of permutations and changes, as well as connections to other cities and other myths, and therefore to the nation as a whole.8 Nuremberg1 was one of the greatest and most important cities in Germany in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. By the nineteenth century it had become a provincial backwater; however, Nuremberg2 had become Germany’s symbolic capital.


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Moreover, the Nuremberg myth emerged at the very same time as — and therefore offers unique insights into — the development of German nationalism itself. Freud was also interested in analyzing the general via the specific. His choice of case studies was quite deliberate. He studied neurosis not because he had a prurient interest in disease but rather because he believed that sickness offered unparalleled insights into health. Freud compared the human psyche to a kind of crystal, such as ice or glass. When a crystal breaks, its breakage occurs along particular lines that are already inherent but difficult to see in the unbroken crystal. The structure of crystals is therefore easier to study once they are broken. Likewise, Freud believed, the human psyche is formed along particular lines and patterns. Those patterns are always present, but in a healthy adult they are difficult to discern. Neuroses, Freud believed, offer privileged access to the psychological constitution of health itself. Neurotic people may, like a crystal, be broken; but the patterns of their breaking reveal a great deal about what constitutes wholeness.9 I am far from contending that the real Nuremberg1 is sicker or healthier than any other German city. However Nuremberg2 is for me a case study in the development of German ideology. Nuremberg1 was quite literally broken in the war, and one could argue — and in fact the American journalist William Shirer did argue — that both the real Nuremberg and its imagined double had already become neurotic, along with the rest of Germany, during Hitler’s Third Reich.10 The breaks and fissures in Nuremberg1 and Nuremberg2 do not simply reveal a great deal about one city and its imaginary double. They provide privileged access into the development of an entire nation and its myths. Freud tried to map the human psyche; my exploration of Nuremberg2 is an attempt to map the German psyche and its development. For most of its history Germany has been without a permanent capital. It has had no metropolis that concentrates all political, economic, and cultural power in one place. France has its capital, Paris, and England its London, but Germany has nothing of the kind. Berlin is a relatively new and weak city that has not, for most of German history, functioned as anything like a German capital. Even in 1991 the German Bundestag was barely able to decide to make Berlin the center of government after national reunification; almost half of the parliamentary representatives who voted on June 20 of that year on the future site of the German capital wanted to keep the government in Bonn, a small West German city that used to be known mockingly as the “Bundeshauptdorf” (capital village of the federation).11 German history is a history of competing regions and competing cities. It is a history of plurality, not of singularity. That plurality and provincialism are represented better by Nuremberg than by Berlin. Ralf Dahrendorf is entirely correct when he states that Germany “is not


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centered on a capital,” and that “the Federal Republic lives in its small and mid-sized cities,” not in Berlin.12 In this sense Germany is rather like the United States, which is characterized by its metropolitan plurality and not by any kind of urban exclusivity. One can welcome or curse this, but virtually no one would claim that it is not the case. Just as few Americans would imagine that New York is representative of the entire United States, so too would few Germans recognize Berlin as a synecdoche of Germany itself. Americans might in fact be more likely to view Oklahoma City or Denver as representative of the United States than New York. And so too Germans have recognized and might still recognize a place like Nuremberg as more representative of the real Germany than the capital Berlin. Even in its provinciality, Nuremberg is somehow representative. Karl Schlögel, a German historian who is a proponent of the so-called spatial turn in historiography and cultural studies, argues that time always needs to be thought together with place, and vice versa.13 There is no history independent of place, and no place independent of history. The two spheres are inextricably intertwined. In order to understand history in all its concreteness and complexity, we need to study the history of places. As Schlögel argues, “If we want to give an image of the world, we need the concept of a center, a middle — no matter how it is defined or where it is located. All our knowledge of history clings to places.”14 Schlögel is particularly interested in Berlin as the place where, on November 9, 1989, the Cold War rigidification of European spatial categories suddenly and unexpectedly ceased. I am interested in Nuremberg as an imaginary space in which conceptions of Germany and Germanness came into being over many centuries. Just as Haffner makes a distinction between the real city and the imaginary city, so too the great German historian Friedrich Meinecke once famously distinguished two different aspects of a nation’s existence: the Staatsnation and the Kulturnation.15 The Staatsnation is the real existing political state with its borders and government. The Kulturnation is the nation as it imagines itself to be, tied together by bonds of language, culture, religion, history, and desire. Sometimes the Staatsnation exists independently of any Kulturnation, as with the former Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia, where various different peoples and cultures without any particular sense of common identity lived in the same state. Such states tend to be short-lived because they are tied together only by state power, not by the will of the people. Sometimes the Kulturnation exists independently of any state, as for instance with the Kurds today, who are spread out over Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran, but who nevertheless share a sense of common cultural identity as Kurds. Such nations without states tend to be viewed as problems by conventional state authorities. Ideally, the Staatsnation and the Kulturnation coincide. For Meinecke Germany during most of the nineteenth century was a Kulturnation without a state — that is: a nation in search of a state — but


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after the founding of the German Reich in 1871 the Kulturnation was unified with the Staatsnation. Meinecke’s distinction is useful here not only as a reminder of the dualism of German history and as a parallel between the two Nurembergs that I have labeled Nuremberg1 and Nuremberg2. Far more than that, it is directly applicable to the two Nurembergs. A politically divided Germany in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may have had no need for a political capital, of course, but a culturally unified imaginary Germany longing for geographical and political reality needed something like a cultural center, a metropolis of dreams. Nuremberg1 may have been politically insignificant in the nineteenth century, but Nuremberg2 became the capital city of Meinecke’s Kulturnation.

Notes 1

Michael Diefenbacher and Rudolf Endres, eds., Stadtlexikon Nürnberg (Nuremberg: W. Tümmels, 2000). 2 Sebastian Haffner, “Rheinsberg, Elegie des Ruhms,” in Haffner, Das Leben der Fußgänger: Feuilletons 1933–1938, ed. Jürgen Peter Schmied (Munich: Carl Hanser, 2004), 274–81; here, 274. Original German: “Es gibt Orte, die selbst der zu kennen glaubt, der nie dort gewesen ist. Ihre Namen sind so etwas wie Zauberformeln geworden; man braucht sie nur auszusprechen: Potsdam — Weimar — Nürnberg, und jeder, der sie hört, wird ganz bestimmte Bilder vor sich sehen, eine ganz bestimmte Luft zu atmen meinen. Diese Städte haben neben ihrer wirklichen, körperlichen, steinernen Existenz eine zweite gewonnen, die aus einem dichteren, unzerreißbareren Stoff gewoben ist als Stein; sie leben als Klang und Bild unzerstörbar, unbekümmert darum, wie ihre Wirklichkeit sich wandelt. Das Potsdam der Wachtparade und des Hohenfriedbergers wird lebendig sein, wenn das wirkliche Potsdam längst ein Stadteil von Groß-Berlin sein wird; und das Nürnberg der Meistersinger ist lebendiger als das Nürnberg der Spielwarenindustrie und der Fußballklubs. Diese Städte sind nur nebenbei, nur auf zufällige und gleichgültige Art geographisch-politische Wirklichkeiten; hauptsächlich und eigentlich sind sie Legende.” 3 Julius Rodenberg, In deutschen Landen: Skizzen und Ferienreisen (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1874), 283. Original German: “Diese Stadt ist einzig in ihrer Art, denn sie ist nicht Copie, sondern Original.” 4 Rodenberg, In deutschen Landen, 279. Original German: “Der kindlichen Phantasie erscheint Nürnberg wie ein unerschöpfliches Magazin voll der buntesten Bilderbücher, wie ein Eldorado mit den niedlichsten Häusern, Bäumen, Pferden und Menschen, die man auspacken und einpacken kann”; “so wird man sich sagen, daß man hier eine Wirklichkeit vor sich hat, die für das Auge des Erwachsenen bunter und märchenhafter ist, als es alle Pracht und Herrlichkeit der Baukästen jemals für das Kind gewesen.” 5 See Stephen Brockmann, German Literary Culture at the Zero Hour (Rochester: Camden House, 2004), 122–23.


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6 Gerald Strauss, Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century: City Politics and Life Between Middle Ages and Modern Times (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976). 7

Alexander Lips, Die deutsche Bundesstadt: Eine Phantasie auf absoluter Basis (Germanien [Vienna]: n.p., 1815), 23. 8

See also Dieter Wuttke, Nuremberg: Focal Point of German Culture and History (Bamberg: Stefan Wendel, 1988). 9 Sigmund Freud, “Die Zerlegung der psychischen Persönlichkeit,” in Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse (Vienna: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, 1933), 80–111; here, 82–83. In English: “Freud, The Anatomy of the Mental Personality, Lecture XXXI,” in New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1933), 82–112; here, 84–85. 10

William L. Shirer, End of a Berlin Diary (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), 288–89. 11

On the debate about the capital, see Alexandra Richie, Faust’s Metropolis: A History of Berlin (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1998), 850–58; and David Clay Large, Berlin (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 545–52. 12

“Deutsche Illusionen: Die Macht des Nationalstaates und die Grenze der europäischen Idee,” interview with Ralf Dahrendorf, Die Zeit, 27 January 2005, 39. Original German: “ist nicht hauptstadtzentriert”; “die Bundesrepublik lebt in ihren kleinen und mittleren Städten.” 13

This movement was already well under way in the United States, England, Germany, and France by the end of the 1990s, and was only strengthened by the terrorist attack on New York that occurred on September 11, 2001, which suddenly reminded scholars of the tremendous importance of place as a category. 14 Karl Schlögel, Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit: Über Zivilisationsgeschichte und Geopolitik (Munich: Carl Hanser, 2003), 70. Original German: “Wir brauchen, wenn wir ein Bild von der Welt geben wollen, eine Vorstellung von einem Zentrum, einer Mitte — wie immer sie bestimmt sein mag, wo immer sie auch angesiedelt ist. All unser Wissen von Geschichte haftet an Orten.” 15

Friedrich Meinecke, Cosmopolitanism and the National State, trans. Robert B. Kimber (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1970).

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View of Nuremberg in Hartmann Schedel’s world chronicle of 1493. Woodcut. Provided by the Germanisches Nationalmuseum.

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1: A Small Town in Germany

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UREMBERG IN 1500 HAD ABOUT 25,000 inhabitants, making it one of Germany’s largest cities.1 Cities in other countries, such as London, with more than 50,000, Naples, with 230,000, or Paris, with 200,000, were bigger, but in Germany there were few cities at the time with more than 20,000 inhabitants.2 Nuremberg was surrounded by a thick wall intended to keep out hostile armies. It was ruled by a hereditary patrician class of merchants whose wealth came primarily from trade with other major European cities, particularly cities in Italy and the low countries; these patricians controlled all important aspects of city life, from detailed regulations concerning trade to military and judicial affairs. Nuremberg was an imperial city, a so-called civitas imperialis or Reichsstadt, which meant that over the course of several centuries it had managed to win independence from any intermediary feudal lord and swore allegiance only to the Holy Roman Empire itself, the loose confederation of various states, principalities, and cities of which Germany then consisted. In an edict of 1219 Emperor Frederick II, grandson of the legendary Barbarossa (Frederick I), had sought to bind Nuremberg to him in loyalty by irrevocably declaring “that every citizen of this city shall have no other liege lord than Us and Our successors, the Roman kings and emperors.”3 This meant that Nuremberg had the emperor’s blessing in its quest for independence from other feudal authorities; it repaid the emperor’s beneficence with loyalty, money, and military assistance. As a way of thanking Nuremberg for its loyalty to the empire, Barbarossa’s successor Emperor Sigismund decreed two centuries later, in 1424, during the proto-Protestant Hussite rebellion in Bohemia (1419–36), that the imperial insignia — the emperor’s ceremonial crown, sword, orb, and so on, as well as various other relics believed to have religious and historical significance, such as the lance that pierced Christ’s flesh during his crucifixion, a splinter from the cross on which Christ died, and a tooth of St. John the Baptist — should be removed from Bohemia, where they were then being kept, and where the Emperor believed they might be in danger from the Hussites, and placed permanently in Nuremberg. Since the fourteenth century some of Nuremberg’s craftsmen had banded together in musical clubs to write songs and sing. Craftsmen who reached the highest level in these clubs were called Meistersinger, mastersingers. The Nuremberg mastersinger and coppersmith Hans Rosenplüt

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proudly described the most precious of Nuremberg’s imperial and religious insignia two decades after their transfer to Nuremberg in his long poem “Der Lobspruch auf Nürnberg” (In Praise of Nuremberg, 1447). Rosenplüt noted that Emperor Sigismund had chosen Nuremberg because of its unparalleled virtues as a city: And even the most magnificent Kaiser on his horse astride, Sigmund traveled so far and wide That all the Roman Empire he saw there. Nor found he nothing with Nuremberg to compare, Where beautiful wisdom and truth abound. That seemed to him so sweet a vibrant sound That he often heard from there resound. Wherefore at his command the sacred things in Nuremberg can now be found.4 In Nuremberg the holy and imperial relics were placed on public display on the market square every year on the second Friday after Easter, at the Feast of the Holy Lance, when crowds would fill the square in order to gain access to the magical benefits supposedly conferred by them; specifically, it was believed that pilgrims who had performed the ritual correctly would have their stay in purgatory shortened by almost thirty-eight years.5 Given the belief that the average person would spend between one and two thousand years in Purgatory, this may not have seemed like a lot, but any expected lessening of the fiery torments that went along with a stay in that place between heaven and hell was welcome.6 The ceremonial display of the holy relics had a specific order: first the relics having to do with Christ’s birth — such as a piece of wood from Christ’s crib and the tooth of St. John the Baptist — were displayed. Then came the imperial insignia themselves, such as the crown and the orb. And finally came the holy relics related to the passion of Christ, such as the holy lance and five thorns from Christ’s crown of thorns.7 The imperial insignia represented the link between religion and politics in the Holy Roman Empire: the link that supposedly made the empire holy and the emperor anointed by God himself through the pope in Rome. In his 1493 Liber Chronicarum, or Nuremberg Chronicle, one of the most important and beautiful printed books of the fifteenth century — it tells the whole history of the world, as it was then understood, from its creation to the time of the book’s printing — the physician and Nuremberg humanist Hartmann Schedel describes the imperial insignia and their significance thus: This city . . . also contains the imperial insignia. To wit: the robe. The sword. The scepter. The orb and the crown of the great Kaiser Karl that are held in Nuremberg town. And which, in the coronation of a Roman

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king, give credence of holiness and antiquity. . . . And other holy things which are honored throughout the world, and which are shown publicly every year at Easter time with great solemnity in the town.8

Hartmann Schedel’s assertion that the imperial crown once belonged to Charlemagne himself — it never did, since the crown was not created until 962, when Emperor Otto I was crowned by the pope — was part and parcel of the Holy Roman Empire’s narrative of historical continuity reaching back through Charlemagne to the Roman emperors of classical antiquity. As early as 1356 the Golden Bull, which laid down procedures for electing the German emperor — he was to be chosen by seven Electors: four worldly lords such as the King of Bohemia and the Margrave of Brandenburg and three princes of the church such as the Archbishops of Mainz and Cologne — also decreed that each newly elected emperor should hold his first imperial diet in the city of Nuremberg. Such decrees were signs of Nuremberg’s importance for the empire. The Holy Roman Empire had no capital city, and emperors traveled from town to town in order to demonstrate their power and presence — they were, as Rosenplüt wrote, “reiser,” that is, travelers; but a few cities, such as Nuremberg or Cologne, were clearly more important than others. Writing in the sixteenth century, Jean Bodin called Nuremberg “the greatest, most famous, and best ordered of all the imperial cities.”9 The emperor’s castle in Nuremberg, which stood on a high rocky hill overlooking the rest of the city, gave evidence of the emperor’s privileged position in urban life; it was around this castle that the city itself first developed in the eleventh century. Like other imperial cities, Nuremberg was valuable to the emperor precisely because it owed allegiance to him alone. Most other German cities, such as Munich or Cologne, owed their primary allegiance to an intermediary feudal lord such as a duke or a bishop. Conflicts of interest inevitably arose, since the Holy Roman Empire was not a centralized, topdown political structure but rather a complex, unwieldy agglomeration of competing political forces. Not only were there constant tensions between church and state, but even among the worldly powers of the feudal aristocracy, dukes, margraves, and counts jockeyed for power against each other and against the emperor. The relationship between a free imperial city like Nuremberg and the Holy Roman Emperor was hence mutually beneficial: the Emperor supported the city in its quest to maintain and enhance its independence from other lords, and the city supported the Emperor with contributions of money and troops. Niccolo Machiavelli acknowledged the significance of Germany’s cities when he wrote that “the power of Germany certainly resides more in her cities than in her princes.” Cities like Nuremberg, Machiavelli claimed, were “the real nerve of the Empire.”10 By 1500 Nuremberg was not only one of Germany’s wealthiest and most populous cities; it also was a mini-state that controlled

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large swaths of land surrounding the urban core — about twenty-five square miles. The Italian humanist Enea Silvio Piccolomini, who was later to become Pope Pius II, waxed enthusiastic about Nuremberg’s charms in the late 1450s. Trying to demonstrate that German cities were not being made poor by papal demands for money, he cited Nuremberg as an example of urban wealth: “What a splendid appearance this city presents! What beauty of location, what learning there, what culture, what a superb government! Nothing is missing to make a perfect civic community. How clean the streets, how elegant the houses!”11 The landscape around Nuremberg may have been aesthetically pleasing to the future pope, but it was not particularly fruitful agriculturally. Frederick II had acknowledged as much in his edict of 1219, noting that “the city has neither vineyards nor shipping and in fact is situated on very inhospitable land.”12 And Johann Cochlaeus, the rector of Nuremberg’s Lorenz school, wrote in 1512 that “the city lies on barren land, and hence its people cannot support themselves just from agriculture.” Cochlaeus argued that as a result Nuremberg was dependent only on the hard work and diligence of its citizens, “which is certainly far more admirable than if it were so rich and glorious merely because of nature’s bounty.” Nuremberg was wealthy and successful not by virtue of luck or circumstances, but because its hard-working citizens had made it so. It was a triumph of human culture over brute nature. Geographically Nuremberg, Cochlaeus wrote, was the center not just of Germany but of Europe: “For it lies equidistant from the Adriatic to the Baltic, in terms of Europe’s width. And also the distance from the Don and to Cadiz is equal, by which one measures Europe’s length.”13 In several maps of Europe completed around this time Nuremberg is pictured as the center of the continent, and of the Holy Roman Empire. Encomiums to the city like those of Enea Silvio Piccolomini and Johann Cochlaeus were quite common in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, part of a genre thought to have been inaugurated by Rosenplüt’s lengthy vernacular poem in praise of his city. Rosenplüt named a great many cities such as Prague and entire countries such as Egypt, as well as arts and sciences such as rhetoric and geometry, concluding that the city of Nuremberg combined the greatest strengths of all regions and all arts: “All these arts will one find in Nuremberg.”14 Indeed, Rosenplüt wrote, there was no city to compare to Nuremberg: “Therefore I never found another city like Nuremberg,/Which lies on dry sand.”15 As Rosenplüt described the city, its citizens were diligent and pious, its government was wise and peace-loving, and it was blessed by God and the emperor. Another Nuremberg mastersinger, Kunz Has, tried to expand on Rosenplüt’s praise of the city half a century later, in 1490, when he wrote over seven hundred lines of poetry praising the wise and measured rule of Nuremberg’s patricians, the excellence of Nuremberg’s craftsmen, the

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piety of the citizens, and above all the city’s status as a great center of trade and economic power, a subject that Has felt that Rosenplüt had neglected: And yet he did not explain What they in Nuremberg attain: That in their class they do remain And such great commerce thence unfurled Whereby their name is known throughout the world: Their reputation is fueled by their praiseworthy rule.16 Has went on to name the various wares traded in Nuremberg, from fabrics through spices and various foodstuffs to wood, coal, and stone. Nuremberg, Has wrote, was even praiseworthy in the genuine care that it gave to the citizens whom its judges had condemned to death, since it made sure that they got the necessary sacraments well before their execution: Nor did I ever see So much true sympathy For people being led to die. And therefore you will now see why There are few cities in the German land That can be compared to Nuremberg on its sand.17 A short while later, in 1496, the great German humanist Conrad Celtis, who spent many years in Nuremberg, decided to improve on Rosenplüt’s and Has’s panegyrics to the city by writing an elegant little book of Latin prose entitled Norimberga. Because this book was in Latin rather than in the presumably inferior German language, it would appeal, Celtis hoped, to a wider educated audience and spread Nuremberg’s fame throughout the western world, in which Latin was still the primary language of communication among educated elites, as well as in the Roman Catholic church, which still enjoyed a religious monopoly in western Europe generally and the German lands specifically. Like Rosenplüt and Has, Celtis filled his work with praise for the city and its government, upon which Celtis called down the blessing of the gods: So we beseech you, oh immortal gods, if our prayer can yet avail something, that you preserve and defend our city in its prosperity, welfare, and lasting stability. May you the guardian tutelary gods, rulers of the fates of lands and cities, preserve with protective hand the blessings of good fortune as long as the firmament bears the stars and the wind moves the waves!18

As if to suggest that Nuremberg had means at its disposal to resist the onslaught of envious lords, Celtis was also at pains to describe the city’s impressive fortifications: “Nuremberg wears about herself a strong girdle of a three-fold wall and trench,” complete with towers “equipped with

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machines, cannons, and other kinds of artillery. With these weapons the city can withstand any siege.”19 Celtis, who had been crowned in Nuremberg as Germany’s poet laureate by Emperor Frederick III in 1487, hoped to be remunerated generously by the city fathers for his public relations work on their behalf; much to his chagrin, they only gave him twenty gulden. The most famous poet to praise the city was the mastersinger Hans Sachs, a Nuremberg shoemaker, who, in 1530 — several years after the Protestant Reformation in Nuremberg — wrote a German-language poem entitled “Ein Lobspruch der Stadt Nuernberg” (In Praise of the City of Nuremberg). In this poem Sachs describes Nuremberg as a kind of earthly paradise full of a vast number of houses, with citizens who are “a hard-working people, rich and very powerful,/clever, handy, and peace-loving.”20 Nuremberg has a wise government, Sachs writes, and it distinguishes itself particularly because of its loyalty to the Empire and its allies: To the Holy Roman Empire And also to the allies it did acquire Nuremberg has always and ever anew been faithful and honorable and true And therefore often undergone suffering undue.21 Such encomiums demonstrate that by the late Middle Ages and the early modern era Nuremberg was an object of not only political but also literary discourse, and that such discourse was motivated by at least three factors. First, citizens like Rosenplüt, Has, and Sachs genuinely loved their city. Sachs calls it his “fatherland, which I found to be so very praiseworthy,” and he concludes with the hope: “may its praise sprout, bloom, and grow:/Nuremberg’s Hans Sachs wishes it so.”22 Second, the city fathers desired fame and glory and actively encouraged such praise. Third, writers like Celtis hoped that kind words about the city and its wealthy patricians would open the city’s considerable coffers to them. Such literary works about the city are one of our primary sources of knowledge about Nuremberg and its politics so many centuries ago; however they are no more disinterested or objective than many more modern sources. For instance Celtis claims that Nuremberg has 52,000 residents, and that its wall has two hundred towers; neither figure is likely to be accurate. Schedel even goes so far as to write that Nuremberg’s wall has as many towers as there are days of the year. Sachs puts the figure at 183, whereas Rosenplüt cites 187.23 In fact the accurate figure was probably around 150.24 Even in the late Middle Ages, at the time of its greatest economic and political power, Nuremberg was already a city in quotation marks. At the beginning of the sixteenth century Nuremberg, like all of Germany, was still Catholic. Hans Rosenplüt described the piety of the city’s residents, listing its cloisters and monasteries and its charitable organizations for needy, sick, or impoverished citizens — places like the

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Zwölfbrüderstiftung for twelve destitute craftsmen or the JungfernAlmosen, a home for impoverished orphaned maidens. Nuremberg, Rosenplüt wrote, was not just a city full of charitable, god-fearing citizens; it was one of only five holy cities in the world, coming after Jerusalem, Rome, Trier, and Cologne: Now I name Nuremberg as the fifth In which the priestly guilds Serve God so religiously and well With masses, with orisons, with candlelight, With nuns and monks and laymen, The religious orders do their duty completely With singing, with reading, with fasting, and with prayer.25 Half a century later Conrad Celtis, in his Norimberga, similarly praised the city’s religiosity and piety. Neither Rosenplüt nor Celtis made note of the religious ferment that was to make Nuremberg one of the first major cities in Germany to carry out the Protestant Reformation. Emperor Sigismund had sought to save the imperial insignia from the proto-Protestant Hussites in Bohemia by sending them to Nuremberg in 1424, but a century later Nuremberg itself was to become Protestant. This development rendered null and void the religious significance previously ascribed to the holy relics, and the feast of the Holy Lance was no longer celebrated in Nuremberg in the traditional way after 1523. In March of 1525, two years after the last such celebration and less than eight years after the posting of Martin Luther’s theses against the sale of indulgences on the door of the palace church in Wittenberg on 31 October 1517, Catholic priests and Lutheran ministers engaged in a public theological debate about the relative merits of Protestant and Catholic doctrine. It took place, in German — not in Latin, the language that was usual for theological disputes — before a large audience in Nuremberg’s City Hall. Andreas Osiander, the preacher of Nuremberg’s largest church, St. Lorenz, and a former student of Luther’s in Wittenberg, was the primary representative of Protestantism in Nuremberg; he called upon the city’s government to institute Protestant reform throughout the city’s churches. Nuremberg’s population generally considered Osiander to be the winner of the theological disputation that occurred in 1525. Thereupon Nuremberg’s city fathers decreed Protestantism to be the religion of the city. Catholic clerics were ordered to stop preaching publicly, and public celebrations of the Catholic mass were forbidden. Meanwhile Catholic monasteries and nunneries were dissolved or dissolved themselves — although two convents survived for many decades until the last of their nuns had died. Hans Sachs and even Albrecht Dürer, Nuremberg’s and Germany’s greatest painter, experienced the transition from Catholicism to Protestantism themselves; Sachs wrote enthusiastic poems about it, and

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Dürer, who was generally sympathetic to Protestantism, included references to it in some of his artworks. The switch to Protestantism had a significant and negative impact on Nuremberg’s relationship with the Holy Roman Empire, since the very conception of the Empire was Catholic. After all, the Emperor was crowned in Rome by the pope himself. If the pope was, as Hans Sachs and other Nuremberg Protestants believed, a representative of the anti-Christ, then the legitimacy of the Emperor himself was put in question. In a 1523 poem Sachs invoked the pope in the image of a ravening lion snarling at Wittenberg’s nightingale Martin Luther, and he complained of the pope’s unnecessary and illegitimate rules and regulations, which, he argued, had no basis in the Bible itself: Of rules the pope has laid down more than a ton, But from God Himself comes nary a one. He hunts people down to the devil’s Hellhole, To Satan with their body and soul. St. Paul warned us about the pope’s bad ways: the fourth chapter of Timothy says that at the end of all the world’s days many souls will leave God’s true faith and adhere to the council of the devil-wraith; they will even forbid people to marry, and ban many foods with which God let us tarry, and for which we praise God without fear. I believe this is sufficiently clear.26 Nuremberg’s ruling patricians were a cautious and conservative lot, and they took great pains to avoid the revolutionary excesses of some Protestant towns and regions in Germany. They even banned one of Hans Sachs’s antiCatholic poems and reprimanded him for writing it. Nuremberg still valued its status as an imperial city and still treated the Holy Roman Emperor with great respect, as in 1541 when Martin Luther’s nemesis Emperor Charles V, a staunch proponent of Catholicism, visited the city and proceeded to the royal castle through a triumphal arch that the city had built for him — an arch decorated with Latin phrases such as: Quod tibi tam constans faveat victoria Caesar, Non modo Fortunae muneris esse puta, Sacra sed Augustum moderans Prudentia pectus, Hunc titulum laudis maluit esse suae.27 As Arthur Groos has pointed out, such phrases do two things simultaneously: on one level they signal the now Protestant city’s traditional obeisance to the Catholic emperor, but on another level they temper that obeisance by urging the emperor to be wise and prudent. In a time of danger and uncertainty, Nuremberg’s city fathers were hedging their bets.

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Hans Sachs in 1545 at the age of 51. Woodcut by Hans Guldenmund. Provided by the Germanisches Nationalmuseum. The transition from Catholicism to Protestantism in Nuremberg roughly corresponds to the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the early modern period, which is conventionally dated to 1500. It also corresponds to the end of feudalism and the beginning of capitalism as

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an economic and social system. Whereas the victory of Protestantism in Nuremberg has a specific date — 1525 — the transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern period and from feudalism to capitalism is far harder to pinpoint. This transition gradually wrested power from the lower-level feudal aristocracy of knights and barons who had played such an important role in military, political, and economic affairs in the medieval period, and placed it in the hands of wealthy cities like Nuremberg. At the same time the very definition of power was gradually changing. Whereas in the feudal period power was defined primarily by the ownership of land and the control of agriculture, in the modern period power was defined increasingly by the control of trade, capital, and the production of goods and services. It was in cities like Nuremberg that trade occurred, capital was amassed, and goods and services were produced. The knights who had previously governed much of European social life as the lords over peasants and the elite mounted fighters in any army gradually became impoverished, and many of them resented the cities and their residents, the prosperous Bürger, with their growing wealth. Götz von Berlichingen’s autobiography is a memoir of one such knight who fought a rear-guard action against the increasingly powerful cities, including Nuremberg, where Götz’s autobiography was published in 1731, and Augsburg, where Götz was held prisoner from 1528–30.28 Cities like Nuremberg in turn fought many battles with various feudal lords, including particularly the margraves of Brandenburg-Ansbach, as well as assorted other highwaymen and robber barons. These cities derived their wealth and power from trade; by attacking urban merchants on the highway, robber barons were not only enriching themselves but making life difficult for their up-and-coming social rivals. Nuremberg was certainly a representative of capitalism in Germany, but capitalism in Nuremberg was not the speculative, free-wheeling capitalism of Nuremberg’s neighbor to the south, Augsburg, where the famous banking house of the Fuggers became fantastically wealthy, and where regulations on commerce and banking were far less strict. Nuremberg’s cautious patricians kept strict rules on all aspects of economic life, including all the trades, and they discouraged speculation of any kind. Hans Sachs describes the city’s rules and regulations, and its bureaucrats, as follows: And of civil servants there are more than a few, for all things everywhere their job they do, so that nothing through sloth is left undone and much with duty and hard work can be won; the law and reformation of this clan is written out for every man. Therein is stated clear and just what do or leave undone one must;

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and whoever violates this rhyme is punished in accordance with his crime.29 In other words, capitalism in Nuremberg was constrained by a great many rules and regulations intended to ensure social order and fairness, and there were prescriptions on everything from the way that cattle were to be slaughtered to the kinds of clothing women of various social classes were permitted to wear. Nuremberg’s patricians tended to view the entire city as a kind of extended family, and they therefore wanted to make sure that no member of the community was able to make an unfair profit at the expense of any other member of the community. Sachs praises the patriarchal care of Nuremberg’s ruling patricians: The honest and wise council thus checks on its citizens of all classes without fuss. Great diligence is the fuel that governs their lawful rule; with good laws and effective police, without tyranny, they ensure the peace.30 The city council had demonstrated that it was capable of policing itself when it ordered the execution of one of its most prominent patrician citizens, the first Losunger (an office equivalent to that of mayor), Nikolaus Muffel, in 1469 for stealing money from the municipal coffers.31 It is possible that the rules and regulations imposed by Nuremberg’s patricians on economic life were one reason for the decline in Nuremberg’s fortunes after 1550. A city like Augsburg, with its more favorable location and more laissez-faire approach to capitalism, had more success. However there were other reasons for Nuremberg’s long decline. In particular, the discovery of the new world and the increasing focus of trade on the Atlantic Ocean meant that Nuremberg’s traditional trading partners in Italy were no longer as significant, and that Nuremberg’s status as an important midpoint between Italy and northern Europe was lessened. Instead trade became increasingly centered on the Atlantic Ocean, in Belgium, the Netherlands, and England. In addition, Germany’s religious differences, which culminated in the Thirty Years War (1618–48), divided the country, killed many of its inhabitants, and used up much of the country’s — and Nuremberg’s — wealth. In the aftermath of this war, political power in a weakened Germany gravitated from relatively advanced western city-states like Nuremberg to economically backward but large territorial agglomerations in the east, such as Brandenburg-Prussia and Austria. All of these factors contributed to Nuremberg’s decline. The relative conservatism of Nuremberg’s capitalism was only one such factor. Just as Hans Sachs has left us with written documentation of this period in Nuremberg’s history, so too Albrecht Dürer has left us with a

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Albrecht Dürer, self-portrait, age 26, 1498. Provided by the Prado Museum, Madrid. pictorial documentation. However whereas Sachs was writing in a German vernacular that was still largely scorned by wealthy patricians and not taken seriously as a literary language by educated humanists, Dürer’s paintings and engravings knew no linguistic barriers and spread the artist’s fame throughout Europe. In essence Dürer introduced the principles of Italian renaissance art to Germany. He had apprenticed in Nuremberg to the older artist Michael Wolgemut — of whom Dürer created a moving portrait — but in his travels to Italy in 1494/95 and 1505 to 1507 he studied

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the art of renaissance Italy, including its focus on perspective and anatomical detail. Dürer brought these innovations back to Nuremberg, where he became a famous and successful painter. His many self-portraits and his pictures of family, friends, and patrons give us a rich store of visual information about the way that Nuremberg’s citizens looked and dressed at the end of the Middle Ages, while his religious and philosophical images give a sense of citizens’ piety and worldviews. Three other Nuremberg craftsmen deserve to be mentioned in this context. The first is Veit Stoss, a brilliant woodcarver who remained true to Catholicism even after the Reformation. His Angelic Salutation (1517–18) in the Church of St. Lorenz is a beautiful annunciation surrounded by a rosary; Stoss also created the crucifix in the church of St. Sebald, as well as the famous altarpiece at the church of St. Mary in Krakow, Poland, where he lived for two decades before settling permanently in Nuremberg in 1496. In Nuremberg Stoss was to experience the strictness of municipal justice: after being convicted of a forgery, he was branded on both of his cheeks. The stone carver Adam Kraft was also a representative of the brilliance of artistic craftsmanship in Nuremberg shortly before the transition to Protestantism. Kraft’s masterpiece is the Sacrament House in the church of St. Lorenz, an extraordinarily beautiful tabernacle created to house the Eucharistic bread and wine of a communion service. Kraft’s Sacrament House, with filigreed stonework that rises sixty feet into the air, gives the impression that stone itself has become a supple, lightweight substance straining to reach the heavens. Kraft also created the stations of the cross that marked the path from Burgschmiedstrasse 18, near the imperial castle, to St. John’s cemetery outside the city walls; these works, financed by a wealthy knight from Bamberg, were laid out in such a way as to precisely recreate what was thought to have been Christ’s actual path toward crucifixion in Jerusalem. A third remarkable craftsman was the metalworker Peter Vischer, who, together with his sons, completed the Tomb of St. Sebald, Nuremberg’s patron saint, in the church of the same name in 1519, shortly before the Reformation in Nuremberg. It is typical of the conservatism and respect for tradition of Nuremberg’s city fathers that none of these artworks was harmed during the Reformation, and that indeed they all remained in the churches for which they had been created, where they can still be seen five centuries later. Whereas in some German cities artworks were destroyed by radical iconoclasts, in Nuremberg most artworks were preserved and even honored. It is of course important to ask exactly why Nuremberg experienced such a flowering of the arts and of craftsmanship around the year 1500, but this question is exceedingly difficult to answer. No doubt one of the important reasons is the city’s wealth and prominence among Germany’s imperial cities. Wealthy patrons demanded artistic quality, and they had the

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money to pay for it. Among Nuremberg’s greatest artists, however, it was clearly not just money that was at stake. Dürer, Vischer, Kraft, and Stoss demonstrate a religious devotion and fervor that give their work a spiritual significance. This is true not only of the Catholics Vischer, Kraft, and Stoss, but also of Dürer, who started out a Catholic, but who was sympathetic to Protestantism. And it is also true of a lesser artist like Hans Sachs, who — in spite of occasional glimpses of beauty in his extensive work — is significant not so much because of the grace of his poetry as because of what that poetry reveals about the attitudes of his time, and because of the significance his work clearly had for many of his contemporaries. There is another aspect of Nuremberg at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the early modern era that deserves to be mentioned: the fact that in 1499 the Nuremberg council expelled all Jews from the city. Nuremberg was not the only German town to treat its Jews so badly; nor was this the first time that Nuremberg had subjected its Jewish population to chicanery and expulsion. In the fourteenth century, for instance, in the midst of the Black Plague, Jews were blamed all over Germany for the epidemic. In 1349 Nuremberg’s Jews were subjected to a pogrom, their houses were burned, and in their place Nuremberg’s central market square — six centuries later it was to be renamed Adolf-Hitler-Platz for twelve long years — was created on the very space where Jews had once lived. As the market square’s focal point a new house of worship, the church of Our Lady, was built between 1355 and 1358. Prior to 1499, all such pogroms and expulsions were ultimately followed by the return of Jews to Nuremberg. However in 1499 the city council once again cracked down on the Jews, this time in a semi-permanent fashion, by expelling all Jews from the city in perpetuity. It was not until three and a half centuries later that Jews began to settle in the city again in the middle of the nineteenth century. Toward the end of one of Hans Sachs’s plays from 1557, a Jewish figure steps out of character and addresses the audience with a reference to the historical expulsion of Nuremberg’s Jews: A happy thought to close my ditty: There’s not a Jew left in our city.32 Clearly the expulsion of the Jews from Nuremberg in 1499 was motivated by medieval Christians’ traditional hatred of the Jews as representatives of the race that had supposedly killed Jesus Christ, and that was purported to regularly engage in the killing of Christian children and the desecration of the Eucharistic host. This can be seen in one of the poems of the Nuremberg mastersinger Hans Folz, a predecessor of Sachs, who has a Jewish figure proclaim: “We enjoy the blood of your children.”33 Such myths were by no means limited to Nuremberg. Nuremberg’s great Protestant reformer Andreas Osiander became the first major Christian figure to argue publicly against these myths in a 1527 pamphlet published

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anonymously and entitled “Ob es war und glaublich sey, daß die Juden der Christen Kinder heymlich erwürgen und ihr Blut gebrauchen” (Whether it is true and credible that the Jews secretly strangle Christian children and use their blood).34 Nuremberg’s city council even allowed Osiander, who was fascinated by the cabala, to host a Jewish tutor who instructed him in Hebrew. Hans Sachs’s portrayals of Jews are sometimes positive and sometimes negative, governed primarily by his fervent Protestantism; in his major poetic statement on the Jewish religion, a 1530 dispute between a Christian “doctor” and a rabbi, the rabbi ultimately converts to Protestantism, but only after the Christian has made the decisive argument that the historical suffering of the Jews is concrete proof of God’s wrath at their false beliefs.35 In the Middle Ages Jews performed useful and necessary economic functions (such as lending money) that Christians were forbidden to perform. It is possible that, as Guido Kisch has suggested, one reason for the expulsion of the Jews from Nuremberg in 1499 was that as Catholic strictures weakened and Christians were allowed to perform many of the economic tasks that had previously been off limits to them, Jews were no longer perceived as economically necessary to the vitality of the city.36 Now Christians could be “Jews” in the sense that they could lend money; and hence it is likely that Hans Sachs’s 1557 public declaration that “There’s not a Jew left in our city” was in fact meant ironically, since Nuremberg, in spite of the absence of real Jews, still had plenty of Christian moneylenders and usurers.37 Sachs’s audience would no doubt have laughed knowingly at this declaration, much as a contemporary audience might laugh if an actor playing a mafia boss were to proclaim that in the absence of ItalianAmericans there is no more crime in a city. It is entirely imaginable that one reason for Nuremberg’s ultimate economic decline, which set in about half a century after the expulsion of the Jews, may have been the long-term effects of that very expulsion. It may be that even if Christians could now perform the economic tasks previously carried out by Jews, the city still would have benefited economically from the presence of a non-homogeneous ethnic and religious population. However it is important to stress once again that Nuremberg was not unique in its bad treatment of Jews in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; all too many other German cities behaved the same way. And of course it was not just in Germany that Jews were persecuted. England had expelled its Jews in 1290, and Spain expelled its Jews seven years before Nuremberg did, in 1492, the year of the Catholic reconquest of Spain and Columbus’s discovery of the New World. All in all, Nuremberg at the beginning of the sixteenth century presents a picture of remarkable economic, political, and artistic success. Its fame had spread through all of Germany and Europe, its craftsmen and their wares were valued far and near, and the city had great weight in the affairs of the Empire. Nuremberg was a successful showplace for capitalism

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as a new economic system, and its merchant class was wealthy and hardworking. However the city was in no way radical; this was a conservative, cautious capitalism that was careful to honor tradition and authority. Moreover, the records available to us suggest a rather rigid social and economic system that seems to have been unable to respond quickly to the social change of which Nuremberg and its success were part; because of this, Nuremberg may ultimately have been a victim of its own success. The very developments that had made possible its own remarkable long-term success, when carried further, ultimately led to its equally notable longterm decline. And this decline, which paralleled a general decline in the fortunes of the Holy Roman Empire itself, was to become almost as much a part of the Nuremberg myth as the success of the city in 1500.

Notes 1 Gerald Strauss, Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century: City Politics and Life Between Middle Ages and Modern Times (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976), 35. There is no absolute certainty about this figure, as population statistics are unreliable. Other historians claim that the city had 40,000 inhabitants. Whatever the actual figure — whether 25,000 or 40,000 — it is clear that Nuremberg in 1500 was small by contemporary standards. 2

Strauss, Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century, 36.

3

Ursula Pfistermeister, Nürnberg: Zauber einer unvergänglichen Stadt in Farbbildern und alten Stichen (Nuremberg: Hans Carl, 1975), 9. In German: “daß jeder Bürger dieses Orts keinen andern Schutzherrn haben soll, als Uns und Unsere Nachfolger, die Römischen Könige und Kaiser.”

4 Hans Rosenplüt, “Der Lobspruch auf Nürnberg,” in Reimpaarsprüche und Lieder, ed. Jörn Reichel (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1990), 220–24; here, 226–27. Original German: “Und auch der allerdurichleuchtigiste keiser / Sigmundt, der was ein sollicher reiser, / Das er awszog das ganz romisch reich. / Noch vand er Nurmberg nindert gleich / Mit hubscher weißheit und wahrheit. / Das daucht in ein sueße clingende seit, / Die oft vor im von in erhal. / Dorumb er in das heiligtum beval.” 5 Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Nuremberg: A Renaissance City, 1500–1618 (Austin: U of Texas P, 1983), 28. 6 On one Spanish theologian’s estimate of the expected average stay in purgatory, see Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 313. 7 Julia Schnelbögl, “Die Reichskleinodien in Nürnberg, 1424–1523,” Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 51 (1962): 78–159; here, 122. 8 Pfistermeister, Nürnberg: Zauber einer unvergänglichen Stadt, 44. Original German: “Diese statt . . . frewet sich auch der keyserlichen zaichen. als des mantels. schwerter. scepters. der opffel und kron des großen keyser Karls die die zu

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Nuemberg bey ine haben. und die in der krönung eins roemischen konigs von der heiligkeit unnd alters wegen einen glawben geben. . . . und andern in der gantzen werlt zewirdigen heilthumen, die ierlich zu österlicher zeit offentlich daselbst mit großer solennitet gezaigt werden.” 9 10

Cited in Strauss, Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century, 12. Cited in Strauss, Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century, 4.

11

Cited in Strauss, Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century, 4. See also Albert Werminghoff, Conrad Celtis und sein Buch über Nürnberg (Freiburg im Breisgau: Julius Boltze, 1921), 82.

12

Pfistermeister, Nürnberg: Zauber einer unvergänglichen Stadt, 19. In German: “der Ort weder Weinberge, noch Schiffahrt hat, vielmehr auf einem sehr rauhen Boden liegt.” 13

Pfistermeister, Nürnberg: Zauber einer unvergänglichen Stadt, 8. In German: “Die Stadt liegt ja auf unfruchtbarem Boden, das Volk kann sich daher nicht lediglich von seinem Ackerland ernähren”; “was man gewiss viel höher zu schätzen hat, als wenn sie durch das Geschenk der Natur so reich und so glänzend dastünde”; “Sie liegt nämlich gleich weit von der Adria und von der Ostsee, was die Breite Europas ausmacht. Gleich ist auch die Entfernung zum Don und bis Cadiz, mit der man die Länge (Europas) misst.”

14

Rosenplüt, “Der Lobspruch auf Nürnberg,” 228. Original German: “Die kunst vindt er in Nurmberg all.” 15 Rosenplüt, “Der Lobspruch auf Nürnberg,” 230. Original German: “Dorumb ich Nurmberg gleichen nie vant, / Auf einem durren sande gelegen.” 16 K. A. Barack, “Ein Lobgedicht auf Nürnberg aus dem Jahre 1490 von dem Meister-Sänger Kuntz Haß: Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Kulturgeschichte,” Zeitschrift für deutsche Kulturgeschichte: Bilder und Züge aus dem Leben des deutschen Volkes 3 (1858): 376–405; here, 383–84. Original German: “Jedoch so hat er nit verzelt, / Was die von nürmberg enthelt, / Das in irem stand beleiben / Und solchen grossen handeln treiben, / Dadurch ir nam wirt weit genennt: / Das macht ir trefflich regiment.” 17 Barack, “Ein Lobgedicht auf Nürnberg aus dem Jahre 1490 von dem MeisterSänger Kuntz Haß,” 400. Original German: “Auch hab ich nyndert mehr erfarn, / Das man sollich erbarmung hat / Mit leuten, die man fürt zum tot. / Als ir yetzund habt verstanden, / Seind weng stet in teutschen landen, / Die sich nach nürmberg prechen.” 18

Cited in Lewis W. Spitz, Conrad Celtis: The German Arch-Humanist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1957), 38. 19

Cited in Strauss, Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century, 13.

20

Hans Sachs, “Ein Lobspruch der Stadt Nuernberg,” in Hans Sachsens ausgewählte Werke, vol. 1, Gedichte (Leipzig: Insel, 1961), 330–42; here, 335. Original German: “ein emsig Volk, reich und sehr maechtig, / gescheit, geschickt und fuertraechtig.”

21 Sachs, “Ein Lobspruch der Stadt Nuernberg,” 339. Original German: “Dem heiligen roemischen Reich, / den Bundgenossen desgleich / hat Nuernberg mit

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den wahrhaft Alten / bestaendigliche Treu gehalten, / darob oft große Not erlitten.” 22 Sachs, “Ein Lobspruch der Stadt Nuernberg,” 341, 342. Original German: “Vaterland, das ich so hoch lobwuerdig fand”; “daß sein Lob gruen’, blueh und wachs. / Das wuenscht von Nuernberg Hans Sachs.” 23 Sachs, “Ein Lobspruch der Stadt Nuernberg,” 340; Rosenplüt, “Der Lobspruch auf Nürnberg,” 223. 24

Strauss, Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century, 13, 36.

25

Rosenplüt, “Der Lobspruch auf Nürnberg,” 232. Original German: “Nu setze ich Nurmberg fur die funften, / Dorinnen von priesterlichen zunften / So großer heiliger gotsdienst geschicht / Mit meße, mit tagzeit, mit wachslicht / Von nunnen, munichen und leienpriestern, / Die ordenlichen ganz halten ihr register / Mit singen, mit lesen, mit vasten und gepet.” 26 Hans Sachs, “Die wittenbergisch Nachtigall, die man ietz hoeret ueberall,” in Hans Sachens ausgewählte Werke, 1, Gedichte (Leipzig: Insel, 1961), 12–28; here, 18. Original German: “Unzahl hat der Papst solcher Bot, / der doch keins hat geboten Gott. / Jagt die Leut in Abgrund der Hell / zu dem Teufel mit Leib und Seel. / Paulus hat ihn gezeiget an / am vierten zu Timotheon / und spricht: Der Geist saget deutlich, / daß zu den letzten Zeiten, sich, / etlich vom Glauben werden treten / und anhangen des Teufels Raeten, / werden Leuten die Eh verbieten / und etlich Speis, die Gott durch Gueten / beschaffen hat mit Danksagung. / Ich mein’, das sei klar genung.” 27 Arthur Groos, “The City as Text: The Entry of Charles V into Nuremberg (1541),” in James F. Poag and Claire Baldwin, The Construction of Textual Authority in German Literature of the Medieval and Early Modern Periods (Chapel Hill and London: U of North Carolina P, 2001), 135–56; here, 143. Translation in Groos, 154, n. 32: “That victory is constantly favorable to you, Caesar, do not think this only a gift of Fortune. It is sacred Prudence, who, reigning in the breast of the august ruler, preferred that this sign of her praise be evident.” 28

Götz von Berlichingen, Autobiography, ed. Hannah Stephanie Marguerita Stuart (London: G. Duckworth, 1956).

29 Sachs, “Ein Lobspruch der Stadt Nuernberg,” 336. Original German: “Auch seind die Amtleut ohne Zahl / zu allen Dingen ueberall, / zu versehen all Dienst und Amt, / daß aus Unfleiß werd nichts versaumt; / ihr Gsetz und Reformation / ist fuergeschrieben iedermonn. / Darin ist angezeiget wol, / was man tun oder lassen soll; / und wer sich darin uebergafft, / der wird nach Gstalt der Sach gestraft.” 30 Sachs, “Ein Lobspruch der Stadt Nuernberg,” 337. Original German: “Also ein ehrsam weiser Rat / selbs ein fleißig Aufsehen hat / auf seine Buerger aller Staend / mit ordenlichem Regiment, / guter Statut und Polizei / guetig ohn alle Tyrannei.” 31 Strauss, Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century, 92. Olga Pöhlmann’s historical novel Niklas Muffel (Stuttgart: Union, 1928) gives an account of this incident. Tellingly, Muffel had committed his crimes in order to procure money for the purchase of religious relics.

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32 Cited in Strauss, Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century, 122. Original German: “Nun frew wir uns, daß diese statt / Keinen Jüden mehr in ir hat. . . .” From Brigitte Jünger, “Die Darstellung der Juden im Werk von Hans Sachs,” Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 77 (1990): 17–61; here, 44. 33

Cited in Jünger, “Die Darstellung der Juden im Werk von Hans Sachs,” 24. Original German: “Wir nießen euer kinder plut.” 34

Jünger, “Die Darstellung der Juden im Werk von Hans Sachs,” 60.

35

Jünger, “Die Darstellung der Juden im Werk von Hans Sachs,” 27–28.

36

See Strauss, Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century, 122, and also Guido Kisch, The Jews in Medieval Germany (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1949), 316–22 (cited by Strauss). 37 I am indebted to Brigitte Jünger’s article “Die Darstellung der Juden im Werk von Hans Sachs” for this argument.

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2: The Capital of Nostalgia

T

HE REDISCOVERY OF NUREMBERG COINCIDED with the beginning of German Romanticism. In fact the rediscovery of Nuremberg was the foundational act of German Romanticism. Hence one could say that Nuremberg, or concepts of Nuremberg, had a profound impact on European intellectual history. The rediscovery — or invention — of Nuremberg created an intellectual movement that was to affect Germany and Europe for many decades. Paradoxically, Nuremberg’s rediscovery coincided with the final agony of the once powerful city. It occurred during the Napoleonic wars, when the city was virtually bankrupt and under threat of military occupation by French troops, which were in the process of invading many of the principalities of which Germany then consisted. On 23 July 1796, in the year that Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and his friend Ludwig Tieck anonymously published their book Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Confessions from the Heart of an Art-Loving Friar), the foundational text of German Romanticism, the crown and scepter of the Holy Roman Empire — the state form in which highest constitutional authority in German lands had existed for many centuries — along with the other imperial insignia that had, by Emperor Sigismund’s decree, been kept in the city since 1424, were spirited out of Nuremberg at the behest of the city’s leaders in order to keep them out of the hands of the invading French. Two weeks later, on 8 August, Nuremberg was occupied by French troops.1 Although Nuremberg and its promoters tried for more than a century to reclaim the crown and the other insignia of empire, they failed. The insignia were taken to Vienna, where they remained until Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, when, at the behest of Adolf Hitler, they were returned to Nuremberg. There they stayed until 1945, when the American military returned them to Vienna. Tourists can see them to this day in the treasure chamber at the Hofburg. Ten years after the insignia of the empire left Nuremberg in 1796, the Holy Roman Empire that they symbolized itself ceased to exist, also as a result of the Napoleonic Wars. On 6 August 1806, Emperor Francis II abdicated, bringing an end to the nine hundred years of the empire. In the absence of the empire that had helped to guarantee its imperial freedoms, the city of Nuremberg, which had gone bankrupt in 1797, could no longer sustain its independence. Caught between the larger, more powerful states of Prussia in the north and Bavaria in the south, and rocked by the

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aftershocks of the French revolution and the ongoing military conflict in Europe, the city-state struggled to maintain its independence for a decade after its loss of the imperial crown that had been entrusted to it by Emperor Sigismund. Five weeks after Francis II’s abdication, Nuremberg’s long struggle came to an end. On 15 September 1806 the city was annexed by the newly created Kingdom of Bavaria, which had previously been a mere duchy; Bavaria’s elevation to a kingdom, like Nuremberg’s ultimate decline, had been made possible by the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire. On that day in September, during the ceremonial act of metropolitan obeisance to the Bavarian King Maximilian I, the former Duke and Prince Elector Maximilian IV, the wife of a Nuremberg merchant is reported to have tearfully embraced her children, crying: “You poor children, now you are the servants of a prince!”2 Although the once great city retained memories of its former imperial freedoms, Nuremberg has been a Bavarian city ever since — no longer the secret capital of the Holy Roman Empire or even of Bavaria. Nuremberg’s decline had been painfully slow, occurring over the course of three centuries. In part, the decline was a function of the city’s independent status. Because of its wealth and significance, the city was coveted by many princes, particularly by the margraves of BrandenburgAnsbach, members of the Hohenzollern family, who sought to make Franconia into their own fiefdom by fighting two bloody, costly, and fruitless wars against Nuremberg in the middle of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Thirty Years War accelerated Nuremberg’s decline and also the decline of the Holy Roman Empire itself, and hence of German unity; even after that bloody war’s end, at a time when many German cities were undergoing extensive ducal and baronial construction programs, and when elegant palaces and residences were being built as architectural embodiments of the pride and power of absolutist lords, Nuremberg remained largely untouched, precisely because it did not have an aristocratic overlord. Had the Hohenzollerns managed to subjugate the city to their will, they would no doubt have erected an impressive Baroque palace there for themselves; but since neither they nor any other feudal lord conquered the city, no such construction took place. Like the castle behind Sleeping Beauty’s hedge of thorns in the Grimm brothers’ fairy tale, Nuremberg and its late medieval cityscape seemed simply to sleep, as if waiting for a prince to discover it. In the fairy tale the princess sleeps for a hundred years; Nuremberg slept for three centuries. Wackenroder and Tieck, two students from Berlin, were destined to play the role of fairy-tale prince, and one can think of their book Herzensergießungen as a kind of wake-up kiss to the down-on-its-luck city. However, what Tieck and Wackenroder awakened was not so much the city itself as educated Germans’ fantasies of a romanticized past, whether real or imagined. Shortly after seeing Nuremberg for the first time in June

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of 1793, Wackenroder, the son of a Prussian bureaucrat, wrote to his parents back home: “Both on the inside and on the outside, almost all the houses seem to me to show no trace of modern tastes. Not a single newfangled façade.”3 For Wackenroder the city’s lack of modernity was initially not entirely positive, since Nuremberg’s houses, as he described them, were dark and unpleasant, and its people sometimes “terrible caricatures.”4 Quickly Wackenroder’s ambivalent reaction to the old city turned positive, however, as he explained to his parents the following day: “My amazement at this city knows no bounds, because there’s not a single new building in it — just countless old ones, from the tenth century onward, and so one is completely transported into olden times and always expecting an encounter with a knight or a monk or a burgher in old-fashioned costume, because new clothes simply don’t fit the style of the city’s buildings.”5 For Wackenroder, a romantic young man from a larger and more modern city filled with bureaucrats like his father, Nuremberg made the non-bureaucratic German past come alive; it seemed a place that time had forgotten, a vast living monument to bygone and better days. Nuremberg must indeed have been a remarkable sight in 1793. Wackenroder visited three times during the summer and early autumn, one of them in the company of his friends Tieck and Wilhelm von Burgsdorff; in total he spent no more than a week there, but that week was to have a profound impact on German intellectual history for at least a century. Nuremberg was by far the best preserved of the major German medieval cities, completely surrounded by an impressive wall and with a wealth of Gothic and renaissance architecture in its relatively narrow, cramped streets. Wackenroder wrote to his parents: “Some of the gates are massive, with round, black towers. The churches are vast dark hulks full of images and Gothic adornments, little towers that let light through, and large gates decorated with figures, and so on. There are a great many such churches.”6 In its unplanned confusion of narrow passageways, Nuremberg contrasted sharply with the strict grid-like planning of baroque cities such as nearby Erlangen, where Wackenroder and Tieck were students, or Berlin, which was their home. Whereas Erlangen and cities like it had been created by absolutist princes and rationally planned, Nuremberg seemed to have grown organically. It was a living organism, not a machine. Outside Nuremberg’s wall the countryside began. The city featured hundreds of towers and spires, appearing from the outside to offer both great diversity and overarching unity, with the massive old imperial castle — where the Holy Roman Emperors had sojourned during their frequent visits to Nuremberg — as its focal point. In 1793 Nuremberg probably looked much the way it had been depicted in the woodcut of Schedel’s Weltchronik three centuries earlier, in 1493.7 Hence Wackenroder’s excited and only slightly exaggerated declaration that “one finds not a single new building.” Wackenroder proclaimed to his parents, “I’ve never seen

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another city like Nuremberg. The city has a particular interest for me. Because of its outward appearance one could call Nuremberg romantic in style.”8 The city, he declared, had “an antique, exciting appearance.”9 What Wackenroder saw as a cause for admiration and joy others before him had viewed in a much less positive light. Over the course of the previous two centuries Nuremberg had garnered a reputation as a backward, old-fashioned city with musty, dark buildings and unenlightened, mentally underdeveloped citizens. Whereas Wackenroder celebrated Nuremberg’s medieval cityscape, others found the metropolis unpleasant and vaguely threatening. The Enlightenment poet and thinker Christian Schubart called Nuremberg “a gray . . . city, lost in debt, cowardliness, and despicable silence.”10 In 1797, the official date of the publication of Wackenroder’s and Tieck’s paean to the city, Jonas Ludwig von Hess, a visitor from Hamburg, wrote that Nuremberg’s medieval atmosphere, far from conjuring up pleasant romantic images, reminded him “of the law of the highwayman, of the old Germany, constantly trembling in fear, writhing, betrayed by itself, and bristling with weapons.” “The dangerous spirit of olden days bares its teeth to us,” Hess complained, and the city appeared “chained up and closed off like a prison cell.”11 Hess and Schubart were not the only enlightened Germans to reject Nuremberg’s musty medieval aura. In 1796 another visitor to Nuremberg declared: “Strolling through the city brings physical and mental pain, because one is constantly exposed to the view of the most disgusting buildings.”12 In the same year Anselmus Rabiosus complained: “Whenever I came into this city I felt as if I had to cry. The entire citizenry seems to me like a colony of silkworms who are being raised for no other purpose than to be killed once they are mature. There is nothing great, nothing sublime, nothing that reaches to the heavens here. Everything is narrow, petty, oppressive, an image of emptiness and decline.”13 Ten years earlier an enlightened Protestant minister had complained: “If one’s eye is accustomed to the simple beauty of nature and to the noble imitation of that beauty, one can hardly be pleased by the awkwardness of the unpleasant decorations that one finds everywhere [in Nuremberg]!”14 Nuremberg might look good from a distance with its many towers, but the closer one got to it the uglier it became, “because everywhere the old-fashioned and the Gothic rears its head. The streets are almost all dark and twisted, the buildings are tall and colorful and painted with tasteless figures, often decorated with images of saints, and inside they frequently have an illogical lay-out.” When this visitor entered Nuremberg’s church of St. Sebald, he thought he “was coming into a den of bats, it stank so much of vermin and looked so malevolent.”15 The travel books of the eighteenth century remained largely blind to Nuremberg’s medieval allures. In his Neueste Reise durch Teutschland (Most Recent Journey through Germany), published in 1741, Johann

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Georg Keyssler complained that the church of St. Sebald, one of Nuremberg’s two primary Gothic structures, was “long and dark,” and he had little to say about the city’s old masters, such as Albrecht Dürer or Veit Stoss.16 The most extensive Enlightenment guide to Nuremberg, Beschreibung der vornehmsten Merkwürdigkeiten in des Heyligen Römischen Reiches freyen Stadt Nürnberg (Description of the Most Significant Curiosities in the Holy Roman Empire’s Free City Nuremberg), was written by Christian Gottlob von Murr, whom Wackenroder visited in 1793. Murr published his book about Nuremberg in 1776, and in it he complained about Nuremberg’s “relentless walls, whose threatening girth seemed to whisper sighs of regret and voluntary suffering,” its “raw stones, which were worn down by the knees of saints,” and its “dank and empty spaces, where black melancholy floated in dark yards and shadowy mausoleums.” As for the famous crucifix by Veit Stoss in the church of St. Sebald, Murr wrote: “Must the crucifixes really be so emaciated that they look as if the Redeemer had died of consumption?”17 The great woodcarver Veit Stoss was not well-treated by Nurembergers at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Wackenroder himself complained that Stoss’s masterpiece, the “Angelic Salutation,” was kept wrapped up at the church of St. Lorenz “in a large green sack in front of the altar, hanging in public from the church’s rafters, a disgrace to Nuremberg.”18 Two decades after Wackenroder’s complaint, the citizens of Nuremberg tried to save money by replacing the metal chain from which the “Angelic Salutation” was suspended with a rope made of hemp. In 1817 the rope snapped, and the priceless artwork crashed to the ground. Neither most Nurembergers nor many visitors found anything particularly beautiful about the city in the eighteenth century, and even well into the nineteenth century; in fact, shortly after Nuremberg’s annexation by Bavaria in 1806, the city fathers began to sell some of the city’s art treasures, and they allowed part of the medieval wall around the city to be disposed of. Wackenroder himself complained that “for about twenty or thirty years all the art treasures have been making their way via auctions to other places.”19 The city was, in Wackenroder’s eyes, a wonderful museum of the glories of medieval Germany, but at the same time it was also a graveyard, since the culture represented by Nuremberg’s buildings and monuments was essentially dead. The city’s great artworks were “the most eloquent proof of the incomparable flourishing of the arts in this city,” but at the same time they were “the gravestones of a lost art.”20 For the city fathers, meanwhile, the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries was the time to get rid of the old and make way for the new. The nineteenth century, after all, was the era in which many European cities, such as Paris and Vienna, finally lost their medieval fortifications, which were replaced by broad boulevards for military and civilian

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traffic. At the beginning of the nineteenth century it looked as if Nuremberg, too, might be modernized. And for most of the city’s visitors this would not have been a bad thing. On his way to Frankfurt for the imperial coronation in 1790, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart succinctly summed up the Enlightenment’s disregard for the city in a letter to his wife Constanze: “We had breakfast in Nuremberg — an ugly city.”21 Such negative descriptions of Nuremberg were entirely in keeping with the prejudices of the Enlightenment against the medieval period generally and Gothic architecture in particular. Johann Georg Sulzer’s Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste (General Theory of the Arts, 1771), one of the most important works on aesthetics to be published during the Enlightenment, had also condemned Gothic architecture. Sulzer had defined Gothic art as “a barbarous taste” that stemmed from “the awkwardness of showing ugliness and improper proportions in clearly visible form.” This in turn, Sulzer believed, came from artists’ “inability to reflect on what is appropriate and fitting.”22 It was critics such as these who had led the young Goethe, by his own admission, to condemn Gothic architecture. As he wrote in his groundbreaking essay “Von deutscher Baukunst” (On German Architecture, 1772), “Based on what I had heard others say, I praised the harmony of mass, the purity of form, and I was a sworn enemy of the confused arbitrariness of Gothic adornment. Under the heading ‘Gothic,’ as in an entry in the dictionary, I listed all the synonymous misconceptions that I had ever encountered, such as indefinite, disorganized, unnatural, patched-together, tacked-on, overladen.”23 It was not until, as a student, he saw the cathedral of Strassburg, Goethe wrote, that he came to recognize and celebrate the beauty of Gothic architecture: “Approach it and experience the profoundest feeling of truth and beauty of proportion, sprung from a strong, rough-hewn German soul in the setting of the gloomy petty-clericism of the Middle Ages.”24 Goethe was in his early twenties when he wrote these words, still in his rebellious Sturm und Drang (storm and stress) period; he had not yet become the Weimar classicist of his later years. His celebration of Gothic art as genuinely German was to have a major impact on the Romantics; but at the time, Goethe’s position was decidedly in the minority. Just as Nuremberg itself was seen as an ugly and backward city, so too its citizens were often seen as particularly blinkered and stupid. In 1767, for instance, one young Nuremberger, Johann Friedrich Herel, dubbed his city “Moropolis” (the city of the morons) and declared that Nuremberg was a place “where the hatred of all its citizens for solid learning is so massive that one cannot make fun of it enough.”25 When Herel was attacked by his angry fellow citizens for his satire of their city, one of his defenders penned a counterattack on the critics, writing: “This is the story of what happened during these last few days in Nuremberg, which is a city where the people are as dumb as horses’ snouts and bake good gingerbread,

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which is pretty to look at and sweet as honey.”26 One year later, in 1768, a critic of Nuremberg penned a poem to be sung to the tune of the popular German student song “Gaudeamus igitur”: Stupeamus igitur Norici dum sumus27 Nuremberg and its “Moropolitans” were satirized and criticized throughout the last decades of the eighteenth century. Even Wackenroder complained that some of the city’s women “wear their scarves as if they had a toothache and have extremely short waists under which very short skirts flop out around them with unusual shapelessness: a costume that makes them highly grotesque.”28 The transition from Enlightenment to Romanticism in Germany offers an object lesson in the reconsideration of values, and in the way that small groups of intellectuals can, in the fullness of time, exercise profound influence in the larger cultural sphere. What had appeared to enlightened Germans during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as an ugly, oldfashioned city, suddenly appeared to the early Romantics as the epitome of German authenticity. To them the Middle Ages, far from being a time of dark and awful superstition, had been a high point of German power and culture. They saw the artworks of the late medieval era in Nuremberg not as ugly and outmoded but as authentic works of German genius. If Nuremberg’s narrow medieval streets had previously seemed cramped, one observer wrote in 1836 that “even the irregular crookedness of the alleyways doesn’t strike one as unpleasant: for it increases the picturesque quality of the city and gives it the mark of freedom, and thus an attractive side even in the spiritual sense.”29 In contrast to the authentically German genius of medieval Nuremberg, it was the Enlightenment era, with its purportedly one-sided rationalism and adherence to foreign tastes, that now appeared problematic to German Romantics. For them Nuremberg represented a kind of national authenticity that had been lost during the Baroque and classical eras, when German princes sought to imitate foreign rulers such as the French “sun king,” Louis XIV, and when only foreign art and foreign tongues had been considered worthy of admiration. The Prussian King Frederick the Great was a good example of that hatred of the German language. He is said to have declared that he would “as soon expect to receive pleasure from the neighing of my horse” as from the singing of a song in the German language.30 He disliked the German language and German literature so much that he even wrote a treatise against it — in French. In his 1780 essay De la littérature allemande (About German Literature), Frederick urged German writers to improve their literature by giving up the German language and imitating great French writers like Racine. “I do not believe that any writer can write well in a language which has not yet been refined,” he declared. Moreover, “the

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German language is still semi-barbaric and divided into as many dialects as Germany has provinces. . . . The German language is confusing, difficult to use, does not sound pleasant and is not rich in metaphors.”31 In the era of the Napoleonic wars, when German patriots sought to ward off the French invasion of their homeland, many considered such a love of foreign manners tasteless and inauthentic, a betrayal of the German fatherland. They criticized the German aristocracy for its imitation of foreign ways and claimed for themselves the role of true German patriots. The early Romantics sought to discover an authentically German art undefiled by snobbish princes and highfalutin courtiers. Their longing for Nuremberg was a homesickness for a true and better Germany that had somehow, they believed, been lost. In 1796 Wackenroder wrote the primary chapters of Herzensergießungen, and the book was then edited and supplemented by his friend Tieck. The book contains an implicit attack on those who despise German art: “True art sprouts forth not only under Italian sky, under majestic domes and Corinthian columns — but also under pointed arches, intricately ornamented buildings, and Gothic towers.”32 One chapter of the little book, entitled “Ehrengedächtnis unsers ehrwürdigen Ahnherrn Albrecht Dürers” (A Memorial to our Venerable Ancestor Albrecht Dürer) begins with the most famous invocation of Nuremberg’s medieval allures ever written: Nuremberg! you formerly world-renowned city! How I liked to wander through your quaint streets; with what childlike love I gazed at your antiquated houses and churches, upon which the permanent trace of our early native art is imprinted! How deeply I love the structures of that age, which have such a robust, powerful and true language. How they transport me back into that venerable century when you, Nuremberg, were the vibrantly teeming school of native art, and a truly fruitful, overflowing spirit of art lived and thrived within your walls: — when Master Hans Sachs and Adam Kraft, the sculptor, and above all, Albrecht Dürer with his friend, Wilibaldus Pirkheimer, and so many other highly praised men of honor were still living! How often I have wished that I were back in that age! How often it has appeared before me anew in my thoughts, while I was sitting in a narrow corner in your venerable libraries, Nuremberg, in the twilight of the little, round-paned windows and brooding over the folio volumes of valiant Hans Sachs or over some other old, yellow, worm-eaten paper; or while I was walking under the bold arches of your dark churches, where, through colorfully painted windows, the sunlight splendidly illuminates all the objects of art and paintings of the past age!33

Wackenroder’s invocation contains most of the elements that were to constitute the Romantic apotheosis of Nuremberg for the next century: the nostalgia for the past, the love of the fatherland, the celebration of

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narrow streets and medieval architecture, the praise for Nuremberg’s artistic masters, especially Albrecht Dürer, and the mention of Nuremberg’s literature, in this case the work of the “valiant” shoemaker and poet Hans Sachs. For Wackenroder and Tieck Nuremberg becomes a kind of national-aesthetic utopia: “Blessed be to me your golden age, Nuremberg! the only age when Germany could boast of having its own native art.”34 In contrast, the present-day era of the late eighteenth century appears pale and lifeless: “I must cry out woe upon our age, that it practices art merely as a frivolous plaything of the senses, while it is actually something very serious and exalted.”35 In the age of Dürer, the book’s fictitious monkish author proclaims, there had been a specific and unmistakable German character, and this “serious, upright and powerful nature of the German” had expressed itself in Dürer’s art. In contrast, “this firmly determined German character and German art as well have disappeared in our times,” and young Germans learn about other nations and peoples but not about themselves and their own nation. “The period of our own vigor is over,” and instead “cold, immaculate, insipid works are the fruit.”36 “German art was a pious youth, raised in simplicity within the walls of a small city amidst intimate friends; — now that it is older, it has become a universal man of the world who, along with his provincial manners, simultaneously wiped away the emotion and the unique character from his soul.”37 Germany has lost a sense of its authentic self, and Nuremberg is imagined as a kind of reminder of that lost authenticity. Goethe himself — who had written a poem about Hans Sachs two decades earlier — was well aware of Wackenroder’s book, which immediately became a sensation among educated Germans. Many of them initially believed that Goethe must have written it, since his novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship) had appeared in a similar layout with the same publishing house a year earlier, and since neither Wackenroder nor Tieck had indicated their authorship in the book itself; the title page of Herzensergießungen identified the author simply as an anonymous “art-loving friar.” The Romantic philosopher and critic August Wilhelm Schlegel gave Goethe a copy of Herzensergießungen in 1796, and before he traveled to Nuremberg for the last time a year later Goethe wondered what had become of it; but he rejected the “neo-Catholic sentimentality” and the “cloister-friarizing, sternbaldizing absurdities” created by Wackenroder and Tieck because it contradicted his own classical, Greco-Roman tastes.38 Goethe — who is, paradoxically, considered by many English-speaking literary scholars to have been a Romantic himself — considered Romanticism unhealthy and rather dangerous. Goethe’s mention of “sternbaldizing absurdities” was a reference to Tieck’s work Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (Franz Sternbald’s Wanderings), published in 1798 after his friend Wackenroder’s untimely death. This unfinished novel, the first in a long series of picaresque

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Romantic artist-novels, was the fictional account of the young painter Franz Sternbald, supposedly Albrecht Dürer’s most talented student. At the beginning of the novel the protagonist sets off from Nuremberg to explore the world, particularly Italy, and already he is filled with homesickness for his beloved Nuremberg, whose gleaming spires he and his best friend Sebastian — who has accompanied him for a short while at the start of his journey — observe in the distance when they stop to look back at the city they have just left: “Sebastian and Franz gazed back at the towers of Nuremberg, whose cupolas and windows shone brightly in the light of the sun.”39 This was an image that was to appear again and again, in various forms, in subsequent Nuremberg literature. In the first of the many poems that proliferate throughout the novel, Sebastian sings: Home will remain faithful and good to you If you return and stay faithful too, Traveling and bidding adieu Lead to the joy of seeing home anew.40 These lines succinctly express the whole point of the journey: that in traveling to foreign lands one learns to appreciate one’s homeland better. Fernweh (longing for far-away places) and Heimweh (homesickness) are mirror images of each other. If one early twentieth-century travel writer was later to coin the phrase “Heimweh nach der Fremde” (homesickness for the foreign) with reference to contemporary tourism, then what Romantics like Tieck were describing was a “Fernweh nach der Heimat” (longing for the foreign place that is home).41 Sebastian asks his friend Franz whether he will still love Nuremberg and still be the same person when he returns home from his journeys, and Franz of course replies that he will: before he has even really left Nuremberg, he already feels nostalgia for it. Although Tieck never finished Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, he intended to have it end with the protagonist’s return from Italy to Nuremberg; the final scene would have taken place in St. John’s cemetery, at the grave of Albrecht Dürer, which had already played a role in Wackenroder’s letters to his parents and in the Herzensergießungen. In August of 1793 Wackenroder had written to his parents that Dürer and Sachs were buried in “the most beautiful churchyard I’ve ever seen, and more interesting than any other because of the bones of the many artists who in their own time, at least, were so thoroughly great, and who called Nuremberg their fatherland.”42 In the Herzensergießungen Dürer’s graveyard is described as the place where “the forgotten bones of our old Albrecht Dürer [rest], on account of whom I am glad that I am a German.”43 In Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen Nuremberg appears as a kind of German Jerusalem. Particularly in the first part of the novel Franz has it constantly on his mind: “Shall I ever forget you? . . . shall I ever love you less? O my beloved Sebastian, what would then become of my heart? How

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happy I am to be a German, and to be your and Albrecht’s [i.e. Albrecht Dürer’s] friend!”44 As Franz notes in his first letter to Sebastian, which he writes after encountering an old peasant whose strongest desire is to see the famous city of Nuremberg before he dies, the golden age is far closer than they think: they are living in it. “We always talk about a golden era as if it had happened long, long ago, and we imagine it in unusual and shrill colors. But O dear Sebastian, so often this wonderful land lies right at our feet.”45 In essence Franz leaves Nuremberg only to return to it; absence is literally intended to make his heart grow fonder. It is only in far-away lands that the sweet nostalgia of homesickness can truly flourish. Franz’s journey to Italy is ultimately a journey of discovery to his homeland Germany. Initially Tieck had intended to co-author Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen with his friend Wackenroder, but Wackenroder’s premature death made this plan impossible. In their plans for Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen and elsewhere Wackenroder and Tieck were fascinated by the Middle Ages, a period in which, as they imagined, art and religion had formed a kind of mystical unity. As they put it in their book Phantasien über die Kunst (Fantasies About Art), published in 1799, also after Wackenroder’s death, religion in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries “was in all events, large and small, constantly” people’s “staff and their sustainer; it gave to every otherwise little esteemed occurrence a deep significance for them.”46 “Where art and religion unite, the most beautiful river of life flows forth out of the converging streams.”47 Such a conception of the unity of art and religion is a direct affront to the ideals of the Enlightenment, which had argued for the separation of the spheres, and it prefigures other Romantic conceptions, such as Novalis’s essay “Die Christenheit oder Europa” (Christendom, or Europe) written in 1799 but not published until 1826, in which the Middle Ages were reconceived as a period of utopian unity between art and religion, and among all Europeans. In such conceptions the Protestant Reformation and then the Enlightenment had brought about a rift in the world, separating modern Europeans from the true, metaphysical source of their being; one of the primary goals of Romanticism was the overcoming of that rift and the restoration of the original unity. That unity also meant the unity of art itself, which, the Romantics believed, should not be divided into competing forms of art — painting, music, etc. — but should work together to achieve the same utopian end. Such conceptions of artistic unity prefigured Richard Wagner’s later formulation of the “Gesamtkunstwerk” (total work of art), an idea he tried to embody in his musical dramas. In their reflections on the unity of art and religion, Wackenroder and Tieck argued that the utopian divinity of art should not be measured by the “merchant’s yardstick . . . or by weights of gold.”48 Art, they believed, was not about money or the quotidian world of making a living; it was the closest mortal human beings could come to divinity: “In the perfection of art we can see

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most purely and beautifully the longed-for image of a paradise, of absolute happiness.”49 Wackenroder and Tieck were followed in their travels to Nuremberg by Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim, Joseph von Eichendorff, and E. T. A. Hoffmann, all of whom also celebrated Nuremberg as, in Eichendorff’s words, “one of the most remarkable remnants of German antiquity.”50 Eichendorff wrote: “We walked in awe over this (partly because of Tieck’s Sternbald) classical ground, as if anywhere a knight might come racing through the streets with swaying plume.”51 Brentano called Nuremberg one of his “favorite dreams,” and the Romantic painter Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld declared that “in the midst of these pointed gables German loyalty and dignity still hold sway.”52 Hoffmann’s novella “Meister Martin der Küfner und seine Gesellen” (Tobias Cooper, Master Cooper, and His Men, written 1817–18 and first published in 1819), which tells the story of a Nuremberg cooper, his lovely daughter, and her suitors, begins with an invocation of “the magnificent monuments of old German art,” which are “eloquent testaments” to “the glory, the hard-working piety, and the honesty of a beautiful and long-gone epoch.” Like Wackenroder and Tieck, Hoffmann imagines himself transported into a previous time: “One feels as if at any moment one of the house’s residents might walk in and welcome one with the warmth of hospitality.”53 In fact, Hoffmann’s narrator expresses the hope that the readers of his novella will, via his narration, be transported back to early modern Nuremberg, a time when “art and craftsmanship shook hands with each other in honorable diligence.”54 Hoffmann’s depiction of Nuremberg as seen from a distance closely resembles the one in Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen two decades earlier: “In the distance one could clearly see the renowned imperial city of Nuremberg spread out in the valley, its proud towers stretching bravely to the sunset, which showered its gold upon the roofs below.”55 By 1816, when Hoffmann wrote his famous Christmas story “Nußknacker und Mausekönig” (The Nutcracker and the Mouse King), the Romantic celebration of the city had already become so widespread that the author even made gentle fun of it, allowing one of the characters in a story-within-the-story, overcome by nostalgia for his hometown, to declare: “Oh, Nuremberg, Nuremberg, dear native town — he who still knows thee not, place of renown — though far he has traveled, and great cities seen — as London, and Paris, and Peterwardein — knoweth not what it is happy to be — still must his longing heart languish for thee — for thee, O Nuremberg, exquisite town — where the houses have windows both upstairs and down!”56 The point of this joke, of course, is that Nuremberg is not the only city whose houses have windows, and that Peterwardein cannot meaningfully be listed with the European capitals London and Paris. Throughout “Nußknacker und Mausekönig” Hoffmann plays with distance from and contentedness with the homeland: the story’s protagonist Marie celebrates Christmas and New Year in the bosom of the family in Germany,

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and at the same time she is able, through the magic of her loving godfather, and of her own imagination, to travel to exotic places. The relationship between familiarity and exoticism structures the entire story, and it is no doubt one of the reasons why, as both a story and a ballet, it has become one of the most popular Christmas traditions in the western world. It celebrates excitement and exoticism while at the same time offering the comfort of the family, and the familiar. And that, after all, is part of what Christmas is all about. “Nußknacker und Mausekönig” helped to cement Nuremberg’s romantic association with Christmas, an association that continues today in the countless performances of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s ballet during the Christmas season, as well as in the famous Nuremberg Christmas fair, the “Christkindlmarkt,” and in Nuremberg’s storied “Lebkuchen” (gingerbread cake). By 1815, after the awakening of German national feeling had helped inaugurate a change in the military situation in Europe, forcefully embodied in the Prussian, Austrian, and Russian defeat of Napoleon’s troops at the Battle of Nations in Leipzig in 1813, the poet and anti-Napoleonic military agitator Max von Schenkendorf, in his poem “Die deutschen Städte” (The German Cities), celebrated Nuremberg as follows: If one wants to know the German land And love it in all its parts, Then one must name Nuremberg, so grand, So full of noble arts. You never grew weak and gray, You hard-working city, and true, Where Dürer’s power held sway And Sachs’s music grew.57 This poem, like Wackenroder’s and Tieck’s invocations of Nuremberg, binds the Romantic fascination with Nuremberg to the admiration for specific figures, such as Dürer and Sachs, who were seen as having contributed to the city’s greatness. One year later, in 1815, the year that Napoleon suffered his crushing final defeat at Waterloo and postwar Europe was reordered at the Congress of Vienna, Alexander Lips, a professor of philosophy at the University of Erlangen, proposed in an essay entitled Die deutsche Bundestadt (The German Federal City) that the newly created German federation — which had now replaced the Holy Roman Empire as the state form of German existence — ought to have some sort of metropolitan “focal point that gathers all of Germany’s power in a single spot and gives it the aura of beauty and holiness.”58 That German capital, Lips believed, should be Nuremberg: because Nuremberg lay at the center of an idealized Germany extending from east to west and north to south; because of its glorious past; because of its splendid architecture and the imperial castle, a reminder “of the former unity of Germany”;59 because of

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its history as a free and independent imperial city; and because of “the true German quality of the former imperial city of Nuremberg. This is still one of the capitals of German honor and probity. The Nuremberger is straightforward, forthright, modest, polite, frugal; and these are the virtues that fit only the German and grow in the climate of his soul, and it is only these virtues that we should foster.”60 In order to reinforce his point that Nuremberg was the “middle point of Germany,” Lips appended to his pamphlet an idealized map that showed Nuremberg at the exact center of a schematized Germany. If Nuremberg were not already there, he declared, Germans would have to create it from scratch.61 Of course Lips’s suggestion was not followed, and he himself recognized that it was little more than a dream; but his pamphlet demonstrates that by 1815 at the latest the Romantic invention of Nuremberg was beginning to resonate in the political sphere as well. For many Romantics Nuremberg had become the symbolic capital of their divided fatherland. By this time the German rediscovery of Nuremberg had also begun to have an effect abroad. In 1817 the Swedish Romantic poet and critic Per Daniel Amadeus Atterbom came to Nuremberg full of expectations that were, he wrote, not disappointed: Here for the first time one truly sees what German national spirit and German genius were back when the Holy Roman Empire was still flourishing. Imagine an ancient German imperial city in all of its glory, completely unchanged — in all of Nuremberg there is hardly a single building erected after the beginning of the seventeenth century, and most buildings come from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, with many even older. Picture to yourself . . . a vast number of towers, churches, houses, and walls, all of them built in a traditional style, and most of them in the beautiful, slim, upward-thrusting Gothic style. The highest of all, on a formidable hilltop, is the ancient imperial castle, which is so old that its foundation lies outside the bounds of Nuremberg’s history. Imagine surrounding it the still-extant city fortifications in the form of massive moats, walls, and bridges. . . .62

In Nuremberg, Atterbom claimed, he had finally found the true Germany: It was only there, in the middle of Germany, that the rich and warm heart that had been forgotten for centuries, but that still beats in friendship for sympathetic souls, opened itself up to me in the life and art of the most profound of the European nations. This heart, it seems, is fortunately beginning to beat more strongly in all the better sons of Germany.63

The Dürer Cult Wackenroder’s and Tieck’s celebration of Nuremberg also had an impact on German Romantic painters, such as Friedrich Overbeck, Philipp Otto

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Runge, and the Nazarenes, who inaugurated a Dürer cult. In 1798, after reading Tieck’s novel Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, Runge enthusiastically declared: “Never has anything seized the inmost parts of my soul like this book.”64 In Rome German painters were sometimes sarcastically referred to as the “Dürerists” or the “Nurembergers.” German Romantic artists’ first major celebration of Dürer’s birthday occurred in Rome in 1817. One year later the “Albrecht-Dürer-Verein” (Albrecht Dürer Club) was created in Nuremberg by a group of young artists. In 1820, on St. John’s Day (June 24), Dürer’s grave at St. John’s cemetery in Nuremberg, which had until then been largely neglected, was, for the first time, decorated with a laurel wreath.65 The Albrecht-Dürer-Verein began to hold regular commemorations at Dürer’s gravesite. In 1825 the city of Nuremberg purchased the house in which Dürer had lived, and a year later the Albrecht-Dürer-Verein was placed in charge of the house, which, like Dürer’s grave, became a site of pilgrimage. The artistic “Nurembergers” liked to imitate not only the art but also the clothing and hairstyles of the early sixteenth century — so skillfully portrayed by Dürer himself — especially during their Dürer celebrations. At the celebration in Rome in 1817 they decided that in the future they would celebrate Dürer’s birthday every year, “since it is most capable of fanning the flames of enthusiasm in German hearts,” as Overbeck wrote in a letter to his friend Joseph Sutter.66 Overbeck describes the setting for the ceremony in Rome thus: The picture of the immortal master was hanging there, surrounded by a thick wreath of oak, in which the tools of the various arts that he practiced were entwined as attributes, specifically: palette and brush, chisel, embossing wood, compass and square, feather-pen, and so on; and beneath that picture, on a table, lay the best of Dürer’s copperplates and woodcuts, which we had all collected. There was also a description of his life, parts of which were read aloud, to the great delight and edification of all.67

This is a description of a quasi-religious ritual in which Dürer plays the role of a worshipped deity. Dürer’s writings function as a holy book, while the picture of the master is an icon for veneration. In the second decade of the nineteenth century such adoration of Dürer remained a relatively limited affair, pursued by the Nazarenes and other German artists but not necessarily by a mass public. However ten years later, when the threehundredth anniversary of Dürer’s death was observed, the situation was quite different, and the Dürer cult had become a far more widespread affair. In 1826, two years before the anniversary, Albert Christoph Reindel, the director of Nuremberg’s art academy, called on all German artists to celebrate the coming anniversary; he declared that such a commemoration could help overcome what he saw as the flatness and emptiness of contemporary German art. The celebration of Dürer had begun among a few

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particularly forward-looking souls, Reindel acknowledged, but now all German artists should support it; indeed, the celebration of Dürer had become the duty of the German people [Volk] itself.68 Reindel’s idea was that German artists should send their work to Nuremberg, where it would be kept in a special “family album” [Stammbuch] as evidence of their admiration for the great artist. King Ludwig I of Bavaria, who had ascended the throne in 1825, was even more insistent on the importance of the upcoming Dürer celebration for the common people. In response to Reindel’s call to German artists, he proclaimed that declarations of fealty to Dürer by artists, while necessary, were not sufficient. The king suggested that a public statue of the great artist should be erected in Nuremberg for all of its citizens, and in the name of all Germans: The call to Germany’s artists to honor Albrecht Dürer by creating a family album is praiseworthy, and this task should certainly not be neglected; but it does not seem to me sufficient to honor the memory of this man appropriately. Only a statue in iron will suffice.69

In preparation for the 1828 celebrations the Nuremberg publisher Friedrich Campe, who had founded the Börsenverein der deutschen Buchhändler (Association of German Booksellers) in 1825, put out a series of books that helped to spread enthusiasm for Albrecht Dürer and his era. The most important of these was Reliquien von Albrecht Dürer, seinen Verehrern geweiht (Relics of Albrecht Dürer, Consecrated to His Admirers), whose very title implied a quasi-religious adoration of the great artist. This book, which was to be a key source for Dürer scholars for many decades thereafter, contained a series of writings by Albrecht Dürer himself about his life and work. In his introduction to the book Campe declared that Nuremberg in the sixteenth century had been “the cradle of German industry and invention, the crown of German art and science, and the greatest of the German republics.”70 Campe repeated these words in his introduction to another book put out in the same year, a reprint of a work written in 1546 by the Nuremberg printer Johann Neudörffer. In his introduction to Johann Neudörffers Nachrichten von den vornehmsten Künstlern und Werkleuten so innerhalb hundert Jahren in Nürnberg gelebt haben (Johann Neudörffer’s Reports on the Most Important Artists and Craftsmen Who Have Lived in Nuremberg in the Last Hundred Years), Campe celebrated Neudörffer as the inventor of Fraktur, the “German” Gothic alphabet.71 In the same introduction, dated 6 April 1828, the three-hundredth anniversary of Dürer’s death, Campe wrote that the reader “will be amazed . . . at the number of excellent artists who were living in a single city at the same time. What a shining light was Nuremberg! This one city did more for invention, for the arts, and for science, than entire countries. May Germany never thanklessly forget this accomplishment; and may Nuremberg always remain faithful to the spirit of its ancestors!”72 Campe’s boosterism for the

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city of Nuremberg was shared by other city fathers, in particular the clever and hardworking associate mayor, Johannes Scharrer, who, in a book entitled Die Blüthezeit Nürnberg’s [sic] in den Jahren 1480–1530 (Nuremberg’s Golden Age in the Years 1480–1530), intended as an invitation to participate in the Dürer celebration of 1828, also stressed that Dürer, while certainly primus inter pares, was by no means the only remarkable artist who had lived in Nuremberg at the end of the Middle Ages. Nuremberg, Scharrer wrote, had been “the shining center of the Roman empire, in which all the magic of royalty and of princely splendor came together and were refracted.”73 Indeed, he opined, “one cannot help but be struck by the thought that at this time and in this place, through so much spiritual strength, providence wanted to accomplish something truly great.”74 For Scharrer, Dürer represented the “period of Nuremberg’s culmination. Three centuries have not been able to weaken the aura that shines around the artist — on the contrary, with each new artistic period his image shines forth in new glory, reminding us of what he and his time once were, of what we and our time now are, and of what we can ultimately become, if we learn to understand how he and his time became what they were.”75 Scharrer’s main point was that Dürer, far from being an isolated, random genius, had been the perfect flowering of the social organism from which he sprang: Nuremberg itself. In order to understand Dürer’s genius, it was necessary to understand the social context from which that genius had emerged. In contemplating the greatness of Nuremberg at the beginning of the modern era, Scharrer and others hoped, Nuremberg and Germany in the nineteenth century could learn to be and achieve more. The past was to speak directly to the present. Scharrer was a wily promoter of his city, and his promotional activity points forward to the ways in which, now more than ever, cities seek to encourage historical and cultural tourism. This was not just a naive glorification of the past; rather, the supposedly glorious past was already being used as part of a marketing campaign for a city that was in reality beginning to experience rapid industrialization and modernization. Seven years after the Dürer celebration, the German industrial revolution was inaugurated in, of all places, Nuremberg, where the first railroad line began to operate between Nuremberg and Fürth in 1835. If the rediscovery of Nuremberg had begun with two students from Berlin, it was now being promoted for economic reasons by the city fathers themselves at precisely the moment of the city’s industrialization. The Romantic rebellion against modernity was consumed by the modernity it attempted to resist. The 1828 celebrations in Nuremberg revolved around a formal ceremony at which the foundation stone for the Dürer statue suggested by King Ludwig I — designed by Germany’s most popular sculptor, the Berlin artist Christian Daniel Rauch, and not completed until 1840 — was laid. Since the anniversary of Dürer’s death occurred on Easter Sunday that year, the official ceremony was pushed to the following day, Monday,

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The monument for Albrecht Dürer. Provided by the Stadtarchiv Nürnberg.

7 April. However on the anniversary of Dürer’s death, Easter Sunday, 6 April, about three hundred admirers of Dürer gathered together at sunrise for a special ceremony at St. John’s cemetery — the very place where Tieck’s novel Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen had been set to end. At Dürer’s gravesite the celebrants invoked the great artist just as Franz

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Ludwig Emil Grimm, morning celebration at Dürer’s grave, Easter Sunday, 6 April 1828. Many of the celebrants are shown wearing costumes from the Dürer period. Provided by the Germanisches Nationalmuseum.

Sternbald had been intended by his creator to invoke his master Dürer. The artist Ludwig Emil Grimm, who also completed a drawing of the Easter morning ceremony at Dürer’s grave, described it thus: At six o’clock everyone came together at Dürer’s grave; in picturesque groups the many artists from the most varied parts of Germany were suddenly gathered at his grave. On it lay a large wreath of ivy. At that moment there was a solemn hush. Then came the mighty sound of the trumpets, and their sublime and compelling music echoed through the air, proclaiming the noble celebration of the hour and the day! The storm quieted down, the clouds parted, and the sun shone in all its glory over the castle, illuminating the beautiful cemetery and the large group of celebrants!76

There is something blasphemous about this ceremony, since, on Easter Sunday, it conjures up a kind of Dürer-resurrection that competes with and even seems to overshadow the resurrection of Christ. The religion of art has replaced the religion of Christianity. The publisher Friedrich Campe, who had so tirelessly promoted the Dürer celebration, was also thrilled with the way the weather cooperated

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on that Easter Sunday. Twelve years later, when the Dürer statue was finally unveiled, he was to remember: The clearest of skies favored this spirited celebration; the morning sun rose behind the noble imperial castle, shining its light on Adam Kraft’s stations [of the cross] and transfiguring the interesting St. John cemetery, where so many of the noblest men now rest! There was general agreement that this morning hour was the true core of the whole celebration, and that all participants would remember it for the rest of their lives.77

Not all visitors to Nuremberg were charmed by Campe and his enthusiasm for Dürer. The art collector Sulpiz Boisserée, who was about to become one of the chief proponents of the effort to finish building the cathedral of Cologne, had come to Nuremberg with the famous Munich artist and teacher Peter Cornelius; he wondered: “Is that a preacher, who keeps on massaging us with his speeches?” But Boisserée was also moved by the ceremony, which he described as “quite pretty, and most unexpectedly favored by the weather.” He declared that “almost everyone was moved by profound emotion.”78 On the following day, 7 April 1828, the foundation stone for the Dürer statue was officially laid; into it were placed various Dürer-related objects, including a copy of Campe’s book Dürers Reliquien, a Bavarian coin with a picture of King Ludwig I, and a copy of the official program for the celebration. The ceremony began with trumpets and drums and included a speech by the mayor of Nuremberg, Jacob Friedrich Binder. In conjunction with the celebration of the three hundredth anniversary of Dürer’s death one poet created a ditty that sounded very much like a prayer: O German master, be kind to us today In that place where spirits like you hold sway And look on us, your Germans, we implore. O bless us, Father Dürer, so true, That we may serve German art like you; Be our guiding star forever more!79 One year later, in 1829, Ludwig Bechstein composed a poem about a draughtsman’s instrument that had been found by the architect Karl Alexander Heideloff in the Dürer House in Nuremberg when it was being restored in 1826. Bechstein’s poem invokes the sense of Dürer’s physical presence as conjured up by this quasi-religious relic that Dürer himself might possibly once have held: I hardly knew what was happening to me As I held you in my trembling hands; The olden times I could clearly see, A wonderful guest in these German lands.

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A multitude of figures came From old pictures, fresh and bright, From monuments of wondrous fame, They blossomed and grew in the magical light.80

Historical Drag The many Germans celebrating Dürer in 1828 and at other times often tried to augment the atmosphere of historical proximity by getting dressed up in period costumes. Ludwig Grimm’s drawing of the celebration at Dürer’s grave on Easter Sunday of 1828 shows many of the participants dressed in such costumes and wearing their hair in the style of Albrecht Dürer’s paintings. Historical pageants had become popular forums for folk festivals over the course of the first decades of the nineteenth century, and the Dürer celebration coincided with the rapid growth of such festivals, which had received a tremendous boost with the invention of the Oktoberfest in Munich in 1810 to celebrate the future King Ludwig I’s marriage to Therese of Saxe Hildburghausen; from that time on, the Oktoberfest has consistently been the most popular and most famous folk festival in the world. Along the same lines as Munich’s Oktoberfest, so-called NationalFeste or Volksfeste (national or people’s festivals) were celebrated in various cities throughout Bavaria, starting in 1826 in honor of the birthday and name-saint’s day of King Ludwig I. At these festivals the king’s subjects got dressed up in elaborate period costumes intended to represent traditional German artisanal and peasant pursuits, such as hunting, the cultivation of wine, gardening, blacksmithing, and so on. The architect Karl Alexander Heideloff — the same man who had discovered the draughtsman’s implement in Albrecht Dürer’s house in 1826 — actually created an elaborate book containing costume designs for such festivals, giving each group of artisans its own flag.81 In addition to serving as patriotic celebrations of Bavarian identity and the Bavarian king, these festivals helped to strengthen German nostalgia for the supposedly glorious days of old, and for the craftsmanship of the late Middle Ages, represented in particular by Dürer and the shoemaker-poet Hans Sachs. In Nuremberg the national festival was celebrated with particular fervor in August of 1833, when Ludwig I and his wife Therese actually visited the city for a three-day celebration that included an elaborate historical pageant commemorating the era of Albrecht Dürer and the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, whose patronage of the arts, and particularly of Dürer, had already been celebrated by German Romantic artists. In a book commemorating the 1833 historical pageant, M. G. Saphir noted: “The impression one gets when one sees figures from a bygone era walk solemnly through the streets in measured steps is quite remarkable, and one can’t help but be transported back to that romantic era in spirit.”82

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Although these costumes were in fact designed by Heideloff in the nineteenth century, there is no doubt that Heideloff tried to make them as authentic as possible, and Saphir’s description shows that the costumes were indeed perceived as authentic embodiments of sixteenth-century clothing. Saphir writes that at the moment of the king and queen’s arrival in Nuremberg the clouds in the sky gave way to sunshine, so that “the sky shone in the blue national colors” of Bavaria.83 Nature itself seemed to be celebrating the Bavarian royals, just as it had celebrated Dürer’s anniversary five years earlier. The city of Nuremberg, which had so grudgingly become a part of Bavaria a quarter of a century earlier, was not to be outdone; as Saphir describes it, the entire city was decked out in the blue and white colors of the Bavarian flag: “On the gables of all the roofs flags with the national colors were flying, and from the castle this was quite an impressive spectacle!”84 Among the other historical figures involved in the 1833 pageant was the shoemaker-poet Hans Sachs. Such celebrations were popular not just in Nuremberg but also in Munich and, indeed, throughout Germany. In February of 1840, during the pre-Lenten carnival and several months before the official ceremony commemorating the completion of the Dürer statue in Nuremberg, an elaborate historical festival of German artists was held in Munich to celebrate the memory of Kaiser Maximilian I and Albrecht Dürer. This festival proved to be so popular that it was repeated the following month. According to Rudolf Marggraff, who published a description of the pageant, it was intended to provide “a characteristic and multifaceted image of German life in the first half of the sixteenth century,” and to demonstrate the connection between the Emperor Maximilian I’s patronage of the arts and the patronage of King Ludwig I of Bavaria.85 Just as Maximilian had been a generous and far-sighted ruler in the sixteenth century, Marggraff suggested, so too King Ludwig was now — and indeed Ludwig’s principle accomplishment as ruler was the patronage of the arts and the transformation of Munich into an impressive capital city. For Marggraff what made the early modern period so fascinating was “the intimate relationship and interconnections between the noble knights and the burghers, between science and art . . ., a relationship most perfectly developed in the life of the free German imperial cities, one of which was Nuremberg.”86 As Marggraff describes this pageant, it was divided into a parade of bourgeois citizens, a parade of noblemen surrounding the Emperor, and a parade of imaginary characters such as the mountain king, Venus, and Bacchus, the god of wine. Of course the most important historical personages in the parade were Albrecht Dürer and Emperor Maximilian. The parade of bourgeois citizens included representatives of all of the important Nuremberg groups of craftsmen, including the mastersingers, the brewers, the butchers and bakers, the bookbinders, the masons, and the carpenters, with Albrecht Dürer himself coming towards

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the end of the parade, followed by bearers of the coat of arms of the city of Nuremberg and various city dignitaries. In Marggraff’s words, the parade was intended to demonstrate “the greatness, dignity, purity, and beauty of burghers’ life in the free imperial city of Nuremberg at the moment of its greatest flowering.” Nuremberg at this time had been, according to Marggraff, “the shining middle point of the Roman empire . . .; and in all relationships of bourgeois and social life, and of life and work for artists and craftsmen, Nuremberg could be seen as an example and model for all the other German cities.”87 In his novel Der grüne Heinrich (Green Henry, second version 1879–80), the Swiss writer Gottfried Keller also described this pageant from the point of view of his protagonist, who plays a minor role in the festivities, and who notes that even as a Swiss patriot and a “fellow-actor, I feasted my eyes on all the splendor; as if I had been a descendant of the departed fellowship of the Empire myself, I drew my breath full of proud joy.”88 Keller’s narrator notes that this pageant established an entire tradition of costumed revelry that “could be seen all over the country for long afterwards.”89 If Wackenroder had imagined, while wandering through Nuremberg, that he might be surprised by a knight in shining armor jumping out at him, then Wackenroder’s followers decided to give his dream concrete form in such pageants, parades, and festivals: in Nuremberg, Munich, and elsewhere they dressed up in historical costumes and played the roles themselves, probably imagining that what they were seeing was the essence of history itself. Such pageants played a role in what the historian Eric Hobsbawm has called “the invention of tradition.”90 In imagining a noble and glorious past, Germans, and particularly the German middle class and nobility, were trying to strengthen a sense of common identity and pride. That such concepts of mutual identity were in fact sorely lacking is evident in the fact that only eight years after the Munich festival that glorified him, the unpopular and reactionary King Ludwig I, who was as mistrustful of democracy as he was supportive of the arts, was forced to abdicate on 20 March 1848 in the wake of civil unrest in Munich. He was succeeded by his son Maximilian II, and the Munich revolution was soon crushed, but it was clear to princely rulers in Bavaria and elsewhere in Germany that they needed to do what they could to strengthen Germans’ imagined sense of community and belonging. Five years later, in 1853, as Nuremberg was in reality experiencing the beginning of the industrial revolution, the Bavarian “Volksfeste” were given new life. One observer of the celebration in Nuremberg described it as a pageant in which the past itself seemed to come alive: The effect of this parade, for which the ancient city provided the necessary backdrop, was perfect. Even in its inhabitants the Nuremberg of old seemed to have come alive again. The people marching through the

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streets — the figures of Peter Vischer, Albrecht Dürer, and Hans Sachs were particularly noticeable, but the city’s soldiers and its carnival runners were also there — seemed to be the real citizens of the present, and the audience watching them seemed to be just masks. In any other city this would have looked like mere mummery and fakery; but here it seemed to become reality. Anywhere else the parade would simply have spurred one’s imagination on; but here it took control of one’s emotions, so that one watched the parade pass by and disappear with a sensation of homesickness.91

This is a contradictory account. In the middle of Nuremberg’s industrial revolution, it describes the glorified past as the true reality and the reality of the present day, including industrialization, as a fiction. At the same time, the description belies this confidence in the past by invoking a feeling of homesickness at the passing of the parade of colorful figures representing the imagined past. That past is both fragile and strong. That such celebrations occurred in such great numbers and with so many participants at precisely the moment when Nuremberg was becoming the industrial capital of southern Germany is surely anything but a coincidence. The celebration of and nostalgia for the past was a compensation for the difficulties of a problematic present and an uncertain future.

Dürer and Sachs Come to Life in Fiction and on the Stage In 1829, one year after Germans celebrated the three-hundredth anniversary of Dürer’s death and over a decade before the statue of Dürer was completed, the art historian August Hagen (1797–1880), a professor at the University of Königsberg and the first art historian regularly employed at a Prussian university, published a collection of loosely connected novellas entitled Norika, das sind Nürnbergische Novellen aus alter Zeit (Norika, Being Nuremberg Novellas from the Old Time).92 Unlike Wackenroder’s Herzensergießungen, which had been stylized as the work of a mendicant monk in the present day, Hagen stylized his book as an authentic document from late medieval Nuremberg, including on the title page the words “after a handwritten manuscript from the sixteenth century.”93 Norika purports to be based on letters written in the sixteenth century by a young merchant from Frankfurt, Jacob Heller, who travels to Nuremberg, where he meets some of the greatest German artists of the time, especially Albrecht Dürer and Hans Sachs, who is, in the course of the book, crowned as poet laureate by one of his fellow mastersingers. As the narrator declares in the book’s preface: “In intimate contact with the most esteemed scholars and artists who ever lived, surrounded by the most magnificent artworks ever created, I felt that Nuremberg had become an earthly paradise.”94 This fictitious

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personage from the sixteenth century predicts the future of Nuremberg’s decline and resurrection when, at the end of the book, commemorating Dürer’s death on April 6, 1528, he writes: It may be that it will take many centuries to make up for the sins of the present; but someday the memory of past glory will be awakened anew, along with the memory of the divine artists of that period, who decorated the city like a starry crown, and whose greatest pride was Albrecht Dürer.95

Should the memory of Nuremberg and its greatness be banished from future generations? asks the narrator rhetorically, only to answer his own question: “No — may merciful heaven prevent that!” The Thirty Years War, which he sees coming, will ultimately “blow itself out, and it won’t take everything with it when it goes.”96 What will remain will be the national unity and identity that are a gift of German art. Whereas Wackenroder’s and Tieck’s invocations of Nuremberg had included an explicit criticism of the present as inadequate and inauthentic, Hagen’s invocation of the city is an implicit praise of the present, which has once again purportedly found the path toward German authenticity. It is only in the present day, Hagen is suggesting, that the true glory of the past has been recognized. Some of the book’s readers seem to have believed that Hagen’s Norika was an authentic document from the sixteenth century; it matched their image of what they thought the sixteenth century must have been like.97 The work was popular enough to go through seven printings in the nineteenth century, and it helped to spread the cult of Nuremberg, with its subcults of the artists Dürer and Sachs, beyond the relatively narrow artistic-intellectual circles in which it had started.98 When Norika was reprinted for the first time in 1854, a reviewer for the Leipziger Illustrirte [sic] Zeitung called it the best collection of novellas about artists ever to be published, claiming that it “put us in the middle of that most magnificent epoch of Nuremberg, when this German city was fortunate enough to have within its walls a company of the most excellent masters in all of the arts and crafts.”99 The reviewer even recommended that tourists planning on going to Nuremberg should read Norika as part of their preparations. Among others, Hagen’s Norika, with its celebration of Hans Sachs, may well have influenced Richard Wagner, who appears to have used some of the book’s motifs in his opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersingers of Nuremberg). In that same year the Austrian playwright Johann Ludwig Deinhardstein published a play entitled Hans Sachs that had been premiered two years earlier at the Burg-Theater in Vienna. Deinhardstein’s play, which was enormously successful with the public, was a romantic comedy about the greatest of the mastersingers, the shoemaker Hans Sachs. The play revolves around the tension between Sachs and the other bourgeois citizens and patricians of Nuremberg, who look down on Sachs because he is only a shoemaker. In

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particular the richest man in Nuremberg, the goldsmith Steffen, refuses to allow his daughter Kunigunde to marry Sachs until the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I, intervenes during a surprise visit to Nuremberg. Although Deinhardstein himself was critical of the historical Sachs’s actual poetic production, which he considered second-rate, he nevertheless praised Sachs as the only true poet “at a time that did everything it could to spoil poetry.”100 As Deinhardstein describes it in a ditty with which the play opens, the muse of poetry comes not to the other mastersingers of Nuremberg, who try to force her appearance via their constrictive rules and regulations, but only to Sachs: And the goddess descended to this one, Looking for him where he worked alone: The goddess blessed him as her favorite son. And filled with the magic she had shown, He sang the songs that she’d taught him to share. Simple, quiet, modest, pious, and true, He devoted his life to art’s service and care With hard but happy work he labored there And thus he did what the burgher must do.101 In this play Sachs is a model of bourgeois probity: hard-working, straightforward, and modest. The shoemaker-poet’s ethic of hard work and honesty had been celebrated in literature since Goethe’s 1776 poem about Hans Sachs and Rupert Becker’s 1793 novel about Sachs’s son. Becker had written that Sachs’s son had “dispensed with the prejudice that physical labor lessens a man; and in his eyes the shoemaker’s leather apron, wrapped around the loins of a hard-working burgher and master, was far more of an honor than the golden key on the hips of a fancy layabout, who lives on nothing but the inheritance of his thirty-two ancestors.”102 This description by Becker contains a clear criticism of the feudal nobility, which perceives itself as better than citizens who have to work for a living, but which produces nothing itself. In Deinhardstein’s play, which is dedicated to his patron the Empress Caroline Auguste of Austria, such criticism of the nobility has disappeared. It is not the Emperor Maximilian who looks down on Hans Sachs for being a mere shoemaker, but rather his stuck-up fellow citizens, the patrician bourgeois. Deinhardstein’s Sachs works all week long as a shoemaker, and only on Sundays does he compose poetry. Sachs takes pride in his hard work, and in the usefulness of the shoes he makes. He criticizes the wealthy bourgeois good-for-nothings who taunt him, declaring: “It’s better, you’ll admit,/To be a shoemaker than a twit.”103 When the wealthy Kunigunde asks him to give up the purportedly demeaning physical labor of shoemaking so that he can marry her, he refuses, insisting on his self-respect and modesty as an artisan. In the face of scorn, rejection, and intrigue Sachs decides to leave Nuremberg forever;

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but not far from the city he has a chance encounter with the Emperor Maximilian, who is coming incognito to pay a surprise visit to Nuremberg. Maximilian does not immediately reveal himself to Sachs, but he does admit that he is one of the many admirers of Sachs’s poetry. In the end, after a series of complications and intrigues, Maximilian declares that Sachs should marry the woman he loves. Her false suitor, a wealthy city councilman from Augsburg, is banished from the city. At the close of the play Emperor Maximilian gives Kunigunde a laurel wreath and declares to her: O worthiest of girls, Bedeck this honored poet’s curls With this rich laurel wreath; May it clearly show that we favor him And be a reward to him for so much grief.104 Goethe, who had initiated the Hans Sachs revival with his poem about the shoemaker in 1776, the two-hundredth anniversary of Sachs’s death, created his own prologue to Deinhardstein’s play for the production performed at the royal court theater in Berlin in 1828, five years before Goethe’s death. In that prologue the Weimar master, like so many others, invoked the greatness of Germany in the early modern period: Many good things happened to us, we know, In Germany over three centuries ago, Much that was honorable, useful, and good, And much that still helps us today, as it should. But why list it all? I ask. For listing it would be a thankless task. The list is inscribed on the heart of the fatherland: It brightens our spirit and helps us to stand.105 One reviewer of Deinhardstein’s play called it a fine example of patriotic German theater, asserting that it fulfilled August Wilhelm Schlegel’s dictum that the most important task for theatrical art in Germany “in order to lay the foundations for a truly national theater” was “to go back to historical traditions, to the events and characters of the German past, and to show them to us in accurate pictures.”106 As this reviewer believed, the current age was far fairer in its acknowledgement of the greatness of the German past than earlier eras, which, he claimed, had tended to look down on and despise the noble past. Deinhardstein’s play was an important part of the revival of interest in Nuremberg and in its early-modern artistic and artisanal masters, particularly Albrecht Dürer and Hans Sachs. One of the many admirers of the play was the composer Albert Lortzing, who in 1828 noted that it was being performed in a great many theaters throughout Germany with notable success, and that in Osnabrück, the city where he was then living, Hans Sachs “pleased us remarkably well, it is one of the best productions of our age.”107

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Twelve years later Lortzing teamed up with his friend the writer Philipp Reger to create an opera based on Deinhardstein’s play. Lortzing’s opera, with a libretto by Reger and incidental verse by Philipp Jacob Düringer, was also called Hans Sachs; it premiered in Leipzig in 1840 to commemorate the four-hundredth anniversary of the invention of the printing press. While it was nowhere near as popular as Deinhardstein’s original play, or as Lortzing’s opera Zar und Zimmermann (The Czar and the Carpenter, 1837), it was nevertheless one of the precursors to the nineteenth century’s most famous treatment of Hans Sachs, and of early modern Nuremberg, Richard Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, the long history of whose composition began with a brief sketch made by the twenty-two-year-old Wagner in 1845.

Historicist Architecture One of the admirers of Deinhardstein’s Hans Sachs was the architect Karl Alexander Heideloff, who had found the draughtsman’s instrument in Albrecht Dürer’s house in 1826, and who designed fanciful costumes for the 1833 historical pageant to celebrate the visit to Nuremberg of King Ludwig I and his wife Therese. Since 1820 Heideloff had been actively involved in construction and city planning in Nuremberg, and it is partly due to his influence that the city’s leaders began to recognize the value of Nuremberg’s medieval architecture. Like the young Goethe, Heideloff viewed Gothic architecture as the true German national architectural style, and he envisioned a revival of what he saw as authentically German and genuinely Christian art in Nuremberg specifically and Germany more generally. Like Tieck and Wackenroder, Heideloff admired the art of the Middle Ages because, in his view, it represented a unity between art and religion. All genuine art, he believed, served a higher purpose: the representation of the divine. “Only an era like that was able to create noble things, because back then the masters of art lived in God, and God created art through them.”108 Heideloff believed that contemporary art had gone astray by becoming “mere” art, unconnected to higher religious ideals. He argued that Gothic architecture, as the true German style, owes its origin solely and uniquely to the German spirit and its creative power, a fact that should make us even more determined to dispense with the sad architecture of today and to return again to the true art of our fathers.109

Heideloff was part of a general trend toward the rediscovery and appreciation of Gothic architecture in Germany that had started with the young Goethe’s celebration of the Strassburg cathedral in 1772. The movement to finish the construction of the Cathedral of Cologne, ceremonially

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inaugurated in a national celebration in 1842, was probably the most important single part of this movement. In his autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit (Poetry and Truth), Goethe wrote that this movement gave him great satisfaction, convincing him that “what I formerly wanted and wished had a value,” and that the work of architectural rediscovery he himself had left unfinished was now being completed by others. This created for him, Goethe wrote, “the beautiful feeling . . . that only mankind taken together is the true man, and that the individual can only be joyful and happy when he has the courage to feel himself in the whole.”110 Goethe was particularly enthusiastic about Sulpiz Boisserée’s efforts on behalf of the Cathedral of Cologne, because such efforts, he believed, could give contemporary Germans a better understanding of “the great and gigantic idea of our forefathers.”111 Heideloff played an important role in city planning in Nuremberg during the middle of the nineteenth century, and he was responsible for a great many neo-Gothic buildings, facades, fountains, and monuments, as well as for the growing interest in the preservation of historic landmarks throughout the city, such as the house where the historical Hans Sachs had lived. That house had almost collapsed when the building next to it was demolished in 1835.112 For Heideloff the recollection of a glorified past was a way to ward off the more unpleasant aspects of a present that was witnessing rapid change in the early years of the industrial revolution. One of Heideloff’s unrealized plans was a neo-Gothic city theater, designed at the end of the 1820s, during the period when Deinhardstein’s play was most popular, that would have featured in the most prominent location on its facade a statue of Hans Sachs, whom Heideloff enthusiastically described as “one of the oldest German theatrical poets,” who, “to honor Nuremberg, the city of his fathers,” would be presented to the “grateful gaze” of the city’s theatergoers.113 In 1842 a group of Nuremberg citizens, noting the success of the Albrecht Dürer monument two years earlier, conceived a plan to create a monument for Hans Sachs as well. That plan came to nothing, but it pointed to a future in which the figure of Hans Sachs would become, if anything, even more important than that of Albrecht Dürer in the eyes of German patriots, for whom late medieval and early modern Nuremberg had come to be seen as a national utopia.

Baron Hans von Aufsess and the Founding of the Germanic National Museum In 1830, one year after the publication of August Hagen’s Norika and Johann Deinhardstein’s Hans Sachs, King Ludwig I of Bavaria wrote a note to a young Franconian nobleman, Baron Hans von Aufsess, a collector of

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historical artifacts, suggesting that Aufsess should use his collection of German antiquities as the basis for the creation of a central museum for the display and preservation of items connected to the history of Bavaria. Baron von Aufsess, born in 1801, was a passionate German patriot who had, in the first decade and a half of his life, witnessed the constant coming and going of French troops throughout Franconia.114 When he went to the University of Erlangen in 1817, Aufsess became active in the German fraternity movement and was one of the founding members of the “Allgemeine teutsche Burschenschaft” (General German Fraternity) there; this was a pan-German fraternity that sought to overcome local jingoism and bring German students throughout the divided nation together into one overarching patriotic movement.115 In Erlangen the fraternity was also known by other patriotic-sounding names: “Germania,” “Teutonia,” and “Arminia,” with the last appellation coming from the Germanic warrior Arminius who, in AD 9, had defeated three Roman legions under the leadership of the Roman general Varus. The German fraternity movement of the early nineteenth century venerated Arminius and strove to achieve two goals that students imagined to have been partially prefigured by him: on the one hand the unity of the German nation, which, after the Congress of Vienna, was divided into thirty-nine different states, city-states, and principalities; and on the other hand a democratic polity. These two goals — national unity and democracy — coincided with the primary goals of most German liberals throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1819, authoritarian local German governments were cracking down on the politicized fraternity movement with severely restrictive measures known as the Carlsbad Decrees (Karlsbader Beschlüsse) in response to the assassination of the Austrian agent and writer of popular plays August Friedrich von Kotzebue by a German fraternity member; the “Allgemeine teutsche Burschenschaft” in Erlangen, trying to forestall repressive measures on the part of the Bavarian government, renamed itself “Erlangia” to give itself a more local and less offensively pan-German sound; but the overarching political goals of the fraternity remained the same. In that same year the young Baron von Aufsess wrote to a friend in Thuringia proclaiming his steadfast adherence to the dream of German unity over and above all local particularities: “We are all Germans — whether Saxons or Bavarians — but the only person worthy of his clan is he who thinks and acts as a German.”116 What guided Aufsess throughout his life was the conviction that in spite of local variations Germany was a historical and cultural unity, and that one of the best ways to cultivate that unity was to study and propagate the history of the fatherland. This fascination with German history, particularly with the Middle Ages and the Holy Roman Empire, had been strengthened by the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire and the wars of liberation against Napoleon, and it is well illustrated by a poem written by the patriotic poet Max von Schenkendorf — author

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of the aforementioned poem “Die deutschen Städte,” with its praise of Nuremberg — in 1813: Good old German days of yore, Without envy or trouble before: Now the voice of the people calls To you in your slumbering halls. Once again we’ll hear the songs, Once again we’ll see the throngs Of German men at arms, and we’ll sing The victories of Frederick the king.117 The glorious deeds of the past were supposed to strengthen Germans’ pride and provide them with energy for more glorious deeds in the present. It was in this atmosphere of patriotic nostalgia for Germanic glory that Aufsess spent his youth. Throughout the 1820s, during a period of deep reaction and authoritarianism in most German states, Aufsess obsessively collected paintings, armor, wood carvings, and a multitude of other items illustrating the history of the German lands for the last thousand and more years. It was still relatively easy to come by such items at this time, as there was not yet a general understanding of their value. Occasionally Aufsess simply stole things, as when, during a visit to Constance in 1823, he cut off a piece of the carriage in which the reformer Jan Hus had been driven to be burned at the stake for heresy four centuries earlier.118 Aufsess kept these items at his home, which was quite literally a castle in Franconia. King Ludwig’s idea in 1830 was that Aufsess’s collection could form the core of a Bavarian history museum, which he imagined might be located in Bamberg, a city about thirty-five miles northwest of Nuremberg and important historically as a bishop’s residence. However Aufsess had different ideas; he wanted any history museum with which he was associated to address not just Bavaria but all of Germany, and he was also not interested in locating his museum in Bamberg, with its remarkable baroque bishop’s palace; instead he wanted his museum to be situated in the largest and most important Franconian city, the former imperial city of Nuremberg. In January of 1831 Aufsess wrote to King Ludwig I’s son, the Bavarian Crown Prince and future King Maximilian II, acknowledging that “the inner situation of our German fatherland is unfortunately in many ways a very sad one,” and he expressed his hope that the creation of a central storage facility for the collection of German antiquities, which would bring together “all men who are open to German customs and sensibilities,” might help to alleviate Germany’s self-isolation and counteract “the foreign and unchristian customs that have for a long time been preventing Germany from finding strength and potential for growth in itself.”119 A year later, in January of 1832, Aufsess created a new journal called Anzeiger für Kunde des deutschen Mittelalters (Bulletin for the Study of the German Middle Ages).

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In the first issue of his new journal Aufsess proclaimed the patriotic reason for his interest in German history and German art: Whoever loves his fatherland, be he a prince or a commoner, a burgher or a peasant, poor or rich, must also cultivate a love for the history of his fatherland, and he must enjoy contributing to the honor and lasting glory of his country by celebrating everything beautiful and grand that its art and history have to offer. This is my historical declaration of faith, which I feel duty-bound to set forth right now at the beginning of my enterprise. I am not ashamed of this credo, even if I should have the misfortune of being misunderstood or laughed at because of it.120

As Aufsess saw it, his project was not just a patriotic but also a democratic one: he believed it was unfair and unwise to restrict historical study of the fatherland to a limited number of privileged scholars. Instead, he wanted to allow people from all walks of life to be engaged with and touched by German history: “Knowledge of history and art should not be the property of just one class, such as the scholars or the artists; rather, it should, as in olden times, be spread out among all classes of the people.”121 Aufsess believed that other nations, such as France and England, had long since recognized the importance of preserving patriotic historical antiquities. Such efforts were laudable, he insisted, but they put his politically fractured fatherland to shame since, as he saw it, so little was being done in Germany to preserve patriotic history. Aufsess envisioned his new journal as a means of communication among lovers of the fatherland and its history. Through such communication, a new patriotic community would emerge, coming to consciousness of itself through the sustained study of German cultural history. This community would ultimately understand the unity of German culture, and via participation in the common patriotic project “the little spark of interest in the history and art of the fatherland” would be nourished and, in the fullness of time, the small flame would grow into a raging fire.122 Out of the study of Germany’s unified cultural history would emerge a greater understanding of German unity in the present, and that understanding would lead, ultimately, to the political unification of the nation. In the autumn of 1832 Aufsess moved with his collection of antiquities to Nuremberg, and in January of 1833 he founded a new organization entitled the “Gesellschaft zur Erhaltung älterer deutscher Geschichte, Literatur und Kunst” (Society for the Preservation of Ancient German History, Literature, and Art), which in its turn created a museum for antiquities in the former home of one of Nuremberg’s most prominent patrician families, the Scheurls, in the Burgstraße near the imperial castle. Among the members of von Aufsess’s new organization were the publisher Friedrich Campe and the architect Heideloff, who had already played an important role in the celebration of late medieval Nuremberg in earlier

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years: Campe had been one of the chief organizers of the Dürer celebration in 1828, and Heideloff was the architect and city planner who sought to preserve and enhance Nuremberg’s late medieval cityscape. In Nuremberg Aufsess tried for two years to establish his museum, but he failed because of the very resistance he had foreseen in his initial statement about the possibility of “being misunderstood or laughed at.” It was primarily professional German historians who viewed Aufsess’s project critically, seeing the baron as little more than a dilettante; moreover, many professional historians were reluctant to have their supposedly objective scholarly endeavors connected to the highly controversial topic of German political unity, which by definition conflicted with the political status quo at the time. Karl Heinrich Ritter von Lang, for instance, a government official in nearby Ansbach, criticized Aufsess’s organization as a “project like the tower of Babel” arguing that the baron wanted to create for himself a megalomaniacal “historical papacy”123 Lang expressed his concern that Aufsess’s enthusiasm would lead only to “the invasion of a superficial . . . medievalism which, for lack of anything better, would be forced to offer us its old grave pots, battle hammers, beer tankards, rusty brooches, and grotesque images of saints as supposed historical delicacies.”124 Wilhelm Grimm, the great philologist and collector of German fairy tales, was also, at least initially, a critic of Aufsess’s plans, which he saw as the “silly idea of a bizarre eccentric.”125 The editor of the prestigious national history project Monumenta Germaniae Historiae, the ambitious collection of original texts on German history that was founded in 1819 by the great Prussian reformer Baron von Stein and that was very much an inspiration for Aufsess, was particularly negative about Aufsess in a letter he wrote to his friend Alexander von Humboldt; he complained about what he saw as Aufsess’s unscientific approach and wrote that Aufsess, who freely admitted that he was not a traditional scholar, nevertheless was attempting “to establish in Nuremberg a kind of Oracle of Delphi to which anyone can turn for answers to his historical questions.”126 In 1833 Aufsess invited historians from all over Germany to join him at a solemn meeting in Nuremberg, but only two representatives of the major historical organizations located outside Nuremberg came; as Aufsess himself put it, “almost no one or only a few people had the courage and the desire to come to the gathering.”127 Disappointed by his failure to generate more scholarly and public support for his patriotic project, Aufsess left Nuremberg the following year and moved, with his collection, back to the family castle at Unteraufsess, where, for more than a decade, he lived a relatively quiet life, working on his scholarly interests in German cultural history and on the genealogy of his own baronial family, which he was able to trace back five centuries to 1338. In order to find peace and quiet and get away from the noise caused in the castle by his many children, Aufsess barricaded himself into the top of one of its towers when he was working;

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Hans von und zu Aufseß at the age of 63 wearing a knight’s armor and carrying a crossbow made around 1650. Photograph from 1864. Provided by the Germanisches Nationalmuseum.

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he also liked to get dressed up in medieval costumes. In 1845, by virtue of a dissertation on church history, Aufsess received his doctorate at the University of Erlangen. In the final years before the revolutionary events of 1848, Aufsess again became more politically and professionally active. When, at the initiative of Leopold von Ranke, the first meeting of “Germanists” (Germanisten; that is, German legal scholars, historians, and linguists) took place in Frankfurt in the fall of 1846, Aufsess sent them a message reminding them of his previous plans for a museum of national history. Once again he expressed to them his hope for the creation of a “general German museum.”128 As he put it, Our sense of Germany’s unity and our desire to achieve it have not just manifested themselves in material interests but also entered the arena of the spiritual: they have spread to the church, to art, and to science. Until now Germany’s various historical societies have had a merely provincial significance, but I do not doubt in the least that the time has come to allow their more general significance for the entirety of the fatherland to become apparent and effective.129

Von Aufsess compared his idea of creating unity among Germany’s many local historical organizations with German singing clubs’ efforts to unify the nation through song. With reference to ordinary Germans’ willingness to contribute money for the completion of the Cathedral of Cologne, he declared: “After all, the history of our whole dear fatherland is an even greater and more beautiful cathedral than the one in Cologne.”130 Finally von Aufsess stressed the necessity for working together: Only in the concerted action and unified effort of all men of spirit can truly great things be achieved. And our German unity, too, will become reality only in this way. May this reality finally make itself known in a grand German national history! Because it is only in and through history that German unity has its foundation and continues to live in the souls of the latest descendents.131

While Germany’s professional historians were still generally skeptical of Aufsess and his plans, they did agree with him on the usefulness of combining Germany’s various historical organizations under the umbrella of one overarching group. Two years later, in 1848, revolution broke out in many German cities, and the dream of German unity and German democracy seemed more achievable than ever. When German democrats constituted a national assembly at the Paulskirche in Frankfurt that year, Aufsess sent them an essay entitled “Patriotische Fragen an Deutschlands Reichs- und Bundestag zu Frankfurt” (Patriotic Questions to Germany’s Imperial and Federal Diet in Frankfurt) in which he asked two main questions: 1. “Who should the Emperor be?” and 2. “Where should the Emperor live?”

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Predictably, Aufsess argued that Nuremberg was the only legitimate home for the German Emperor and the German Bundestag (Federal Diet). It would, Aufsess wrote, be a wonderful coincidence if the insignia of the Empire were to return again to their old place in Nuremberg . . ., if the resurrected German Emperor were to have his throne on the same spot where Frederick I and Maximilian I had theirs. What other German city combines such strong and beautiful memories with all the advantages of more recent times? Germany has a history, and that history is more than just an empty phrase. If we had never had a Kaiser before, who knows if anyone would be thinking of a German Kaiser now? Perhaps Germany would dissolve into its individual states, without unity. Only historical consciousness has, through its reawakening, transformed the Germans into a single people.132

In these arguments one notices the pride with which Aufsess claims for historians like himself the role of prophets of German unity. Once again, Aufsess’s arguments fell on deaf ears. However in the meantime the energetic baron was coming closer and closer to achieving his goal of the creation of a German national historical museum. After the revolutionary movement for German political unity and democracy failed in 1848–49 in the face of the resistance of Germany’s royal and aristocratic elites, many German patriots, including Aufsess himself, saw the museum project as a necessary corrective and consolation that would remind Germans of their “consciousness of a national mission.” The museum, Aufsess hoped, would remind Germans of the nation’s “past glories” and of the greatness that Germany, even if it did not possess it at present, was capable of.133 In 1851 Aufsess once again moved to Nuremberg with his collection of historical artifacts. One year later, in 1852, he finally succeeded in gaining support for his museum plan at the general assembly of German historians that took place in Dresden in August of that year. As Aufsess described his motivation in persistently pursuing his dream of a German national museum over the course of several decades, it was primarily a patriotic endeavor: “this wonderful enterprise, so worthy of the German nation . . . sparked in me, from the historical research and studies of my youth onwards, the idea of founding a German national museum, whose task would be” to take the historiography of Germany, already begun elsewhere, and move it forward and deeper, “into the inner core of the conditions of life of the German people.”134 As the museum itself officially described its mission in 1853, “the object of the task we have set ourselves is the history of the German nation and people in its broadest sense.”135 In the first volume of the museum’s monthly newsletter, Aufsess declared that the task of the museum, far from being merely scholarly, was “a German national affair,” and that the museum and the nation would become ever more closely interlinked as the museum fulfilled its historical mission.136

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The museum was intentionally created as a special foundation independent of any particular German principality or state. Indeed, Aufsess urged all German patriots throughout Germany, no matter what state they happened to live in, to support the museum in word and deed. This was, in essence, a museum by the German people, of the German people, and for the German people. The German people were considered to be the actual owners of the museum; the subject matter of the museum was the history of the German people; and the intended audience for the museum was none other than the German people, broadly conceived. In an era of German division, the Germanic National Museum (Germanisches Nationalmuseum) was intended to provide a specific and concrete sense of national identity that would transcend particular local borders and appeal to Germans as a whole; it was, as one of its supporters argued, “the only German national institution in support of patriotic education and values.”137 Aufsess argued that the rapidly growing “national institution” or “national enterprise” was “now the only one capable of giving foreigners a picture of German unity of spirit.”138 But it was not just to foreigners that Aufsess and his allies wanted to demonstrate the unity of German cultural life; the primary audience for the museum was domestic. It was primarily to Germans themselves that Aufsess wanted the museum both to demonstrate and to embody German national unity. At the German Federal Assembly (Deutsche Bundesversammlung) in Frankfurt, the foundation of the museum was greeted with enthusiasm as “a significant national enterprise,” in the words of Baron August von Bieberstein, the representative from Baden.139 In 1853 the Federal Assembly passed an official resolution recognizing the museum “as an important national enterprise for the history of the fatherland” and recommending it to “the active protection and beneficent support of” the governments that ruled Germany’s constituent parts.140 Nor was it just at the parliamentary seat of the German Federation that educated Germans were enthusiastic about the creation of the museum. The writer Gustav Freytag, whose soon-to-be-published book Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit, 1855), a celebration of bourgeois morality, was to be one of the most consistently popular German novels of the nineteenth century, wrote to Aufsess to express “the joy and thanks . . . that the whole nation owes to you for your grand patriotic achievement.”141 Where else but in Nuremberg, a city now widely recognized as the symbolic capital of the nation, could this museum be located? As early as 1833 Aufsess had argued that Nuremberg was ideal for such a museum because of its “geographical position . . . almost in the middle of Germany”142 After the creation of the museum, in spite of offers from princes and lords elsewhere, Aufsess continued to adhere to the notion that Nuremberg was the most appropriate location for his national institution. Nuremberg, he declared in an 1854 letter to King Maximilian II, was “the best and most appropriate place for such a German national

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enterprise.”143 It was appropriate, the museum’s leaders agreed, “that in the midst of the Germanic tribes, almost in the middle point of the former Empire of the German nation, in the old and honorable city of Nuremberg, a Germanic National Museum” had been created.144 Indeed, the museum’s leaders believed that Nuremberg was “the most fitting, one is even tempted to say the born seat for a German national museum.”145 Nuremberg as a city was already a kind of living historical museum, and hence it was fitting for the national museum to be located within its walls. In an essay published eight years after the museum’s foundation, Otto Gabler, a senior government official in Berlin, gave a public fundraising lecture for the museum in which he declared that late medieval Nuremberg, with its “strivings for unity, its gaze always focused on the Reich as a whole,” had been “a city of the first rank.”146 Nuremberg as a city might have lost its political significance in the intervening years, in which it had lost the insignia of the Reich, Gabler proclaimed, “but the city has now won another jewel, our Germanic museum.” Gabler’s Prussian metropolis Berlin was perhaps the incarnation of Germany’s present and future, but Nuremberg represented the nation’s past, the memory of which was crucial for the present and future as well. Aufsess’s museum, as the concrete representative of Germany’s past, could have “no more fitting place . . . than the old, honorable city of Nuremberg,” and in turn the museum would make Nuremberg once again a “a middle point . . . for the elevation and invigoration of the German spirit, of German strength, and of German unity.”147 The museum had in a sense come to replace the lost crown jewels as a symbol of German unity. There are a number of reasons why the museum called itself “Germanic” (Germanisch) and not “German” (deutsch). Perhaps the most important is that at the time of its foundation there was no really unified national political government. The term “Germanic” seemed to imply a cultural and historical unity that transcended the problems and limitations of the German politics of the day. Indeed, Aufsess imagined Nuremberg as the center not so much of the real, existing German Federation as of the defunct Holy Roman Empire, which, in spite of its demise, continued to be the focal point of his national imaginary. Moreover, the term “Germanisch” made it possible for ethnic Germans living outside the territory of the federation to see the museum as relevant to their own interests. This sense of the term is evident in Aufsess’s reference to the various “Germanic tribes.” The term “Germanisch” lent the museum a kind of historical aura appropriate not only to its subject matter but also helpful in keeping the museum as separate as possible from potentially controversial contemporary political topics, such as the urgent but frustrated desire of many German patriots to achieve democratic political unity in the hereand-now, a desire that had been crushed in 1848–49. “Germania” was the Germany “of the old world,” explained one reference work in 1855,

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whereas the Germany of the present was simply, and more prosaically, called “Teutschland.”148 Aufsess was trying to appeal to the patriotic pride of Germany’s rulers while not appearing to threaten their concrete dynastic, political, and economic interests; as he declared in August of 1853, Germany’s numerous princes would no doubt share an idealistic interest not just in their own particular territories but also, above and beyond that, in “our common German fatherland.”149 In addition the word “Germanisch” lent an aura of particular patriotism to the museum, since according to the Grimm brothers’ Deutsches Wörterbuch (German Dictionary) the word meant German “in a more narrow sense . . ., truly German, used to emphasize national pride in contrast to hated foreign ways, particularly in the Napoleonic period, when, in a certain sense, the battles of the ancient Germanic tribes against Caesar’s troops . . . were repeated.”150 Finally, Aufsess’s success in creating the Germanic National Museum roughly coincided with the institutional foundation of the discipline of Germanistik, which had been created at the 1846 conference of Germanisten to which von Aufsess had sent one of his many messages. For Germany’s Germanists, it was the nation’s literature and history that were the primary core of its essence, and through the study of both, Germans would achieve an ever clearer understanding of their national identity. The national significance of the museum achieved additional symbolic weight when, in 1855, the Federal Assembly in Frankfurt decided to donate to the museum the library of the revolutionary National Assembly that had taken place in Frankfurt in 1848. By the time of Aufsess’s resignation in 1862 the political unity that the museum’s founder had struggled for so long to achieve was coming closer, albeit in a different and more truncated form than Aufsess had hoped. In 1866, the year that August von Essenwein took over the leadership of the museum, Prussia expelled Austria from Germany in a brief, decisive war that resulted in the break-up of the German Federation. What this war and the exclusion of Austria meant was that the city of Vienna, where the German crown jewels were now kept, and Vienna’s rulers, whose ancestors had for so long been the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire, were no longer considered part of the real, existing political Germany. The museum’s leaders initially reacted negatively to this “sad war among brothers,” in the course of which the city of Nuremberg itself was briefly occupied by Prussian troops; they declared that as “the property of the entirety of the German people and thus a representative of its unity,” the museum considered “every victory, no matter which side achieved it, as a defeat.”151 But in the end Essenwein and the other leaders of the museum made a virtue out of necessity, declaring that after “the political ties that had still held together the remnants of the old German Reich were broken . . . the Germanic museum now has an even greater national significance,” and that the museum was now the only “national band that ties together Germany’s various clans.”152

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When Prussia, under Otto von Bismarck’s leadership, defeated France in another brief and decisive war in 1870, ushering in the creation of the new, smaller German Reich dominated by Prussia and led by the Prussian king, who now became the new German emperor, the museum’s leaders greeted the Prussian victory enthusiastically as the culmination of their many years of effort on behalf of the fatherland. The museum, the elderly Aufsess wrote in 1871, had helped to raise the level of German national consciousness as “a visible point of unification for the still-divided nation, almost as a model and sign of the future so full of hope.”153 And King Ludwig II of Bavaria, the son of Maximilian II, who had come to power after his father’s death in 1864, expressed his pride that “within Bavaria’s borders an institution is blossoming that, as a true national monument to the power and glory of the days of yore, has become a blessed nursery of German thoughts and German values, thus helping to pave the way for the mutual development of German strength.”154 Whereas the museum had initially been imagined as a reminder of German cultural unity and of a glorious past during a time of division, it was now, after the foundation of the second Reich, reconceived as a precursor to an even more glorious present.

Nuremberg Redivivus Over the course of the years between 1832, when Aufsess had first suggested the creation of his museum, and 1852, when it finally came into existence, Nuremberg had continued to be perceived by many Germans as a kind of symbolic capital. These sentiments were widespread, shared by liberals and conservatives alike. Louise Otto, one of the founders of the German women’s movement, published a popular three-volume historical novel entitled Nürnberg: Culturhistorischer Roman aus dem 15. Jahrhundert (Nuremberg: A Cultural-Historical Novel of the Fifteenth Century) in 1859. The novel painted a romantic picture of Nuremberg’s medieval past, but, in contrast to many other idyllic pictures of the middle ages, it portrayed some of their worst excesses as well, particularly medieval anti-Semitism. The novel’s primary character is a stonemason who has come to Nuremberg to participate in the building of one of the city’s great Gothic churches. As Otto describes her impetus for writing the novel in the preface to its second edition, her invocation of Nuremberg’s beauty is entirely consistent with such depictions from the time of Wackenroder on: all the towers and gables, the little chapels and fountains spoke to me of a glorious past that hardly any other German city experienced . . ., and so it is quite right to call Nuremberg the treasure chest of the German Reich — in Nuremberg all the days of yore came alive for me, and the centuries disappeared as if they were just one disappearing day.155

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The novel’s central topos is the unity of German art and German nationhood. The building of the church in Nuremberg is seen as equivalent to the structure of the Reich itself. Throughout the novel, artists play an important role. Not only is the novel’s main character a stonemason, but the young Albrecht Dürer and the celebrated stonemason Adam Kraft also play roles. Over the course of the novel, readers witness the poet Conrad Celtis’s coronation as poet-king by a noble virgin, as well as the emperor’s enthusiasm for poetry and his insistence on the unity between art and power. Art, the novel’s readers are told, is not just something individual; rather, it emerges from the spirit of an entire nation. For this reason the novel’s protagonist must nevertheless remain anonymous in his artwork. He signs his work not with his name but only with a special sign. German essence and German art are the same, the novel implies. Unlike many other celebrations of late medieval Nuremberg, such as Deinhardstein’s play Hans Sachs, this novel is critical of corrupt nobles; the villain of the novel is Eberhard von Streitberg, an outlaw knight. The novel also criticizes the misogyny of the fifteenth century, and it ends with the expulsion of the Jews from Nuremberg, an event that actually did occur in 1499. Otto’s novel is proof that not all celebrators of late-medieval Nuremberg were reactionary conservatives; in fact reactionaries were more likely to pick the Catholic bishop’s residence Cologne as their imaginary focal point, not Protestant Nuremberg with its independent bourgeois traditions. For Otto, Nuremberg is above all a bourgeois city, not a city of the feudal aristocracy. It is the bourgeoisie that supports German art, not the corrupt feudal aristocracy. But in spite of her liberal critique of the Middle Ages and the implied critique of a reactionary medievalism, Otto too sees Nuremberg as the center of the German Reich. She argues in the novel for German unity, which she views as both expressed by and prefigured in great German art. Two years after the publication of Otto’s novel about Nuremberg, the city celebrated a major festival that helped to solidify its national and international reputation as the imaginary capital of the nation. In July of 1861 thousands of German men, singers from 260 music clubs from all over the divided nation, gathered in Nuremberg for a singers’ festival (Sängerfest) full of parades, assemblies, hymns, and speeches. In the nineteenth century Germany witnessed an explosion of various patriotic civic organizations, especially athletic clubs, rifle clubs, and singing clubs. The primary goal of all of these organizations, most of them exclusively or primarily for men, was political: in the context of a fragmented Germany undergoing rapid industrial and social change, they offered a compensatory sense of belonging and national unity.156 As the editor of a book put together to commemorate the men’s singing festival in Nuremberg, Johann Kaspar Beeg, put it, the festival was far more than “a mere song festival.” It was, he argued, “a great celebration of the German people” and had created “ties that bind all German hearts even tighter in love for their fatherland.”157 In

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Beeg’s view, a feeling of national belonging and togetherness was easy to come by in a politically unified nation; but in a fractured nation ruled by many different governments, the feeling of national solidarity grew slack and therefore needed to be supported in nonpolitical ways. In the absence of political bonds, love of music was the most powerful element binding the German people together, he argued: “Singing . . . unites everyone: every class — privileged and underprivileged; every age-group — the blossoming youth and the man whose hair has gone gray; every group can devote itself to the care of song.”158 As for the choice of Nuremberg, Beeg proclaimed: Nuremberg is an ancient city that has had an important and honorable name in German history for eight hundred years — one can read about this in any chronicle. But for those with no desire to study: go out into the city itself, and there it will tell you of its honorable past and what it has known and experienced over the many years. And to anyone with an eye for it, it will seem as if a piece of the noble German Middle Ages were coming to life all around him.159

The city itself was a living museum of the German past, and one’s very presence in it was a lesson in national pride. The motto of the 1861 singers’ festival was: “In word and song the German banner goes forth/Uniting in love both south and north,” and the organizers’ desire for unity through music was expressed in a multitude of songs, as well as in banners draped throughout the massive neo-Gothic festival hall specially constructed on the outskirts of the city for the event. A typical example of the slogans emblazoned on such banners: Music overcomes distance wherever we are, Stronger than an army’s might; Music brings us together from near and far To defend and protect and fight.160 The 1861 singers’ festival in Nuremberg, probably the most important such festival in Germany in the nineteenth century, was long remembered as a high point among participating singers and in Nuremberg itself. Like the various Volksfeste before and after it, the Sängerfest included a significant historical component. As a chronicler of the festival put it half a century later, one of the goals of the elaborate decorations placed throughout the city was to transform the physical city of Nuremberg into “the opened pages of a picture book.” By means of pictures, poetry, parades, costumes, and song, onlookers and participants would be brought into direct contact with the past. The past was to be projected, as if by magic, directly into the present. Forms of work and life that have long since disappeared were to be invoked. Our immortals were to appear as people of the present day, right

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in front of the houses where they once lived and worked, to walk the streets and converse with the spectators who crowded around them.161

This chronicler believed that the goal had been achieved beyond what could reasonably have been expected: The life-like immediacy enchanted and delighted everyone, and suddenly it was as if time had disappeared, the ancient past had been transformed into the present, and the old masters had become our contemporaries.162

One of the most important historical figures, of course, was Hans Sachs. Now the house in which Sachs had lived four centuries earlier was decorated with pictures of the shoemaker-poet, and a banner draped on the house proclaimed: “May peace and unity grow/Throughout the German land: Hans Sachs wants it so.”163 The high point of the celebration occurred in the festival hall when, as one commemorator put it, “in solemn and celebratory tone the chorus of many thousands of German men broke out as if in a common prayer with the words: The whole of Germany, A unified Germany, Long may it live, hurray!”164 However it wasn’t just in the festival hall that the singers celebrated. They also transformed the city itself into a stage when, on the second day of the festival, they marched through the Nuremberg’s oldest section: Countless numbers of people stood in tightly packed rows on both sides of the long parade route; Nuremberg’s attractive women and girls looked down on the proceedings from all the windows of the resplendent houses, and from the delicate niches and balconies. . . . One could see people up to the very tops of the roof gables. And through this sea of people came the massive parade, with splendid banners flying in the breeze, to the sound of six loud musical choruses, surrounded by unending cries of love from the crowd, and greeting the crowd with its own shouts.165

Among the various places throughout the city where the singers celebrated was the Germanic National Museum, whose director Baron von Aufsess opened the doors of the museum to the patriotic singers. Such popular celebrations, participated in and witnessed by literally tens of thousands of people, transformed the city into a stage for the celebration of German history and culture, and for the invocation of a future unified Germany. These celebrations demonstrate that the Reich founded by Wilhelm I and his chancellor Bismarck a decade later were not simply acts of authoritarian arrogance forced onto a passive and reluctant population. On the contrary, they show that Bismarck was responding to a very real outpouring of patriotic fervor among significant segments of the

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The Sängerfestzug in Nuremberg, 1861. The lithograph shows the second day of the celebration, with the parade of singers marching through Nuremberg’s old town to the festival hall on the Maxfeld in front of the Laufer gate. Lithograph by Rudolph and Julius Geißler. Provided by the Germanisches Nationalmuseum.

population, not only in Nuremberg, but throughout Germany. After the achievement of German unity, German singers could and did see themselves and their songs as part of the powerful historical force that had resulted in national unification. To use words that the young philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in an early treatise, whose publication in 1876 occurred five years after the foundation of Bismarck’s empire, they were “the people [Volk] creating poetry.”166 Over the course of seventy years the rediscovery of medieval Nuremberg by two Romantic students from Berlin had spread throughout the fragmented nation, and now literally thousands of Germans were coming physically to Nuremberg to experience the city and the presence of the glorious past that it purportedly offered. Others were reading about the

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city in novels, poems, and collections of stories, and still others were seeing the city on stage in plays like Deinhardstein’s and operas like Lortzing’s. Still others could experience the imagined German community in Nuremberg’s most important museum, Aufsess’s “national institution.” What had started as a minority affair, a seeming pipe dream on the part of two idealistic young men, had now become a mass phenomenon, combining Germans from all classes in the celebration of a purportedly medieval city at the very moment when that city had become the most important industrial center of southern Germany. What had begun as a nonconformist critique of the present had evolved into the mass vision of a unified Germany in which the allegedly glorious past could serve as a model for a hopefully glorious future. Out of Romantic literature and popular history had emerged a powerful sense of German national unity that ultimately found its concrete historical embodiment in a new German empire. Ten years after the singers’ festival in Nuremberg, the fatherland whose unity the singers had so fervently proclaimed was in fact unified by two other men from Berlin — men who were radically different in their vision from the Romantics Wackenroder and Tieck: Otto von Bismarck and King Wilhelm I of Prussia, who had himself crowned as German Emperor in the hall of mirrors of the palace of Versailles in January of 1871. Less than a month after the great singers’ festival in Nuremberg, on 10 August 1861, the composer Richard Wagner, who had returned to Germany in 1860 after over a decade in political exile following his participation in the Dresden revolution of 1848, passed through Nuremberg, where, as he reported in his autobiography, he saw “a number of the city’s curiosities,” and where he was probably moved to begin work on the opera about Nuremberg that he had envisioned as early as 1845.167 Less than half a year later Wagner had finished the libretto for that opera, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. It was to be the crowning Romantic apotheosis of the city and the major artistic statement on German identity at the moment of the nation’s belated unification.

Notes 1

Albert Bühler, “Die Flüchtung der Nürnberger Reichskleinodien 1796 und ihre Reklamierungen nach deutschen Quellen,” Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 46 (1955): 481–510. 2

Peter J. Bräunlein, “ ‘Sag mir Einer, welche Stadt, Beßere Schildhalter hat . . . ?’ Gedächtniskultur und städtische Identität im frühindustriellen Nürnberg,” Kea: Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften 8 (1995): 209–52; here, 219. 3

Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Silvio Vietta and Richard Littlejohns (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1991), 2:180. Original German: “Aber sowohl aus- als inwendig, scheinen mir

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doch fast alle Häuser keine Spur v. modernem Geschmack zu haben. Keine einzige neumodische Façade.” 4 Wackenroder, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 2:225. Original German: “arge Karrikaturen.” 5 Wackenroder, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 2:187. Original German: “Die Stadt selbst kann ich nicht genug mit Verwunderung ansehen, weil man kein einziges neues Gebäude, sondern lauter alte, vom 10ten Säc. an, findet, so wird man ganz ins Altertum versetzt, u erwartet immer einem Ritter, od. einem Mönch, oder einem Bürger in alter Tracht zu begegnen, denn die neue Tracht paßt gar nicht zu dem Kostum in der Bauart.” 6

Wackenroder, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 2:187. Original German: “Die Thore sind zum Theil dicke, runde, schwarze Thürme. Die Kirchen sind große, schwarze Massen, voller Bildwerk u Gothischer Zierrathen, durchbrochenen Thürmchen, großen Thoren mit Figuren, usw. Es sind ihrer eine große Menge.” 7 See Ludwig Grote, Die romantische Entdeckung Nürnbergs (Munich: Prestel, 1967), 24. 8

Wackenroder, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 2:188. Original German: “man kein einziges neues Gebäude findet”; “Nürnberg ist eine Stadt, wie ich noch keine gesehen habe, u hat ein ganz besonderes Interesse für mich. Man kann sie, ihres Äußeren wegen, in der Art romantisch nennen.” 9 Wackenroder, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 2:180. Original German: “ein antikes, abentheuerliches Ansehen.” 10

Cited in Rudolf Endres, “Nürnberg im 18. Jahrhundert,” Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 75 (1988): 133–53; here, 135. Original German: “eine graue . . . in Schulden, Mutlosigkeit und verächtlicher Stille versunkene Stadt.” 11 Grote, Die romantische Entdeckung Nürnbergs, 20. Original German: “an das Faustrecht, an das alte stets in Schrecken gehüllte, tobende, von sich selbst verratene, waffenstarrende Deutschland”; “Der abenteuerliche Genius der Vorzeit bleckt uns die Zähne entgegen”; “verriegelt und verschlossen wie ein Kerker.” 12 Ursula Pfistermeister, Nürnberg: Zauber einer unvergänglichen Stadt in Farbbildern und alten Stichen (Nuremberg: Hans Carl, 1975), 20. Original German: “Ein Spaziergang durch die Stadt ist mit körperlicher und geistiger Beschwerde verbunden, denn man hat unaufhörlich den Anblick der abscheulichsten Häuser. . . .” 13

Pfistermeister, Nürnberg, 20. Original German: “So oft ich diese Reichsstadt betrat, so oft war mir’s, als ob ich weinen müsste. Die ganze Bürgerschaft kommt mir vor, wie eine Pflanzschule von Seidenwürmern, die man bloß aufzieht, um ihnen, wenn sie reif sind, die Haut abzuziehen. Nichts Großes, nichts Erhabenes, nichts Emporstrebendes ist hier zu finden. Alles ist beengt, kleinlich, niedergedrückt, alles ein Bild der Leerheit und des Sinkens.” 14 Cited in Erich Schmidt, “Die Entdeckung Nürnbergs,” in Schmidt, Charakteristiken, vol. 1 (2nd ed., Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1902), 36–42; here, 39. Original German: “Wenn das Auge an die simple schöne Natur und an eine edle Nachahmung derselben gewöhnt ist, wie kann einem dann das [in

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Nuremberg] überall hervorstechende steife, mit unangenehmem Prunk überladene Wesen gefallen!” 15 Cited in Schmidt, “Die Entdeckung Nürnbergs,” 40. Original German: “weil noch überall das ganz Altväterische, Gothische hervorguckt. Die Gassen sind fast alle winklicht finster, die Häuser hoch, bunt und mit abgeschmackten Figuren bemalt, sehr häufig mit Heiligenbildern garnirt, und innewendig oft widersinnlich angelegt”; “glaubte ich in einen Aufenthalt der Fledermäuse zu kommen, so sehr stank es nach diesem Ungeziefer und so düster menschenfeindlich sah es aus.” 16

Grote, Die romantische Entdeckung Nürnbergs, 9. Original German: “lang und finster.”

17

Grote, Die romantische Entdeckung Nürnbergs, 10. Original German: “unerbittliche Mauern, deren düsterer Umfang reuende Seufzer und freiwillige Qualen in sich faßte . . . die rauhen Steine, welche heilige Knie abnutzten . . . Oder düstere Einöden, wo die schwarze Melancholie in düsteren Hainen und dunklen Grüften schwebte”; “Müssen denn die Kruzifixe so ausgemergelt aussehen, als ob der Heiland an Schwindsucht gestorben sei?”

18

Wackenroder, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 2:191. Original German: “in einem großen, grünen Sack, der vor dem Altar, vom Gewölbe der Kirche, zur Schande v. Nürnberg, ganz öffentlich herabhängt.”

19 Wackenroder, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 2:186. Original German: “seit 20–30 J. ohngefähr gehen durch Auktionen alle Schätze der Kunst, ins Ausland.” 20 Wackenroder, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 2:221. Original German: “die redendsten Beweise, von dem damals beyspiellosen Flor der Künste in dieser Stadt”; “die Grabmähler der verlohrenen Kunst.” 21 Grote, Die romantische Entdeckung Nürnbergs, 13. Original German: “Zu Nürnberg haben wir gefrühstückt — eine häßliche Stadt.” 22 “Gothisch,” in Johann Georg Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste, Digitale Bibliothek Band 67 (1771; Berlin: Directmedia, 2002), 1888–990; here, 1888, 1890. Original German: “einen barbarischen Geschmack”; “eine Unschiklichkeit, den Mangel der Schönheit und guter Verhältnisse, in sichtbaren Formen anzuzeigen”; “Mangel des Nackdenkens über das, was man zu machen hat.” 23

Goethe, “Von deutscher Baukunst,” in Goethes Werke in zwölf Bänden, ed. Nationale Forschungs- und Gedenkstätten der klassischen deutschen Literatur in Weimar, vol. 11, Schriften zu Kunst und Literatur (Berlin: Aufbau, 1981), 25–34; here, 29. In English, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “On German Architecture,” in Goethe, Essays on Art and Literature, ed. John Gearey and trans. Ellen von Nardroff and Ernest H. von Nardroff (New York: Suhrkamp, 1986), 3–10; here, 5. Original German: “Auf Hörensagen ehrt ich die Harmonie der Massen, die Reinheit der Formen, war ein abgesagter Feind der verworrnen Willkürlichkeiten gotischer Verzierungen. Unter die Rubrik gotisch, gleich dem Artikel eines Wörterbuchs, häufte ich alle synonymische Mißverständnisse, die mir von Unbestimmtem, Ungeordnetem, Unnatürlichem, Zusammengestoppeltem, Aufgeflicktem, Überladenem jemals durch den Kopf gezogen waren.” The “Wörterbuch” that Goethe is referring to is Sulzer’s Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste. See Goethe, Schriften zu Kunst und Literatur, 463.

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24 Goethe, “Von deutscher Baukunst,” 32; Goethe, “On German Architecture,” 9. Original German: “tretet hin und erkennt das tiefste Gefühl von Wahrheit und Schönheit der Verhältnisse, würkend aus starker, rauher, deutscher Seele auf dem eingeschränkten düstern Pfaffenschauplatz des medii aevi.” 25

Dr. A. Dreyer, Nürnberg und die Nürnberger in der Karikatur und Satire ihrer Zeit (Munich: Georg Müller, 1920), 48. Original German: “wo die Verachtung aller Einwohner gegen eine gründliche Gelehrsamkeit so groß ist, daß man sie nicht genug belachen kann.” 26 Dreyer, Nürnberg und die Nürnberger, 51. Original German: “Das ist die Geschichte von dem, was in diesen Tagen zu Nürnberg geschehen ist, welches ist eine Stadt, da die Leute dumm sind wie Roß und Mäuler und backen guten Pfefferkuchen, lieblich anzusehen und süß wie Honigseim.” 27

Dreyer, Nürnberg und die Nürnberger, 52. Translation: “Let us make life stupid / As long as we are Nurembergers.”

28

Wackenroder, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 2:180. Original German: “tragen Tücher als wenn sie Zahnschmerzen hätten, u haben äußerst kurze Taillen, unter welchen ein sehr kurzer Rock sie ungemein dickwulstig umgiebt: eine Tracht die sie höchst ungestalt macht.”

29 Michael Brix, Nürnberg und Lübeck im 19. Jahrhundert: Denkmalpflege, Stadtbildpflege, Stadtumbau (Munich: Presetel, 1981), 25. Original German: “Selbst das Unregelmäßige, Winkliche der Gassen fällt nicht unangenehm auf: denn es erhöht das Malerische derselben, und das Gepräge der Freiheit tragend, hat’s auch geistig eine einziehende Seite.” 30

Cited in T. C. W. Blanning, “Frederick the Great and German Culture,” in Royal and Republican Sovereignty in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Memory of Ragnhild Hatton, ed. Robert Oresko, G. C. Gibbs, and H. M. Scott (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 527–50; here, 532. 31

Cited in Blanning, “Frederick the Great and German Culture,” 534.

32

W. H. Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck, Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1997), 59. In English: Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Confessions and Fantasies, trans. Mary Hurst Schubert (University Park: The Pennsylvania State UP, 1971), 117. Alternative English translation: Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck, Outpourings of an Art-Loving Friar, trans. Edward Mornin (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1975), 58. Original German: “Nicht bloß unter italienischem Himmel, unter majestätischen Kuppeln und korinthischen Säulen; — auch unter Spitzgewölben, kraus-verzierten Gebäuden und gotischen Türmen wächst wahre Kunst hervor.” 33

Wackenroder and Tieck, Herzensergießungen, 50–51; Wackenroder, Confessions, 112; Wackenroder and Tieck, Outpourings, 49–50. Original German: “Nürnberg! du vormals weltberühmte Stadt, wie gerne durchwanderte ich deine krummen Gassen, mit welcher kindlichen Liebe betrachtete ich deine altväterichen Häuser und Kirchen, denen die feste Spur von unsrer alten vaterländischen Kunst eingedrückt ist! Wie innig lieb ich die Bildungen jener Zeit, die eine so derbe, kräftige und wahre Sprache führen! Wie ziehen sie mich zurück in jenes graue Jahrhundert, da du, Nürnberg, die lebendigwimmenlnde Schule der vaterländischen Kunst warst

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und ein recht fruchtbarer, überfließender Kunstgeist in deinen Mauern lebte und webte: — da Meister Hans Sachs und Adam Kraft, der Bildhauer, und vor allen Albrecht Dürer mit seinem Freunde Willibaldus Pirckheimer und so viel andre hochgelobte Ehrenmänner noch lebten! Wie oft hab ich mich in jene Zeit zurückgewünscht! Wie oft ist sie in meinen Gedanken wieder von neuem vor mir hervorgegangen, wenn ich in deinen ehrwürdigen Büchersälen, Nürnberg, in einem engen Winkel beim Dämmerlicht der kleinen rundscheibigen Fenster saß und über den Folianten des wackern Hans Sachs oder über anderem alten, gelben, wurmgefressenen Papier brütete; — oder wenn ich unter den kühnen Gewölben deiner düstern Kirchen wandelte, wo der Tag durch buntbemalte Fenster all das Bildwerk und die Malereien der alten Zeit wunderbar beleuchtet!” 34

Wackenroder and Tieck, Herzensergießungen, 59–60; Wackenroder, Confessions, 117; Wackenroder and Tieck, Outpourings, 58. Original German: “Gesegnet sei mir deine goldene Zeit, Nürnberg! — die einzige Zeit, da Deutschland eine eigene vaterländische Kunst zu haben sich rühmen konnte.”

35

Wackenroder and Tieck, Herzensergießungen, 53; Wackenroder, Confessions and Fantasies, 114; Wackenroder and Tieck, Outpourings, 52. Original German: “Wehe muß ich rufen über unser Zeitalter, daß es die Kunst so bloß als ein leichtsinniges Spielwerk der Sinne übt, da sie doch wahrlich etwas sehr Ernsthaftes und Erhabenes ist.” 36

Wackenroder and Tieck, Herzensergießungen, 56; Wackenroder, Confessions, 115; Wackenroder and Tieck, Outpourings, 55. Original German: “grade und kräftige Wesen des deutschen Charakters”; “In unsern Zeiten ist dieser festbestimmte deutsche Charakter, und ebenso die deutsche Kunst, verlorengegangen”; “Die Periode der eigenen Kraft ist vorüber”; “kalte, geleckte, charakterlose Werke sind die Frucht.” I have changed the word “individual” in the translation to “our own” in order to correspond more accurately to the meaning of “eigenen.”

37 Wackenroder and Tieck, Herzensergießungen, 56–57; Wackenroder, Confessions, 115–16; Wackenroder and Tieck, Outpourings, 55. Original German: “Die deutsche Kunst war ein frommer Jüngling in den Ringermauern einer kleinen Stadt unter Blutsfreunden häuslich erzogen; — nun sie älter ist, ist sie zum allgemeinen Weltmanne geworden, der mit den kleinstädtischen Sitten zugleich sein Gefühl und sein eigentümliches Gepräge von der Seele weggewischt hat.” 38 Ludwig Tieck, Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, ed. Alfred Anger (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1999), 524. Original German: “neukatholische Sentimentalität”; “klosterbrudrisirende, sternbaldisirende Unwesen.” 39 Tieck, Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, 13. Original German: “Sebastian und Franz sahen abwechselnd nach den Türmen von Nürnberg zurück, deren Kuppeln und Fenster blendend im Schein der Sonne glänzten.” 40 Tieck, Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, 18. Original German: “Heimat bleibt dir treu und bieder, / Kehrst du nur als Treuer wieder, / Reisen und Scheiden / Bringt des Wiedersehens Freuden.” 41 John Zilcosky, Kafka’s Travels: Exoticism, Colonialism, and the Traffic of Writing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 4. Quoting Waldemar Bonsels, Wanderschaft zwischen Staub und Sternen: Gesamtwerk, vol. 3 (Munich and Vienna: Langen-Müller, 1980), 44.

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42 Wackenroder, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, 2:221. Emphasis in the original. Original German: “der schönste Kirchhoff, den ich bis itzt gesehen habe, u interessanter als jeder andre durch die Gebeine der für ihre Zeiten wenigstens durchgängig großen Künstler, deren Vaterland Nürnberg war.” 43

Wackenroder and Tieck, Herzensergießungen, 52; Wackenroder, Confessions, 113. Original German: “So ruhen die vergessenen Gebeine unsers alten Albrecht Dürers, um dessentwillen es mir lieb ist, daß ich ein Deutscher bin.”

44

Tieck, Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, 26–27. Original German: “Dich sollt’ ich vergessen? . . . dich sollt’ ich weniger lieben? O mein liebster Sebastian, was wäre dann aus meinem Herzen geworden? Wie glücklich fühl ich mich darin, daß ich ein Deutscher, daß ich dein und Albrechts Freund bin!” 45 Tieck, Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, 31. Original German: “Wir sprechen immer von einer goldnen Zeit und denken sie uns so weit weg und malen sie uns mit so sonderbaren und buntgrellen Farben aus. O teurer Sebastian, oft dicht vor unsern Füßen liegt dieses wundervolle Land.” 46 W. H. Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck, Phantasien über die Kunst (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000), 8. English translation: Wackenroder, Confessions and Fantasies, 165. Original German: “war bei allen großen und geringen Vorfällen beständig ihr Stab und ihre Stütze; sie legte ihnen in jede sonst geringgeachtete Begebenheit einen tiefen Sinn.” Translation somewhat modified for word order. 47

Wackenroder and Tieck, Phantasien über die Kunst, 16; Wackenroder, Confessions, 170. Original German: “Wo sich Kunst und Religion vereinigen, aus ihren zusammenfließenden Strömen der schönste Lebenstrom sich ergießt.” 48

Wackenroder and Tieck, Phantasien über die Kunst, 46. Original German: “Elle des Kaufmanns . . . oder nach Goldgewichten.” 49

Wackenroder and Tieck, Phantasien über die Kunst, 57. Original German: “In der Vollendung der Kunst sehen wir am reinsten und schönsten das geträumte Bild eines Paradieses, einer unvermischten Seligkeit.”

50 Joseph von Eichendorff, Sämtliche Werke des Freiherrn Joseph von Eichendorff, ed. Wilhelm Kosch and August Sauer (Regensburg: J. Habbel, 1908), vol. 11, Tagebücher, 194. Original German: “eines der merkwürdigsten Überbleibsel des deutschen Altertums.” 51

Sämtliche Werke des Freiherrn Joseph von Eichendorff, 194–95. Original German: “Mit Ehrfucht schritten wir über diesen (auch d. Tiecks Sternbald) klassischen Boden, als müßte überall ein Ritter mit wehendem Helmbusch durch die Straßen herabgesprengt kommen.”

52

Cited in Hans Max von Aufsess, Des Reiches erster Konservator: Hans von Aufsess, der Gründer des Germanischen Nationalmuseums (Würzburg: Fränkische Bibliophilengesellschaft, 1971), 20. Original German: “liebste Träume”; “in diesen zackigen Giebeln noch teutsche Treue und Würde walte.”

53 E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Meister Martin der Küfner und seine Gesellen,” in Hoffmann, Die Serapions-Brüder (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1963), 416–71; here, 416. Original German: “die herrlichen Denkmäler altdeutscher Kunst”; “beredte Zeugen”; “den Glanz, den frommen Fleiß, die Wahrhaftigkeit einer schönen vergangenen Zeit”; “Es ist, als werde nun gleich

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einer von den Hausgenossen eintreten und mit treuherziger Gastlichkeit dich empfangen.” 54 Hoffmann, “Meister Martin der Küfner,” 417. Original German: “Kunst und Handwerk sich in wackerm Treiben die Hände boten.” 55 Hoffmann, “Meister Martin der Küfner,” 431. Original German: “Ganz deutlich konnte man in der Ferne die berühmte Reichsstadt Nürnberg sehen, die sich im Tale ausbreitete und ihre stolzen Türme kühn in das Abendrot hinaufstreckte, das sein Gold ausströmte auf ihre Spitzen.” 56 E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Nußknacker und Mausekönig,” in Die Serapions-Brüder, 198–252; here, 227. In English: “Nutcracker and the King of Mice,” trans. Major Alexander Ewing, in E. T. A. Hoffmann, The Best Tales of Hoffmann, ed. E. F. Bleiler (New York: Dover, 1967), 130–82; here, 157. Original German: “O schöne — schöne Vaterstadt Nürnberg — schöne Stadt, wer dich nicht gesehen hat, mag er auch viel gereist sein nach London, Paris und Peterwardein, ist ihm das Herz doch nicht aufgegangen, muß er doch stets nach dir verlangen — nach dir, o Nürnberg, schöne Stadt, die schöne Häuser mit Fenstern hat.” Tchaikovsky, ignoring Hoffmann’s irony, set his story in Nuremberg; for the Russian composer, Nuremberg was the location of a German Christmas. 57 Max von Schenkendorf, “Die deutschen Städte,” in Schenkendorf, Gedichte, ed. F. M. Kircheisen (Berlin: Morawe & Scheffelt, 1913), 170–83; here, 177. Originally published in 1815. Original German: “Wenn einer Deutschland kennen / Und Deutschland lieben soll, / Wird man ihm Nürnberg nennen / Der edlen Künste voll. / Dich nimmer noch veraltet, / Du treue, fleiß’ge Stadt, / Wo Dürers Kraft gewaltet / Und Sachs gesungen hat.” 58

Alexander Lips, Die deutsche Bundesstadt: Eine Phantasie auf absoluter Basis (Germanien [Vienna]: n.p., 1815), 28. Original German: “Phokus, der alle Kraft Deutschlands in einem Punkte sammelt und ihm den Nimbus des Schönen und Heiligen verleiht.” 59 Lips, Die deutsche Bundesstadt, 19. Original German: “an die frühere Einheit Deutschlands.” 60

Lips, Die deutsche Bundesstadt, 20. Original German: “der ächte deutsche Sinn der ehemaligen Reichsstadt Nürnberg. Hier ist noch einer der Sitze deutscher Redlichkeit und Sitten. Der Nürnberger ist schlicht, gerade, bescheiden, höflich, sparsam; Tugenden, die allein den Deutschen kleiden und in seinem Seelen-Klima gedeihen, und die wir nur allein anbauen sollten.”

61 Lips, Die deutsche Bundesstadt, 23. Original German: “Mittelpunkt Deutschlands.” 62 Per Daniel Amadeus Atterbom, Reisebilder aus dem romantischen Deutschland (Stuttgart: Steingrüben, 1970), 131. First published in Germany in 1867. In my German-language source: “Hier sieht man erst richtig, was deutscher Nationalgeist und deutsches Genie zu der Zeit waren, da das Heilige Römische Reich noch im Flor stand. Stell Dir eine altdeutsche Reichsstadt vor in aller ihrer Herrlichkeit, vollkommen unverändert — es gibt in ganz Nürnberg kaum ein Haus, das jünger ist als vom Beginn des 17. Jahrhunderts, die meisten stammen aus dem 14. und 15. Jahrhundert, viele sind noch älter — ; stell Dir . . . eine zahllose Schar von Türmen

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vor, von Kirchen, Häusern und Gemäuern, alle in einem traditionellen, zum großen Teil in dem schönen, schlanken, nach oben gereckten gotischen Stil errichtet, und am höchsten von allen die uralte, auf einer gewaltigen Bergeshöhe erbaute Kaiserburg, die so alt ist, daß ihre Gründung außerhalb der Grenzen von Nürnbergs Historia liegt; stell Dir außenherum die noch erhaltene Stadtbefestigung in Gestalt rüstiger Gräben, Wälle und Brücken vor. . . .” 63 Per Daniel Amadeus Atterbom, “Ein schwedischer Dichter erlebt Nürnberg 1817,” in Nürnberg in alten und neuen Reisebeschreibungen, ed. Barbara Fürst (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1990), 113–17; here, 113. In my German-language source: “Dort erst, im Mittelpunkt Deutschlands, öffnete sich mir das reiche, warme, jahrhundertelang verkannte, doch allen verwandten Seelen noch immer gleich freundlich schlagende Herz im alten Leben und der alten Kunst des tiefsinnigsten Volksstamms Europas, welches, wie es scheint, jetzt glücklicherweise wieder auflodert bei allen besseren Söhnen Deutschlands.” 64 Tieck, Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, 503. Original German: “Mich hat nie etwas so im Innersten meiner Seele ergriffen, wie dies Buch.” 65 Matthias Mende, “Die Transparente der Nürnberger Dürer-Feier von 1828: Ein Beitrag zur Dürerverehrung der Romantik,” Anzeiger des Germanischen Nationalmuseums 1969, 177–209; here, 198, n. 12. 66 Anne G. Kosfeld, “Bürgertum und Dürerkult: Die bürgerliche Gesellschaft im Spiegel ihrer Feiern,” in Renaissance der Renaissance: Ein bürgerlicher Kunststil im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. G. Ulrich Großmann and Petra Krutisch (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1992), 3–20; here, 6. Original German: “als der am meisten geeignet ist, die Begeisterung der deutschen Herzen neu zu entfachen.” 67

Kosfeld, “Bürgertum und Dürerkult,” 6. Original German: “Es war das Bildnis des unsterblichen Meisters aufgehängt, umkränzt von einem dicken Eichenkranz, in welchem die Werkzeuge der verschiedenen Künste, welche er ausgeübt, als Attribute angebracht waren, nämlich: Palette und Pinsel, Grabstichel, Bossierholz, Zirkel und Winkelmaß, Feder etc., und unter demselben lagen auf dem Tische die Besten seiner Kupferstiche und Holzschnitte, die wir alle zusammengetragen hatten. Auch eine Lebensbeschreibung von ihm war vorhanden, aus welcher vorgelesen wurde zur großen Freude und Erbauung aller.” 68 Nürnberger Dürerfeiern, 1828–1928: Ausstellung der Museen der Stadt Nürnberg und des Stadtarchivs Nürnberg (Nuremberg: Museen der Stadt Nürnberg, 1971), 27. 69 Kosfeld, “Bürgertum und Dürerkult,” 7. Original German: “Löblich ist der an Deutschlands Künstler ergangene Aufruf, Albrecht Dürer durch Anlegung eines Stammbuches Achtung zu bezeigen; es soll nicht unterbleiben, aber hinlänglich deucht es mir nicht, dieses Mannes Andenken würdig zu ehren; nur durch sein Standbild aus Erz kann dieses geschehen.” 70 Reliquien von Albrecht Dürer, seinen Verehrern geweiht (Nuremberg: Campe, 1828), vii–viii. Original German: “die Wiege deutscher Industrie und Erfindung, die Krone deutscher Kunst und Wissenschaft, und die größte der deutschen Republiken.” 71 Johann Neudörffers Nachrichten von den vornehmsten Künstlern und Werkleuten so innerhalb hundert Jahren in Nürnberg gelebt haben (Nuremberg: Campe, 1828), v.

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Johann Neudörffers Nachrichten, viii. Original German: “staunen wird . . . über die Menge der ausgezeichneten Künstler, die in einer Stadt gleichzeitig lebten. Welch ein Lichtpunkt war Nürnberg! Diese einzige Stadt hat mehr für Erfindung, Kunst und Wissenschaft gethan, wie ganze Länder. Möge Deutschland dies nie undankbar vergessen; möge Nürnberg dem Geist der Ahnen treu bleiben!”

73

Johannes Scharrer, Die Blüthezeit Nürnbergs in den Jahren 1480–1530 (Nuremberg: Campe, 1828), 4. Original German: “war der glänzende Mittelpunkt des römischen Reichs, in dem sich aller Zauber der Majestät und des Fürstenprunks vereinigte und spiegelte.”

74 Scharrer, Die Blüthezeit Nürnbergs, 5. Emphasis Scharrer’s. Original German: “es drängt sich hiebei unwillkührlich der Gedanke auf, daß die Vorsehung zu dieser Zeit und an diesem Ort durch so viel geistige Kraft recht Großes habe bewirken wollen.” 75

Scharrer, Die Blüthezeit Nürnbergs, 8–9. Original German: “Culminations-periode Nürnbergs. Drei Jahrhunderte vermochten den Glanz nicht zu schwächen, der den Künstler umstrahlt, vielmehr tritt sein Bild mit jeder neuen Kunstperiode in neuer Glorie hervor, mahnt uns an das, was er und seine Zeit war, was wir und unsere Zeit sind, und was wir werden können, wenn wir einsehen lernen, wie er und seine Zeit geworden.”

76 Nürnberger Dürerfeiern, 1828–1928, 42–43. Original German: “Um sechs Uhr war alles um Dürers Grab versammelt, und in schönen Gruppen standen die vielen Künstler aus den verschiedensten Teilen Deutschlands auf einmal da an diesem Grabe vereint, ein großer Efeukranz lag auf diesem, und eine feierliche Stille war eingetreten. Da fingen die mächtigen Töne der Posaunen an, und ihre erhabenen und ergreifenden Töne hallten ringsum wider und verkündeten die hohe Feier der Stunde und des Tages! Der Sturm legte sich, die Wolken teilten sich, und die Sonne stand in all ihrer Pracht über der Burg, beleuchtete den schönen Kirchhof und die feierlich große Gruppe!” 77

Nürnberger Dürerfeiern, 1828–1928, 43. Original German: “Der reinste Himmel begünstigte diese gemüthvolle Feier; die Morgensonne stieg hinter der ehrwürdigen Kaiserburg klar auf, beleuchtete die Adam Kraftschen Stationen und verklärte den interessanten St. Johannis Kirchhof, wo der edelsten Menschen so viele schlummern! Von allen Seiten wurde zugestanden, daß diese Morgenstunde der eigentliche Kern des ganzen Festes war und die Erinnerung an dieselbe alle Anwesenden durchs Leben begleiten würde.”

78

Nürnberger Dürerfeiern, 1828–1928, 40, 41. Original German: “Ist das ein Pfaff, der uns so mit seinen Reden besalbt?”; “recht schön, vom Wetter über alle Erwartung begünstigt”; “fast alle waren von einem tiefen Gefühl ergriffen.” Peter Cornelius the artist (1783–1867) should not be confused with Peter Cornelius the composer (1824–74). 79

Nürnberger Dürerfeiern, 1828–1928, 55. Original German: “Blick’ freundlich heut, du großer deutscher Meister, / Aus einem Kreise dir verwandter Geister / Auf uns, auf’s deutsche Volk herab. / O gieb uns, Vater Dürer, deinen Segen, / Daß treu, wie du, die deutsche Kunst wir pflegen; / Sey unser Stern bis an das Grab!”

80 Nürnberger Dürerfeiern, 1828–1928, 59. Original German: “Ich wußte kaum wie mir geschah / Als ich bewundernd Dich erfasst; / Es trat die alte Zeit mir nah

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/ Ein wunderbarer, ernster Gast. / Die Fülle der Gestalten quoll / Aus alten Bildern, licht und frisch / Aus Monumenten, wundervoll, / Sprang blühendes Leben zauberisch.” 81 Die Meistersinger und Richard Wagner: Die Rezeptionsgeschichte einer Oper von 1868 bis heute, exhibition catalogue (Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 1981), 111–20. 82 M. G. Saphir, Drei Tage in Nürnberg am achten grossen Nationalfeste, den 25. 26. und 27. August 1833 (Nuremberg: Riegel und Wießner, 1833), 17. Original German: “Wundersam ist der Eindruck, den es hervorbringt, Gestalten aus der Vorwelt im gemessenen feierlichen Zug durch die Straßen schreiten zu sehen, und man wird unwillkürlich in jene romantische Zeit im Geiste versetzt.” 83

Saphir, Drei Tage in Nürnberg, 12. Original German: “der Himmel lachte in der blauen Nationalfarbe.”

84

Saphir, Drei Tage in Nürnberg, 16. Original German: “Es wurden nämlich auf den Giebeln aller Dächer Fahnen mit der Nationalfarbe ausgesteckt, und von der Burg herab gewährt dieses Schauspiel einen imposanten Anblick!” 85

Dr. Rudolf Marggraff, Kaiser Maximilian I. und Albrecht Dürer in Nürnberg: Ein Gedenkbuch für die Theilnehmer des Maskenzugs der Künstler in München am 17. und 2. März 1840 (Nuremberg: Campe, 1840), 3. Original German: “ein charakteristisches und mannigfaltiges Bild deutschen Lebens in der ersten Hälfte des sechzehnten Jahrhunderts.” 86 Marggraff, Kaiser Maximilian I. und Albrecht Dürer, 3. Original German: “die innige Beziehung und Wechselwirkung, in welchem das Rittertum mit dem Bürgertum, die Wissenschaft mit der Kunst . . . stand, ein Verhältnis, das seine vollendete Ausbildung in dem Leben der Deutschen freien Reichsstädte, dergleichen Nürnberg war, finden mußte.” 87

Marggraff, Kaiser Maximilian I. und Albrecht Dürer, 9–10. Original German: “die Größe, Würde, Gediegenheit und Schönheit des freireichsstädtischen, bürgerlichen Lebens Nürnbergs in der Zeit seiner höchsten Blüthe”; “der glänzende Mittelpunkt des römischen Reiches . . . ; und in allen Beziehungen des bürgerlichen und geselligen, gewerblichen und künstlerichen Lebens und Wirkens konnte Nürnberg als Muster und Vorbild für die übrige Gesammtheit der deutschen Städte angesehen werden.” 88

Gottfried Keller, Der grüne Heinrich, vol. 1 of Keller, Sämtliche Werke und ausgewählte Briefe, ed. Clemens Heselhaus (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1958), 845. Translation from Gottfried Keller, Green Henry, trans. A. M. Holt (Woodstock & New York: Overlook P, 2003), 441. Original German: “Meine eigene Mitspielerschaft ganz vergessend, erlabte ich mich an dem Anblick der Herrlichkeit; als ob ich selbst ein Nachkomme der verschwundenen Reichsgenossen wäre, atmete ich voll stolzer Freude. . . .” The thirteenth chapter of the third part of Der grüne Heinrich, entitled “Carnival Again” (“Wiederum Fastnacht”), is devoted to a description of this pageant. 89 Keller, Der grüne Heinrich, 844; Green Henry, 440. Original German: “noch langehin überall zu sehen waren.” Keller’s protagonist is referring here particularly to soldierly costumes, but these were by no means the only historical costumes in vogue during the coming decades.

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90 Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983). 91 Cited in Die Meistersinger und Richard Wagner, 111. Original German: “Die Wirkung dieses Zuges, zu dem die alterthümliche Stadt die nothwendige Umgebung bot, war vollkommen. Das alte Nürnberg schien auch in seinen Bewohnern wieder aufgelebt. Die durch die Strasse Einherschreitenden, unter denen besonders die hehren Gestalten Peter Vischer’s, Albrecht Dürer’s und Hans Sachs’ hervorragten, wobei auch die Stadtknechte mit ihrer getheilten Farbenkleidung und die Schönbartläufer nicht fehlten, schienen die rechten Bürger der Gegenwart und die Zuschauer die Masken zu sein. Was an jedem anderen Orte Mummenschanz und blosses Schauspiel geblieben wäre, schien hier zur Wirklichkeit zu werden, und was anderswo nur die Phantasie angeregt haben würde, bemächtigte sich hier so des ganzen Gefühles, daß man mit einer Art von Heimwehempfindung den Zug vorübergehen und verschwinden sah.” 92 On Hagen’s life, see n.a., August Hagen: Eine Gedächtnißschrift zu seinem hundertsten Geburtstage, 12. April 1897 (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler und Sohn, 1897). 93 August Hagen, Norika: Das sind Nürnbergische Novellen aus alter Zeit; nach einer Handschrift des sechzehnten Jahrhunderts (1829; Leipzig: Adriaan M. van den Broucke, 1913). Original German: “Nach einer Handschrift des sechzehnten Jahrhunderts.” 94 Hagen, Norika, xiii. Original German: “Im vertraulichen Verkehr mit den ersten Gelehrten und Künstlern, die je lebten, umgeben von den herrlichsten Kunstwerken, die je entstanden, war mir in Nürnberg ein irdisches Paradies aufgetan.” 95 Hagen, Norika, 287–88. Original German: “Wenn auch erst späte Jahrhunderte die Schuld der Gegenwart sühnen, so wird doch dereinst das Andenken an die frühere Herrlichkeit neu erwachen und an seine verklärten Künstler, die wie ein Sternenkranz die Stadt schmücken, deren größter Stolz Albrecht Dürer war. . . . ” 96

Hagen, Norika, 287. Original German: “Nein — das mag der barmherzige Himmel verhüten!”; “verrauschen und nicht alles in ihren Strudel hinabziehen.” 97 One can assume that some readers believed the book to be an authentic document of the sixteenth century from the fact that the English translation was preceded by the disclaimer: “No such MS. as Hellers Journal exists. How far a fiction of this character is wholly defensible, the literary conscience of the public must be lest [sic] to decide.” Hagen, Norika, x. On the same page Hagen also defends himself against what he seems to have interpreted as an accusation of fraud. 98

On the book’s popularity, see August Hagen: Eine Gedächtnißschrift, 78.

99

Cited in August Hagen: Eine Gedächtnißschrift, 121–22. Original German: “versetzen uns mitten in jene herrlichste Zeit Nürnbergs, als diese deutscheste Stadt das Glück hatte, in ihren Mauern einen Verein der ausgezeichnetsten Meister in allen Gattungen der Kunst und Kunstthätigkeit zu besitzen.” 100

Johann Ludwid Ferdinand Deinhardstein, Hans Sachs: Dramatisches Gedicht in vier Acten (Vienna: Carl Armbruster, 1829), xii. Original German: “zu einer Zeit, welche Alles that, die Dichtkunst zu verderben.”

101 Deinhardstein, Hans Sachs, xiv–xv. Original German: “Zu diesem ließ die Göttin sich herab, / Und sucht’ ihn in der stillen Werkstätt auf / Und weih’te ihn

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zu ihrem Liebling ein; / Und von der Weihe Zauberkraft erfüllt, / Sang er die Weisen, die sie ihn gelehrt; / Und einfach, still, bescheiden, fromm und treu, / Weiht’ er sein ganzes Leben ihrem Dienst, / Mit regem Fleiß und freud’ger Sorgsamkeit / Ausübend auch dabey des Bürgers Pflicht.” 102

Cited in Die Meistersinger und Richard Wagner, 80; from Rupert Becker, Späne aus der Werkstatt Meister Sachsens, eines unmittelbaren Abkömmlings des berühmten Meistersängers Hans Sachs (Leipzig: Voss & Leo, 1793), 6. Original German: “das Vorurtheil abgelegt, daß Handarbeit den Menschen herabsetze; und das Schurzfell, um die Lenden eines fleißigen Bürgers und Meisters gegürtet, zierte in seinen Augen weit mehr als der goldene Schlüssel an den Hüften eines vornehmen Müßiggängers, der von nichts als dem Vermächtnis seiner zweyunddreißig Ahnen zehrt.”

103 Deinhardstein, Hans Sachs, 47. Original German: “Denn besser ist’s — dies räumt Ihr ein — / Ein Schuster, als ein Geck zu seyn.” 104

Deinhardstein, Hans Sachs, 122. Original German: “Kleine Muse, / Bekränze deines würd’gen Dichters Haupt / Mit diesem reichbelaubten Lorbeerkranze, / Er mag ihm Zeuge seyn von uns’rer Huld / Und schöner Preis von manchem schweren Kampfe.”

105

Deinhardstein, Hans Sachs, 126. Original German: “Dem Deutschen geschah gar viel zu lieb, / Als man Eintausend fünfhundert schrieb, / Ergab sich manches zu Nutz und Ehren, / Daß wir daran noch immer zehren. / Und wer es einzeln sagen wollte, / Gar wenig Dank verdienen sollte, / Da sich’s dem Vaterland zu lieb’ / Schon tief in Geist und Herzen schrieb.”

106

Deinhardstein, Hans Sachs, 127. Original German: “um für uns ein wahrhaft nationales Schauspiel zu begründen”; “zurückzugehen auf die historischen Überlieferungen, auf die Begebenheiten und Charaktere der deutschen Vorzeit, und in treuen Gemälden sie uns vorzuführen.”

107

Die Meistersinger und Richard Wagner, 69. Original German: “hat . . . außerordentlich gefallen, es ist eine der besten Produktionen, welche die jetzige Zeit hervorgebracht hat.”

108

Urs Boeck, “Karl Alexander Heideloff,” Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 48 (1958): 314–90; here, 334. Original German: “Nur eine solche Zeit konnte Edles schaffen, denn damals lebten diese Meister in Gott und Gott schuf aus ihnen.” 109 Boeck, “Karl Alexander Heideloff,” 336. Original German: “einzig und allein deutschem Gemüth und dessen schaffender Kraft seinen Ursprung verdankt, was uns umsomehr bestimmen sollte, das leidige moderne Bauwesen zu verlassen und zur ächten Kunst unserer Väter zurückzukehren.” 110

Goethe, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit, parts 1 and 2, in Goethes Werke in zwölf Bänden, ed. Nationale Forschungs- und Gedenkstätten der klassischen deutschen Literatur in Weimar (Berlin: Aufbau, 1981), 8:404. In English, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe’s Autobiography: Poetry and Truth from My Own Life, trans. R. O. Moon (Washington: Public Affairs P, 1949), 338. Original German: “was ich sonst wollte und wünschte, einen Wert hatte”; “das schöne Gefühl . . . , daß die Menschheit zusammen erst der wahre Mensch ist und daß der

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Einzelne nur froh und glücklich sein kann, wenn er den Mut hat, sich im Ganzen zu fühlen.” Translation slightly altered. 111 Goethe, Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit, parts 1 and 2, 405; Goethe’s Autobiography: Poetry and Truth from My Own Life, 339. Original German: “die große und riesenmäßige Gesinnung unserer Vorfahren.” 112 Stewart Spencer, “Wagner’s Nuremberg,” Cambridge Opera Journal 4, no. 1:21–41; here, 26. 113 Die Meistersinger und Richard Wagner, 98. “einer der ältesten deutschen Theaterdichter”; “zur Ehre seiner Vaterstadt Nürnberg”; “den dankbaren Blicken.” 114 On Aufsess’s life, see Johannes Krausse, Beitrag zur Lebensgeschichte des Hans Freiherrn von und zu Aufsess, des Gründers des Germanischen Nationalmuseums (unpublished typescript, available at the library of the Germanisches Nationalmuseum under the call number Hs. 149915). See also Hans Max von Aufsess, Des Reiches erster Konservator. 115 On Aufsess and the fraternity movement, see Hermann Leupold, ed., Einst und Jetzt (Sonderheft 1987: Erlangia-Concordia-Bavaria). 116 Friedrich Harzmann, “Hans Freiherr von und zu Aufsess,” in Quellen und Darstellungen zur Geschichte der Burschenschaft und der deutschen Einheitsbewegung, ed. Hermann Haupt (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1921), 7:65–74; here, 66. Original German: “Wir sind alle Teutsche — Sachse oder Bayer — aber nur derjenige ist seines Stammes würdig, welcher teutsch denkt und handelt.” 117

Max von Schenkendorf, “Bei den Ruinen der Hohenstaufenburg,” in Schenkendorf, Gedichte, 16–18; here, 16. Original German: “Alte, gute, deutsche Zeit, / Weckest nimmer Gram und Neid, / Nun aus deiner tiefen Gruft / Dich des Volkes Stimme ruft. / Wieder sollen Lieder schallen, / Wieder hört man frohe Mär, / Von der Deutschen Sieg und Heer, / Wie in Kaiser Friedrichs Hallen.”

118 Krausse, Beitrag zur Lebensgeschichte des Hans Freiherrn von und zu Aufsess, 18–19. 119 Peter Burian, “Das Germanische Nationalmuseum und die deutsche Nation,” in Das Germanische Nationalmuseum Nürnberg, 1852–1977: Beiträge zu seiner Geschichte, ed. Bernward Deneke and Rainer Kahsnitz (Munich and Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1978), 127–262; here, 150, fn. 99. Original German: “Der innere Zustand unseres deutschen Vaterlandes ist leider in mancher Beziehung ein höchst trauriger”; “alle für deutsche Sitte und Art empfängliche Männer”; “das Fremde und Unchristliche, welche Deutschland schon seit langer Zeit zu keiner Blüthe und Kraft in sich selbst kommen ließ(en).” 120 Hans von Aufsess, “Vorwort des Herausgebers,” Anzeiger für Kunde des deutschen Mittelalters, January 1832, columns 1–6; here, column 3. Original German: “Wer das Vaterland liebt, sey der Fürst oder Unterthan, Bürger oder Bauer, arm oder reich, der muß auch eine Liebe zur Geschichte des Vaterlandes hegen, der muß gerne dazu beitragen die Ehre und den bleibenden Ruhm des eigenen Herdes durch alles Schöne und Große, was uns Kunst und Geschichte darbieten, zu verherrlichen. Dies ist mein historisches Glaubensbekenntnis, das ich

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mich verpflichtet halte, hier sogleich mit Beginnen meines Unternehmens abzulegen, und dessen ich mich nicht schäme, sollte ich auch das Unglück haben, damit verkannt oder sogar verlacht zu werden.” 121 Aufsess, “Vorwort des Herausgebers,” column 3. Original German: “Die Geschichts- und Kunstkenntniß sollte nicht Eigenthum einer Klasse, etwa der eigentlichen Studierten und Künstler seyn, sondern, wie in alter Zeit, sich unter allen Klassen der Menschen verbreiten.” 122

Aufsess, “Vorwort des Herausgebers,” column 3. Original German: “das Fünklein eines Interesse an der vaterländischen Kunst und Geschichte” 123 Hans Freiherr von und zu Aufsess und die Anfänge des Germanischen Nationalmuseums, exhibition catalogue (Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 1972), item C-12. Original German: “babylonischen Thurmbau”; “historischen Pabsttum.” 124

Freiherr von und zu Aufsess, Sendschreiben an die erste allgemeine Versammlung deutscher Rechtsgelehrten, Geschichts- und Sprachforscher zu Frankfurt am Main (Nuremberg: Riegel & Wiessner, 1846), 10. Original German: “das Eindringen einer kernlosen . . . Mittelalterthümlichkeit welche in Ermangelung eines Bessern uns ihre alten Grabestöpfe, Streithämmer, Bierhumpen, verrosteten Spangen und verzerrten Heiligenbilder als vermeintliche geschichtliche Leckerbissen darzubieten gezwungen würde.”

125

Hans Freiherr von und zu Aufsess und die Anfänge des Germanischen Nationalmuseums, item C-12. Original German: “albernen Idee eines sonderlichen Sonderlings.”

126

Krausse, Beitrag zur Lebensgeschichte des Hans Freiherrn von und zu Aufsess, 32. Original German: “in Nürnberg eine Art Delphisches Orakel zu errichten, wohin sich jedermann mit seinen geschichtlichen Anfragen um Antwort wenden solle.” 127

Aufsess, Sendschreiben, 10. Original German: “fast Niemand oder nur sehr Wenige Lust und Muth hatten, die Versammlung zu besuchen.”

128 Harzmann, “Hans Freiherr von und zu Aufsess,” 68. Original German: “allgemeines deutsches Museum.” 129 Peter Burian, “Das Germanische Nationalmuseum und die deutsche Nation,” 149. Original German: “Der Einheitssinn und Einigungstrieb beurkundete sich nicht allein in materiellen Interessen, sondern ging auch in das geistige Gebiet über, in Kirche, Kunst und Wissenschaft. Hatten die historischen Gesellschaften bisher nur eine provinzielle Bedeutung, so möchte ich kaum bezweifeln, daß es an der Zeit sey, auch ihre allgemeine für das gesamte Vaterland hervortreten zu lassen und geltend zu machen.” 130

Aufsess, Sendschreiben, 24. Original German: “Ist doch die Geschichte des ganzen theuern Vaterlandes noch ein schönerer, grösserer Dom als Der zu Köln.”

131

Aufsess, Sendschreiben, 30. Original German: “Nur im Zusammenwirken und einheitlichen Streben der Gesamtheit aller Geister kann wahrhaft Grosses geleistet werden. Auch unsere deutsche Einheit wird nur darin ihre Wahrheit erhalten können. Möge sich diese Einheit endlich auch durch eine grosse deutsche Nationalgeschichte beurkunden! Denn in ihr und durch sie ist jene begründet und lebt in ihrem fortlebenden Geiste fort bis auf die spätesten Nachkommen.”

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Hans Freiherr von Aufsess, Patriotische Fragen an Deutschlands Reichs- und Bundestag zu Frankfurt (Munich: Georg Franz, 1848), 8. Original German: “wenn die Reichskleinodien wieder an ihre alte Stelle zu Nürnberg . . . kämen . . ., wenn der wiedererstandene deutsche Kaiser auf der Stelle thronte, wo Friedrich I. und Maximilian I. ihren Thron aufgeschlagen hatten. Welche Stadt Deutschlands verbindet so schöne und kräftige Erinnerungen mit all’ den Vorzügen neuerer Zeit? Deutschland hat eine Geschichte und diese ist kein leeres Wort. Hätten wir nie einen Kaiser gehabt, wer weiß ob Jemand jetzt an einen deutschen Kaiser dächte, ob Deutschland nicht in einzelnen Staaten ohne Einheit zerfiele? Nur das historische Bewußtsein hat durch sein Wiedererwarchen die Deutschen zu Einem Volke gemacht. . . ., ”

133 Burian, “Das Germanische Nationalmuseum und die deutsche Nation,” 149. Original German: “Sendungsbewußtsein als Nation”; “großer Vergangenheit.” 134 Peter Burian, “Das Germanische Nationalmuseum und die deutsche Nation,” 132, fn. 13. Original German: “Dieses großartige der deutschen Nation würdige Unternehmen . . . entflamte mich bei meinen deutschhistorischen Studien und Forschungen schon von Jugend an mit der Idee, ein deutsches Nationalmuseum zu gründen, dessen Aufgabe es sei”; “und zwar bis in die innersten Lebenszustände des deutschen Volkes.” 135 Burian, “Das Germanische Nationalmuseum und die deutsche Nation,” 138. Original German: “Der Gegenstand der gesetzten Aufgabe ist die Geschichte des deutschen Volkes und Landes in der weitesten Bedeutung.” 136

“Vorwort,” Anzeiger für Kunde der deutschen Vorzeit: Neue Folge 1, no. 1 (July 1853), columns 1–4; here, column 2. Original German: “eine deutsche Nationalsache.”

137

Alexander Ziegler, Deutsche National-Unternehmungen (Dresden: Carl Höckner, 1862), 43. Original German: “das einzige deutsche Nationaleigenthum zu Nutz vaterländischer Bildung und Gesittung.”

138 Hans von Aufsess, “Einladung zur Zeichnung von Actien und jährlichen Geldbeiträgen zum Besten des germanischen Nationalmuseums zu Nürnberg,” addendum to Anzeiger für Kunde der deutschen Vorzeit: Neue Folge 1, no. 2 (31 August 1853): 3. Original German: “der jetzt einzigen, die dem Auslande ein Bild deutscher Sinneseinheit zu geben im Stande ist.” 139 Burian, “Das Germanische Nationalmuseum und die deutsche Nation,” 133, fn. 15. Original German: “ein bedeutungsvolles nationales Unternehmen.” 140 “Chronik des germanischen Museums,” Beilage zu Nro. 2 des Anzeigers für Kunde der deutschen Vorzeit: Neue Folge 1, no. 2 (August 1853), columns 41–48; here, column 41. Original German: “als ein für die vaterländische Geschichte wichtiges, nationales Unternehmen”; “der schützenden Theilnahme und wohlwollenden Unterstützung.” 141

Burian, “Das Germanische Nationalmuseum und die deutsche Nation,” 127, fn. 2. Original German: “die Freude und Dankbarkeit . . . welche Ihnen die ganze Nation für Ihr patriotisches und großes Werk schuldet.” 142

Burian, “Das Germanische Nationalmuseum und die deutsche Nation,” 143. Original German: “geographische Lage . . . fast in der Mitte Deutschlands.”

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143 Burian, “Das Germanische Nationalmuseum und die deutsche Nation,” 143. Original German: “der beste und geeignetste Sitz für eine solche deutsche Nationalanstalt.” 144 Burian, “Das Germanische Nationalmuseum und die deutsche Nation,” 143. Original German: “Daß inmitten der germanischen Volksstämme, fast im Mittelpunkt des ehemaligen Reiches deutscher Nation, in der altehrwürdigen Stadt Nürnberg ein germanisches Nationalmuseum” 145

“Chronik des germanischen Museums,” Beilage zu Nro. 4 des Anzeigers für Kunde der deutschen Vorzeit: Neue Folge 1, no. 4 (October 1853), columns 81–94; here, column 85. Original German: “der trefflichste, man möchte sagen, der geborne Sitz eines deutschen Nationalmuseums.” 146 Otto Gabler, Nürnbergs Bedeutung für die politische und kulturgeschichtliche Entwicklung Deutschlands im 14. und 15. Jahrhundert (Berlin: Ludwig Rauh, 1860), 34. Original German: “Einheitsbestrebungen, seinen stets auf die Gesammtheit des Reiches gerichteten Blick”; “eine Stadt ersten Ranges.” 147 Gabler, Nürnbergs Bedeutung, 35. Original German: “aber ein anders Kleinod hat jetzt die Stadt gewonnen, unser germanisches Museum”; “keine geeignetere Stätte . . . als das alte, ehrwürdige Nürnberg”; “Mittelpunkte . . . zur Erhöhung und Belebung deutschen Geistes, deutscher Kraft und deutscher Einheit.” 148 Burian, “Das Germanische Nationalmuseum und die deutsche Nation,” 135, fn. 29. Original German: “der alten Welt.” 149 Hans von Aufsess, “Einladung zur Zeichnung von Actien,” 3. Original German: “das gemeinsame deutsche Vaterland.” Emphasis in the original. 150 Burian, “Das Germanische Nationalmuseum und die deutsche Nation,” 135, fn. 28, quoting from Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 4, section 1, part 2 (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1897), columns 3717–18. Original German: “im engern sinne . . ., echt deutsch, besonders in der napoleonischen zeit gern mit nationalem stolz als gegensatz gegen das verhaszte fremde gebraucht, da sich gewissermaszen die Kämpfe der alten Germanen gegen den . . . eingedrungenen Cäsar wiederholten.” 151 Burian, “Das Germanische Nationalmuseum und die deutsche Nation,” 166. Original German: “trauriger Bruderkrieg”; “Eigenthum des ganzen deutschen Volkes und somit Repräsentant seiner Einheit”; “jeden Sieg, auf welcher Seite er auch erfochten werde, als eine Niederlage.” 152 Burian, “Das Germanische Nationalmuseum und die deutsche Nation,” 169. Original German: “die politischen Bande gesprengt sind, welche die Glieder des alten deutschen Reiches bisher noch zusammenhielten . . ., das germanische Museum eine erhöhte nationale Bedeutung habe”; “nationale Band, welches jetzt Deutschlands Stämme umschließt.” 153

Burian, “Das Germanische Nationalmuseum und die deutsche Nation,” 192. Original German: “ein sichtbarer Einigungspunkt der noch ungeeinigten Nation, gleichsam als vorbildliches Zeichen hoffnungsvoller Zukunft.” 154

Burian, “Das Germanische Nationalmuseum und die deutsche Nation,” 192. Original German: “eine Anstalt innerhalb Bayerns Marken blüht, welche als echt nationales Denkmal der Macht und Herrlichkeit vergangener Tage zur segensreichen

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Pflanzstätte deutschen Sinnes und deutscher Sitte geworden ist und hiemit auch der gemeinsamen Entfaltung deutscher Kraft die Wege ebnen half.” 155

Louise Otto, Nürnberg: Culturhistorischer Roman aus dem 15. Jahrhundert, 3 vols. (Bremen: J. Kühtmann, 1875, 1:vi. Original German: “all die Thürme und Giebel, die Chörlein und Brunnen, die da sprachen von einer glorreichen Vergangenheit, wie kaum eine andere deutsche Stadt sie erlebt . . ., daß man Nürnberg wohl nennen mag: das Reliquienkästlein des deutschen Reichs — da war die ganze alte Zeit lebendig vor mir und die Jahrhunderte versanken, wie der eine sinkende Tag.”

156 For a good general overview and interpretation of these festivals, particularly the one in Nuremberg, see Dietmar Klenke, “Das nationalheroische Charisma der deutschen Sängerfeste am Vorabend der Einigungskriege,” in “Heil deutschem Wort und Sang!” Nationalidentität und Gesangskultur in der deutschen Geschichte, ed. Friedhelm Brusniak and Dietmar Klenke (Augsburg: Bernd Wißner, 1995), 141–96. 157 Gedenkbuch des in der Stadt Nürnberg 1861 begangenen Großen Deutschen Sängerfestes (Nuremberg: Zeiser, 1861), 1. Original German: “ein bloßes Gesangfest”; “ein hoher Feiertag des deutschen Volkes”; “Knoten des Bandes, das alle deutsche Herzen in Liebe zum Vaterlande umschlingt, noch fester.” 158 Gedenkbuch des Großen Deutschen Sängerfestes, 2. Original German: “Der Gesang . . . vereinigt Alles; jeder Stand — vornehm und gering, — jedes Alter, — der blühende Jüngling wie der ergrauende Mann, — jedes Geschlecht mag seiner Pflege sich widmen.” 159

Gedenkbuch des Großen Deutschen Sängerfestes, 5–6. Original German: “Daß Nürnberg eine uralte Stadt ist, welche seit acht Jahrhunderten in der deutschen Geschichte immer einen wichtigen ehrbaren Namen geführt hat, mag man in jeder Chronik lesen. Wer aber keine Lust zum Studieren hat, der gehe nur hinein in die Stadt, da wird sie selbst ihm erzählen von ihrer achtbaren Herkunft und was sie Alles erlebt und erfahren in langer Zeit; und wer ein Auge dafür hat, dem wird es zu Muthe werden, als würde ein Stück des edelsten deutschen Mittelalters lebendig um ihn.”

160

Gedenkbuch des Großen Deutschen Sängerfestes, 28. Original German: “Deutsches Banner, Lied und Wort / Eint in Liebe Süd und Nord,” / “Das Lied ist aller Zwietracht Feind / Und stärker als ein Heer / Das Lied ist’s, das uns einig macht / Zu Schutz und Trutz und Wehr!” 161

Wilhelm Vogt, “Das große deutsche Sängerfest des Jahres 1861,” Festzeitung [of the eighth Deutsches Sängerbundes-Fest zu Nürnberg 27.–31. Juli 1912] no. 1 (1 January 1912): 14–20; here, 15. Emphasis in the original. Original German: “ein aufgeschlagenes Bilderbuch”; “. . . sollte wie durch eine Zauberei die Vergangenheit unmittelbar in die Gegenwart hereingeschoben, längst verschwundenes Wirken und Leben heraufbeschworen werden, unsere Unsterblichen als Gegenwartspersonen auftreten, unmittelbar vor den Häusern, die einst ihre Wohnund Werkstätten gewesen, auf den Straßen davor erscheinen, Zwiesprache halten mit denen, die . . . sie umdrängen.”

162 Vogt, “Das große deutsche Sängerfest des Jahres 1861,” 16. Original German: “Die lebensvolle Unmittelbarkeit ergriff und entzückte jedermann, mit einem

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Schlage war die ganze Zeitperspektive ausgeschaltet, die alte Zeit in Gegenwart umgewandelt, die alten Meister unsere Zeitgenossen geworden.” 163 Die Meistersinger und Richard Wagner, 129. Original German: “Daß Fried und Einigkeit erwachs / Durchs deutsche Land: das wünscht Hans Sachs.” 164 Gedenkbuch des Großen Deutschen Sängerfestes, 45. Original German: “ernsten feierlichen Tones der vieltausendstimmige Chor deutscher Männer wie zu gemeinsamem Gebete in die Worte ausbrauch: Ein ganzes Deutschland, / Ein einig Deutschland lebe / Hurrah, hoch!!!” 165

Die Meistersinger und Richard Wagner, 129, from Gedenkbuch, 51. Original German: “In dicht gedrängten Reihen standen zu beiden Seiten des langen Weges unzählige Menschen; aus allen Fenstern der prangenden Häuser, aus den zierlichen Chörchen und von den Balkonen herab schauten Nürnbergs reizende Frauen und Töchter . . .; bis zu den Firsten der Dachgiebel hinauf waren Leute wahrzunehmen. Und durch dieses Menschenmeer wandelte der ungeheure Zug, überragt von prächtigen flatternden Fahnen, unter dem Klange von sechs rauschenden Musikchören, umtost von dem brausenden unaufhörlichen Liebeszuruf der Menge, und selbst reichen Gegengruß spendend.”

166

Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, in Nietzsche Werke, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1967), 4.1:1–82; here, 47. Original German: “das dichtende Volk.” Nietzsche, of course, was referring not to the Sängerfest but to Wagner. The Sängerfest, however, more literally fits these words. 167 Die Meistersinger und Richard Wagner, 14. Original German: “einige Merkwürdigkeiten der Stadt.”

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AGNER WANTED HIS OPERAS TO BE the nineteenth-century equivalent of what he imagined the great Athenian dramatic festivals to have been in the fifth century B.C.: a celebration and reaffirmation of collective cultural identity. In our own time the only comparable experiences are the great rock festivals of the 1960s and 1970s, which gave hundreds of thousands of young people a sense of their generational identity: festivals like Woodstock, where thousands of people came to sit around for days and listen to music, creating at the same time a kind of separate society. Wagner hoped that his operas would awaken an entire nation to an understanding of its own essence. What Wagner wanted, however, was decidedly not what he got. While the composer envisioned his operas as mass events enjoyed by vast numbers of German citizens, they were and have remained restricted to a privileged elite. Events like the singers’ festival in Nuremberg in 1861, which drew thousands of singers and an even larger audience, attracted far larger crowds than Wagner’s operas ever have. The Bavarian “national festivals” celebrated at Munich’s Oktoberfest and during royal visits to Nuremberg and other cities were always, and have continued to be, more popular than Wagner’s operas. It is they that have attracted truly large numbers of people, and that continue to attract ordinary Germans and tourists to this day. By the end of the nineteenth century Nuremberg was celebrated in postcards, calendars, paintings, panoramas, monuments, street parades, festivals, travel guides, school books, novels, stories, plays, poems, and songs. Most of these media had a greater direct impact on individual Germans than Wagner’s demanding Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg — or any of the master’s other operas, for that matter. While Wagner celebrates the mass impact of Nuremberg festival culture in the final scene of his opera, in which the citizens of Nuremberg gather for a celebration outside the walls of the city, and while this scene embodied the composer’s own hopes for the reception of his musical dramas, his own opera has never enjoyed that kind of popularity. Wagner’s opera about Nuremberg was not even performed in Nuremberg until 1874, six years after its premiere in Munich in 1868; the Nuremberg performance was directed by Hans von Bülow — the conductor whose wife Cosima, the daughter of the great piano virtuoso and composer Franz Liszt, Wagner had taken as his mate a decade earlier. When Nuremberg unveiled its monument to Hans Sachs in 1874, Wagner was

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not even invited to come to the unveiling. In the initial planning for that unveiling, Nuremberg’s festival committee did not envision performing Wagner’s opera or even a portion thereof. Hans von Bülow, who had been invited by the festival committee to the unveiling, and who had conducted a number of benefit concerts to help finance the statue, specifically urged Nurembergers to invite the composer who had made their city the center of his imaginary Germany: “In Bayreuth, which is so close to you, lives the man who could give your festival its crowning significance.”1 It was only because von Bülow had reminded Nuremberg’s worthies of the existence of Wagner that they finally, at the last minute, added two brief excerpts from Die Meistersinger to their festival program; but they did not, as von Bülow had urged, invite the master himself to Nuremberg. Wagner had asked the city’s opera director to donate the proceeds of the first performance of Die Meistersinger in Nuremberg to the Hans Sachs statue committee; he complained bitterly that this director had not even bothered to respond to his request: “My hopes for Nuremberg itself . . . were disappointed in the extreme.”2 At the time of the opera’s Nuremberg premiere in March of 1874, Wagner was primarily concerned with establishing the permanence of his cultural legacy by founding a music festival entirely devoted to his own works in the Franconian city that von Bülow had mentioned: Bayreuth, about forty miles to the northeast of Nuremberg. Wagner was also trying to finish his massive four-opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), whose subject was no less grandiose than the death of the gods, the end of the old world, and the birth of a new world. It is no wonder that, with his mind on the twilight of the gods, the composer had little interest in the real city of Nuremberg, a city so at odds with his imaginary German capital. Nuremberg showed equally little interest in return. Wagner and his work are an object lesson in the discrepancy between stated intention and actual outcome. Wagner consistently stated that he wanted his works to be seen not as “operas” but as “musical dramas.” In Germany and elsewhere they are, in spite of his wishes, seen and performed as operas. Wagner argued for what he called the Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art), which would, he hoped, overcome the purported egotism of each of the individual art forms (music, painting, architecture, poetry, drama, and so on) and establish a collective unity; instead Wagner is primarily seen as a composer, and his “operas” are relegated to the art form “music,” not to “poetry” or “drama” or “art.” In his operas and his other writings Wagner consistently proclaimed his hatred of capitalism, of exploitation, and of money itself, and yet from the very beginning — and now more than ever — his operas have been performed primarily for the delectation of the rich and powerful. Wagner proclaimed a direct affinity between art and revolution and hoped that his works would help to bring about a social and economic upheaval; instead, from the very beginning,

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his operas have been at the center of the political and economic status quo. Wagner proclaimed his hatred of the bourgeoisie, but the bourgeoisie is the primary audience of his operas. Wagner was a notorious anti-Semite and the author, in 1850, of a vicious anti-Jewish screed entitled “Das Judentum in der Musik” (Jewishness in Music), but among his most consistently devoted admirers and followers have been many Jews — as demonstrated, for instance, by Daniel Barenboim’s controversial performance of excerpts from Tristan und Isolde as an encore performance at the Israel Festival on 7 July 2001. In 1848 Wagner himself participated in a revolution against the feudal aristocracy in Dresden, as a result of which he was obliged to flee Germany for over a decade; and yet without the support of the incurably romantic young Bavarian monarch King Ludwig II, his greatest admirer, Wagner would have suffered financial ruin, and the Bayreuth festival would never have been established. Wagner consistently stated that his musical dramas, far from being mere objects of enjoyment, were intended to be quasi-sacred rituals in which an entire nation would come to understand the essence of its own identity; instead, his musical dramas are and always have been primarily objects of enjoyment and vehicles for the pleasure, self-congratulation, and self-satisfaction of an educated bourgeoisie separated from a less cultivated majority in part precisely by their enjoyment of Wagner. They come to Wagner’s operas to see and be seen, and perhaps also to enjoy the drama and music, and during the intermissions, far from discussing the mysteries of German identity, they drink champagne and nibble on hors d’oeuvres. There has probably never been such a grandiose split between stated intention and actual outcome in the history of art, before or since. Wagner’s art and its reception are a case study in the problem of co-optation, the process by which initially radical or even revolutionary works are tamed and made part of the very system that they purport to criticize. In this, too, Wagner prefigures the history of twentieth and twenty-first century musical rebellion, from jazz to rock and roll, and beyond. The most cursory examination of Die Meistersinger and of Wagner’s other operas reveals why they could not appeal to a larger audience. The most obvious reason is their inordinate length: Die Meistersinger and several of Wagner’s other operas clock in at a stupendous length of about four hours of actual playing time; with intermissions, this can easily run to between five and six hours of elapsed time. The Ring cycle demands a minimum of three and a half days. This amount of time demands a kind of leisure that most Germans and other westerners simply did not have in the nineteenth century, long before the establishment of the forty-hour work week and regular lengthy paid vacations. But even if the majority of Germans had had the time in the 1860s and 1870s to devote to Wagner’s operas, they did not have the educational or cultural prerequisites for doing so. Wagner’s operas are complex linguistically and musically. The libretti are

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Gustav Singer’s set design for the final scene of the third act of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in a 1938 production in Dessau. This production was influenced by Benno von Arent’s designs for previous productions in Berlin, Nuremberg, and Munich. The final scene of the third act, with its colorful masses of banners, reflects the aesthetics of the Nazi party rallies in Nuremberg. Picture provided by the Theaterwissenschaftliche Sammlung of the Universität zu Köln, Institut für Theater- Film- und Fernsehwissenschaft. frequently written in an intentionally archaic manner radically different from normal German speech. Die Meistersinger, for instance, is written in what Wagner imagined to have been the German speech of around 1550; it presents significant linguistic difficulties for German audiences of the late nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, let alone for nonGermans trying to understand Wagner’s work. Musically, Wagner departed from those aspects of opera that make it popular with larger audiences: he wanted to avoid spectacular show pieces like arias, and he tried to make his operas durchkomponiert (literally “through-composed”), with the focus not on individual moments of grandeur or pleasure but on the structure and architecture of the whole. This demands a sustained concentration and devotion that most audiences simply do not have. Ordinary Italians may hum or whistle tunes by Puccini in the streets, but ordinary Germans do not hum or whistle Wagner, now or then — with the exception, perhaps, of the wedding march from Lohengrin, which many westerners know well

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even if they can not identify it. After all, it is the music to which many brides throughout the world walk down the aisle. Not coincidentally, this opera was written before the full development of Wagner’s mature style. But even so, many find it to be profoundly difficult. In 1878 Mark Twain went to a performance of Lohengrin in Mannheim and wrote: The banging and slamming and booming and crashing were something beyond belief. The racking and pitiless pain of it remains stored up in my memory alongside the memory of the time that I had my teeth fixed. There were circumstances which made it necessary for me to stay through the four hours to the end, and I stayed; but the recollection of that long, dragging, relentless season of suffering is indestructible.3

As for the wedding march, which Twain found to be “almost divine,” it was, he wrote, “only . . . one brief little season of heaven and heaven’s sweet ecstasy and peace during all this long and diligent and acrimonious reproduction of the other place.”4 Finally, Wagner’s operas demand a kind of cultural education that most audiences then and now lack. Die Meistersinger, for instance, deals with a forgotten musical art form from a forgotten century and involves complex critical discussions about things like “shortened, long, and overlong tones,/The scarlet ink, the paper mode” that mean nothing to an average audience, whether German or not.5 Not only does Die Meistersinger thematize Hans Sachs and the art of the early modern mastersingers, it also talks about the even earlier medieval poet Walther von der Vogelweide, and it contains complex Christian references to Martin Luther and metaphors about St. John the Baptist. None of these make the opera easy for an ordinary audience to understand. Almost all popular operas deal with love and loss, and so too do Wagner’s. In fact one could summarize the plot of Die Meistersinger with the classic love-story plot “boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy regains girl.” But the problem is that Wagner’s operas deal with much more than just love and loss. Wagner weighs down the topic of love with metaphysical and national significance, and in the process love itself is marginalized. Die Meistersinger is not supposed to be merely about love; it is supposed to be, above all, about Germany. If American authors dream of writing the great American novel, Wagner dreamed about writing the great German musical drama. His dramas would constitute, as both he and his temporary disciple Friedrich Nietzsche hoped, the rebirth of tragedy out of the spirit of music, and thus, as Nietzsche put it, “the rebirth of German myth.”6 On top of all this, Die Meistersinger is supposedly a comedy. A comedy that clocks in at four hours of playing time is already a contradiction in terms, given most audiences’ patience. Some highly unusual, fully prepared audiences that have done their homework may be willing to devote six hours to a tragedy about the end of the world and the death of the

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gods, but to devote an equivalent amount of time to a purported comedy about sixteenth-century Nuremberg and its aesthetic politics is another matter entirely. It is probably not an accident that among Wagner’s mature works it is the Ring cycle, not Die Meistersinger, that has had an impact on popular culture in films like Apocalypse Now and The Blues Brothers. John Belushi could make fun of the ponderousness of Wagner at his tragic apex; but even the satirists seem to be stymied by the problem of classical music’s hard-rocker in his lighter comic mode. Die Meistersinger stands out from Wagner’s other operas in a number of ways. If the traditional distinction between a tragedy and a comedy was that tragedies end in an unhappy death and comedies end with the happy continuation of life, then Die Meistersinger is a comedy, and, indeed, his only comedy. It is the only Wagner opera that ends with a continuation of normal life: two pairs of lovers are united in marriage, the protagonist Hans Sachs is crowned with a laurel wreath by the heroine and lionized by the townspeople of Nuremberg, and the city celebrates itself joyfully, just as Wagner hoped Germans would learn to celebrate themselves and their identity — and of course him — via his operas. Die Meistersinger is also the most realistic and historically accurate of all Wagner operas — which, in the context of an oeuvre that includes flying Valkyries and knights who sail away on swans, does not mean that it is a realistic and historically accurate opera. But unlike most of Wagner’s other operas, Die Meistersinger takes place in an identifiable place, Nuremberg, at a specific time, the middle of the sixteenth century, and its chief protagonist, Hans Sachs, as well as the collective entity of the title, the mastersingers, actually did exist in Nuremberg at that time, even if they did not enjoy the prestige they have in the opera, where they are presented as forming the apex of the city’s social structure. (In reality Nuremberg in the sixteenth century was ruled by a small group of wealthy and quasi-noble bourgeois patricians who looked down on mere craftsmen like the shoemaker Hans Sachs; in this respect Deinhardstein’s depiction of the city was more accurate historically than Wagner’s.) Other aspects of Die Meistersinger, of course, are freely invented and/or historically inaccurate. In particular the figure of the opera’s romantic hero, Walther von Stolzing, is Wagner’s creation. Wagner depicts guilds in the opera, but in fact Nuremberg’s patricians had banned the formation of guilds in the city after the craftsmen’s rebellion of 1348–49.7 Wagner has the mastersingers meet in St. Katherine’s church (the Katharinenkirche), but in fact in the mid-sixteenth century St. Katherine’s was not used for the meetings of the mastersingers; it was not so used until the seventeenth century, although Wagner did not know this. The most glaring historical error in Wagner’s depiction of the city is the complete absence of banks and banking, and of international trade, since in its heyday Nuremberg was in historical reality one of the most important centers of commerce in Germany; instead Wagner gives us a bizarre picture of a

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bourgeois city without capitalism.8 And there are a great many other historical inaccuracies in the opera. But the very fact that one can specify them reveals Die Meistersinger as the most historical and concrete of all Wagner’s operas: it would make no sense to speak of historical inaccuracies, for instance, with respect to an opera like Das Rheingold, which deals with the creation of Valhalla, the palace of the Norse gods. Die Meistersinger is, in this sense, falsifiable. With enough diligence one can explore what in the Die Meistersinger is historically accurate and what is historically inaccurate. Even one of Wagner’s fiercest critics, Eduard Hanslick, praised the realism of Die Meistersinger, writing that it was a “lively historical picture of German popular and burgher-life from the middle ages.”9 And other critics followed suit. Moreover, even the inaccuracies in Die Meistersinger reveal Wagner’s close study of historical documents, especially Johann Christoph Wagenseil’s study of the mastersingers, Von der Meister-Singer holdseligen Kunst (On the Joyful Art of the Mastersingers, 1697), from which Wagner got the sometimes strangesounding names of all twelve of his mastersingers (Kunz Vogelgesang, Konrad Nachtigall, and so on), and Jacob Grimm’s study Über den altdeutschen Meistergesang (On Old German Master-Singing, 1811). In addition, of course, Wagner was influenced by his literary predecessors: Goethe, with his 1776 poem about Hans Sachs; Wackenroder and Tieck, with their Romantic invocation of late medieval Nuremberg in Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders, Phantasien über die Kunst, and Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen; E. T. A. Hoffmann and his description of early modern Nuremberg in “Meister Martin der Küfner und seine Gesellen,” which includes a discussion of the mastersingers as well as the central motif of a struggle for the hand of the daughter of a wealthy craftsman; Deinhardstein’s play Hans Sachs; Lortzing’s opera of the same name; and probably also August Hagen’s Norika. Wagner takes from all or most of these sources, but what he creates is entirely his own. A close examination of the ways in which Wagner changes the story and the setting may not be terribly useful, since, as Peter Uwe Hohendahl has pointed out, Die Meistersinger is not simply an amalgamation of disparate sources.10 However some of the broader outlines of Wagner’s reworking of the Nuremberg myth are suggestive not only of what the artist wanted to achieve with his opera — because, as already noted, Wagner’s intentions are one thing and his outcomes are another — but, more important, of the way that Die Meistersinger differs as a statement about German identity from its predecessors. Because above all else Die Meistersinger is a statement about German identity, a reflection of what Hugo von Hofmannsthal called “the sense of German unity coming into being.”11 In a sense German identity was the central theme of Wagner’s work. And of course the history of the Romantic rediscovery and invention of Nuremberg is a history of conceptions of German identity. On

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27 September 1865 Wagner proclaimed in a note to his supporter King Ludwig II: “we must show them clearly and unequivocally, in golden letters of fire, what is truly German, what the genuine German spirit is: the spirit of all that is genuine, true and unadulterated.”12 It is anything but surprising that Wagner chose Nuremberg as the setting for his major statement about German identity; he was following a decades-old tradition that neither started nor ended with him. “Do you know what this remarkable, ancient city of Nuremberg means to me now?” he asked King Ludwig in a letter of 22 November 1866. He went on to answer his own rhetorical question by describing Nuremberg as “the abode of the ‘art-work of the future,’ the Archimedes point at which we shall move the world — the inert mass of the stagnating German spirit — from its axis!”13 Generations of Romantics before Wagner had already seen the city as such an Archimedean point. It is true, as Timothy McFarland has written, that the emergence of the myth of Nuremberg as “an idealised monument to a peculiarly German kind of city” had to a large extent coincided with the “historical disappearance” of the referent.14 However this myth was not “arising like a phoenix,” as McFarland puts it, at the time that Wagner wrote the opera; rather, it had arisen at the end of the previous century, almost a generation before Wagner’s birth.15 In fact, the emergence of this myth had slightly preceded Nuremberg’s industrialization: the Romantic apotheosis was one of those instances of literary consciousness preceding historical reality. Germans began mourning the loss of the mythic Nuremberg long before the city itself, which Wagner described as being “well-preserved like a precious jewel,” ceased to exist.16 It was in consonance with that myth that the theme of German identity became most explicit in Wagner’s operatic work, and it was as a statement about German identity, and about Nuremberg as the central core of that identity, that Die Meistersinger became politically important, belying the relatively small numbers of people directly affected by it. After all, when one’s most devoted fan is the king of Bavaria, it does not particularly matter that the vast majority of the king’s subjects are not likewise fans. And the same point could be made for the twentieth century even more forcefully: when one’s most avid follower is the dictator of Germany, Adolf Hitler, who decrees that every Nazi party rally in Nuremberg is to begin with a production of Die Meistersinger, then it does not particularly matter that most ordinary Germans, and even most ordinary Nazis, remain immune to Wagner’s dubious charms. Broad popular appeal may arguably matter a great deal in a democracy, but Bavaria in the 1860s and Germany in the Third Reich were anything but democracies. And even in a democracy the importance of popular appeal should not be overestimated: many objects acquire their aura precisely because of their real or imagined exclusivity. This is as true in the world of consumer goods (automobiles, whiskey, perfume, and so on) as it is in the world of art and literature (James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and yes, Wagner).

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Two of the most important ways in which Wagner differentiates his own work from those of his predecessors are indicated in the very title of the opera. Whereas Deinhardstein and Lortzing had called their works Hans Sachs, focusing on a traditional hero and his love interest, Wagner names his opera not after any one person but after a collective entity: the mastersingers. His opera, by inference, is not about one individual but about an entire collective. The power of that collective is reinforced by the name of the city in which it resides: Nuremberg. No other Wagnerian opera title — and few by other composers — features the name of a city, and in giving the opera this title, Wagner helped it to resonate with the history of the Romantic rediscovery of Nuremberg, and with visions of Nuremberg as a bastion of German authenticity that had been developing with increasing intensity throughout the first six decades of the nineteenth century; he hoped, as he put it, “to offer the German people in this work a reflection of its own true nature of a kind only bunglingly presented in the past.”17 Whereas Tannhäuser in Wagner’s eponymous opera had been an individual musical genius, misunderstood by his contemporaries, Hans Sachs, the protagonist of Die Meistersinger, is the product and flowering of a collective entity out of which he emerges and toward which he points back. In this sense Wagner’s depiction of Sachs is consistent with Johannes Scharrer’s depiction of Albrecht Dürer four decades earlier: not an isolated genius but rather the product of an entire civic culture. Wagner’s introduction of the knightly hero Walther von Stolzing as a romantic love interest also indicates a significant change of focus. Whereas Deinhardstein and Lortzing had presented a conflict between the young Hans Sachs and his bourgeois compatriots, Wagner depicts a conflict between the feudal aristocracy embodied by Walther von Stolzing and the bourgeoisie, represented by the mastersingers. In Deinhardstein’s play and Lortzing’s opera, Hans Sachs is a young romantic hero, and it is he who longs to marry the rich young heiress; in Wagner’s opera, Sachs is a middle-aged widower, and he has become wise and resigned. It is not he but the impoverished young knight Walther von Stolzing who strives for the hand of Eva, the rich goldsmith’s daughter. Finally, both Deinhardstein’s play and Lortzing’s opera end with a celebration of Maximilian, the Holy Roman Emperor, who has enabled Hans Sachs to marry the woman he loves. Deinhardstein’s play ends with the following words, spoken by everyone on stage except the emperor himself: “Hail Kaiser Max!/Hail Hapsburg! Hail forever!”18 Wagner eliminates the emperor who plays such an important role in the works of his two predecessors as a kind of imperator ex machina. Instead, Sachs takes the place of the emperor, and Wagner’s opera ends with a quasi-royal celebration and coronation of the shoemaker-poet.19 The ending of Die Meistersinger directly resembles but also contrasts with Deinhardstein’s and Lortzing’s endings: “Hail! Sachs! Hans Sachs!/Nuremberg’s poet Sachs!”20 Wagner

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thus replaces the Holy Roman Emperor with Hans Sachs, and he replaces the dynastic reference to the Hapsburgs with a reference to the free imperial city of Nuremberg. Moreover, Wagner makes the regal role of Sachs even clearer in his stage directions when he writes: “Pogner kneels as if in homage before Sachs. The Mastersingers acclaim Sachs with upraised hands as their leader.”21 Wagner’s opera does not just make Nuremberg the capital of the Holy Roman Empire; it makes Hans Sachs its emperor. These considerations show that Wagner was far from the obsequious celebration of the feudal aristocracy demonstrated by Deinhardstein, who, “in deepest fealty,” had dedicated his play to “her majesty the empress of Austria, Queen of Hungary and Bohemia, etc., etc., etc. Caroline Auguste,” herself, of course, a Hapsburg and no doubt likely to be gratified by Deinhardstein’s servility.22 In spite of the importance for him of King Ludwig II of Bavaria, Wagner dedicates his opera to no one. Far from painting a picture of despicable bourgeois citizens fighting amongst themselves, as Deinhardstein does, Wagner paints a picture of Nuremberg as a kind of bourgeois paradise, full of free citizens whose highest embodiment is the charismatic Hans Sachs himself. It is he who comes to the aid of the needy young nobleman Walther von Stolzing, not the other way around. From the very beginning of Die Meistersinger Wagner paints the bourgeoisie in a positive light. The wealthy goldsmith Veit Pogner is a far more likeable and serious figure than the goldsmiths in Deinhardstein’s and Lortzing’s works. Pogner wishes to demonstrate his devotion to art, and not just to money, by giving his only daughter, along with all of his wealth, to the man who can sing the best song at the festival of St. John the Baptist (midsummer, June 24) that is to be celebrated the following day outside the city walls. Pogner complains that the bourgeoisie’s reputation for greed is undeserved: In castle and in humble hut, The evil slander ended not That only treasure and gold Our burghers’ dreams can hold! Though in our country’s spacious bounds The arts we alone have tended, For this we are little commended. But how our deeds do honour us all And how in steadfast mood, We cherish the fair and good, The power of art and all its worth To that I would here bear witness on earth.23 What this means is that the entire plot of the opera, which revolves around a singing competition for the hand of Pogner’s daughter Eva, is set in motion by a wealthy citizen’s desire to demonstrate in the most forceful

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way possible the dignity of the bourgeoisie, a dignity that comes from its devotion not to money but to art, and from its status as the only protector and defender of art in Germany. It is not just Pogner who makes this point; in his final speech, Hans Sachs returns to it, after Walther has declined to be honored by the bourgeois mastersingers whom he, as a young aristocrat, despises. “Do not disdain our Masters thus,/But honour well their art!” declares Sachs. He adds, with specific reference to Stolzing’s aristocratic lineage: ’Twas not your father’s name and worth, Nor yet your title, wealth or birth; It was your poet’s art That won a Master’s heart, Him must you thank for all your bliss.24 In other words, Sachs tells Walther, the art that has won him the joy of love is not an aristocratic form, like that of the medieval Minnesänger (troubadours) whom Walther admires, but rather a bourgeois form, practiced and developed by the mastersingers. They may not be perfect, and their insistence on rules and regulations may be annoying, but nevertheless it is only they who have managed to preserve for art an important role in German life: This art our Masters well did guard. They knew its true estate And in its spirit firm they stood, Thus have they kept it great, And though not honoured as of old, When courts and kings its glories told; When strife and turmoil grew, It remained German and true.25 Sachs acknowledges the difference between the art of the noble troubadours and that of the bourgeois mastersingers; however he insists that it is not the mastersingers but rather the feudal aristocracy who have failed and will continue to fail the cause of German art: Take heed! Ill times now threaten all; And if the German Reich should fall And false foreignness rule our land No king his folk would understand, And foreign pride and foreign ways Would darken all our German days; The good and true were soon forgot, Did they not live in Masters’ art.26

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These words resonate with the history of aristocratic absolutism in Germany, particularly German princes’ slavish imitation of the French monarchs in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They echo the words of Germany’s first musical journalist, Johann Mattheson, who, in 1740, after King Frederick II of Prussia had sent his musical conductor to Italy to look for good singers, had asked: “When will we give up our blind worship of foreigners and learn to judge our own countrymen fairly?”27 Nuremberg in the sixteenth century resonates as authentically German for Wagner because it exists at a time before the Thirty Years War, before the consequent weakening of the Holy Roman Empire, and at a time when poets like Hans Sachs still wrote in a language that was close to the authentic vernacular language of the German people — unlike the courtly, complex literary language of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However Nuremberg in the mid-sixteenth century is also no longer Catholic, and therefore no longer dominated, in Wagner’s eyes, by the Roman church; it is authentically German, with an authentically German form of Christianity. Such German authenticity was crucial to Wagner, who was brazen enough to remind his patron Ludwig II, king of Catholic Bavaria, “how pernicious an influence Roman political thinking has already had on the growth of the German peoples.”28 Sachs’s words also resonate with the history of the Napoleonic invasions of Germany at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, at a time when many German princes simply surrendered to the invading armies, and when the resistance to the French was driven primarily by the patriotic bourgeoisie and the lower nobility, which saw the higher-level aristocracy and its capitulation to Napoleon as unpatriotic. Nuremberg’s status as a German utopia is underlined again and again throughout the opera. In the first act, which takes place in St. Katherine’s, we see Nuremberg’s citizens as pious Lutherans who place their trust in Jesus Christ and his precursor, St. John the Baptist. The second act takes place in a Nuremberg street in front of Hans Sachs’s house later that evening; it ends with a riot that briefly but forcefully disturbs the peace of Nuremberg. However the very violence of the riot reinforces the impression of Nuremberg’s usual peacefulness. The final words of the second act, spoken by a night watchman in perfect stillness, are: “Praise ye God the lord!”29 It is in the second act that Wagner employs the most extensive literary metaphors to reinforce the image of Nuremberg as an earthly paradise. Sachs has three main goals in this act: to prevent Walther from eloping with Eva; to prevent the opera’s only negative figure, the aged and greedy mastersinger Sixtus Beckmesser — who wants to marry Eva only for her money and not for love — from singing a love song to Eva undisturbed beneath her window; and to finish a pair of shoes for Beckmesser, who had criticized him in the first act for not yet having finished the shoes he ordered. Sachs achieves all three goals simultaneously

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by singing his own song while loudly finishing Beckmesser’s shoes with a hammer; his song comes at the center of act 2 and hence at the center of the opera as a whole. In this song Sachs takes advantage of the fact that Eva’s name, in German, is identical to that of Eve, the biblical first mother and hence the origin of original sin. Sachs sings a song about Adam and Eve and points out that if they had not been expelled from paradise and forced to wander through the world, human beings would never have had to wear shoes: When Eve from Paradise was cast, Her sin she soon repented, For, limping o’er the stony path, Her feet were sore tormented.30 Although Sachs appears simply to be singing a humorous song about making shoes, he is in fact sending a message to Eva, who is about to try to flee Nuremberg with Walther. He is telling her that Nuremberg is an earthly paradise, and that eloping would be the equivalent of original sin. And he is also telling her that the only reason he is singing the song and working at night is to prevent her from committing this sin: Oh Eve, for shame you now should weep, For this is all your doing, That now the feet of mortal men The angels must be shoeing! Had you left fruit alone You ne’er had trod on stone. Because you followed your giddy head I now sit here with awl and thread . . .31 Eva understands Sachs’s message. When Walther asks her who Sachs is playing a joke on — Beckmesser or the two of them — she replies: “His song reproves / All three, I fear.”32 And of course she is absolutely right. Sachs punishes Beckmesser for his arrogance, and at the same time, in the riot that ensues when Sachs’s apprentice David observes that the nearsighted Beckmesser is in fact singing the song for his own beloved, Eva’s maid Magdalene — who is dressed in Eva’s clothes in order to facilitate the planned elopement — Sachs is able to whisk Eva back into her house and prevent the elopement. Paradise never has to be regained, because it is never lost. And of course Sachs also finishes Beckmesser’s shoes. In the third act, which takes place on the feast of St. John, Sachs reflects upon the events of the previous day, singing words that were themselves to become part of the Nuremberg myth: In peaceful ways well grounded, Content in fruitful work,

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By Germany surrounded My cherished Nuremberg!33 In this act the biblical metaphors are intensified when Sachs’s apprentice David, singing a song in honor of St. John, makes the discovery that Hans is none other than the German name for John: John⫽Johannes⫽ Hannes⫽Hans. David’s song transports the story of St. John the Baptist to Nuremberg; the River Jordan becomes Nuremberg’s Pegnitz, and John the Baptist becomes Hans Sachs, who ultimately “baptizes” both Walther’s prizewinning song and his apprentice David (by making him into a journeyman). What this means for the opera is that St. John’s Day is Hans Sachs’s name saint’s day, and that Hans Sachs is depicted as a kind of St.John-the-Baptist-like prophet, “the voice of one crying in the wilderness” (Mark 1:3) and proclaiming the arrival of a presumably German messiah. Finally Walther’s song — like Sachs’s in the second act, it makes use of the biblical significance of Eva’s name — transports its listeners to a paradisiacal garden which is at one and the same time the Garden of Eden and also the home of the Greek muses, Mount Parnassus. Eva is able to combine these two places for Walther, and Hans Sachs reminds Walther that Eva is a product of Nuremberg’s bourgeois culture. The final scene of the third act presents a picture of Nuremberg as a social paradise: all social classes and all professions are gathered on a grassy meadow outside the city walls, and from a distance, as in Tieck’s and Hoffmann’s literary works, the outline of the city can be seen. In celebrating Hans Sachs, the citizens of Nuremberg are celebrating themselves, for he is the embodiment of all that is best within them. At the end of the opera Wagner is in a sense trying to teach his audience how it should react to his music and to him: with praise and veneration. Wagner does not, however, present Nuremberg as being without problems and contradictions. On the contrary, the opera is full of a great many oppositions. First there is the opposition between Walther von Stolzing, as a representative of the feudal aristocracy, and the mastersingers, as representatives of the bourgeoisie. This social opposition parallels an aesthetic opposition: Walther (unlike the actual medieval troubadours whom he purports to admire) believes in genius, inspiration, and nature in art, whereas the mastersingers believe in the power of rules and regulations. For Walther it is the artist himself, as absolute genius, who decides what art is; for the mastersingers it is the rules of the guild, the so-called “Tabulatur.” The contrast between Walther and the mastersingers is paralleled by another equally important one between the mastersingers and the ordinary people, the Volk. The mastersingers look down on the Volk as uneducated and stupid. Just as Sachs plays the role of Walther’s benefactor, so too he supports the ordinary people. He argues that at least once a year the mastersingers should let the people speak their mind about art.34

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All of these oppositions threaten to disrupt Nuremberg as an earthly paradise, and in fact at the end of act 2 they erupt in the afore-mentioned riot. However in the third act all of these oppositions are resolved. Far from ending in a riot, this act culminates in a demonstration of unity and pride, with the “massed choral voice” of the crowd on stage “becoming the massed voice of the Volk,” as Thomas S. Grey puts it.35 What brings all of these oppositions together — aristocracy vs. bourgeois, mastersingers vs. people, an aesthetics of inspiration vs. an aesthetics of rules and regulations — is Sachs himself. He is the mediator between the competing instances, the pivot around which the plot revolves. To the mastersingers he champions the cause of Walther von Stolzing, and to Walther he champions the cause of the mastersingers. Aesthetically, he is able to teach Walther to follow the mastersingers’ rules while at the same time preserving the inspirational source of Walther’s poetic genius.36 Sachs’s apprentice David had tried to teach Walther the rules of the mastersingers in the first act, but David does not really understand the rules himself yet, and therefore he is unable to explain them in a way that makes sense to Walther; it is only the master himself, Hans Sachs, who can do so in the third act. Finally, Sachs brings the mastersingers and the people together, just as he brings Walther and Eva and David and Magdalene together. He is the John the Baptist of a new and unified German identity. In spite of its great length, Die Meistersinger is a tightly structured dramatic work. This is an opera about singing and about art, and each act ends with a kind of song competition. At the end of the first act Walther fails in his song; at the end of the second act Beckmesser fails in his song; and finally, at the end of the third act, Walther, the opera’s romantic hero, triumphs in his song. As both David and Sachs explain to Walther, a mastersong is based on the following structure: two stanzas that resemble each other closely, followed by a final stanza that uses some of the same themes and motifs but in a different and new way, just as, in Sachs’s metaphor, the union of husband and wife produces difference in similarity in a child. As some critics have pointed out, the opera itself follows this structure, with the first two acts being, in a sense, stanzas, and the third act being an Abgesang (closing song). The only figure that Sachs is not able to integrate into the social fabric of Nuremberg is the greedy town clerk Beckmesser, who disappears in shame shortly before the end of the third act, after he has disgraced himself by plagiarizing a song by Walther. (The motif of plagiarism had already been part of Deinhardstein’s play and Lortzing’s opera, but in those works it is a song by Hans Sachs himself that is plagiarized.) Just as Sachs concentrates all that is best in the bourgeoisie, Beckmesser concentrates all that is worst: greed, conventionality, lack of love, an inability to understand true art, and an insistence on rules and regulations. Because Beckmesser represents all these unpleasant attributes, his disappearance from the social

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order leaves Nuremberg as a paradise without any kind of evil influences. Beckmesser is a kind of negative messiah: he embodies all the sins generally attributed to the bourgeoisie as a whole, and hence his removal purifies the bourgeoisie. Some recent interpreters of the opera have therefore interpreted Beckmesser as a Jew.37 For several reasons, which I will explain below, these interpretations are incorrect, but they do point to a structural similarity between the role that Beckmesser plays in the opera and the role that Jews played in German anti-Semitism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Specifically, just as Beckmesser, in Wagner’s opera, unites all the sins normally attributed to the entire bourgeoisie in one easily disposable person, thus exculpating the bourgeoisie as a class from blame, so too Jews in the ideology of German anti-Semitism united all the worst attributes normally attributed to the bourgeoisie, or to Germans as a whole, and enabled them to be shoved off onto a people deemed foreign and unGerman. This too served an exculpatory purpose: it was not the bourgeoisie that was greedy but the Jews, and so on. Hence there is a strong structural similarity between Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger and the role of the Jews in German (and Wagnerian) anti-Semitism. But this structural similarity does not mean that the actual figure of Beckmesser in Wagner’s opera was intended by Wagner or perceived by the opera’s audiences as a Jew. There are three major reasons why Beckmesser cannot literally be Jewish. The first and most obvious is that Jews were expelled from Nuremberg in 1499, and the opera takes place fifty years later, at a time when there were no Jews in Nuremberg. In fact it is entirely possible that one of the many reasons Nuremberg was so attractive to Wagner, who made no effort to conceal his anti-Semitism, and who was to bemoan the construction of a synagogue in Nuremberg in close proximity to the historical house of Hans Sachs, was precisely its absence of Jews. The second reason is that even if Wagner had not known that there were no Jews in Nuremberg in the middle of the sixteenth century, he would not have portrayed a Jew as a respected member of the guild of the mastersingers and one of the city’s most important leaders. Such a portrayal would have been historically inaccurate, since even in cities that allowed Jews to live in them, Jews were not accorded this kind of social status; and it would also have run against the grain of Wagner’s own anti-Semitic thinking. The third and final reason why Beckmesser cannot be Jewish is that he is not so specified in the opera, and if Wagner had wanted to make him Jewish he undoubtedly would have made this explicit. To argue that Beckmesser “is” something for which there is no evidence in the opera is to confuse fiction with reality, since Beckmesser is a fictional character created by Wagner’s words, music, and stage directions, and by the singing, acting, and directing of those who stage Die Meistersinger; he cannot, in some pristine and independent reality, “be” anything that goes beyond those words, music, and

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stage directions. In fact Jews are conspicuously absent not only from Die Meistersinger but also from Wagner’s other operas, and this is not surprising for a composer and writer who hated Jews. Dieter Borchmeyer is hence entirely correct when he states that “there are no Jewish characters in his [Wagner’s] music dramas,” but this absence of Jewish characters does not necessarily indicate an absence of “anti-Semitic tendencies,” as Borchmeyer goes on to suggest. Indeed, Borchmeyer’s claim that Wagner’s “hatred of the Jews was excluded from the inner sanctum of his artistic personality” might more accurately be revised to state that the composer’s hatred of the Jews excluded them from the inner sanctum of his operas, in spite of their prominence in his thinking elsewhere.38 Barry Millington is hence wrong in claiming that Beckmesser has literally “undergone ritual circumcision,” even if he is right in pointing out that “Beckmesser incorporates unmistakably anti-Semitic characteristics.”39 Nor is David J. Levin correct when he claims that Beckmesser’s “evident incapacities . . . mark him as Jewish.”40 It is simply a logical fallacy to state that incorporating anti-Semitic characteristics is the equivalent of being a Jew. If this were true, as both David B. Dennis and Hans R. Vaget suggest, Nazi readings of Die Meistersinger would surely have made Beckmesser’s Jewishness explicit; but they did not.41 There is no evidence that either Wagner or the Nazis saw Beckmesser as Jewish.42 Wagner opined against the Jews in his essays and letters, but he did not include them in his operas, which are celebrations of a German identity in which Jews, according to him, have no place. Beckmesser should hence be seen not literally as a Jew but as a dramatically necessary structural element of the opera: without him there would be no dramatic tension and therefore no opera. However it is true that in the opera Beckmesser plays the same role that Jews play in German anti-Semitism, and for this reason the identification of Beckmesser as a Jew is a highly productive misreading, as demonstrated by the controversy it has generated.43 Like the many other proponents of the Romantic rediscovery and invention of Nuremberg in the nineteenth century, Wagner depicts early modern Nuremberg as a center of authentic German identity, an identity that revolves centrally around the glorification of art. In the Romantic Nuremberg tradition, Albrecht Dürer and Hans Sachs had come to embody the apotheosis of German art and identity. Wagner’s glorification of German art, however, is far more aggressive than that of Wackenroder and Tieck. Whereas in the early Romantic tradition the German master Dürer and the Italian master Raphael had been placed side by side as coequals, frequently depicted shaking hands with each other in paintings, Wagner’s master Sachs aggressively rejects any non-German influences as “foreign pride and foreign ways” (wälschen Dunst mit wälschem Tand). Moreover, Wagner makes explicit the political function of art in the most famous lines of the opera, in which Sachs, in the middle of the sixteenth

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century, foresees the end of the Holy Roman Empire, an event that did not happen in reality until 1806. At the end of the opera Sachs declares to the assembled citizens of Nuremberg, and the multitude repeats after him, as if to emphasize the truth-content of his words: Were the Holy Roman Empire To dissolve into mist We still would have Holy German Art!44 Political empires come and go, Sachs proclaims, but what remains constant about the German people is its art. It is art, and not any specific political arrangement, that guarantees a people’s authenticity and identity. By implication, of course, it is Wagner, in the 1860s, as a representative of German art, who is presenting to Germans, in his opera, a true and authentic portrait of who they are as a people. This is what Arthur Groos has called the “proleptic” dimension of the opera, a dimension containing Wagner’s nineteenth century as its anticipated future.45 Germany is about to be unified in the second Kaiserreich (empire), but what Wagner insists is important is not so much this political unification or the rapid development of capitalism that was to follow it as the German people’s own sense of their identity through non-capitalist art, particularly poetry and music. It is that sense of positive national identity that Wagner sees embodied in a mythical early modern Nuremberg. Some Germans were deeply moved by Wagner’s depiction of German identity. In 1868 the critic Heinrich Porges wrote in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik that Wagner had presented the “innermost core of German identity . . . in his work,” and a year later Ludwig Nohl wrote that Wagner was helping “the nation to a full consciousness of itself and of the profound way in which we belong to each other.”46

Hans Sachs Gets a Statue While Wagner was working on his operatic monument to Hans Sachs, a group of Nuremberg citizens was working on a monument in bronze to be placed not far from the house in which Hans Sachs had lived. The first suggestion for such a statue had come in 1842, two years after the unveiling of the Dürer monument, when citizens inspired by the success of the Dürer monument founded an organization to sponsor a monument to Sachs. This organization met in the Hans Sachs house, at that time a restaurant. Although these plans did not immediately bear fruit, they formed the prehistory for the later efforts of the Nuremberg sculptor Konrad Kraußer, who had studied art with Karl Alexander Heideloff and Albert Christoph Reindel, two of Dürer’s most prominent admirers in the third and fourth decades of

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the nineteenth century. Kraußer pursued the idea of a Sachs statue singlemindedly, and in 1862, one year after the Nuremberg singers’ festival, he came up with an unusual model for the proposed statue, one that showed Sachs not standing but sitting. A year later thirty-four men in Nuremberg formed a group to raise funds for the monument. This group worked, in various incarnations and with many interruptions, over the course of more than a decade, during which Germany witnessed three brief wars fought by Prussia as well as the foundation of the Prussian-led second empire. By 1874 the statue was ready. In the meantime Kraußer had died; the statue was cast by Christoph Lenz. In order to raise funds for the statue the sponsoring committee had published notices in various newspapers, as well as in the popular magazine Die Gartenlaube, calling on all Germans to support their patriotic endeavor. The committee received relatively little support from the city of Nuremberg itself; a great deal of money came from outside Nuremberg, from various clubs and civic organizations, including a significant amount from the shoemaker organizations of pan-Germany (Schuhmachervereine Alldeutschlands). In addition Hans von Bülow had raised money through concerts in Nuremberg, Fürth, Würzburg, and Erlangen; and Nuremberg’s clubs and civic organizations, as well as private citizens, had contributed various sums. The record of contributions to the monument shows that the idea came from the middle class, not from a group of aristocratic leaders. The sponsoring club appropriately chose the feast of St. John’s in 1874 as the day of the unveiling of the statue because, as Ernst Lützelberger, Nuremberg’s librarian and one of the major supporters of the monument, declared in his account of the monument’s history, the feast of St. John was “an ancient festival day of the German people” and also because (as the apprentice David finds out in Wagner’s opera) “Johannes and Hans [were] one and the same name.”47 On May 27, two months after Wagner’s Meistersinger had its Nuremberg premiere, the foundation stone for the Hans Sachs statue was laid at a public ceremony; into the foundation were placed items similar to those that had been placed in the foundation of the Dürer statue over four and a half decades earlier: a map of the city, a record of contributions to the fundraising committee, copies of the advertisements that had appeared in Die Gartenlaube and other publications, and so on. The ceremonies that occurred on May 27 and at the unveiling of the statue a month later were yet another confirmation of Nuremberg’s role in the popular imagination, and of Hans Sachs’s role as part of that mythical Nuremberg. Thousands of Nurembergers, and particularly its men’s singing clubs, participated in these ceremonies. The festival committee laid out a detailed plan for the celebration, involving a festive gathering in the great hall of Nuremberg’s municipal building on the evening of June 23, a celebratory parade through the city on the morning of June 24, and the unveiling of the statue thereafter, followed by a sit-down dinner in the late afternoon and special nocturnal illumination of the statue

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Hans Sachs monument, 1909. Provided by the Stadtarchiv Nürnberg. later on. The festival committee formally requested that Nuremberg’s citizens and schoolchildren be given time off to participate in the celebration, and it asked all residents living on the parade route and around the monument itself to decorate their houses. On the day of the celebration the

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area around the statue was draped in flags and banners, as were the streets through which thousands of people marched. As usual at such celebrations, Nuremberg’s athletic clubs worked as a security detail. Again and again in their celebrations of Hans Sachs before, during, and after the unveiling of the statue, participants referred to the shoemaker as — in the words of one celebrant — not only “the epitome and the prophet of the true German middle class” and of the Protestant Reformation but also “a prophet of the new German Reich.”48 Hans Sachs was to be admired and celebrated because of his status not as a warrior or an aristocrat but as a hardworking citizen who had purportedly contributed to the formation of the modern German language, and who had created poems and plays understood and enjoyed by ordinary German people. In his speech at the unveiling ceremony Ernst Lützelberger declared that Sachs had a particular relevance to Germany today because “in him we see the embodiment of today’s struggles and strivings, which had already begun with him.”49 Lützelberger reinforced these sentiments at the festival dinner late that afternoon, when he proclaimed that, through his poetic works, Hans Sachs had helped to lay the foundation “for the creation of a German Reich under one Kaiser.”50 Various civic organizations then read poems or placed wreaths at the statue. The shoemakers of Stettin included in their poem a greeting to the city of Nuremberg: Hail, O city where craftsmen lead, From your friends from Pomerania’s sand. You bore strong men in spirit and deed For our German fatherland.51 In a celebration on Nuremberg’s central market square following the unveiling, one celebrant also made a toast to the capital of the German imaginary: Once again I raise my glass high Full of the sweetest wine so pretty And burning with enthusiasm I cry: A toast to you, Nuremberg, wonderful city! You pearl of true German value You honor your masters so well Brave city, good and true Where even foreigners are glad to dwell Hail Nuremberg! May you sprout, blossom, and grow! Your native son Sachs would have wished it so!52 In his speech at the celebratory dinner late that afternoon Nuremberg’s mayor Baron Otto von Stromer compared the celebration to the singers’ festival of 1861. Various toasts were proposed, including one to Richard

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Wagner and one to “the German middle class as a pillar of the Reich,” as well as one to the preservation of Nuremberg’s historic artifacts and monuments.53 The sentiment about the importance of preserving and passing on the legacy of the past was emphasized by Germany’s shoemakers, who created a poem that included a hymn of praise to Nuremberg, comparing the city to a grandfather who likes to tell his grandchildren stories of the past: Old Noris is that way too; in the very same way She seeks to rear our youth with loving care And again and again she keeps the present day From fleeing too fast from the past we all share. She demands that we respect old age, She’s a book that honors antiquity on every page. Wherever your path in Nuremberg leads, The city reminds you of our ancestors’ deeds.54 Hanover’s shoemakers contributed a nod to Goethe and Wagner as discoverers of Hans Sachs: Richard Wagner’s opera already honored the man, Leaving a monumental musical trace; But today the eye of the German can scan Father Sachs’s honorable and noble face. Every German was happy to do his part, For it was a duty righteous and good. May it teach us the lesson it should: To honor craftsmanship and cultivate art.55 A number of the poems and ditties composed in honor of the occasion also made reference to St. John’s day and Hans Sachs’s supposed status as proclaimer of a new art, a new faith, and a new Germany. If one compares the celebrations of 1874 with the writings of Wackenroder and Tieck four generations earlier, one notes again that what had started as self-critical has become increasingly self-congratulatory: the nineteenth century is congratulating itself for honoring a tradition it sees as having been unjustly ignored in previous centuries. Hans Sachs is explicitly invoked as proclaiming the coming of a new German Reich that is now, in 1874, the German status quo. In two essays written that same year for his book Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen (Untimely Meditations), the young philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche argued against precisely this kind of proleptic misuse of history, which he aptly designated “monumental,” meaning that the building of monuments to the past was a form of self-congratulation in the present. Nietzsche warned against the “extirpation of the German spirit for the sake of the ‘German Reich,’ ” explicitly suggesting that the German military victory in the Franco-Prussian war three years earlier could soon be turned into “a total defeat” on the part of German culture. He feared that

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a hypertrophy of national self-congratulation would replace historical criticism and critical historiography.56 At the same time Nietzsche declared that Germany in the nineteenth century was suffering from an acute “historical sickness,” that is, a neurotic obsession with a selectively misread history that threatened to smother concern for the present and future.57

More Celebrations That same year, 1874, the Berlin writer and publisher Julius Rodenberg, who was to found the liberal journal Deutsche Rundschau in the following year, had written a patriotic travel book entitled In deutschen Landen (In German Lands).58 This book was intended to strengthen the bond between southern and northern Germany in the wake of the creation of a Prussian-dominated German Reich in 1871. Rodenberg’s travelogue contained a description of Nuremberg as a landscape of memory. In the very word “Nuremberg,” Rodenberg wrote, lay “enchantment for the German spirit. Everyone knows it from his childhood on, and everyone preserves a grateful memory of it.”59 Nuremberg, Rodenberg wrote, was a city that put Germans into a dreamlike state, transporting them to bygone times. When one walked through Nuremberg’s streets, he proclaimed, all the names and dates that were mere shadows when one read about them in books suddenly came alive: “They become something with a body, something that we can touch, and this brings them closer to us. We walk along in the quiet moonlight, and they are at our side. Can it have been much different four hundred years ago?”60 There was no other German city like it, Rodenberg wrote: “It preserves for us a shining image of what no description can do justice to and what, once it is gone, not even the cleverest imitation would be able to replace.”61 When Nuremberg observed the four-hundredth anniversary of Hans Sachs’s birth twenty years later, in November of 1894, the celebration was even bigger and more self-congratulatory than it had been for the unveiling of the poet’s monument. This time the festival committee organized elaborate historical floats involving Hans Sachs himself, as well as allegorical representations of the city of Nuremberg, and of art itself. Once again a multitude of civic organizations, and particularly Nuremberg’s men’s singing clubs, were involved. On the evening before the major celebration, at a festive gathering in one of Nuremberg’s restaurants, Nuremberg’s mayor, who had the appropriate name Georg von Schuh, made the selfcongratulation explicit when he ascribed the neglect of Sachs’s memory to a bygone “sad era of the greatest decadence of German customs, the German language, and German poetry, an era that we would gladly erase from the history of the German people.” In contrast, proclaimed von Schuh, today Hans Sachs “has woken up again and will continue to live

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forever. Today all of Germany celebrates him, particularly . . . Nuremberg, the city of his birth.”62 At the same celebration another participant, Dr. Rudolph Genée, lavished praise on the city in which Sachs had lived: “Today’s Nuremberg, too, is still the most beautiful monument to its own history. It was only from such a rich and fruitful soil that so many good things could come forth.”63 During the period of its blossoming, Genée proclaimed, Nuremberg had not simply been “a German city,” it had been “the authentically German city.”64 Just as previous festivals had done, so too this one tried to bring the past alive in word and song. As Nuremberg’s most prominent local historian, the archivist Ernst Mummenhoff described the effect of the historical pageant that paraded through the city, “One could imagine oneself living here more than 300 years ago, so complete was the harmony of the image offered by the streets and the parade.”65 In the festival play that Genée had written, a herald proclaimed Hans Sachs to be a hero of the spirit, one of the creators of the modern German language, and a prophet of the new German Reich: But note well what he hoped for: That we would cultivate the German core. He wanted our love of the fatherland and its ways Which he never ceased to praise, Our love for our cozy, quiet home always To be the source of all civic virtue and pride. . . . If Hans Sachs were with us now at our side, In the new German Reich unified He would find that his dreams have come true as they should: Newly fashioned from age-old wood, It is a ship that is great, proud, and good.66 Gone was any residual disappointment with the Prussian-German empire as a merely “kleindeutsche Lösung” (small-German solution) of the perennial German question; this Prussianized Germany was ahistorically proclaimed to have been the dream of all good German patriots like Hans Sachs from the very beginning. This was a good example of Nietzsche’s warning that in monumental historiography “the past itself is damaged: entire large parts of it are forgotten, scorned, and washed away as if by a gray, unremitting tide.”67 In the course of these celebrations the Nuremberg opera house performed Wagner’s Meistersinger to general acclaim, and at a festival dinner mayor von Schuh, once again conjuring up the utopian image of Nuremberg at the peak of its flowering as “the treasure chest of the German nation,” used Sachs’s words at the end of the opera to urge his fellow citizens to honor their German masters.68 At the same event a schoolteacher, making implicit reference to Julius Langbehn’s popular book Rembrandt als Erzieher (Rembrandt as Educator), which

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had appeared anonymously four years earlier, in 1890, urged Germans to view Hans Sachs as their “Erzieher” (educator). Hans Sachs, after all, was “the image of a true German man.”69 In his own speech on the occasion, Mummenhoff, who was well-known for his costumed portrayals of Hans Sachs, proclaimed the relevance of the shoemaker-poet’s legacy for the present day.70 Press reports about the event noted the significance of its having taken place in the streets of Nuremberg, “where every step and every stone tells a story about Nuremberg’s great past” and where participants could enter “completely into the era of the poet,” as a reporter from Vienna put it.71 Another reporter noted: The historical background of Nuremberg’s truly unique streets, houses, buildings, bridges, merlons and gables, bays and galleries gave the parade an aura that couldn’t be replicated anywhere else. The illusion succeeded completely. That’s exactly the way the imperial processions must have moved through the very same streets.72

By this time the self-congratulatory celebration of a glorious past, complete with historical costumes, pageants, and parades, had become routine in Nuremberg. In 1912, just two years before the outbreak of the First World War, Nuremberg again celebrated a massive civic-aesthetic event with the eighth festival of the federation of German singers, an organization that had been founded fifty years earlier, after the first major singing festival in Nuremberg in 1861. Once again a huge provisional festival hall was built, but this time the festival also took place in the city’s own festival hall on the so-called Luitpoldhain (Luitpold meadow), named after the Bavarian Prince Regent Luitpold, who had succeeded his insane nephews Ludwig II and Otto I as chief of state. It was in this festival hall, several decades later, that the Nazis would open their Reich party rallies. With all these celebrations of Hans Sachs, the city and the nation had not forgotten Dürer. In 1871 Nuremberg celebrated the four-hundredth anniversary of Dürer’s birth; and shortly after the turn of the twentieth century the writer and art historian Ferdinand Avenarius (1856–1923), one of Richard Wagner’s nephews and the editor of a journal called Kunstwart (The Art Watcher), created a patriotic pan-German organization called the “Dürerbund” (Dürer federation) with about 300,000 members and the goal of working toward a “healthy culture.”73 Among the other national festivals celebrated in Nuremberg before the First World War were the twelfth German marksmanship festival in 1897 and the tenth athletic festival in 1903. In addition, Nuremberg received several visits from Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was seen as having a particular connection to the city via his status as successor to the burgraves of the imperial castle — in spite of Nuremberg’s two wars against the Hohenzollerns in the late medieval and early modern period, and the fact that the Hohenzollerns’ castle in Nuremberg, which had been located next to the emperor’s, had

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been burned to the ground, probably by Nuremberg’s citizens themselves, many centuries earlier; the imperial castle was even ahistorically dubbed the “Hohenzollern castle” (Hohenzollernburg). By this time Nuremberg had also made an inroad into children’s literature. In 1913 Margarete Lenk (1841–1917), a teacher from Leipzig, published a children’s story entitled Nürnberg, des Deutschen Reiches Schatzkästlein (Nuremberg, The Treasure Chest of the German Empire) about a boy from Saxony named Hermann who goes to Nuremberg with his uncle in order to tour the city. While in Nuremberg Hermann longs for the past to appear before his eyes. As he explains later to his family: “Oh how wonderful it would be,” I thought, “if this square were to come alive with figures as colorful as the ones I saw in the picture at the city hall.” The more I imagined it, the more glorious it seemed to me, and finally I said out loud:

“Now has come the hour For the days of yore to come to power! Awake, spirit, walk through castle and town, And bring the shining glory down: The Kaiser and his awesome might Proud burghers and their will for right, Rich merchants and everything they own, And pious artists of great renown!74 After Hermann has chanted this rhyme, Noris, the female allegorical representation of the city, appears to him and grants him three wishes. What he wants most of all, of course, is to be transported into the past. First he wishes to see the Holy Roman Emperor himself; then he wishes to see the Volk; and finally he wishes to see Nuremberg’s famous artists. All of these wishes are granted him, at least in his imagination: he gets to see Albrecht Dürer, Hans Sachs, Veit Stoss, and Peter Vischer get together for a drink at Nuremberg’s most famous sausage restaurant, the “Bratwurstglöcklein” (Bratwurst Bell). Schoolbooks were also published for children with excerpts from poetry about Nuremberg and from historical fiction about the city, as well as from historical documents. As the editor of one such collection pointed out in an introduction for teachers, “Where else could one find, at every step, better or clearer tools for teaching about Germany than in Nuremberg, the treasure chest of the nation?”75

“Nuremberg” in the Weimar Republic The invocation of Nuremberg as a capital of the German imaginary did not stop with the First World War and the end of the Reich that celebrants

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from the 1870s to the 1910s had seen prophetically foretold in the cultural flowering of Nuremberg’s Golden Age. In Bayreuth in 1924 the audience rose to sing the German national anthem after the final chorus of Wagner’s opera.76 1928 marked the four-hundredth anniversary of Dürer’s death and the one-hundredth anniversary of the first major city-wide Dürer celebration. In 1928 Nuremberg had a liberal mayor, Hermann Luppe, a man hotly opposed by the far right, including the leader of Nuremberg’s Nazis, Julius Streicher. Luppe began his celebratory remarks on Dürer’s significance by citing the words that Wagner had placed into the mouth of Hans Sachs at the end of Die Meistersinger: “Honor your German masters!” (Ehrt Eure deutschen Meister!). For Luppe, just as for German rightwingers, Dürer was to be a “leader and example in the struggle for the preservation and deepening of our culture,” and he was to “continue his work in us as a spur to the cultivation of everything that is beautiful and noble, to true Germanness and pure humanity.”77 What differentiated these words from those of the reactionaries was that the invocation of true Germanness was softened by the reference to pure humanity; nevertheless, Luppe was promoting the Dürer cult in much the same way that the German right would have. As part of the Dürer celebrations in 1928, almost as a matter of course, Nuremberg’s opera house put on a new production of Wagner’s Meistersinger, premiered on Easter Sunday. At the celebrations that occurred in July of that year, students and schoolchildren gathered at the Dürer statue to hold speeches and sing songs about Dürer. These speeches and songs were just as full of patriotic fervor as the speeches of half a century earlier, but now instead of the self-congratulatory references to an achieved German Reich they contained a critique of the Weimar Republic and the present. Edmund Ries, a student of theology, declared: “We students honor you, O great master Albrecht Dürer, as a model for us all, and we swear to you that in your works we acknowledge the guiding light to a shining future for our greatly suffering nation. It is your simplicity and straightforwardness, your unvarnished truth, your strength, your piety of spirit — your true Germanness that seems to have been lost to us over the course of time.”78 Once again, purportedly, Germany had entered a period of foreign influence and alienation from its true self, and hence many of the speakers at the ceremony invoked Dürer’s love of his homeland as exemplary. It was this insistence on a return to previous glory that had motivated German reactionaries to gather in Nuremberg five years earlier, in September of 1923, for the so-called “Deutscher Tag” (German Day), held at the height of one of the Weimar Republic’s worst economic crises, after the French occupation of Germany’s industrial heartland, the Ruhr region, in January of that year and during the period of massive inflation that rendered the German Reichsmark virtually worthless. The “Deutscher Tag” brought together representatives of most of the country’s major

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right-wing parties, including Alfred Hugenberg’s German National People’s Party (Deutschnationale Volkspartei or DNVP) and Adolf Hitler’s upstart National Socialist German Workers Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), still relatively small and unknown at the time. Two months later, in November of 1923, Hitler would try and fail to take power in Germany during the so-called “beer hall putsch.” The “Deutscher Tag” was held on September 2 because that was the date of the second German Kaiserreich’s major military celebration, a commemoration of the victory over French troops at Sedan in 1870. In preparation for the “Deutscher Tag,” Nuremberg’s right-wing groups urged citizens to participate actively, especially by decorating their homes with flags and banners. Left-wing groups and parties worried about a possible putsch attempt, and Nuremberg’s police insisted that they alone would keep order in the city. Nuremberg’s major newspaper, the right-wing Fränkischer Kurier, published an editorial on 1 September 1923 intended as a “Weckruf zum Deutschen Tag” (Awakening Call for the German Day), and on the day of celebration itself the newspaper declared on its front page: Once again our old Noris is preparing to greet thousands of German brothers from all parts of the German fatherland. The multitudes are coming to Germany’s center, to Nuremberg, where they seek solace in remembrance and strength in the works of our great ancestors. Where is that more possible than in our city with its thousand years of instructive history, where the proud throngs of burghers held high the flag of freedom, where Hans Sachs sang and Dürer’s art held sway?79

The last words were almost a direct quote from Max von Schenkendorf’s 1815 poem “Die deutschen Städte,” written in the wake of the wars of liberation against Napoleon. The implication of this citation on the part of the Fränkischer Kurier was that Germany was in need of a new war of liberation. The newspaper reinforced its demand for liberation of the German spirit, as well as the German state, by including in its coverage other material from the early-nineteenth-century wars of liberation, such as information about the patriotic philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, author of the famous Reden an die deutsche Nation (Speeches to the German Nation, 1806–7), and the patriotic poet Ernst Moritz Arndt, author of the anti-Napoleonic “Katechismus für teutsche Soldaten” (Catechism for German Soldiers, 1812) and of the famous hymn “Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?” (What is the German’s Fatherland? 1813). The very title of the newspaper’s front-page report the following day on the activities of the “Deutscher Tag” was itself a program: “Die Freiheitsbewegung: Eine gewaltige Volkskundgebung” (The Liberation Movement: A Massive Rally by the People). As the newspaper described the event,

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Who can count the throngs that came together on September 1 and 2 in our old, true German Noris? Those who witnessed this mighty demonstration of the idea of German freedom will always remember how powerful the patriotic idea is, especially in the hour of our greatest need. This is not just some movement, this is a movement of the people that could not be stronger or more powerful; it will continue to grow, and one day it will break forth spontaneously.80

However even in the years of the Weimar Republic not everybody in Nuremberg was celebrating the city’s supposed historical authenticity and its late medieval patina. In 1928, the year of the four-hundredth anniversary of Dürer’s death, Wilhelm Kunze, a promising young Nuremberg writer born in 1902, wrote a short book entitled Nürnberg: Schicksal einer Stadt (Nuremberg: The Fate of a City) in which he argued, along Nietzschean lines, that Nuremberg’s obsession with the past was a danger for the future. Just as Nietzsche had argued in his essay “Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben” (On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life) that nineteenth-century Germany was suffering from what he called the “historical sickness,” so too Kunze argued that Nuremberg was gradually being devoured by its own past. The city was positively filled with ghosts, he claimed: “One can not even describe how full of ghosts the atmosphere of the city is. Spiritism has become a popular sport here.”81 The presence of so many ghosts was a threat to the city’s living residents and to any life or growth left in them. Indeed, Kunze argued, Nuremberg was already essentially dead; it was nothing more than a museum of its own history. These words echoed those of Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder over a century earlier, who had already lamented the fact that by 1793 Nuremberg’s artistic monuments were little more than the graveyard of a magnificent past. For Wilhelm Kunze in 1928 Nuremberg’s orientation toward the past made it a particularly appropriate home for the Germanic National Museum. After all, the city itself was by now little more than a museum. Nuremberg’s love affair with its own traditions, Kunze argued, now stood in the way of any progressive urban development, and the city’s residents lived in a kind of otherworldly reverie filled with visions of the past and incapable of a connection to the future: They live in the past; they find themselves drawn to the tempting anachronism of the visible monuments and repelled by the present, which many of them do not love because they can not summon the necessary spiritual strength. Today Nuremberg is dead, preserved as a mummy of its past greatness.82

Historicism was not an effective form of life, Kunze argued; on the contrary, it was a sign of failure to understand the organic, living nature of culture, which could not consist simply of the imitation and glorification of the past. In Nuremberg monumentalism had petrified the spirit of an

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entire city. “Nuremberg’s destiny is in search of its final fulfillment,” he proclaimed. “The path to the end can not be completed without sacrifices.”83 Kunze reminded his readers that it was in Nuremberg a century earlier, in the very year of the three-hundredth anniversary of Dürer’s death and hence of the foundation of the mass culture of Nuremberg historicism, that Kaspar Hauser, the man without language or memory, had one day been discovered; Kaspar Hauser, the man without human culture, was perhaps a needed corrective to Nuremberg’s monumental memorializing. Nuremberg needed, perhaps, to learn to be a little more like Kaspar Hauser, the primitive man. It needed to learn how to forget.

Notes 1 Die Meistersinger und Richard Wagner: Die Rezeptionsgeschichte einer Oper von 1868 bis heute, exhibition catalogue (Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 1981), 84. Original German: “in dem Ihnen so benachbarten Bayreuth lebt ja Derjenige, welcher Ihrem Feste die krönende Weihe ertheilen kann.” 2

Original German and most of the translation from Stewart Spencer, “Wagner’s Nuremberg,” Cambridge Opera Journal 4, no. 1:21–41; here, 39. From Wagner, “Wollen wir hoffen?” in Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, 4th ed. (Leipzig: C. F. W. Siegel, 1907), 10:118–36; here, 120. Original German: “Meine Hoffnung auf Nürnberg selbst täuschte mich . . . ganz und gar.” 3

Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1982), 46–47.

4

Twain, A Tramp Abroad, 48.

5

Richard Wagner, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg/Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (London: John Calder, 1983), 50. In German: “Der kurze, lang und überlang Ton, / die Schreibpapier-, Schwarz-Dinten-Weis.” English translation by Frederick Jameson, revised by Norman Feasey and Gordon Kember. This is a duallanguage edition, and all English-language and most German-language citations from the opera will be from this source. Since Wagner’s German-language stage directions are not included in this edition, however, such citations will be from Richard Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, ed. Wilhelm Zentner (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1997). 6

Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie, oder Griechenthum und Pessimismus, in Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, vol. 3.1 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1972), 3–152; here, 143; in English: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, in The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 29–144; here, 137. Original German: “die Wiedergeburt des deutschen Mythus.” Emphasis Nietzsche’s. 7

See Gerald Strauss, Nuremberg in the Sixteenth Century: City Politics and Life Between Middle Ages and Modern Times (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1976), 50.

8 Hans Rudolf Vaget notes the “obfuscation of the role of money throughout the opera.” See Vaget, “The ‘Metapolitics’ of Die Meistersinger: Wagner’s Nuremberg

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as Imagined Community,” in Searching for Common Ground: Diskurse zur deutschen Identität 1750–1871, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000), 269–82; here, 277. Peter Uwe Hohendahl writes that the strength of towns like Nuremberg “came from their highly developed international trade, but there is no sign of commerce” in Die Meistersinger: Peter Uwe Hohendahl, “Reworking History: Wagner’s German Myth of Nuremberg,” in Re-Reading Wagner, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Jost Hermand (Madison: Monatshefte, 1993), 39–60; here, 54. 9 Cited in Thomas S. Grey, “Wagner’s Die Meistersinger as National Opera (1868–1945),” in Music and German National Identity, ed. Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002), 78–104; here, 88. 10

Hohendahl, “Reworking History,” 42.

11

Cited in Vaget, “Wagner’s Nuremberg,” 275. Original German: “des fühlbaren Werdens der deutschen Einigung.” 12

König Ludwig II and Richard Wagner, Briefwechsel, ed. Otto Strobel, 5 vols. (Karlsruhe: G. Braun, 1936), 4:33. Translation from Spencer, “Wagner’s Nuremberg,” 38. Original German: “dazu müssen wir ihnen hell und deutlich, mit goldenen Flammenbuchstaben hinstellen, was das wirklich Deutsche, was der ächte deutsche Geist ist: eben der Geist des Aechten, Wahrhaften, Unverfälschten.” 13 König Ludwig II and Richard Wagner, Briefwechsel, 2:103. Most of the translation is from Spencer, “Wagner’s Nuremberg,” 38. see also Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington, eds. and trans., Selected Letters of Richard Wagner (London: J. M. Dent, 1987), 708. Original German: “Wissen Sie, was jetzt dieses wunderliche, alte Nürnberg mir heisst? Es ist die Stätte des ‘Kunstwerkes der Zukunft,’ der Archimedes-Punkt, auf welchem Wir die träge Welt des versumpften deutschen Geistes aus ihrer Axe heben wollen!” 14 Timothy McFarland, “Wagner’s Nuremberg,” in Wagner, The Mastersingers/Die Meistersinger, 27–34; here, 33. 15

McFarland, “Wagner’s Nuremberg,” 33.

16

König Ludwig II and Richard Wagner, Briefwechsel, 2:78. Translation from Spencer, “Wagner’s Nuremberg,” 36. See also Spencer and Millington, Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, 701. Original German: “wohlerhalten wie ein edler Schmuck.” 17

Original German and most of the translation from Spencer, “Wagner’s Nuremberg,” 39; from Wagner, “Wollen wir hoffen?” 119–20. Original German: “mit dieser Arbeit ein dem deutschen Publikum bisher nur stümperhaft noch vorgeführtes Abbild seiner eigenen wahren Natur darzubieten.” 18 Johann Ludwig Deinhardstein, Hans Sachs: Dramatisches Gedicht (Vienna: Carl Armbruster, 1829), 123. Original German: “Heil Kaiser Max! / Heil Habsburg! Heil für immer!” 19

See Peter Uwe Hohendahl, “Reworking History,” 48.

20

Wagner, The Mastersingers/Die Meistersinger, 125. Original German: “Heil Sachs! Hans Sachs! / Heil Nürnbergs teurem Sachs!” 21 Wagner, The Mastersingers/Die Meistersinger, 125. In German, Wagner’s stage directions here read: “Pogner läßt sich, wie huldigend, auf ein Knie vor Sachs

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nieder. Die Meistersinger deuten auf Sachs als auf ihr Haupt” (Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, ed. Zentner, 105). 22 Deinhardstein, Hans Sachs, v. Original German: “in tiefster Unterthänigkeit”; “Ihrer Majestät der Kaiserin von Oesterreich, Königin von Ungarn und Böhmen u.u.u. Caroline Auguste.” 23

Wagner, The Mastersingers/Die Meistersinger, 58. Original German: “An Höfen, wie an nied’rer Statt, / des bitt’ren Tadels ward ich satt, / dass nur auf Schacher und Geld / sein Merk’ der Bürger stellt’. / Dass wir im weiten deutschen Reich / die Kunst einzig noch pflegen, / d’ran dünkt’ ihnen wenig gelegen: / Doch wie uns das zur Ehre gereich’, / und dass mit hohem Muth / wir schätzen, was schön und gut, / was werth die Kunst und was sie gilt, / das ward ich der Welt zu zeigen gewillt.”

24

Wagner, The Mastersingers/Die Meistersinger, 125. Original German: “Verachtet mir die Meister nicht/und ehrt mir ihre Kunst!” / “Nicht euren Ahnen, noch so werth, / nicht euren Wappen, Speer, noch Schwert, / dass ihr ein Dichter seid, / ein Meister Euch gefreit, / dem dankt ihr heut’ eu’r höchstes Glück.”

25

Wagner, The Mastersingers/Die Meistersinger, 125. I have modified the translation of the last line to more accurately reflect the nationalism of Wagner’s original German: “Dass uns’re Meister sie gepflegt, / grad’ recht nach ihrer Art, / nach ihrem Sinne treu gehegt, / das hat sie ächt bewahrt: / blieb sie nicht adlig, wie zur Zeit, / wo Höf’ und Fürsten sie geweiht, / im Drang der schlimmen Jahr’ / blieb sie doch deutsch und wahr.”

26

Wagner, The Mastersingers/Die Meistersinger, 125. Case ending of the word “wälsch” corrected before the word “Tand.” I have modified the translation of the second, third, and fifth lines to make it clear that Sachs is referring not to a military but to a cultural invasion. Original German: “Habt acht! Uns drohen üble Streich’: — / zerfällt erst deutsches Volk und Reich, / in falscher welscher Majestät / kein Fürst dann mehr sein Volk versteht; / und wälschen Dunst mit wälschem Tand / sie pflanzen uns in’s deutsche Land. / Was deutsch und ächt wüsst’ keiner mehr, / lebt’s nicht in deutscher Meister Ehr.’ ”

27 Cited in T. C. W. Blanning, “Frederick the Great and German Culture,” in Royal and Republican Sovereignty in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Memory of Ragnhild Hatton, ed. Robert Oresko, G. C. Gibbs, and H. M. Scott (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997), 527–50; here, 533. 28 König Ludwig II and Richard Wagner, Briefwechsel, 4:16. Cited in Spencer, “Wagner’s Nuremberg,” 37. Original German: “wie nachtheilig der römische Staatsgedanke bereits auf das Gedeihen der deutschen Völker gewirkt hatte.” 29

Wagner, The Mastersingers/Die Meistersinger, 97. In German: “Lobet Gott den Herrn!”

30

Wagner, The Mastersingers/Die Meistersinger, 84. Original German: “Als Eva aus dem Paradies / von Gott dem Herrn verstossen, / gar schuf ihr Schmerz der harte Kies / an ihrem Fuss, dem blossen.”

31 Wagner, The Mastersingers/Die Meistersinger, 85. Original German: “O Eva! Eva! Schlimmes Weib! / Das hast du am Gewissen, / dass ob der Füss’ am Menschenleib / jetzt Engel schustern müssen. / Bliebst du im Paradies, / da gab es keinen Kies / Ob deiner jungen Missethat, / handthier’ ich jetzt mit Ahl’ und Draht . . .”

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32 Wagner, The Mastersingers/Die Meistersinger, 85. Original German: “Ich fürcht’, uns dreien / gilt es gleich.” 33

Wagner, The Mastersingers/Die Meistersinger, 101. I have altered the translation of the third line to make it clear that Sachs sees Nuremberg as the center of Germany. Original German: “Wie friedsam treuer Sitten, / getrost in That und Werk, / liegt nicht in Deutschland’s Mitten / mein liebes Nürenberg!”

34

Wagner, The Mastersingers/Die Meistersinger, 59–60.

35

Grey, “Wagner’s Die Meistersinger,” 81.

36

Hohendahl refers to Sachs as “the pivotal figure in all three constellations.” Hohendahl, “Reworking History,” 52. 37 See particularly Paul Lawrence Rose, Wagner: Race and Revolution (London: Faber & Faber, 1992); Marc A. Weiner, Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1995); Barry Millington, “Nuremberg Trial: Is There Anti-Semitism in Die Meistersinger?” Cambridge Opera Journal 3 (1991): 247–60; and David J. Levin, “Reading Beckmesser Reading: Antisemitism and Aesthetic Practice in The Mastersingers of Nuremberg,” New German Critique 69 (Fall 1996): 127–46. 38 Dieter Borchmeyer, Wagner: Theory and Theatre, trans. Stewart Spencer (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993), 408. Cited in Vaget, “Wagner’s Nuremberg,” 273. 39

Millington, “Nuremberg Trial,” 257, 247.

40

David J. Levin, “Reading Beckmesser Reading,” 135.

41

Hans R. Vaget, “Wagner’s Nuremberg,” 280. David B. Dennis, “ ‘The Most German of all German Operas’: Die Meistersinger through the Lens of the Third Reich,” in Wagner’s Meistersinger: Performance, History, Representation, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi (Rochester: U of Rochester P, 2003), 98–119; here, 103. 42 Thomas S. Grey also makes this point in “Wagner’s Die Meistersinger,” 97–98. Dennis clearly demonstrates the lack of evidence for any Nazi reception of Beckmesser as Jewish in “ ‘The Most German of all German Operas,’ ” 100–103. 43

See also Hans R. Vaget, “Sixtus Beckmesser — A ‘Jew in the Brambles’?” The Opera Quarterly 12 (Autumn 1995): 35–46.

44 Wagner, The Mastersingers/Die Meistersinger, 125. My translation. I have opted for accuracy, not poetry in this passage, which is Wagner’s central programmatic message for the opera. In German: “zerging’ in Dunst / das heil’ge röm’sche Reich, / uns bliebe gleich / die heil’ge deutsche Kunst!” 45 Arthur Groos, “Constructing Nuremberg: Typological and Proleptic Communities in Die Meistersinger,” 19th Century Music 16 (Summer 1992): 18–34; esp. 26. 46

Cited in Grey, “Wagner’s Die Meistersinger,” 85, n. 10, and 87, n. 15. Original German: “innersten Kern des deutschen Wesens . . . in seinem Werk”; “der Nation das Vollbewußtsein ihrer selbst und der tiefinnersten Zusammengehörigkeit zueinander . . . erwecken.”

47 Ernst Karl Julius Lützelberger, addendum to Hans Sachs: Sein Leben und seine Dichtung — Eine Festgabe zur Errichtung des Denkmals in Nürnberg am 24. Juni 1874 [Nebst einem Anhange: Geschichte des Denkmals mit einer Abbildung desselben

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und der Beschreibung der Enthüllungsfeierlichkeiten] (Nuremberg: Hermann Ballhorn, 1874), 14. Original German: “ein uralter Festtag des deutschen Volkes”; “Johannes und Hans [waren] ein und derselbe Name.” 48 Lützelberger, addendum to Hans Sachs, 14. Original German: “ein Urbild und Prophet des ächten deutschen Bürgerthums”; “ein Prophet des neuen deutschen Reiches.” 49 Lützelberger, addendum to Hans Sachs, 23. Original German: “in ihm stellt sich uns die Verkörperung des heutigen Ringens und Strebens schon als begonnen dar.” 50 Lützelberger, addendum to Hans Sachs, 29. Original German: “zur Stiftung eines deutschen Reiches mit einem Kaiser. . . .” 51

Lützelberger, addendum to Hans Sachs, 27. Original German: “Gruß Dir, du alte Handwerksstadt / Von Freunden aus dem Pommernland. / Viel Männer, stark an Geist und That, / Gabst du dem deutschen Vaterland.”

52 Lützelberger, addendum to Hans Sachs, 28. Emphasis in the original. Original German: “Noch einmal habe ich geschwungen / Im Reifen ein gefülltes Glas, / Und von Begeisterung durchdrungen / Tönt es: Dir Nürnberg bring ich das! / Du Perle ächter deutscher Sitte, / Die ihre Meister würdig ehrt, / Du wackre Stadt, in deren Mitte / Wohl jeder Fremde gern verkehrt. / Hoch Nürnberg! grüne, blühe, wachs, / Du Heimath unsers deutschen Sachs!” 53

Lützelberger, addendum to Hans Sachs, 32–33. Original German: “das deutsche Bürgerthum als Stütze des Reichs.” 54 Lützelberger, addendum to Hans Sachs, 35. Original German: “So auch die alte Noris; gleicher Art / Sucht sie die Jugend sorgsam aufzuziehen / Und fort und fort wehrt sie der Gegenwart / Leichtfertig dem Vergang’nen zu entfliehen. / Ehrfurcht dem Alter zwingt sie Jedem ab, / Ihr ganzes Sein ist deß’ ein ew’ges Mahnen, / Wohin du setzest Deinen Wanderstab / Erinnert sie Dich an das Thun der Ahnen.” 55

Lützelberger, addendum to Hans Sachs, 39. Original German: “Schon Richard Wagner’s Meistersinger haben / Ein musikalisch Denkmal ihm erricht’t, / Doch heut’ kann sich des Deutschen Auge laben / An Vater Sachs’ ehrwürdigem Gesicht. / Ganz Deutschland reicht’ zum Denkmal gern die Gaben, / Erkannte es als höchste Ehrenpflicht, / Und Mit- und Nachwelt soll dies Bildniß lehren: / Die Kunst zu pflegen und das Handwerk ehren.”

56 Friedrich Nietzsche, David Strauss der Bekenner und der Schriftsteller, in Colli and Montinari, Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 3.1:153–238; here, 156, 155; English translation from Friedrich Nietzsche, “David Strauss the Confessor and the Writer,” in Unfashionable Observations, trans. Richard T. Gray (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995), 3–81; here, 5. I have changed the punctuation of Gray’s translation. Original German: “Extirpation des deutschen Geistes zu Gunsten des ‘deutschen Reiches’ ”; “eine völlige Niederlage.” Emphasis Nietzsche’s. 57 Nietzsche, Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben, in Colli and Montinari, Nietzsche Werke, 3.1:239–330; here, 325. English translation from Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Utility and Liability of History for Life,” in Nietzsche, Unfashionable Observations, trans. Gray, 83–167; here, 163. Original German: “historische Krankheit.” Emphasis Nietzsche’s.

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58 Julius Rodenberg, 1831–1914, was born Julius Levy but changed his name to that of his hometown in Hessen in 1855 because of widespread anti-Semitism. 59

Julius Rodenberg, In deutschen Landen: Skizzen und Ferienreisen (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1874), 278. Original German: “ein Zauber für das deutsche Gemüt. Jeder kennt es von Kindheit an, und jeder bewahrt ihm ein dankbares Erinnern.”

60

Rodenberg, In deutschen Landen, 280. Original German: “sie nehmen etwas Körperliches und Handgreifliches an, was sie uns näher bringt. Wir gehen in der stillen Mondnacht umher, und sie sind an unserer Seite. Kann es wohl viel anders gewesen sein vor vierhundert Jahren?”

61 Rodenberg, In deutschen Landen, 282. Original German: “es enthält uns ein glänzendes Bild dessen, was keine Schilderung uns vormalen und, wenn es einmal dahingegangen, keine noch so geschickte Nachahmung zu ersetzen im Stande wäre.” 62 Ernst von Mummenhoff, Das Hans Sachsfest in Nürnberg am 4. und 5. November 1894 (Nuremberg: Selbstverlag der Festleitung, 1899), 73. Original German: “traurigen Zeit des größten Verfalls deutscher Art, deutscher Sprache und Dichtung, welche wir am liebsten aus der Geschichte des deutschen Volkes streichen möchten”; “ist . . . wieder erwacht und wird für alle Zeiten fortleben. Heute huldigt ihm Alldeutschland und insbesondere . . . seine Geburtsstadt Nürnberg.” 63 Mummenhoff, Das Hans Sachsfest, 74. Original German: “auch das heutige Nürnberg ist noch das schönste Denkmal seiner Geschichte. Nur aus solchem reichen und fruchtbaren Boden konnten so viele Erscheinungen hervorgehen. . . .” 64 Mummenhoff, Das Hans Sachsfest, 74. Original German: “eine deutsche Stadt”; “die eigentlich deutsche Stadt.” Emphasis in the original. 65 Mummenhoff, Das Hans Sachsfest, 104. Original German: “Man konnte sich um mehr als 300 Jahre zurückträumen, so vollständig war die Harmonie des Bildes, das Straßen und Festzug darboten.” 66 Mummenhoff, Das Hans Sachsfest, 141. Original German: “Doch merket auch, was er gewollt: Daß deutsche Art man pflegen sollt’ / Und daß die Lieb’ zum Vaterland, / Das er so hochpreiswürdig fand, / Zum engumschloßnen stillen Heim / Sei aller Bürgertugend Keim . . . / Ja, wär er heut’ bei uns, der Sachs, / Im neuen, im geeinten Reich, / Er fänd, was er ersehnte, gleich. / Gezimmert neu aus altem Holz / Ist es ein Schiff, gar groß und stolz. . . .” 67

Nietzsche, Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben, 258; Nietzsche, “On the Utility and Liability of History for Life,” 100. Original German: “leidet die Vergangenheit selbst Schaden: ganze grosse Theile derselben werden vergessen, verachtet, und fliessen fort wie eine graue ununterbrochene Fluth.” Emphasis Nietzsche’s. 68

Mummenhoff, Das Hans Sachsfest, 176, 178. Original German: “das Schatzkästlein deutscher Nation.”

69 Mummenhoff, Das Hans Sachsfest, 180. Original German: “das Bild eines echt deutschen Mannes.” 70

Michael Diefenbacher and Rudolf Endres, eds., Stadtlexikon Nürnberg (Nuremberg: W. Tümmels, 2000), 710.

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71 Mummenhoff, Das Hans Sachsfest, 271. Original German: “wo jeder Schritt, jeder Stein von Nürnbergs großer Vergangenheit erzählt”; “ganz in die Zeit des Dichters.” 72 Mummenhoff, Das Hans Sachsfest, 280. Original German: “Aber der geschichtliche Hintergrund der ganz einzigartigen Nürnberger Straßen, Häuser, Bauten, Brücken, Zinnen und Giebel, Erker und Chöre gab diesem Festzug doch ein Gepräge, wie es sonst nirgends wiederkehren kann. Die Illusion gelang vollständig. So müssen die Kaiserzüge sich in denselben Gassen bewegt haben. . . .” 73 Cited in Helmut Beer, “Warum Nürnberg sich so gut als ‘Stadt der Reichsparteitage’ eignete,” in recht extrem.de: Auseinandersetzung mit Nationalsozialismus und Rechtsextremismus — Konzepte und Projekte der politischen und historischen Bildung, ed. Bernd Kammerer and Anja Prölß-Kammerer (Nuremberg: emwe-Verlag, 2002), 63–87; here, 74. 74 Margarete Lenk, Nürnberg, des Deutschen Reiches Schatzkästlein (1913; repr. Zwickau: Johannes Herrmann, 1922), 32. Original German: “ ‘O wie schön wär’s doch,’ dachte ich, ‘wenn sich jetzt dieser Platz belebte mit so bunten Gestalten, wie ich sie auf dem Bilde im Rathaus sah.’ Je länger ich mir’s ausmalte, um so herrlicher erschien es mir, und endlich sagte ich ganz laut: ‘Jetzt ist die rechte, gute Stunde, / Für dich, du Geist der alten Zeit! / Auf, mach’ in Burg und Stadt die Runde, / Weck’ auf die goldne Herrlichkeit: / Die hehre Kaiserpracht / Das stolze Bürgertum, / Des reichen Kaufherrn Macht, / Des frommen Künstlers Ruhm!’ ” 75

M. Obergaßner, ed., “Beilage für den Lehrer,” in Nürnberg im Mittelalter (Nuremberg: Carl Koch, 1925), 1–4; here, 1. Original German: “Wo fänden sich wohl auf Schritt und Tritt bessere und anschaulichere Beispiele für den Deutschkunde-Unterricht als in Nürnberg, dem Schatzkästlein Deutschlands?” 76


77

Bericht über die Veranstaltungen und den Verlauf des Dürerjahres Nürnberg 1928 (Nuremberg: Stadtrat, 1928), 34. Original German: “Führer und Beispiel im Kampf um Erhaltung und Vertiefung unserer Kultur”; “in uns weiterwirken als Triebkraft zur Pflege alles Schönen und Edlen, zu echtem Deutschtum, zu reiner Menschlichkeit. . . .” 78 Bericht über die Veranstaltungen, 85. Original German: “so ehren wir Studenten Dir, großer Meister Albrecht Dürer, als ein Vorbild für uns alle und geloben Dir, in Deinen Werken den Wegzeiger zu erkennen zu einer leuchtenden Zukunft unseres schwer heimgesuchten Volkes. Es ist die Einfachheit und Schlichtheit, das Kernig-Wahre, das Kraftvolle, die Frömmigkeit des Gemüts: eben das echte Deutschtum, das uns im Laufe der Zeit verlorengegangen zu sein scheint.” 79

Fränkischer Kurier, 2 September 1923, 1. Original German: “Unsere alte Noris rüstet sich wieder einmal zum Empfang Tausender Deutscher Brüder aus allen Teilen des deutschen Vaterlands. Sie strömen nach Deutschlands Mitten, nach Nürnberg, und wollen sich laben am Born der Erinnerung und Stärkung holen an den Werken unserer großen Ahnen. Wo ist das besser möglich, als in unserer Stadt mit ihrer tausendjährigen lehrreichen Geschichte, wo der Bürger stolze Schar das Banner der Freiheit hochgehalten, wo Hans Sachs gesungen und Dürers Kunst gewaltet hat?”

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“Die Freiheitsbewegung — eine gewaltige Volkskundgebung,” Fränkischer Kurier, 3 September 1923, 1. Original German: “Wer zählt die Menschen, die am 1. und 2. September in unserer alten treudeutschen Noris zum Deutschen Tag zusammenkamen? Die Zeugen dieser machtvollen Kundgebung für den deutschen Freiheitsgedanken werden ewig daran denken, wie zündend der vaterländische Gedanke gerade in unserer tiefsten Not ist. Das ist nicht irgendeine Bewegung, das ist eine Volksbewegung, wie sie gewaltiger und mächtiger nicht sein kann; sie wird anwachsen und eines Tages spontan losbrechen.” Emphasis in the original.

81

Wilhelm Kunze, Nürnberg: Schicksal einer Stadt (Nuremberg: Ernst Frommann & Sohn, 1928), 19. Original German: “Es läßt sich nicht beschreiben, wie sehr die Atmosphäre der Stadt mit Gespenstern beladen ist. Spiritismus ist hier eine volkstümliche Angelegenheit gewesen.” 82 Kunze, Nürnberg, 17. Original German: “Sie leben in der Vergangenheit, sie fühlen sich angezogen von der lockenden Zeitfremdheit der äußeren Denkmale, fühlen sich abgezogen von der Gegenwart, die viele nur darum nicht lieben, weil sie die nötige Seelenkraft nicht aufbringen. Nürnberg ist heute tot, als Mumie vergangener Größe bewahrt.” 83 Kunze, Nürnberg, 19. Original German: “Das Schicksal Nürnbergs sucht seine letzte Erfüllung”; “Nicht ohne Opfer kann der Weg zu Ende gegangen werden.”

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4: Empire of Longing

W

HEN WILHELM KUNZE WISHED FOR a little more forgetfulness and a little less self-consciousness about Nuremberg’s cultural heritage, he was probably not thinking of the Nazis, who, in 1927, had held their third party rally in Nuremberg — the first two were held in Munich and Weimar respectively — and who, less than five years later, were to be given control of all Germany. Since the Nazis’ rise to power, there have been two diametrically opposed ways of looking at their relationship to the German cultural tradition. The first, and most common, has been to view them as primitive barbarians, completely untouched by a love of culture. This is what the eminent German exile and Frankfurt School sociologist Theodor W. Adorno meant when, in an essay published in 1949, he spoke of the Nazis as “savage hordes” filled with an unreasoning anger and “envy of Kultur” because they felt excluded from it.1 Victor Klemperer, a scholar of Romance languages who survived what the Nazis called the “Third Reich” in Dresden even though the Nazis persecuted him as a Jew, was subscribing to a substantially similar viewpoint when, in a book published shortly after the end of the Second World War, he described the Nazis as “the most extreme opposite of the basic views of the German classical era.”2 Such a view of the Nazis as enemies of traditional German culture is comforting, at least to many Germans, because it leaves that culture, its values, and its implied assumptions about German cultural superiority unquestioned. However from the beginning there has been another way of looking at the Nazis: not as primitive barbarians but as eminently modern Europeans who, far from breaking with the German cultural tradition, had reaffirmed or even fulfilled it. It was this approach to the Nazis that Thomas Mann was thinking of when he allowed Serenus Zeitblom, the first-person narrator of his great postwar novel Doktor Faustus (1947), to declare that the Nazis, far from being “something quite foreign to the nature of our people, [something] forced upon us,” in fact represented in some ways the culmination and embodiment of German cultural development, and that even the greatest representatives of German culture already bore within them the traces of the horrors later wrought by the Nazis.3 The Swiss playwright Max Frisch was making the same point even more directly when, in 1949, he reminded his readers that one of the most profound shocks of the Nazi period had been the recognition that Reinhard Heydrich, the murderous Nazi governor of Bohemia and one of the architects of the genocide of European Jews, had been “a distinguished and very sensitive musician,

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who could hold forth with spirit and true connoisseurship, even with love, on Bach, Händel, Beethoven, Bruckner.”4 In Frisch’s view the paradox of Heydrich’s murderous brutality coupled with his love of music represented the Nazi paradox more generally: by implication, one could make the same point about any number of figures in the Nazi hierarchy, not all of whom could adequately be described as brutish primitives. But quite aside from the precise outlook of any particular Nazi leader, Frisch argued, Nazism itself had been a product of German culture, and German culture could therefore not be conceived of as free of guilt.5 Although these two views of the Nazis are diametrically opposed to each other, there is no necessary reason to choose one over the other. “The Nazis” is, after all, an abstraction; concretely, there were literally millions of members of the Nazi party, each with his or her own relationship to the German cultural tradition. Certainly each of the major Nazi leaders had his own approach: propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, for instance, was a highly educated man with a doctorate and an appreciation even of modern art, including the much-maligned Expressionism otherwise denounced by the Nazi Party as “degenerate art” (entartete Kunst), whereas SS-leader Heinrich Himmler was primarily devoted to anthropological evidence of past Germanic greatness, and Hermann Göring, head of the Gestapo, used art mostly for his own self-aggrandizement and enrichment.6 Hitler himself was a fervent admirer of some aspects of the German tradition, notably Wagner, but he knew very little about other major figures, such as Goethe or even Nietzsche. Lynn H. Nicholas has characterized his artistic tastes as “petit bourgeois.”7 Although the Nazi party was totalitarian in the sense that it sought to exercise total control over the politics, culture, and even daily life of Germans, and although it sought to recast Germany in its own mold, it was a highly complex organization characterized by rivalries and infighting, and even, at times, chaos.8 Adolf Hitler was of course the “Führer” (leader) who made ultimate decisions and possessed unquestioned power, but he did not always make his wishes known directly, and he usually allowed his chief lieutenants a good deal of latitude. Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect and the man responsible for the Nazis’ elaborate construction plans for the immense party rally grounds in Nuremberg, records in his memoirs that Hitler loved Wagner and took Nuremberg and its cultural traditions seriously enough to make Die Meistersinger one of the opening events of the Nazi party rallies that took place every year in Nuremberg from 1933 to 1938. Speer recalls that after finding the Nuremberg opera house largely empty for the gala performance in 1933, when the Nazis were celebrating their rise to power, the annoyed Hitler ordered all of his chief lieutenants to attend the following year’s performance. But, as Speer also notes, Hitler was pragmatic enough to rescind his order in 1935, after it had become obvious that many of the supposed elite defenders of German culture, whom Speer refers to as

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“diamonds in the rough,” were falling asleep or showing their boredom during the performance.9 Hitler may well have been able to whistle the entire overture to Die Meistersinger by heart, as his friend Ernst Hanfstaengl later reported; but it is unlikely that most of his followers could.10 Frederic Spotts has suggested that “just about the only person in the party who liked Wagner’s operas was Hitler himself.”11 There is no question that Wagner meant a great deal to Hitler: he said as much on many occasions, most prominently in his autobiography Mein Kampf (1925), where he wrote that from the moment he saw his first Wagner opera, Lohengrin, he was captivated. “My youthful enthusiasm for the master of Bayreuth knew no bounds,” Hitler wrote. “Again and again I was drawn to his works.”12 It is doubtful, however, whether Wagner and his difficult operas also meant a great deal to all of Hitler’s followers.13 Sebastian Haffner claimed in 1941 that over fifty percent of the German population were devoted Wagnerians, and “that the Wagnerian Hitler — Wagnerian in more than a musical and aesthetic sense — met with a ready response from the German Wagnerians.”14 Haffner’s evaluation is probably wrong, since Wagner is and was a tough nut to crack and has never been popular with ordinary people anywhere, including Germany. Such judgments may betray a conflation of the concepts popularity and significance, which do not mean and have never meant the same thing. For Wagner to be significant, it is not necessary for him to be popular; nor would popularity necessarily make him significant. If Hitler was a devoted Wagnerian who believed, according to Hermann Rauschning, that the composer was “the supreme prophetic figure among the Germans,” and “had discovered, with almost hysterical excitement, that everything written by that great man . . . was in agreement with his own innermost, subconscious, dormant conviction,” then it may not even matter whether millions of other Germans were similarly under the master’s spell.15

Why Nuremberg? In 1933 Hitler declared that Nuremberg would, in perpetuity, be the city of the Nazi party rallies. Exactly why he made this declaration, and what he was thinking when he did so, is open to interpretation. There are two different ways of looking at the issue. The first and most probable explanation for Hitler’s choice of Nuremberg lies in the long cultural history of the city and its images. Uppermost in Hitler’s mind would probably have been Wagner and Die Meistersinger, which Joseph Goebbels himself, in a 1933 broadcast from the Bayreuth festival, called “the incarnation of our national identity,” a work with an unparalleled relevance to “our time and its spiritual and intellectual tensions.”16 As the Nazi Wagnerian Richard Wilhelm Stock

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wrote in a 1938 volume commemorating the relationship between Wagner and Nuremberg, “none of the maestro’s other powerful creations . . . expresses as much feeling and as many of the high values of the people as Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. In this work poetry and sound come together in glorious harmony to create a gigantic panorama of the German people.”17 In Stock’s view, Hitler’s reverence for Wagner and his work expressed itself most forcefully in Hitler’s decision to make Wagner’s opera the “festival play of the Reich party rallies,” a decision connecting Wagner and the city of the Nazi rallies “for all time.”18 Indeed, Stock wrote, “by elevating Die Meistersinger” to this status, “the political genius Adolf Hitler has erected a permanent monument to the artistic genius Richard Wagner in the city of the mastersingers.”19 In the view of Winifred Wagner, Richard Wagner’s daughter-in-law and the widow of Wagner’s son Siegfried, who had died in 1930, Hitler’s decision to use Wagner’s opera “to give the Reich party rally its celebratory aura every year” had a “profound meaning,” since Wagner himself had, she argued, seen Nuremberg as the true home of German culture.20 If one studies Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg closely while keeping Nazi pageantry in mind, one cannot fail to be struck by the similarity between the celebration of Hans Sachs at the end of the opera (“Heil Dir, Hans Sachs!”) and the celebration of Hitler at the Nazi party rallies and elsewhere (“Heil Hitler!” and so on). “Heil” is not and was not in 1933 a normal way for Germans to greet each other; it was an intentional archaism — and also a Wagnerism, although Wagner did not invent it — referring back to an imagined historical way of greeting in the supposedly glorious past. The celebration of Germanness and the unity of the people with which Wagner’s opera ends was surely on Hitler’s mind when he chose Nuremberg as the city of the Nazi rallies, which were intended precisely as such a celebration of Germanness and the unity of the people. The pageantry with which the last act of Die Meistersinger ends takes place on the outskirts of the city, and most of the pageantry of Hitler’s party rallies also occurred outside the walls of the old imperial city, in Speer’s newly built rally grounds. Productions of Die Meistersinger during the years 1933–45 were sometimes quite explicit in connecting the end of the opera with the pageantry of the Third Reich generally and the Nuremberg rallies specifically. On 21 March 1933, to commemorate the official inauguration of the Third Reich on the so-called “Day of Potsdam,” Wilhelm Furtwängler conducted a special performance of the opera in Berlin’s Staatsoper (state opera) at the command of and in the presence of Hitler himself.21 During the “Awake” chorus in the final scene of the opera, when Wagner’s stage directions call for the townspeople of Nuremberg to celebrate Hans Sachs, the singers instead were instructed to turn toward Adolf Hitler, thus transforming Wagner’s fiction into political reality.22 In the 1935 production in Nuremberg, which featured costumes and set designs commissioned and

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vetted by Hitler and designed by Benno von Arent, an SS-man known later as the “Reichsbühnenbildner” (set designer to the Reich), the final scene looked as if both costumes and set had been taken directly from Nazi uniforms and Speer’s architecture for the Nuremberg rally grounds. This Nazi production was to serve as a model for many later productions, including the one created in the same year for the ceremonial opening of the “Deutsches Opernhaus” (German opera house) in Berlin.23 In 1942 and 1943 Die Meistersinger was the only opera performed during the wartime Bayreuth festivals, and actual SS troops functioned as singers and musicians.24 It is even likely that Hitler — whom Joachim Köhler has described as having “‘lived’ Wagner’s work” and having seen himself as a Wagnerian hero — imagined himself as a kind of Hans-Sachs-like figure, bringing the German people together, warning them against foreign enemies, saving them from domestic ones, and receiving their deserved adulation.25 As Köhler writes, “Hitler saw the world through Wagner’s spectacles.”26 Sebastian Haffner has suggested that the “staging of scenes out of Wagner’s operas” was one of Hitler’s top three goals.27 Such judgments may well be exaggerations; after all, if Hitler had been nothing but a particularly fanatical Wagnerian, he would not have had the impact on history that he unfortunately did have. There can, however, be no doubt that Hitler’s political and cultural thinking were profoundly influenced by Wagner; Hitler himself is reported to have proclaimed: “Whoever wants to understand National Socialist Germany must know Wagner.”28 It is most likely that the influence of Wagner worked itself out even at the level of language, choreography, dramatic structure, and pageantry. It is surely no coincidence that after choosing Nuremberg as the city of the Nazi rallies Hitler also chose Wagner’s opera to inaugurate them, and that the 1933 party rally began to the tune of the prelude to Die Meistersinger.29 It is entirely appropriate, likewise, that in the most powerful visual documentation of the rallies, Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will, 1935), as well as in the film Festliches Nürnberg (Celebratory Nuremberg), about the 1937 Nazi rally, the music of Wagner’s Nuremberg opera becomes part of the soundtrack of the film itself.30 Beyond Wagner, whose influence on Hitler is uncontested — although the precise nature of that influence is open to question and interpretation — Hitler had also successfully participated in the “Deutscher Tag” in Nuremberg in early September of 1923, two months before his attempted “beer hall putsch” in Munich, and it is notable that the Nazi rallies of 1927 and 1929, as well as all the rallies of the 1930s, were held in Nuremberg at roughly the same time of year, in August or September. Hitler probably wanted to repeat the success of the “Deutscher Tag,” a day that stood in the long tradition of Nuremberg mythologizing in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in which the city had been seen as a center for

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national and patriotic celebrations of German identity. At the beginning of the “Parteitag des Sieges” (Rally of Victory), the first party rally after the Nazi acquisition of state power, Hitler reminded his listeners of Nuremberg’s cultural traditions and of the “Deutscher Tag” ten years earlier, when the Nazis had still been a tiny minority: “On 2 September 1923 we marched through this city for the first time in large numbers, in the midst of an environment that was still unfriendly to us back then, at a time when it was more difficult to celebrate than it is now. In the name of millions in the National Socialist Party movement, I wish the city of Nuremberg good fortune and prosperity in the years to come and believe that the party leadership of the movement will help to further deepen the renown of this ancient German city and to stamp it even more clearly onto the consciousness of the world.”31 Whether or not Hitler himself was aware of the entirety of the nineteenthcentury tradition of Nuremberg celebrations — it is probable that he was not — it is clear that he was directly and traceably influenced by two of the major products of that tradition: Wagner’s Meistersinger and the 1923 “Deutscher Tag.” There is, furthermore, evidence that the decision for Nuremberg may even have been more calculated than that. After the choice of Nuremberg as the city of the Nazi party rallies, Nazi pundits and historians, and many others, exerted a great deal of energy connecting the contemporary city of the Nazi rallies with the historic city of the German emperors, presenting the Nazi “third” Reich as the logical successor to the Holy Roman Empire or “first” Reich. While such efforts provided retrospective justification for Hitler’s choice of Nuremberg as the city of the Nazi rallies, however, they do not necessarily reflect Hitler’s thinking at the time he made his decision. The second and less satisfactory explanation for Hitler’s decision to hold the party rallies in Nuremberg is that it was essentially pragmatic and not ideological. The primary advocates for this position, who tend to be historians living in and around Nuremberg, may well consciously or unconsciously be trying to save Nuremberg from the stigma of being a Nazi city: after all, if Hitler’s choice of Nuremberg was more or less coincidental, then less blame can be attached to the city. On the other hand, if Hitler’s choice of Nuremberg was logical or even necessary, then even post-Nazi Nuremberg would seem to be caught inextricably in a web of Nazi affiliations. The chief advocate for the pragmatic explanation of Hitler’s choice, Siegfried Zelnhefer, the author of the major study of the Nazi rallies, argues that Nuremberg was originally chosen because its police chief in the 1920s, Heinrich Gareis, was a right-wing ideologue who sympathized with the Nazis and therefore provided them with a congenial environment in which to hold their rallies. These rallies had always taken place on the margins of legality prior to 1933; after all, Hitler himself had been imprisoned

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in Landsberg in 1924, and for many years after his release from prison in December of that year he had struggled against regional bans on his public appearances, which deprived him of his most powerful weapon: his ability to make electrifying speeches. In addition to a sympathetic police chief, Nuremberg offered large chunks of available land in the southeastern part of the city around the so-called Luitpoldhain (Luitpold meadow), named after the Bavarian prince regent Luitpold (1821–1912; regent from 1886–1912). After they came to power, the Nazis were to transform the Luitpoldhain into the so-called “Luitpoldarena” (Luitpold Arena) where the most solemn and arcane ceremonies of the paramilitary SA and SS took place. Since the Nazi party rallies required massive amounts of space for tens of thousands of marchers to move in formation, the availability of such empty space was a significant advantage. In addition to these two advantages, Nuremberg also had a strong Nazi party, as well as an energetic and rabidly anti-Semitic Nazi leader, the aforementioned Julius Streicher, publisher of the notorious racist tabloid Der Stürmer. Streicher was a tireless campaigner for and promoter of the Nazi party in Nuremberg specifically and in the region of Franconia more generally. As the Nazis’ “Gauleiter” (regional leader) of Franconia, Streicher styled himself the “Frankenführer” (Leader of the Franks) — a kind of small-scale, regional Hitler. Finally, Zelnhefer argues, Nuremberg was relatively centrally located and therefore easy for participants throughout the Reich to get to.32 There are several problems with a purely pragmatic explanation for Hitler’s decision to hold the Nazi rallies in Nuremberg. The first and most important is that such an explanation does not really address the situation after the Nazi acquisition of total power in 1933. It is certainly true that a right-wing police chief offered Hitler and his party significant advantages in the 1920s, when they were continually in conflict with the law, but after January of 1933 Hitler and his party were the law, and they did not have to fear the police in any city. Hitler could have chosen any city in the Reich, and he chose Nuremberg. Such a decision in 1933 cannot logically have been motivated by potential Nazi run-ins with the law prior to 1933. Moreover Nuremberg was not the only city that offered empty space on the outskirts of the city; the Nazis could have found any number of cities with such empty space, and in fact Hitler briefly threatened Nuremberg’s Nazi mayor, Willy Liebel, with the prospect of Stuttgart as the venue for the Reich party rallies if Nuremberg did not acquiesce to his demands for space — if, that is, Nuremberg’s leaders placed the city’s future at risk for the sake of “a few old trees in the Luitpoldhain,” as Hitler expressed it.33 This dispute suggests that space alone cannot have been the determining factor for Hitler’s decision. Moreover, as the Nazis later proved, they were more than willing to change the face of entire cities — Berlin, Linz, etc. — to suit their own megalomaniacal purposes. Again, they could

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have created the Reich party rally grounds in any other city of the Reich, including Munich, the so-called “Stadt der Bewegung” (city of the movement) where the Nazis had gotten their start. Instead they chose Nuremberg. As for centrality of location and convenience of train connections, other cities such as Hanover, Frankfurt, Halle, or even Weimar, where the Nazis had held the 1926 party rally, might have been equally convenient; it is therefore unlikely that train connections were the primary reason for the choice of Nuremberg, which lay not in the middle of the Reich, like Halle or Weimar, but rather distinctly to the south. Finally, Julius Streicher, although particularly repugnant because of his pornographic anti-Semitism, was by no means the only fanatical Nazi leader in Germany’s many regions — which the Nazis, in another intentional archaism, stylized as Gaue, an old German word for provinces or regions. Leaders in other Gaue would have been just as happy as Streicher to host the Reich party rallies. In fact, Streicher was so repugnant and corrupt that he ultimately became an embarrassment even to the Nazis themselves; he never reached the highest level of party leadership, and in 1940 he was subjected to a four-day party trial and declared “unfit for leadership.” Hitler subsequently stripped him of his party positions.34 It is unlikely, therefore, that Streicher was the primary reason for Hitler’s choice of Nuremberg as the city of his Reich party rallies. Indeed, Hitler’s threats to the Nuremberg city government about Stuttgart suggest not that he was seriously considering choosing another city for the party rallies but that from the very beginning he had decided on Nuremberg as the only appropriate place to hold them. As Zelnhefer acknowledges, “it is true that Nuremberg seems to have gotten the nod in 1933 almost as a matter of course. And no other city was seriously considered by the NSDAP.”35 Indeed, Zelnhefer suggests, if Nuremberg and its traditions had not already existed in 1933, the Nazis would have had to invent them.36 This comment bears a striking resemblance to the 1815 statement by Alexander Lips that if Nuremberg did not already exist Germans would have to create it from scratch as their “Bundesstadt” (federal city).37 In a larger sense one must ask oneself, first, whether it is really possible to know exactly and definitively what was on Hitler’s mind when he chose Nuremberg and exactly what his intentions were in doing so, and second, whether it really matters anyway. The answer to the first question has to be negative, since even a declarative statement by Hitler himself (“I chose Nuremberg because . . .”) would be open to interpretation and to the possibility that Hitler was lying about his motivations; as is well known, Hitler frequently lied. Statements by anyone else but Hitler are open to the same interpretive uncertainty, of course, and they have the additional disadvantage of being secondhand. It would of course be useful if historians could discover a Nazi party memo detailing various considerations of Nuremberg and other cities with respect to the Reich party rallies. But to

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date no such memo has turned up, and even if it did turn up it would not, for the reasons mentioned above, answer all historical questions. Meanwhile, the absence of such a memo suggests that there may have been little or no debate within the Nazi party about the choice of Nuremberg, and that from the very beginning it was clear that Nuremberg would be the venue for the party rallies. The second question is more important, and more fundamental, than the first: does it really matter what Hitler consciously thought or wanted? The answer to this question cannot be as clear-cut. For centuries historians and philosophers of history have been debating whether men make history or history makes men; that is, whether the guiding force behind history is the “great men” — and of course traditionally they have indeed been men, not women — one reads about in history books or whether, conversely, such men are merely the products of the historical circumstances in which they find themselves. I confess to sympathizing with the latter viewpoint, that is, that history makes men (and also women), but I must acknowledge that the case of Hitler is one of the most convincing counterarguments in favor of the view that men make history. As Henry Ashby Turner argues in a clever counterfactual thought-experiment, not only German but all of world history might quite literally have taken a completely different and perhaps far more benevolent turn — no Holocaust and no Cold War, for instance — if this one man had died in an automobile accident on the outskirts of Nuremberg in 1930. Turner claims: “if Hitler’s career demonstrates nothing else, it confirms beyond any doubt that individuals can have an enormous impact on the course of human affairs.”38 If any one man can be seen as having exerted a powerful impact on the history of the twentieth century, then surely Hitler is that man. If this is the case, then Hitler’s thoughts must be seen as significant, even if they are now unknowable. On the other hand, however, it is indubitably true that Hitler, like every other member of a human culture, was a product of his times. What made him a brilliantly successful politician was not a triumphant imperviousness to the cultural history of the modern era but rather his remarkable ability to synthesize some of the main strands of ideology and prejudice of his time into a package that was attractive to many if not most other Germans. William Shirer, the American journalist who became one of the first English-language chroniclers of the Nazi period, was entirely right when he stated almost half a century ago that Hitler and the Nazis, far from being the original creators of their own ideology, drew most of their ideology and practice from other sources.39 How much of their synthesis of cultural traditions and prejudices was conscious or intentional is almost beside the point. Indeed, it is arguably the case that a cultural synthesis is all the more powerful the less self-conscious and the more unreflective it is. Ratiocination, self-reflection, and self-consciousness may be virtues in the philosopher, but they are not necessarily the virtues of a successful

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politician or artist. Since the romantic philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, German aesthetic philosophy has frequently stressed the role of the unconscious in the creations of the genius, a role that, in Kai Hammermeister’s words, allows the genius “to represent things in his work that he himself fails to comprehend completely.”40 Of course it is highly unlikely that Schelling would have wanted Hitler to be classified as an artistic genius; but it is clear that both Hitler himself and his followers thought of him as a “political genius.”41 And that Hitler’s politics had a great deal to do with art is by now widely recognized. In Hans Jürgen Syberberg’s brilliant 1977 film Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland (Hitler, A Film from Germany), Hitler is seen arising as a kind of zombie or revenant from Richard Wagner’s grave. In many ways this image captures the relationship between Wagner and Hitler, a relationship that does not necessarily rely on consciousness.42 These reflections have a direct bearing on the issue of Hitler’s relationship to the myth of Nuremberg. In Nuremberg cultural traditions that had been developing since the end of the eighteenth century came together to produce a kind of historical succession in which Nazi Nuremberg presented itself to the rest of Germany, and the world, as the valid heir to the medieval imperial city — the “most German of all German cities,” in mayor Willy Liebel’s words — and in which the Germany of Hitler’s “third” Reich presented itself as the successor to the medieval German emperor Barbarossa’s “first” Reich, the Holy Roman Empire, as well as to Bismarck’s “second,” Prussian Reich.43 In September of 1933 Hitler’s official proclamation stated: “In order to awaken the movement’s devotion to these honorable traditions of our struggle, we will therefore for all eternity celebrate the Reich party rallies in this place.”44 Hitler furthermore explained his decision by stating: “By doing this we also want to make a connection to the mighty past and declare that our movement is nothing but the continuation not just of German greatness but of German art and German culture. We also wish to proclaim that our movement will create its own tradition itself.”45 This statement places Hitler’s decision and the Nazi party’s struggle for power in direct relationship to Nuremberg’s “honorable traditions.” What precise traditions Hitler was thinking of in this context is almost irrelevant, because each of his followers could fill in the blank with those aspects of the Nuremberg tradition that he or she considered most important. As Zelnhefer notes, for whatever reason “Hitler left no doubt about his personal preference for the city of the mastersingers.”46 In order for this cultural synthesis to work it was not necessary for Hitler’s conceptions to completely match those of the millions of other Germans for whom Nuremberg had become a national symbol. Some aspects of the Nazi cultural synthesis were created quite consciously, and other aspects may have been created unintentionally, without a great deal of thought or reflection. Hitler certainly did know about Wagner and

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about the “Deutscher Tag” of 1923, but it is unlikely that he knew in great detail about Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck or about the history of Nuremberg’s monuments to Albrecht Dürer and Hans Sachs. But whether or not Hitler knew about all aspects of this historical nexus, he was himself, intentionally or unintentionally, a part of it. As the Nuremberg scholar Helmut Beer points out, in 1933 the Nazis were able to “capitalize on this already flourishing Nuremberg cult.”47 They did not create the cult, nor did they break with it; they continued it and built upon it. Conversely the Nuremberg cult was able to integrate Nazi pageantry into its own history and traditions. Ultimately, then, Hitler’s decision “that our party rallies now and forever more will take place in this city” was overdetermined.48 There was no single reason for it; instead, there were a great many individual reasons which, in their entirety, made the choice of Nuremberg inevitable. Nuremberg was simply the right place at the right time. Nor is it true that the Nazis did not seek to exploit Nuremberg and its cultural traditions prior to 1933. On the contrary, as early as 1927, at the Nazis’ first party rally in Nuremberg, they made a point of demonstrating the historical significance of the city. Alfred Rosenberg, subsequently the author of the Nazis’ chief ideological treatise, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts (The Myth of the Twentieth Century, 1930), declared in 1927 that Nuremberg was a powerful symbol of the Nazi will to revive Germans’ link with their supposedly glorious past: It was a good idea to hold the third National Socialist Reich party rally in the old imperial city of Nuremberg. This city stood at the center of the shining era of German history in the Middle Ages; but it also threatened to become a bastion of the Marxist mass hysteria of the twentieth century. For this reason it was almost like a symbol when, in the days from August 19–21, National Socialism took possession of the city, thereby proclaiming that the freedom fighters of the coming German nation-state will not permit the sites of Germany’s powerful past to become playgrounds for the Jewish-Marxist negation of all traditional values of the German people.49

Rosenberg’s words make it clear that as early as 1927 the purported connection between the Nazis’ own party rally in Nuremberg and Nuremberg’s illustrious history was already an explicit part of Nazi propaganda. Rosenberg claims that it is precisely because of Nuremberg’s great history and traditions that the Nazis have no intention of leaving the city to their political enemies, who have purportedly threatened the city as they have threatened the country. Nuremberg here is a convenient synecdoche for Germany itself, and Rosenberg’s assurance that the Nazis will protect Nuremberg is, more importantly, a claim that the Nazis will protect all of Germany. Of course the celebration of Nuremberg was by this time largely mythological, not based so much on actual historical understanding as on Germans’

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conceptions of what they imagined the past to have been like. However the fact that “Nuremberg” was a myth did not make its celebration any less effective. As the French socialist philosopher Georges Sorel had written in 1906, in his book Reflections on Violence, fantasies are not necessarily a weakness in a political movement but, on the contrary, frequently a strength, especially when people’s “anticipations of the future take the form of those fantasies, which enclose with them, all the strongest inclinations of a people . . ., inclinations which recur to the mind with the insistence of instincts.” Such myths, Sorel argued, provide “an aspect of complete reality to the hopes of immediate action” of any revolutionary collectivity.50 More recently the historian Thomas Nipperdey has stressed the way that nationalism not only tends to utilize mythic thought but to become identical with myth.51 As Peter Uwe Hohendahl writes, in all nationalisms “there is a need for a narrative of origin and for symbolic figures which define the national essence.”52 The Nazis themselves unashamedly celebrated the power of myth. In his Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts Rosenberg declared that “for hundreds of thousands of souls” his racist myth was “not something to be noted with scholarly arrogance as a curiosity in a book somewhere but rather the new awakening of the core of the German soul as it multiplies its cells.”53 The myth of Nuremberg was all the more powerful because it combined Sorel’s “anticipations of the future” with an imagined picture of a noble past, suggesting that what revolutionary conservatives wanted to achieve was eminently possible because it had in fact already been achieved, albeit on a lesser scale, in the period of Nuremberg’s grandeur. Sorel’s reflections on myth had been devoted to socialism and the concept of the general strike, which he had been trying to defend against the accusation that it was unrealistic. But the same reflections on myth are pertinent for Germany’s revolutionary conservatives two decades later. By the 1920s and the 1930s Nuremberg had become the most eloquent and powerful physical symbol of Germans’ myths about their past, as well as their dreams for a future that would conform to that past. The fact that the city had a liberal, progressive metropolitan government that was actually friendly to the left-liberal Social Democratic Party (SPD) made Nuremberg an even more important symbol of a Germany that had, in the opinion of revolutionary conservatives, gone astray. Such myths are essentially a fantasy, and the nations and peoples who reach for them may at least in part be living in a fantasy world. But as Sorel suggests, such fantasies can provide great strength and be entirely consistent with productivity and normality in other areas. Moreover in Nuremberg, more than anywhere else in Germany, this national fantasy world seemed to become living reality. It was here that the past met the present, that German reality seemed to conform to German dreams. As the French Germanist Charles Andler noted in the middle of the First World War, a decade before Wilhelm Kunze’s complaint about Nuremberg’s status as a city haunted by the

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ghosts of its past, “there is no people as ridiculously retrospective as the Germans, no people whose spirit has been stuffed in school so full of legends of their former glory. And among those dreams there is not a single one that they can resign themselves to knowing definitively buried in the rubble of the centuries in which those dreams died.”54 More than any other city in Germany Nuremberg represented the preservation of those valued traditions. Unlike Berlin, which was hated by so many revolutionary conservatives as un-German and alienated, and in which the German past and therefore German identity itself appeared to have been extinguished, Nuremberg was believed to guarantee continuity with Germanic traditions. It was Nuremberg, not Berlin, that became the Nazis’ imaginary capital, as well as their concrete design for a future that conformed with the greatness of the mythological past. In what Peter Fritzsche has called the “profound crisis of national memory” after the loss of the First World War, many Germans, including particularly the revolutionary conservatives, felt they needed these Nuremberg traditions more than ever.55 In an urban context characterized by alienation and anomie, Nuremberg promised health, security, and cultural greatness. Rosenberg was not the only Nazi leader to make connections between the Nazi project and Nuremberg’s traditions in 1927. The “Frankenführer” Julius Streicher was just as explicit about the importance of Nuremberg’s traditions when he greeted participants to what he called the “treasure chest of the German Reich.”56 These words were a direct citation of the tradition of Nuremberg’s nineteenth and twentieth-century promoters; they were the title of countless tourist guides to the city of Nuremberg, as well as of Margarete Lenk’s 1913 children’s book. When Streicher continued by mentioning Nuremberg’s great men and their significance for Nuremberg’s history, he was including himself and his party in the long tradition of celebration of men like Dürer and Sachs and suggesting that the Nazis were valid heirs to this tradition: I don’t need to list all of these men by name, for you carry their names in your hearts today. When you walk through this city, what speaks to you from all the alleyways and from the castle is the best, the true German spirit, the German identity that we National Socialists wish to bring back to our people. Into the treasure chest of the German people came garbage. . . . But then, my dear national comrades, came that historical moment when the Nurembergers rose up and proclaimed: If kaisers and kings fail us, then we will help ourselves.57

Streicher even tries to justify his own fanatical anti-Semitism by making reference to the fact that at the beginning of the modern era Nuremberg expelled all of its Jews. In other words the Nazi party, he claims, stands in a long and honorable tradition of German anti-Semitism, a tradition that many contemporary Germans have forgotten and denied. It is among

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Albrecht Dürer, Knight, Death, and Devil. Copperplate engraving, 1513. Provided by the Germanisches Nationalmuseum. other things this purportedly honorable tradition that the Nazis hope to bring back to Germany. It is notable here that even one of the most primitive of Nazi leaders is explicitly trying to connect the Nazi project, racist aims and all, with a love of cultural tradition.58 In the course of the 1927 party rally Alfred Rosenberg compared his party comrades, Hitler’s storm troopers, to the knight in Albrecht Dürer’s great copperplate engraving “Knight, Death and the Devil”: “In everything

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that you do, remember that for the National Socialist only one thing counts: to cry out to the world: And even if the world is full of devils, we must win anyway!”59 Six years later, on the occasion of the 1933 party rally, Nuremberg’s mayor Liebel presented Hitler, in the name of the city itself, with an original print of the same artwork by Dürer, praising Hitler as the “knight without fear or blame, who, as the Führer of the new German Reich, once again carried and multiplied the fame of the old imperial city of Nuremberg to the whole world.”60 Rosenberg’s description of the end of the 1927 Reich party rally once again conjures up the image of a link between the contemporary Nazi movement and Nuremberg’s imperial history: And even as music played and the columns of men marched to the station to take their special trains back home, hundreds of National Socialists remained behind, gazing from the castle, the symbol of old Noris, at the ocean of rooftops in the city below, gazing out at the broad land of Franconia into the evening’s dusk, and in their souls the empire of their longing shone before them: a National Socialist, liberated Germany.61

Such statements make it clear that Nazi attempts in 1933 and afterwards to connect Nuremberg and its imperial history to the contemporary Nazi party were not simply post-facto attempts to justify a decision made for essentially pragmatic reasons. Liebel’s gift to Hitler in 1933 is preceded by Rosenberg’s description of Nazi party storm troopers as Dürer-like knights in 1927, just as the glorification of medieval Nuremberg in 1933 is preceded by its glorification in 1927 and earlier. Six years before Hitler declared Nuremberg the city of the Reich party rallies, prominent Nazis were already making explicit the connection between their party and the protection of the traditions for which Nuremberg purportedly stood. In the 1929 film documentary of the Nazi party rally directed by Baldur von Schirach, the camera had already lingered lovingly on Albrecht Dürer’s house, the imperial castle, and the other beauties of medieval Nuremberg.62 Rosenberg’s focus on the imperial castle in 1927 resonates with the description given by a reporter in Nuremberg’s Fränkischer Kurier of the end of the “Deutscher Tag” four years earlier, in 1923. In that description the reporter had conjured up the beauty and significance of the illuminated castle at night, symbolically connecting contemporary right-wing concerns with the history of the Holy Roman Empire.63 Festliches Nürnberg, the film documentary of the 1937 Nazi party rally, ends precisely with a shot of the imperial castle from the air, as if to drive home once again the connection between Hitler’s Reich and the Holy Roman Empire. The concept of coincidence is simply inadequate as an explanation for this cultural nexus. Instead, what one sees at work is a powerful force that seems to have drawn many Germans, including Hitler himself, to Nuremberg as a concrete embodiment of their dreams of

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Germanness, of what Rosenberg called the “empire of their longing” (“Reich ihrer Sehnsucht”). Both Nuremberg1 and Nuremberg2 seem to have exerted a kind of gravitational pull on them.

Defining the Reich In 1923, the same year that the Fränkischer Kurier lovingly described the Nuremberg castle illuminated at nighttime, the right-wing writer Moeller van den Bruck published his influential book Das dritte Reich (The Third Reich), which more than any other work was to popularize the concept of a “third empire” among Germans in the 1920s. One must think of this historical constellation as something like a historical-political “perfect storm.” Germany was suffering from hyperinflation, and many ordinary Germans had lost their life savings. French troops had marched into Germany’s industrial heartland, the Ruhr region, in January of 1923. The Ruhr and most of the Rhineland were economically cut off from the rest of Germany. In Nuremberg that September German reactionaries marched through the streets calling for the end of the democratic Weimar Republic, and two months later Hitler attempted, on November 9 — the fifth anniversary of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s abdication — to seize power in Munich. In that same year Moeller van den Bruck, a depressed right-wing thinker who was to commit suicide two years later, sought to express his own dreams of past and future Germanic glory in the concept of a coming, final empire, a “third” Reich. This “third” empire was nothing if not an “empire of longing.” Moeller believed that his millennial “third” empire would fulfill the hope for a return to Germany’s medieval glory and mediate between the tensions and problems of contemporary life. He saw the longed-for Reich as the final goal of all German history, what he called an “Endreich.” This was a quasi-Biblical kingdom, he proclaimed, that “is always promised. And it never comes.”64 German intellectual and spiritual life, he wrote, was characterized by extreme dichotomies such as centralism versus particularism, nationalism versus socialism, church versus state, and so on. There was no other country in the world, he claimed, that was torn by such powerful but potentially productive oppositions as Germany. Whereas the ailing Weimar Republic represented these aporias at their most destructive, the coming Reich would mediate between the extremes, forming a productive synthesis. The final empire would represent the “continuity of German history,” reconciling modernity with age-old Germanic traditions.65 It would, hence, be both thoroughly modern and simultaneously timeless: “our minds turn to the Germany of all times, to the Germany that boasts of a two-thousand-year-old history, and to the Germany of an eternal present that lives in the spirit.”66 The coming third Reich would overcome the deficiencies of Bismarck’s second Reich, which had excluded Catholic

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Austria from Germany, and which had had, in Moeller’s view, no firm spiritual orientation in fundamental values. The second Reich, Moeller argued, had been an “in-between Reich” (Zwischenreich) and a detour (Umweg) on the road to the third and final Reich.67 Any nation, and particularly Germany, was, Moeller argued, a community of values (Wertungsgemeinschaft).68 Where common values are lacking, the nation can not survive. The problem with the second Reich had been that, while it was militarily and politically strong, it lacked core values. The German army had been strong at defending the nation, but it was not clear exactly what “nation” meant and hence what was being defended: Germany had lost to the Allied powers “because while we were strong as a state, and therefore also militarily strong, that is, strong in everything that could fight, we were absolutely weak in everything that one might want to fight for.”69 The third Reich would constitute a return to core values, making the nation strong not just politically and militarily but also spiritually, where it truly counted.70 Moeller’s dream of the third Reich, published in the year of the reactionary “Deutscher Tag” in Nuremberg, exerted a powerful influence on radical conservatives in Germany, including the Nazis, throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Four years later Edgar Jung, another revolutionary conservative, declared in his book Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen (The Rule of the Inferior), a vitriolic attack on the Weimar Republic and its values, that Germany stood on the threshold of a new age: “A turning point that, perhaps not only externally, ushers in a new millennium has arisen.”71 As Jung saw it, “The fatal question of the German people is therefore whether it, the creator of the first Western Reich, will also shape the coming one.”72 Ten years after the publication of Moeller’s Das dritte Reich, in the year of Hitler’s accession to power, the German nationalist Andreas Hohlfeld approvingly described the intellectual ferment that had surrounded the concept of a final Reich in the last years of the Weimar Republic: “There came something entirely irrational, that is according to the then prevailing opinions: the idea of the Third Reich. This idea gripped the Germans; it gripped the political adventurers and the politically homeless; it gripped the deeply rooted and the totally uprooted; it gripped the beings with whom one could neither talk nor argue.”73 The Third Reich, propagated by so many intellectuals, could be many things to many people. It represented the fulfillment of one’s dreams and the overcoming of all that was unpleasant or even degrading in the current situation. As Hohlfeld wrote, “This Third Reich has become the hope of those who are without hope, the faith of those who have lost their faith, the victory of those who have been defeated. Workers and peasants, the middle class, craftsmen, students — they are all searching for something, and in the concept and structure of the Third Reich they are finding the fulfillment of all their longings and the goal of all their hopes.”74 Hohlfeld makes it clear

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that it was precisely the Third Reich’s lack of specificity that made it such a powerful concept, ideal for the projection of dreams and fantasies. Of course after 1933, when the “Third Reich” had become a reality and not just a dream, the Nazis could not be satisfied with Moeller’s description of the final empire as something that could never be realized; on the contrary, they took pains to proclaim that the old dream of a new Reich (Jost Hermand) had been fulfilled by Hitler — that eternity, in a sense, had arrived.75 As the Nazi literary scholar Julius Petersen put it in 1934, “Now tomorrow has become today; and fear of the end of the world has been transformed into a new beginning; the final goal has become visible to the present, and the belief in miracles is being used to actively shape reality itself.” Indeed, Petersen argued, “now that the infinite has entered the realm of the finite, limitlessness has been given a basis on which to rest the anchor of hope.”76 In Petersen’s view the Third Reich summed up all previous millennial thinking in western culture, forming its teleological goal. Whereas millennial thought had previously moved in a spiral from one form to another — from theological to imperial to rational to economic — it had now found its permanent home in Germany, the land in the middle of Europe, where East met West and North met South. It was here, in the center of Europe, that the various competing millennial dreams that had dominated European intellectual history for the last two thousand years could find a permanent synthesis and foundation.

Eternity Arrives One must understand the Nuremberg party rallies as an attempt to demonstrate in a very plastic and palpable way the arrival of Petersen’s eternity. Everything about the rallies, from their choreography to the architecture in which they took place, was to proclaim permanence and continuity, and to connect the development of Hitler’s Third Reich with the vast span of German history. If Andreas Hohlfeld had written in 1933 that “political facts, no matter how powerful or solid they may seem, cannot last and determine the history of the future decisively unless they are placed into the context of historical development, unless they are seen as essential and necessary to the nature and character of a people,” then the Nuremberg rallies were intended to provide this historical context and to depict current events as the necessary, and natural, culmination of German history itself.77 Albert Speer writes that Hitler was so obsessed with history as to believe “that the purpose of his building was to transmit his time and its spirit to posterity,” since “all that remained to remind men of the great epochs of history was their monumental architecture.”78 This obsession of Hitler’s led Speer to propose “A Theory of Ruin Value” and to design his structures so that “even in a state of decay, after hundreds or (such were

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our reckonings) thousands of years” they “would more or less resemble Roman models.” This “theory” led Speer to create for Hitler a “romantic drawing” showing what the “Zeppelin Field would look like after generations of neglect, overgrown with ivy.”79 And Hitler ordered that all important structures in the Reich should be designed according to Speer’s “theory.” Hitler declared in 1936: “We must create with gargantuan proportions a document that will determine styles, and that will also, for millions of Germans, be a monument of pride and a marker of belonging to this community.”80 Three years later, about half a year before the beginning of the Second World War, Hitler declared in a speech to army commanders that the apparently wasteful construction of such monuments was in fact essential for the morale of the German people: “I am doing all of this not out of megalomania but out of the coolest of calculations: that one can give a nation a sense of itself only by means of such massive constructions.”81 As Hitler proclaimed in 1937, “these edifices are designed neither for the year 1940 nor for the year 2000; instead, they are to tower, like the cathedrals of our past, into the millenniums of the future.”82 The Nuremberg rally grounds were to be an even more impressive statement to future generations about the greatness of the contemporary German empire than the coliseum was to archeologists about the glories of ancient Rome. The architect Ludwig Ruff made the connection with ancient Rome visually explicit when he modeled the façade of the Kongreßhalle (congress hall), begun in 1935 but never finished — it was intended to be the largest indoor meeting space in the world — on the coliseum in Rome. Speer modeled the Zeppelin field on the Greek Pergamon alter and the planned Deutsches Stadion (German stadium) on the Olympic stadium in ancient Athens.83 Hitler was unfazed by the gigantic costs of the congress hall project, since it was to be something “truly magnificent and monumental for all time.”84 The materials used for the facades of these structures — granite, marble, and travertine, some of it extracted, after the beginning of the Second World War, by slave laborers in concentration camps such as Mauthausen — were intended to demonstrate the permanence of the National Socialist idea, and to hide the fact that on the inside the structures were made of humble bricks.85 It is ironic that the very rallies celebrated by Nazi propagandists as contemporary reincarnations of Germany’s medieval imperial diets in fact took place for the most part not within Nuremberg’s medieval city walls but rather on the city’s modern outskirts. Moreover the architecture of the rally grounds, far from being in the neo-Gothic style celebrated a century earlier by Karl Alexander Heideloff as genuinely German, was in a Greco-Roman style that might uncharitably have been considered an imitation of foreign models. Whereas Nuremberg’s “Altstadt” (old town), its medieval core, offered a beautiful backdrop for a few significant events, particularly the Nazis’ march past Hitler on the main market square (renamed “Adolf Hitler

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The Nazis march through the old town of Nuremberg, 1933. Provided by and © museen der stadt nürnberg, Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände.

Platz” in 1933) on the day of the SA and SS rallies, the primary focus of attention during the party rallies was not on the “Altstadt,” whose narrow streets and confined quarters offered little space for large formations of uniformed men to maneuver in, but rather on the massive new space created on

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Postcard of the Reich party rally grounds. Provided by and © museen der stadt nürnberg, Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände. the city’s outskirts, the so-called “Reichsparteitagsgelände” (Reich party rally grounds), a space several times larger than the “Altstadt” itself. Mayor Willy Liebel called this area the “temple city of the movement.”86 It was in this vast, entirely modern space, created specifically for the purposes of the party rallies, that the major events of the week-long rallies took place: the rallies of the SS and SA, of the so-called “Reichsarbeitsdienst” (Reich Labor Service), of the Hitler Youth, the maneuvers of the Wehrmacht, the procession of Nazi party functionaries, and Hitler’s major speeches. Whereas Nuremberg’s old town had grown in a more or less haphazard way around the old imperial castle and the city’s two major churches, the rally grounds in the southeast of the city were carefully planned by men who, in the words of Hans-Ulrich Thamer, “were cool-headed technicians, sons of a rational era.”87 Joachim Schumacher, writing in exile in Paris in 1937, may well have been right in claiming that Hitler had organized the German masses in a seemingly organic way “according to completely nonsimultaneous, disparate classes, as if the finance capitalism of 1936 were the city market cooperative association of 1300.”88 However Hitler chose a space that was anything but medieval in order to display his love of medievalism. The paradox of a party holding its major rally in Germany’s bestpreserved medieval city and celebrating that city’s old, supposedly organic traditions while simultaneously erecting massive new and anything but

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organic structures and spaces outside the city’s medieval core is perhaps best summed up in a phrase coined by the American historian Jeffrey Herf: “reactionary modernism.” What Herf is trying to get at by using this phrase is that the Nazis were a technologically ambitious party that celebrated modern achievements in engineering, city planning, architecture, military technology, and so on; but that at the same time they sought to make this modernity seem consistent with what they claimed were the best of German agrarian and pre-modern traditions.89 In Nazi ideology the Third Reich, as the dominant state in modern Europe, was the appropriate contemporary embodiment of the Germany of old. The lay-out of the Nuremberg rally grounds made this connection explicit, since the Große Strasse (Great Road), the major axis of the rally grounds, pointed directly to the imperial castle in Nuremberg’s old town, thus symbolically connecting Hitler’s Third Reich with the first and second empires that had preceded it. As early as 1793 Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder had pointed out that it was from this angle that Nuremberg’s skyline looked most impressive, “in all of its glory and splendor, with all of its towers, while in the background the high pinnacle of the castle overshadows them all.”90 Now Speer and his team systematically made use of this panorama and all of the historical connections it implied. Far from being in conflict with venerated Germanic traditions, Hitler’s “Third” Reich was presented as their fulfillment, and they in turn were what the French novelist Claude Ollier has termed the Nazis’ “medieval alibi.”91

The Nazi Rallies In their general outlines the party rallies in Nuremberg, which took place every year from 1933 to 1938 — and which were, hence, the primary site for the celebration of Nazi ideology during the years of peacetime that preceded Germany’s invasion of Poland in September of 1939 — were already clearly structured by September of 1933, when the “Rally of Victory” took place. The party rallies generally lasted for about a week, and they tended to draw well over half a million people to Nuremberg. Since Nuremberg itself was already a city of about 400,000, this meant that during the week of the party rally Nuremberg became one of the most populous cities in the Reich, a city of over a million people. As one promotional booklet put out by the city government proclaimed in 1938, after Hitler’s annexation of Austria had transformed Bismarck’s “Kleindeutschland” (small Germany) into “Großdeutschland” (large Germany), “the city of the Reich party rallies thus becomes, for a while, after Berlin, Vienna, and Hamburg, the fourth largest city of the German Reich,” but with an even greater population density than those metropolitan centers.92 Moreover, because of the presence of Hitler and the major officers of the party and

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government during the week of the rallies, Nuremberg became not only the symbolic but also the de facto capital of Germany for the duration of the rallies. Nuremberg’s status as de facto capital city was made explicit in 1935, during the cynically misnamed “Reichsparteitag der Freiheit” (party rally of freedom) when, on September 15, the German Reichstag, meeting in Nuremberg, passed the notorious “Nürnberger Gesetze” (Nuremberg laws), which deprived German Jews of their equal status as German citizens and forbade them to marry German citizens of “German or racially related blood.”93 These laws laid the foundation for all subsequent measures taken by the Nazis against German Jews, and as such they can be seen as a central part of the prehistory of the Holocaust, in the course of which the German government murdered about six million European Jews. As repugnant as the Nuremberg race laws were, they were nevertheless seen by the Nazis as the fulfillment of German cultural traditions generally and Nuremberg’s traditions of anti-Semitism specifically. As Richard Wilhelm Stock put it, Nuremberg was, because of its anti-Semitic history, the “metropolis of the world struggle against the Jews,” and with the passage of the Nuremberg laws “the ideological life goals of Richard Wagner” had found “a magnificent fulfillment.”94 Or, as Streicher’s magazine Der Stürmer proclaimed more succinctly, “We won!”95 In August of 1938, shortly before that year’s Nazi rally, in accordance with Hitler’s wishes, the synagogue at Nuremberg’s Hans Sachs Platz was razed following Streicher’s command, taken from Die Meistersinger: “Commence!”96 The party rallies in Nuremberg always began with Hitler’s arrival in Nuremberg and his drive to the hotel “Deutscher Hof.” Likewise the rallies always ended with Hitler’s departure from Nuremberg. In between those two points, each day of the rally had a particular theme, for example, — to take the program of the 1937 party rally — “Tag der Kongreßeröffnung” (Day of the Opening of the Congress) on the first day, “Tag des Reichsarbeitsdienstes” (Day of the Reich Labor Service) on the second day, “Tag der Gemeinschaft” (Day of Community) on the third day, “Tag der Politischen Leiter” (Day of the Political Leaders) on the fourth day, “Tag der Hitlerjugend” (Day of the Hitler Youth) on the fifth day, “Tag der Sturmabteilungen” (Day of the Storm Divisions) on the sixth day, and “Tag der Wehrmacht” (Day of the Army) on the seventh day. Each day the focus was on a different group within the Nazi party or the German state, but the emphasis was always on community and solidarity, and on the unity between the German people, the Nazi party, and Hitler, who was seen as the mystical medium and essence of German identity. One observer, writing in 1933 about Leni Riefenstahl’s first Nazi rally film Sieg des Glaubens (Victory of Faith), called the film “a picture of the unity . . . with which all of Germany’s clans, overcoming centuries of self-centeredness, committed themselves at the Reich party rally in Nuremberg to the new Germany and to the Führer,” in whose person the unity of Germany was supposedly

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embodied.97 A year later another observer, writing about Riefenstahl’s next party rally film, Triumph des Willens, described the unity of Führer and Volk thus: “And again and again we feel it with a power that can almost be called mythical: how profoundly this nation belongs to its Führer, and how profoundly this Führer belongs to his nation! From every glance and every handshake speaks the commitment and the oath: we belong together. Together forever in loyalty.”98 The unity between Führer and Volk was not just the central topic of most of the speeches at the party rally — as when Rudolf Hess, for instance, declared in 1934 that “Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler” — but it was also given a physical presence in the choreography of the rallies themselves, as well as in the spaces constructed for them.99 The masses of people marching in formation through the rally grounds demonstrated and embodied the unity of Germany itself, a unity prefigured and echoed by the designed spaces in which the marches took place. These spaces and buildings were, as Thamer has put it, an “architecture parlante.”100 Albert Speer’s Zeppelin field, for instance, which, along with the Luitpoldarena and the Große Strasse, was the only major new component of the rally grounds that was actually completed prior to the beginning of the Second World War, is centered around the tribune from which Hitler made his speeches, particularly to the men of the quasi-military Labor Service that German young men and women had to join for a half-year period starting in 1935. The Labor Service was an attempt both to battle the high unemployment of the early 1930s and to combat any potential labor unrest through an ideology of unified support and respect for and from working men. From anywhere in the Zeppelin field, the tribune from which Hitler spoke was the focal point, and hence it united anyone from any place in the Zeppelin field in a focus on the man standing on it: Hitler. It was thus an architectural embodiment of both the adoration of Hitler and the unity of the German people.101 As one contemporary critic wrote, “the whole planning and structuring of the individual buildings and groupings was determined by a relationship fundamental to the National Socialist order, the relationship between the Führer and the people.”102 As early as 1927 the journalist and film critic Siegfried Kracauer referred to the choreographed movements of large numbers of people in stage shows or stadium spectacles as a “mass ornament.” Within the mass ornament, individual human beings, far from being “formed from within” by their own specific nature, were merely segments of a much larger organization. Such structures were “composed of elements that are mere building blocks and nothing more.”103 The mass ornament was, hence, properly conceived as a single overarching structure rather than as an amalgamation of many structures. Kracauer was to return to this concept in describing the Nazi rallies in Nuremberg. As he put it in 1947, “the innumerable rows of the various Party formations composed tableaux vivants across the

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Commemoration of the dead, Luitpoldarena, 1934. Provided by and © museen der stadt nürnberg, Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände. huge festival grounds. These living ornaments not only perpetuated the metamorphosis of the moment, but symbolically presented masses as instrumental superunits.”104 In Kracauer’s view, the “mass ornaments into which this transported life was pressed” symbolized “the readiness of the masses to be shaped and used at will by their leaders.”105 Kracauer was suggesting that contemporary culture had a tendency to treat large numbers of people moving in formation as an aesthetic spectacle in and of themselves. The masses were not simply an audience; they were also a major part of the performance. They had come to see a spectacle, but they were themselves part of it. In his initial formulation of the concept, Kracauer had been referring to the choreographed movements of people at entertainment and political events prior to the Nazi rise to power, but as his later reflections demonstrate, the concept of the “mass ornament” appeared even more persuasive for the Nazi use of the masses in Nuremberg and elsewhere during the 1930s and 1940s. Whereas Kracauer viewed the individual human beings who were part of the “mass ornament” primarily as pure objects being manipulated like mannequins, however, one should see them also as subjects, as people willingly and even happily participating in a performance. Walter Benjamin hinted at this when he remarked in 1936 that fascist performance art was

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not just being “carried out for the masses but also by the masses.”106 However Benjamin was just as unwilling as Kracauer to imagine that the masses themselves played a significant volitional role in Nazi art and spectacle. Although, he confessed, it appeared as if “the masses become their own object in this art, they are communicating with themselves, they are running things,” that appearance was, he claimed, inaccurate, because the masses were, in his view, entirely manipulated by the Nazi elite.107 Such a conception is an eloquent testament to Benjamin’s, and also Kracauer’s, unwillingness to imagine the German people as complicit in their own degradation, but it stretches credulity. After all, it is hardly likely that the hundreds of thousands of individuals who were part of the Nazi rallies were simply being manipulated. Instead, one should imagine the rallies not just as a strict, top-down exercise but as something that was genuinely fun and exciting to participate in from the bottom up. One has to imagine that participants in the Nazi rallies would have gotten a distinct sense of excitement from their participation in a major event with so many thousands of other participants. Such participation may have given them the feeling of being part of something much bigger than their own individual personality. It may, perhaps, have seemed to elevate them to a higher level. One participant wrote: “Day and night I dreamed of seeing and hearing this man, our Führer; and in spite of all the obstacles that got in the way, this dream became a reality.” She continued: “The Führer’s final speech was so moving and touched my heart so deeply that — I’m not ashamed to say it — warm tears ran down my cheeks.”108 As Hitler noted in a proclamation made in 1929, in preparation for the second Nuremberg rally, “And whoever is in Nuremberg from August 1–4 will, in tens of thousands of shining eyes, find thanks for his participation, and this thanks will make him happy.”109 The adulation of Hitler at the rallies can be perceived as ennobling those who adore him. If Hitler is perceived as an emanation of the German Volk itself, then in honoring him the German people are honoring themselves. “That is the miracle of our age — that you have found me . . . among so many millions! And that I have found you, that is Germany’s good fortune!” proclaimed Hitler on 13 September 1936.110 One must conceive of the Nuremberg rallies as having a distinctly narcissistic element: the masses were not simply watching Hitler, but through him, they were also watching themselves. Hitler was both the most important spectacle of the rallies and simultaneously their most privileged spectator. He existed in a symbiotic relationship with the adoring masses. His approving gaze and focus on the masses energized and validated them, while their adoration of him transformed him into far more than just a human individual. He was, rather, a god. But because he was a god, he also conferred on his people god-like qualities. It is likely that participation in the Nuremberg rallies produced in many of its participants something akin to what Sorel called “an entirely epic state of mind.”111

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To take part in the Reich party rally was to take part in an event of national significance and hence to make oneself part of history. Participation in the rally was a compensation for the petty humiliations and failures of everyday life, as one party member noted in 1929, when the Nazis were still in the minority: “All of it: nasty words, boycotts against one’s stores, shouting matches and fisticuffs at political speeches, unreasonable searches by the police, and all the fights — it all grows pale compared to the moment when one sees the Führer for the first time, stands in front of him for the first time eye-to-eye and can listen to his words.”112 The power of Hitler’s gaze seemed to be equally effective seven years later, in 1936, when a Protestant nurse from Danzig, remembering her experience of seeing Hitler in front of the hotel Deutscher Hof, wrote: “We feel his eyes looking at us. It is as if he were peering into the depths of your soul. The huge crowd of people hold their breath, they don’t dare to move.”113 According to a report from 1937: “For everyone the most uplifting experience was to be able to look the Führer in the eye from close by. This experience was a powerful incentive to get people involved in the movement.”114 An account of the flag consecration ceremony at the 1934 Nazi rally also invokes the power of Hitler’s gaze: “Holding in his hand the cloth of the flag that was consecrated with blood, the Führer solemnly walks from one standard-bearer to the next, consecrating the standards in a compelling ceremony; he shakes each standard-bearer’s hand, binding him to eternal loyalty with a profound, solemn, unforgettable look. . . . We stand there, sensing the magic of his personality and feeling the power of his gaze, which bores into the depths of one’s soul.”115 Such accounts echo a description made by Joseph Goebbels in his novel Michael (probably written in 1923 but not published until 1929): “The man on the podium gazes at me for a moment. Those blue eyes strike me like flaming rays. This is a command!”116 Such testimonies demonstrate that what participants wanted was not just to gaze at Hitler but also to be gazed at by him, and the choreography of the rallies allowed participants ample opportunity to be gazed at by Hitler. One of the primary functions of the marches was that they allowed marchers to march past Hitler. Participants and observers frequently used religious language to describe the Nuremberg rally. For one participant the rally was “an act of worship in its truest sense.”117 For another Hitler was “the man sent to us by God to save our poor martyred fatherland, to save it from humiliation and disgrace, from poverty and despair.”118 A promotional brochure from 1933 described Hitler has as a kind of pope raising his hand in the Nazi salute to bless the hordes of Hitler Youth, calling this gesture “not just a stereotypical greeting but a symbol of the blessing being called down upon the children.”119 The very title of Riefenstahl’s first Hitler film, Sieg des Glaubens, which was chosen by Hitler himself, invokes the power of faith in the Nazi Party, which is conceived of as a kind of religion or ersatz-religion.

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The “cathedral of light.” Provided by the Stadtarchiv Nürnberg. One observer called the film “a testament to the power of faith in an inner calling, which overcomes all obstacles.”120 During the nighttime march of Nazi political leaders in Nuremberg in 1936, in which Albert Speer had designed a “cathedral of light” out of massed searchlights, Robert Ley, head of the German Labor Front, offered up a kind of Nazi Nicene creed for the assembled participants: “At this sacred hour, as a cathedral without end arches over us, stretching to infinity, we proclaim this creed: We believe in the lord God in heaven, who created us, who governs and protects us, and who sent you to us, my Führer, to liberate Germany. This is our belief, my Führer.”121 In a gushing poem about the “cathedral of light,” Ina Seidel suggested that this new cathedral’s architecture, so much more precious than that of a conventional cathedral, represented Germany itself: Isn’t this church, built of shimmering light, worth more than a castle with steel and stone’s might, and does it not shine on us, holy and bright, a symbol of Germanness eternal and right?122 All the participants of the Nazi rally, Seidel wrote, stood unified “around the One,/and this One is the heart of the people.”123 Another party rally participant wrote: “Our Führer sacrifices himself and guides us safely through all dangers. God himself has strengthened him, and therefore we can entrust ourselves to him with confidence.”124

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Such explicitly religious elements were played up by the Nazis in one of the most important ceremonies of the party rallies, the so-called “Fahnenweihe” (consecration of flags) in which Hitler, after walking solemnly between masses of uniformed Nazis in the Luitpoldarena to the memorial for the dead of the First World War, used the old Nazi flag that had supposedly been spattered with the blood of Nazi “martyrs” during the failed putsch of 1923 — in which sixteen Nazi “heroes” died — to “consecrate” new Nazi flags.125 The Strasse des Führers (road of the leader) along which Hitler marched symbolically connected the living members of the Nazi party to the dead whose memorial was at the road’s end.126 During the flag-consecration ceremony a kind of mystical energy was imagined to be passing from the original “Blutfahne” (blood flag) of 1923 to the new Nazi standards, with Hitler acting as a kind of metaphysical medium surrounded by the uniformed troops of the SA and the SS. It was a kind of profane Nazi communion sacrament. It was not just the Nazis and their followers who proclaimed the power of the Reich party rallies. A report made by the illegal SPD described antiNazi workers as coming back from the Nuremberg rallies “as if numbed.”127 According to the report one socialist said: “We still don’t want to become Nazis, but such mass demonstrations and feats of organization are like hypnosis. You lose any belief that this regime can still be toppled.”128 From foreign observers, too, came reports of ecstatic Germans. The French ambassador, André François-Poncet, wrote: “But what is extraordinary and almost indescribable is the atmosphere of universal enthusiasm that envelops the ancient city, this strange intoxication that seizes hundreds of thousands of men and women, a romantic excitement, a mystical ecstasy, a kind of holy insanity to which they succumb. For eight days Nuremberg is a city governed by ecstasy, a city in the power of a magic spell, yes a city of people who are almost beside themselves.”129 William Shirer, then a correspondent for CBS, described Nuremberg’s masses as “mad with joy” in 1934.130 In particular when the masses saw Hitler they went crazy, Shirer wrote: About ten o’clock tonight I got caught in a mob of ten thousand hysterics who jammed the moat in front of Hitler’s hotel, shouting, “We want our Führer.” I was a little shocked at the faces, especially those of the women, when Hitler finally appeared on the balcony for a moment. They reminded me of the crazed expressions I saw once in the back country of Louisiana on the faces of some Holy Rollers who were about to hit the trail. They looked up at him as if he were a Messiah, their faces transformed into something positively inhuman. If he had remained in sight for more than a few moments, I think many of the women would have swooned from excitement.131

As Leni Riefenstahl noted when she was asked why she showed nothing negative in her 1935 film, “What sort of negative material should I have

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Hitler during the “consecration” of the flags, 1929. Provided by and © museen der stadt nürnberg, Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände.

filmed? Where was there anything that was negative? In every nook and cranny of Nuremberg there was enthusiasm.”132 While such a statement was no doubt governed by Riefenstahl’s self-interested desire to portray her propaganda film as nothing but an objective documentary of reality in Nuremberg, it should nevertheless not be discounted. After all, if there had not been a considerable amount of joy and celebration in Nuremberg during the 1934 party rally, Riefenstahl could not have made the film she made. In a famous essay from 1936, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” (The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility), Walter Benjamin located the specificity of Nazi ritual in what he called an “aestheticizing of politics,” which he differentiated from

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its supposed opposite, the “politicizing of aesthetics” that he ascribed to the Communist party and its backers, whom he supported.133 Whatever one makes of Benjamin’s rather crude distinction between a negative Nazi and a positive Communist aesthetics, he is surely correct in pointing out the Nazis’ emphasis on the aesthetics of political happenings. Bertolt Brecht was making a similar point when he wrote in his journal about “fascism’s theatricalization of politics.”134 What both Benjamin’s and Brecht’s notions suggest is that Nazi political spectacle was not really about content but about form, or, to put it another way, that for the Nazis form was content. To use a phrase coined later by the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, in Nazi happenings the medium was the message. In Nuremberg the medium was not television and computer technology, to which McLuhan was referring, but rather the sheer spectacle of the party rallies themselves, supported and compounded by the modern communications and transportation technologies that surrounded them: amplification technology, radio, film, newspapers, magazines, telephone, and telegraph on the one hand, and automobiles, motorcycles, trains, airplanes, blimps, and streetcars on the other. The transmission of the party rallies to the rest of the Reich through radio, newsreel, newspapers, magazines, and film, was crucially important, of course, because it allowed citizens who could not come to Nuremberg to nevertheless experience the party rallies. As a reporter for the film journal Kinematograph wrote in 1933, “Film in the new Germany has a completely different task than before,” because it was not just about entertainment but about civic participation: “Thus all Germans, even those who live in the most remote corners of the Reich, have the opportunity to participate optically in these events, which may be taking place in a very different part of the country, but which nevertheless are of great significance for all members of the nation.”135 Film and other new media were supposed to make real the Nazi idea of a “Volksgemeinschaft” (community of the people). However, given the massive numbers of people in Nuremberg itself, one should not imagine the rallies as simply spectacles staged for the delectation of passive listeners or spectators in other cities. Rather, the rallies had a value in and of themselves as a concrete embodiment of Nazi ideology. They were not really about the communication of a particular linguistic message that could be captured in words; they were not about ratiocination at all. Rather, they were about gut-level feelings of strength and beauty that came, in the first instance, not from rhetoric, even the very powerful rhetoric of Hitler, but rather from massed bodies, from ritual, from music, from togetherness, from gazing at and being gazed at by the “Führer,” and so on. The party rallies were a kinetic event that was more about ritual motion and feeling than about thinking. They were not meant just to proclaim the unity of Volk and Führer; they were meant to embody it. Hence Thamer’s observation that “the principle objective behind these massive spectacles was to offer visual

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evidence of the German community united behind its leader” has to be modified.136 The rallies were not just evidence for something; they were that something. As Robert Ley declared, “We have not just proclaimed the community of the people, we have also put that community into practice in our exercises.”137 Martin Loiperdinger sums up this aspect of the rallies when he writes that “Via this ritual the claims of fascism’s state propaganda become one with the actual fulfillment of the claims; via their physical activities, those addressed by the propaganda simultaneously become, in the midst of the ritual, participants.”138 The spectacle of tens of thousands of people functioning as part of a ritual organism can certainly be thought of as a kind of Benjaminian aestheticization of politics. But it can also, with equal justification, be thought of as the politicization of art, especially if one looks at the rallies as in and of themselves a kind of mass art work, something that Benjamin himself suggests when he declares that fascist war constitutes “the consummation of l’art pour l’art.”139 Indeed, as Thamer has suggested, one can also think of the Nazi rallies as a kind of Wagnerian “Gesamtkunstwerk” (total work of art) combining elements of drama, music, set design, architecture, sculpture, painting, and dance into an all-round experience of exultation and delight.140 Two aspects differentiate the Nuremberg rallies from traditional aesthetics, however, making them thoroughly modern total works of art: First, the party rallies involve not a passive but rather an active audience that is part of the spectacle itself. In this way the party rallies incorporated elements of modern aesthetic practice that sought to break down the separation between audience and stage, elements incorporated in the Nazi “Thingspiele” (togetherness plays) on the right and also in Bertolt Brecht’s “Lehrstücke” (teaching plays) on the left.141 In this sense (paradoxically, given the Nazis’ persecution of modern art), Nazi political spectacle can be thought of as a triumph of the artistic avant-garde. Second, and most important, the party rallies are not just “art,” not just a separate sphere unconnected to political, social, or economic reality. Instead, they claim to constitute reality, to be a true embodiment of the state of the Nazi party specifically and Germany more generally. Art, in a sense, becomes reality, or reality becomes aestheticized. Reality is transfigured by aesthetic beauty. This is what Benjamin had in mind when he wrote that in fascism the alienation of the masses “has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure.”142 Hitler stressed the significance of the party rallies when he declared, in 1934, that “there is hardly another demonstration of a political kind in the world that expresses as well as this one, in its character and uniqueness, the ruling political idea and the state power that has its foundation in this idea.”143 Thamer is entirely correct when he writes that “the Nuremberg Party rallies were the pinnacle of achievement and the most powerful examples of the political aesthetics of National Socialism and the artist-politician Adolf Hitler.”144

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Notes 1 Theodor W. Adorno, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft,” in Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976), 7–31; here, 11. My translation. Original German: “wüsten Horde”; “Neid auf die Kultur.” 2 Victor Klemperer, Kultur: Erwägungen nach dem Zusammenbruch des Nazismus (Berlin: Neues Leben, 1946), 6. Original German: “den äußersten Gegensatz zu den Grundanschauungen der deutschen klassischen Zeit.” 3 Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus: Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1998), 636. My translation. Alternative English translation: Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1948), 482. Original German: “etwas unserer Volksnatur durchaus Fremdes, Aufgezwungenes.” 4

Max Frisch, “Kultur als Alibi,” Der Monat 1, no. 7 (April 1949): 83–85; here, 84. Original German: “ein hervorragender und sehr empfindsamer Musiker . . ., der sich mit Geist und echter Kennerschaft, sogar mit Liebe hat unterhalten können über Bach, Händel, Mozart, Beethoven, Bruckner.” 5 For more on Mann, Frisch, Adorno, and Klemperer, and the postwar debate on the German cultural heritage, see my book German Literary Culture at the Zero Hour (Rochester: Camden House, 2004), 115–41. 6 See Jonathan Petropoulos, Art as Politics in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1996). 7

Lynn H. Nicholas, The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (New York: Vintage, 1995), 11. 8

See, among others, Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives of Interpretation (London: Edward Arnold, 1993), 59–79; and Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure, and Effects of National Socialism (New York: Praeger, 1970), 236. 9

Albert Speer, Erinnerungen (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1969), 73. In English: Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Collier, 1981), 60. In German: “grobknochige, undifferenzierte Typen.” The English translation sounds wryer than the original German. 10

Ernst Hanfstaengel, Zwischen Weissem und Braunem Haus: Memoiren eines politischen Aussenseiters (Munich: Piper, 1970), 55.

11

Frederic Spotts, Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1994), 165.

12

Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich: Franz Eher, 1934), 15. In English: Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 17. Original German: “Die jugendliche Begeisterung für den Bayreuther Meister kannte keine Grenzen. Immer wieder zog es mich zu seinen Werken. . . .” 13

See George G. Windell, “Hitler, National Socialism and Richard Wagner,” Journal of Central European Affairs 27 (1962–63): 479–97. 14

Sebastian Haffner, Germany: Jekyll and Hyde (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1941), 37.

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15

Hermann Rauschning, The Voice of Destruction (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1940), 229. See also Windell, “Hitler, National Socialism, and Wagner,” 491.

16 Cited in Spotts, Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival, 173; translation from this source. From “Goebbels’ Rede in Bayreuth,” Frankfurter Zeitung, 7 August 1933, 1–2; here, 2 and 1 respectively. Original German: “die Inkarnation unseres Volkstums schlechthin”; “unserer Zeit und ihren seelischen und geistigen Spannungen.” In this speech Goebbels also called Die Meistersinger “the most German of all German operas” (2; “dieser deutschesten aller deutschen Opern”). 17

Richard Wilhelm Stock, Richard Wagner und die Stadt der Meistersinger: Den Großen von Bayreuth Richard und Cosima Wagner zum Gedächtnis in ihrem 125. und 100. Geburtsjahr (Nuremberg and Berlin: Karl Ulrich, 1938), 7. Original German: “Keine der gewaltigen Schöpfungen des Meisters . . . atmet so viel Gemüt und biederen Volkssinn wie seine ‘Meistersinger von Nürnberg.’ In diesem Werk sind Ton und Dichtung in herrlicher Harmonie vereinigt zu einem gigantischen Gemälde des deutschen Menschen.” Emphasis in the original. 18 Stock, Richard Wagner und die Stadt der Meistersinger, 9. Original German: “Festspiel der Reichsparteitage”; “für alle Zeiten.” 19

Stock, Richard Wagner und die Stadt der Meistersinger, 28. Original German: “Der politische Genius Adolf Hitler hat mit der Erhebung der ‘Meistersinger von Nürnberg’ zum Festspiel der Reichsparteitage dem künstlerischen Genius Richard Wagner in der Stadt der Meistersinger ein ewiges Denkmal gesetzt.” 20 Letter from Winifred Wagner, in Stock, Richard Wagner und die Stadt der Meistersinger, 11. Original German: “alljährlich dem Reichsparteitag sein festliches Gepräge zu geben”; “tiefen Sinn.” 21 Patrick Carnegy, “Stage History,” in Richard Wagner Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, ed. John Warrack, Cambridge Opera Handbooks (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994), 135–52; here, 141. See also Hans Rudolf Vaget, “The ‘Metapolitics’ of Die Meistersinger: Wagner’s Nuremberg as Imagined Community,” in Searching for Common Ground: Diskurse zur deutschen Identität, 1750–1871, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000), 269–82; here, 271. 22

Hans Rudolf Vaget, “The Beckmesser Controversy Revisited,” in Wagner’s Meistersinger: Performance, History, Representation, ed. Nicholas Vazsonyi (Rochester: U of Rochester P, 2003), 190–208; here, 207. 23

Bodo-Michael Baumunk and Gerhard Brunn, eds., Hauptstadt: Zentren, Residenzen, Metropolen in der deutschen Geschichte, exhibition catalogue (Cologne: DuMont, 1989, 104–5, item 4/35b. See also Carnegy, “Stage History,” 141. 24

Spotts, Bayreuth: A History of the Wagner Festival, 193.

25

Joachim Köhler, Wagner’s Hitler: The Prophet and His Disciple, trans. Ronald Taylor (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 293. 26

Köhler, Wagner’s Hitler, 17.

27

Haffner, Germany: Jekyll and Hyde, 30.

28

Cited in William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960), 101. 29

Köhler, Wagner’s Hitler, 247.

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30 David B. Dennis makes the point that the claims for the opera’s presence in the film’s soundtrack are frequently overstated and inaccurate. While this is true, music from Wagner’ operas, especially Die Meistersinger, does occur prominently in the film. David B. Dennis, “ ‘The Most German of All German Operas’: Die Meistersinger through the Lens of the Third Reich,” in Vazsonyi, Wagner’s Meistersinger, 98–119; here, 98–99. 31 From Leni Riefenstahl’s 1933 film Sieg des Glaubens. Original German: “Am 2. September 1923 sind wir zum ersten Mal in großen Scharen durch diese Stadt gezogen, damals noch inmitten einer uns feindlichen Umwelt in einer Zeit, in der es schwerer war zu jubeln als heute. Ich wünsche für die Millionenbewegung der Nationalsozialistischen Partei der Stadt Nürnberg für die Zukunft Glück und Gedeihen und glaube, daß die Parteileitung der Bewegung mit beitragen werde, den Ruhm dieser alten deutschen Stadt nur noch zu vertiefen und der Welt noch mehr zu Bewußtsein zu bringen.” My transcription. Hitler’s description of the difficulty of celebrating in 1923 contrasts with positive reports in Nuremberg’s rightwing press in 1923, as well as with a Nazi account of the 1927 party rally; one of the intertitles of the 1927 silent film documentary Parteitag der NSDAP Nürnberg 20.–21. August, cites the Rheinische Tageszeitung as reporting that in 1927 “the ecstasy of the population is simply indescribable” (“Der Jubel der Bevölkerung ist einfach unbeschreiblich”). My transcription. 32 Siegfried Zelnhefer, Die Reichsparteitage der NSDAP: Geschichte, Struktur und Bedeutung der größten Propagandafeste im nationalsozialistischen Feierjahr (Nuremberg: Stadtarchiv Nürnberg, 1991), 24–25. 33 Cited in Zelnhefer, Die Reichsparteitage der NSDAP, 62. Original German: “eine Anzahl von alten Bäumen im Luitpoldhain.” 34

Clemens Wachter, “Julius Streicher und ‘Der Stürmer’: Der antisemitische Fanatiker und seine Hetzschriften,” in Geländebegehung: Das Reichsparteitagsgelände in Nürnberg, ed. Alexander Schmidt (Nuremberg: Sandberg, 2002), 217–19; here, 218; Michael Diefenbacher and Rudolf Endres, eds., Stadtlexikon Nürnberg (Nuremberg: W. Tümmels, 2000), 1052. Original German: “zur Menschenführung ungeeignet.” 35

Zelnhefer, Die Reichsparteitage der NSDAP, 62. Original German: “Allerdings schien Nürnberg wie selbstverständlich den ‘Zuschlag’ 1933 bekommen zu haben. Und ernsthaft kam ein anderer Ort für die NSDAP auch nicht mehr in Frage.”

36

Zelnhefer, Die Reichsparteitage der NSDAP, 170.

37

Alexander Lips, Die deutsche Bundesstadt: Eine Phantasie auf absoluter Basis (Germanien [i.e. Vienna]: n.p., 1815), 23. 38 Henry Ashby Turner, “Hitler’s Impact on History,” in From the Berlin Museum to the Berlin Wall: Essays on the Cultural and Political History of Modern Germany, ed. David Wetzel (Westport: Praeger, 1996), 109–26; here, 126. 39

Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 97.

40

Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002), 71.

41

Stock, Richard Wagner und die Stadt der Meistersinger, 28.

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42 See Peter Uwe Hohendahl, “Reworking History: Wagner’s German Myth of Nuremberg,” in Grimm and Hermand, Re-Reading Wagner (Madison: Monatshefte, 1993), 39–60; here, 58–59. See also Stephen Brockmann, “Syberberg’s Germany,” German Quarterly 69, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 48–62. 43

Bernd Rusinek, “ ‘Die deutscheste aller deutschen Städte’: Nürnberg als eine Hauptstadt des Nationalsozialismus,” in Baumunk and Brunn, Hauptstadt: Zentren, Residenzen, Metropolen, 92–98; here, 92. Original German: “deutscheste aller deutschen Städte.” 44 Cited in Zelnhefer, Die Reichsparteitage der NSDAP, 68. Original German: “Um in der Bewegung das Gefühl für diese ehrwürdigen Traditionen unseres Kampfes zu erwecken, werden wir daher für alle Zukunft die Reichsparteitage an dieser Stelle feiern.” 45 “Wie Leni Riefenstahl den Reichsparteitag-Film schafft,” Lichtbildbühne 26, no. 206 (1 September 1933): 2. Original German: “Wir wollen damit zugleich anknüpfen an die große Vergangenheit und bekunden, daß unsere Bewegung nichts anderes ist als die Fortsetzung nicht nur deutscher Größe, sondern auch deutscher Kunst und deutscher Kultur. Wir wollen damit aber auch bekunden, daß es gilt, daß unsere Bewegung sich selbst ihre eigene Tradition schaffe.” 46 Zelnhefer, Die Reichsparteitage der NSDAP, 62. Original German: “Hitler [ließ] an seiner persönlichen Vorliebe für die Meistersinger-Stadt keinen Zweifel aufkommen.” 47 Helmut Beer, “Warum Nürnberg sich so gut als ‘Stadt der Reichsparteitage’ eignete,” in recht extrem.de: Auseinandersetzung mit Nationalsozialismus und Rechtsextremismus — Konzepte und Projekte der politischen und historischen Bildung, ed. Bernd Kammerer and Anja Prölß-Kammerer (Nuremberg: emweVerlag, 2002), 63–87; here, 64. Original German: “auf diesem längst blühenden Nürnberg-Kult aufbauen.” 48 Zelnhefer, Die Reichsparteitage der NSDAP, 62. Original German: “dass unsere Parteitage jetzt und für immer in dieser Stadt stattfinden.” 49

Alfred Rosenberg and Wilhelm Weiß, eds., Reichsparteitag der NSDAP Nürnberg 19./21. August 1927 (Munich: Franz Eher, 1927), 5. Original German: “Es war ein guter Gedanke, den dritten nationalsozialistischen Reichsparteitag in der alten Reichsstadt Nürnberg zu veranstalten. Der Stadt, die ebenso sehr im Mittelpunkt der Glanzzeiten der deutschen Geschichte des Mittelalters stand, wie sie zu einer Hochburg des marxistischen Massenwahns des 20. Jahrhunderts zu werden drohte. Es war daher gleichsam wie ein Symbol, als in den Tagen vom 19. bis. 21. August der Nationalsozialismus von ihr Besitz ergriff und damit zum Ausdruck brachte, daß die Freiheitskämpfer für den kommenden deutschen Nationalstaat nicht dulden werden, daß die Stätten der großen deutschen Vergangenheit zum Tummelplatz jüdisch-marxistischer Verneinung aller überlieferten Werte des deutschen Volkstums werden.” 50 Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence, trans. T. E. Hulme and J. Roth (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1950), 142. Note also the discussion of Sorel in Jean Neurohr, Der Mythos vom Dritten Reich: Zur Geistesgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1957), 20.

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51 Thomas Nipperdey, “Der Mythos im Zeitalter der Revolution,” in Wege des Mythos in der Moderne: Richard Wagner “Der Ring des Nibelungen,” ed. Dieter Borchmeyer (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1987), 96–109; here, 102. Cited in Hohendahl, “Reworking History,” 50. 52


53

Alfred Rosenberg, Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts: Eine Wertung der seelischgeistigen Gestaltenkämpfe unserer Zeit (1930; repr. Munich: Hoheneichen, 1933), 699. Original German: “Mythus ist für Hunderttausende von Seelen nicht etwas, was man mit gelehrter Überheblichkeit als Kuriosität in Katalogen vermerkt, sondern das Neuerwachen des zellenbildenden, seelischen Zentrums.” 54

Cited in Neurohr, Der Mythos vom Dritten Reich, 20; from Charles Andler, Les Origines du Pangermanisme (Paris: Louis Conard, 1915), xii. 55 Peter Fritzsche, “Cities Forget, Nations Remember: Berlin and Germany and the Shock of Modernity,” in Pain and Prosperity: Reconsidering Twentieth-Century German History, ed. Paul Betts and Greg Eghigian (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003), 35–60; here, 41. Fritzsche also discusses Berlin as a capital of forgetting to which the nation responded with a politics of memory. 56

Rosenberg and Weiß, Reichsparteitag, 9. Original German: “Schatzkästlein des Deutschen Reiches.”

57

Rosenberg and Weiß, Reichsparteitag, 9–10. Original German: “Ich brauche Ihnen nicht die Männer namentlich anzuführen, deren Namen Sie selbst heute in sich tragen. Wenn Sie durch diese Stadt gehen, aus allen Gassen und von der Burg herab spricht der echte, beste deutsche Geist, die deutsche Art, die wir Nationalsozialisten dem Volke wieder zurückholen wollen. In das Schatzkästlein des Deutschen Reiches kam der Unrat. . . . Dann aber, meine lieben Volksgenossen, kam jener geschichtliche Augenblick, als die Nürnberger sich erhoben und erklärten: Wenn Kaiser und Könige versagen, dann greifen wir zur Selbsthilfe.” 58 In fact, as Dennis E. Showalter has pointed out, even Streicher “fancied himself a man of taste and sensitivity.” See Dennis E. Showalter, “ ‘A Tidal Wave of Degeneracy’: National Socialism and Cultural Politics in Nürnberg, 1923–33,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 83:3 (Summer 1984): 283–96; here, 288. 59 Rosenberg and Weiß, Reichsparteitag, 11. Original German: “Denkt bei allem, was Ihr tut, daß es für den Nationalsozialisten nur eines gibt: hineinzuschreien in die Welt: Und wenn die Welt voll Teufel wär’, es muß uns doch gelingen!” 60

Zelnhefer, Die Reichsparteitage der NSDAP, 66. Original German: “Ritter ohne Furcht und Tadel, der als Führer in dem neuen deutschen Reich der alten Reichsstadt Nürnberg Ruhm aufs neue in alle Welt getragen und gemehrt.”

61 Rosenberg and Weiß, Reichsparteitag, 51. Original German: “Und während die Kolonnen mit klingendem Spiel zum Bahnhof zogen, um mit den Sonderzügen wieder in die Heimat zurückzukehren, da schauten noch Hunderte von Nationalsozialisten von der Burg, dem Wahrzeichen der alten Noris, hinunter auf das Giebelmeer der Stadt, hinaus in das weite Frankenland und in den dämmernden Abend, in der Seele das Reich ihrer Sehnsucht vor sich: das nationalsozialistische, freie Deutschland.”

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62 Baldur von Schirach, then the leader of the Nazi party student organization, directed the film Der Nürnberger Parteitag der NSDAP vom 1.–4. August 1929. This was a silent film with “intertitles, and it proclaimed” itself a film “of the Germany that is coming” (“vom kommenden Deutschland”) dedicated to “the movement’s dead” (“den Toten der Bewegung”). My transcriptions. 63

Fränkischer Kurier, 3 September 1923, 3.

64

Moeller van den Bruck, Das dritte Reich (1923; repr. Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, 1931), 244. Original German: “ist immer verheißen. Und es wird niemals erfüllt.” 65 Moeller van den Bruck, Das dritte Reich, 229. Original German: “Kontinuität deutscher Geschichte.” 66

Moeller van den Bruck, Das dritte Reich, 245. Original German: “wir denken an das Deutschland aller Zeiten, an das Deutschland einer zweitausendjährigen Vergangenheit, und an das Deutschland einer ewigen Gegenwart, das im Geistigen lebt. . . .”

67

Moeller van den Bruck, Das dritte Reich, 242.

68

Moeller van den Bruck, Das dritte Reich, 232.

69

Moeller van den Bruck, Das dritte Reich, 232. My emphasis. Original German: “weil wir zwar im Staatlichen, und darauf folgend im Militärischen stark waren, also in allem, was schützen sollte, aber überaus schwach in allem, was geschützt werden sollte.” 70

For the classic study of Moeller’s work, see Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair (Berkeley: U of California P, 1961).

71 Edgar Jung, Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen — ihr Zerfall und ihre Ablösung durch ein Neues Reich (Berlin: Deutsche Rundschau, 1930), 9. English translation from Edgar Jung, Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen/The Rule of the Inferior, ed. and trans. Alexander Jacob (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1995), 7. Original German: “Wir stehen an der Schwelle einer neuen Welt. Eine Zeitwende, die, vielleicht nicht nur äußerlich, ein neues Jahrtausend einleitet, hat angehoben.” 72

Jung, Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen, 21; Jung, Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen/The Rule of the Inferior, 25–26. Original German: “Des deutschen Volkes Schicksalsfrage ist also, ob es, Schöpfer des ersten abendländischen Reiches, auch das kommende mitgestalten wird.”

73 Cited in Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair, 266; from Andreas Hohlfeld, Unsere geschichtliche Verantwortung: Eine zeitgeschichtliche Betrachtung zu einer politischen Aufgabe (Leipzig: Armanen, 1933), 5. Original German: “Es kam — nach den geltenden Anschauungen — etwas ganz Unvernünftiges, es kam die Idee des Dritten Reiches. Und dieser Gedanke packte den deutschen Menschen, er packte politisch Heimatlose und politische Abenteurer, er packte Erdverbundene und Erdentwurzelte, er packte Naturen, mit denen man nicht sprechen, nicht diskutiernen konnte.” 74

Hohlfeld, Unsere geschichtliche Verantwortung, 3. Original German: “Dieses Dritte Reich ist die Hoffnung der Hoffnungslosen, der Glaube der Zweifelnden, der Sieg der Besiegten geworden. Ob Arbeiter oder Bauer, ob Bürger, Handwerker

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oder Student, jeder sucht und findet im Begriff und in der Gestalt des Dritten Reiches die Erfüllung seiner Sehnsucht und das Ziel seiner Hoffnungen.” 75

See Jost Hermand, Der alte Traum vom neuen Reich: Völkische Utopien und Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1988). Translated into English by Paul Levesque in collaboration with Stefan Soldovieri as Old Dreams of a New Reich: Volkisch Utopias and National Socialism (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992).

76

Julius Petersen, Die Sehnsucht nach dem Dritten Reich in deutscher Sage und Dichtung (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1934), 1. Original German: “Nun ist das Morgen zum Heute gworden; Weltuntergangsstimmung hat sich in Aufbruch verwandelt; das Endziel tritt ins Blickfeld der Gegenwart, und aller Wunderglaube wird zur tatkräftigen Gestaltung der Wirklichkeit angesetzt”; “Mit dem Eintritt des Unendlichen in die Endlichkeit ist der Uferlosigkeit ein Boden geschaffen, in den der Hoffnungsanker sich senkt.”

77 Hohlfeld, Unsere geschichtliche Verantwortung, 11. Original German: “Politische Tatsachen, mögen sie noch so festgefügt und von großer Wucht sein, werden nur dann eine Dauer haben und die spätere Geschichte entscheidend bestimmen, wenn es gelingt, sie in den Zusammenhang des geschichtlichen Werdens einzuordnen, sie im Wesen und Charakter eines Volkes wesentlich und unbezweifelbar zu machen.” 78 Speer, Erinnerungen, 68; Speer, Inside the Third Reich, 55. Original German: “daß er baue, um seine Zeit und ihren Geist der Nachwelt zu überliefern”; “Letztlich würden an die großen Epochen der Geschichte doch nur noch deren monumentale Bauwerke erinnern.” 79 Speer, Erinnerungen, 69; Speer, Inside the Third Reich, 56. Original German: “Theorie vom Ruinenwert”; “die im Verfallszustand, nach Hunderten oder (so rechneten wir) Tausenden von Jahren etwa den römischen Vorbildern gleichen würden”; “romantische Zeichnung”; “wie die Tribüne des Zeppelinfeldes nach Generationen der Vernachlässigung aussehen würde, überwuchert von Efeu.” 80 Cited in Eckart Dietzfelbinger and Gerhard Liedtke, Nürnberg — Ort der Massen: Das Reichsparteitagsgelände — Vorgeschichte und schwieriges Erbe (Berlin: Christoph Links, 2004), 34; from Winfried Nerdinger and Katharina Blohm, Bauen im Nationalsozialismus: Bayern 1933–1945 (Munich: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1993), 44. Original German: “Es muß hier in gewaltigstem Ausmaß ein Dokument stilbildender Art geschaffen werden, das zugleich für Millionen Deutsche ein Denkmal des Stolzes sein soll, der Zugehörigkeit zu dieser Gemeinschaft.” 81 Cited in Dietzfelbinger and Liedtke, Nürnberg — Ort der Massen, 35; from Jost Dülffer, Jochen Thies, and Josef Henke, Hitlers Städte — Baupolitik im Dritten Reich (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau, 1978), 296. Original German: “Also das geschieht bei mir auch nicht aus Großmannssucht, sondern es geschieht aus der kältesten Überlegung, daß man nur durch solche gewaltigen Werke einem Volk das Selbstbewußtsein geben kann.” 82

Max Domarus, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen, 1932–1945, 2 vols. (Neustadt a. d. Aisch: Verlagsdruckerei Schmidt, 1962), 1:719. Speech of 7 September 1937. In English: Max Domarus, Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations

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1932–1945, trans. Chris Wilcox and Mary Fran Gilbert (Wauconda, IL: BolchazyCarducci, 1992), 2:927. [Translation slightly altered.] Original German: “Deshalb sollen diese Bauwerke nicht gedacht sein für das Jahr 1940, auch nicht für das Jahr 2000, sondern sie sollen hineinragen gleich den Domen unserer Vergangenheit in die Jahrtausende der Zukunft.” 83

See Dietzfelbinger and Liedtke, Nürnberg — Ort der Massen, 35, 58.

84

Cited in “Eine Halle ohne Dach: Im Innenhof der Kongreßhalle,” in Schmidt, Geländebegehung, 47–53; here, 49. Original German: “wirklich Großartiges und für alle Zeiten Monumentales.” 85 See Paul Jaskot, The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor, and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy (London and New York: Routledge, 2000). 86 Dietzfelbinger and Liedtke, Nürnberg — Ort der Massen, 31. Original German: “Tempelstadt der Bewegung.” 87 Hans-Ulrich Thamer, “The Orchestration of the National Community: The Nuremberg Party Rallies of the NSDAP,” in Fascism and Theatre: Comparative Studies on the Aesthetics and Politics of Performance in Europe, 1925–1945, ed. Günter Berghaus (Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1996), 172–90; here, 186. 88 Cited in Karsten Witte, “Gehemmte Schaulust: Momente des deutschen Revuefilms,” in Wir tanzen um die Welt: Deutsche Revuefilme, 1933–1945, ed. Helga Belach (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1979), 7–52; here, 51. In English: Witte, “Visual Pleasure Inhibited: Aspects of the German Revue Film,” trans. J. D. Steakley and Gabriele Hoover, New German Critique 24/25 (Fall 1981/Winter 1982): 238–63; here, 262. From Joachim Schumacher, Die Angst vor dem Chaos: Über die falsche Apokalypse des Bürgertums, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt: makol, 1972), 269. Original German: “nach völlig ungleichzeitigen disparaten Ständen, als wäre der Finanzkapitalismus von 1936 die Burg- und Marktgenossenschaft von 1300.” 89

Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984). 90 Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Sämtliche Werke und Briefe: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Silvio Vietta and Richard Littlejohns (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1991), 2:191. Original German: “in seiner ganzen Größe u Pracht, mit allen Thürmen, unter welchen der hochstehende Thurm der Burg hinten besonders hervorragt.” 91

Claude Ollier, Disconnection, trans. Dominic Di Bernardi (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive P, 1989), 35. French original: Claude Ollier, Déconnection (Paris: Flammarion, 1988), 54. 92

Willy Liebel, ed., Fünf Jahre Stadt der Reichsparteitage Nürnberg: Ein Bericht über die nationalsozialistische Aufbauarbeit in der Stadt der Reichsparteitage Nürnberg (Nuremberg: K. Ulrich, 1938), 36. Original German: “Die Stadt der Reichsparteitage ist damit für einige Zeit nach Berlin, Wien und Hamburg die viertgrößte Stadt des Deutschen Reiches.” 93 Schmidt, Geländebegehung, 109. Original German: “deutschen oder artverwandten Blutes.” 94 Stock, Richard Wagner und die Stadt der Meistersinger, 9. Original German: “Metropole des Weltkampfes gegen das Judentum”; “die weltanschaulichen Lebensziele Richard Wagners”; “eine herrliche Erfüllung.”

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95 Cited in Clemens Wachter and Alexander Schmidt, “Rassismus in Paragraphenform: Die ‘Nürnberger Gesetze,’ ” in Geländebegehung, ed. Schmidt, 221–25; here, 221. Original German: “Wir haben gesiegt!” 96

Köhler, Wagner’s Hitler, 253–54.

97

“Der Sieg des Glaubens: Der Film vom Reichsparteitag der NSDAP,” Kinematograph 27, no. 4 (2 December 1933): 1. For more on this film, see Martin Loiperdinger, “ ‘Sieg des Glaubens’: Ein gelungenes Experiment nationalsozialistischer Filmpropaganda,” Zeitschrift für Pädagogik (1993): 35–48. Original German: “ein Bild von der Einigkeit . . ., zu der alle deutschen Stämme über jahrhundertelange Eigenbrötelei hinaus sich auf dem Reichsparteitag in Nürnberg zu dem neuen Deutschland und zu dem Führer . . . bekannt hat.” 98 Triumph des Willens: Reklame-Ratschläge (Berlin: Ufa-Werbedienst, 1935), 7. Original German: “Und immer wieder spüren wir es mit einer beinahe mythisch zu nennenden Gewalt: wie sehr gehört dieses Volk zu seinem Führer, wie sehr gehört dieser Führer zu ihm! Aus jedem Blick, aus jedem Druck der Hände spricht das Bekennen und das Gelöbnis: wir gehören zusammen. In ewiger Treue zusammen.” 99 Der Kongreß zu Nürnberg vom 5. bis 10. September 1934: Offizieller Bericht über den Verlauf des Reichsparteitags mit sämtlichen Reden (Munich: Eher, 1934), 190. Emphasis in the original. Original German: “Hitler aber ist Deutschland, wie Deutschland Hitler ist.” 100

Thamer, “The Orchestration of the National Community,” 179.

101

See “Den Führer spüren? Das Zeppelinfeld aus der Perspektive von Zuschauern und Teilnehmern,” in Schmidt, Geländebegehung, 87–95. 102 Cited in Thamer, “The Orchestration of the National Community,” 185. Wilhelm Lotz, “Das Reichsparteitagsgelände in Nürnberg,” in Anna Teut, ed., Architektur im Dritten Reich 1933–1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1967), 190–95; here, 192. Original German: “Sowohl die Gesamtplanung wie auch die Gestaltung der einzelnen Bauten und Platzgruppen werden bestimmt von dem für die nationalsozialistische Ordnung so grendlegenden Verhältnis zwischen Führer und Volk.” 103 Siegfried Kracauer, “Das Ornament der Masse,” in Das Ornament der Masse: Essays (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 50–63; here, 51. In English: Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, trans. and ed. Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995), 75–86; here, 76. Original German: “von innen her geformt”; “werden aus Elementen zusammengestellt, die nur Bausteine sind und nichts außerdem.” 104

Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974), 301.

105

Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 302.

106

Walter Benjamin, “Pariser Brief (I): André Gide und sein neuer Gegner,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3, Kritiken und Rezensionen: Fortsetzung, ed. Rolf Tiedemann et al., Werkausgabe vol. 9 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), 482–95; here, 488. Original German: “für Massen, sondern auch von Massen exekutiert.” Also cited in Martin Loiperdinger, Der Parteitagsfilm “Triumph des Willens” von Leni Riefenstahl: Rituale der Mobilmachung (Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 1987), 23. I am indebted to Loiperdinger for his perceptive critique of Benjamin and Kracauer.

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107 Benjamin, “Pariser Brief (I),” 488. Original German: “die Masse habe es in dieser Kunst mit sich selbst zu tun, sie verständige sich mit sich selbst, sie sei Herr im Hause.” 108 Cited in Marlene Müller-Rytlewski, “Alltagsmühsal und Parteitagsherrlichkeit: Aus Erlebnisberichten der ‘Alten Garde,’ ” in Faszination und Gewalt: Zur politischen Ästhetik des Nationalsozialismus, ed. Bernd Ogan and Wolfgang W. Weiß (Nuremberg: W. Tümmels, 1992), 105–16; here, 114. Original German: “Diesen unseren Führer zu sehen und zu hören war der Traum meiner Tage und Nächte; und dieser Traum wurde trotz aller Hindernisse, die sich mir in den Weg stellten, Wirklichkeit”; “Das Schlußwort des Führers war so ergreifend und zu Herzen gehend, daß — ich schäme mich nicht, es zu sagen — mir heiße Tränen über die Wangen rannen.” 109 Cited in Müller-Rytlewski, “Alltagsmühsal und Parteitagsherrlichkeit,” 105. Original German: “Wer dann am 1.–4. August selbst in Nürnberg ist, der wird in vielen Zehntausenden von glanzerfüllten Augen einen Dank für seinen Beitrag sehen, der ihn beglückt.” 110 Max Domarus, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen 1932–1945, 1:643; Max Domarus, Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations 1932–1945, 2:836. Original German: “Das ist das Wunder unserer Zeit, daß ihr mich gefunden habt . . . unter so vielen Millionen! Und daß ich euch gefunden habe, das ist Deutschlands Glück!” 111

Sorel, Reflections on Violence, 277.

112

Cited in Müller-Rytlewski, “Alltagsmühsal und Parteitagsherrlichkeit,” 110. Original German: “Alles verblaßt, Anpöbeleien, Boykottierung seiner Geschäfte, Saalschlachten, die willkürlichen Haussuchungen der Polizei und alle Schlägereien, immer gegen den einen Moment, an dem man den Führer das erste Mal sah, ihm zum ersten Mal Auge in Auge gegenüberstand und seinen Worten lauschen konnte.” 113 Cited in Ernst Klee, “ ‘Evangelische Diakonie und Nationalsozialismus gehören zusammen’: Wie unsere Schwestern den ‘Reichsparteitag der Ehre’ erlebten,” in Ogan and Weiß, Faszination und Gewalt, 117–25; here, 123. Original German: “Wir fühlen den Blick seiner Augen. Es ist einem so, als sähe er einem bis auf den Grund der Seele. Die Menschenmasse hält den Atem an, wagt nicht, sich zu rühren.” 114

Cited in Thamer, “The Orchestration of the National Community,” 188.

115

Triumph des Willens: Reklame-Ratschläge, 20. Original German: “Der Führer, das blutgeweihte Tuch der Fahne tragend, geht mit feierlichem, beschwörenden Ernst von einem zum anderen Standartenträger, weiht die Standarten, drückt dem Träger die Hand, bindet ihn mit einem tiefen, ernsten, unvergeßlichen Blick zu ewiger Gefolgschaft. . . . Wir stehen dabei, wir spüren das Fluidum dieser Persönlichkeit, wir fühlen diesen Blick, der bis zum Grund der Seele dringt.” 116 Joseph Goebbels, Michael: Ein deutsches Schicksal in Tagebuchblättern (Munich: Franz Eher, 1929), 102. In English: Joseph Goebbels, Michael, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Amok, 1987), 83. Original German: “Der da oben schaut mich einen Augenblick an. Diese blauen Augensterne treffen mich wie Flammenstrahlen. Das ist Befehl!” 117

Cited in Thamer, “The Orchestration of the National Community,” 188.

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118 Cited in Müller-Rytlewski, “Alltagsmühsal und Parteitagsherrlichkeit,” 113. Original German: “der Mann, den uns Gott gesandt, um unser armes gequältes Vaterland zu retten, zu retten aus Schmach und Schande, aus Not und Verzweiflung.” 119

Der Sieg des Glaubens: Der Film vom Reichs-Parteitag der NSDAP (Berlin: Illustrierter Film-Kurier, 1933); promotional brochure, no page number. Original German: “nicht mehr ein stereotyper Gruß, sondern das Symbol des Segens, das über die Kinder ausgeschüttet wird.”

120

“Der Sieg des Glaubens: Der Film vom Reichsparteitag der NSDAP,” Kinematograph 27, no. 4 (2 December 1933): 1. This article also states that Hitler himself chose the title for the film. Original German: “ein Zeugnis von der wirklich alle Widerstände besiegenden Macht des Glaubens an eine innere Berufung.” 121 Cited in Dietzfelbinger and Liedtke, Nürnberg — Ort der Massen, 76; from Zelnhefer, 105. The film Festliches Nürnberg includes footage of the “cathedral of light.” Original German: “In dieser Weihestunde, wo ein unendlicher Dom sich über uns wölbt, der in die Unendlichkeit geht, da wollen wir geloben: Wir glauben an einen Herrgott im Himmel, der uns geschaffen hat, der uns lenkt und behütet und der Sie, mein Führer, uns gesandt hat, damit Sie Deutschland befreien. Das glauben wir, mein Führer.” 122

Ina Seidel, “Lichtdom,” in Ingmar Reither, “Worte aus Stein” und die Sprache der Dichter: Das Reichsparteitagsgelände als poetische Landschaft (Nuremberg: Sandberg, 2000), 36. Original German: “Ist dieser Dom, erbaut aus klarem Feuer, / nicht mehr als eine Burg aus Stahl und Stein, / und muß er nicht ein Heiligtum, uns teuer, / ewigen Deutschtums neues Sinnbild sein?”

123 Seidel, “Lichtdom,” 36. Original German: “um den Einen, / und dieser Eine ist des Volkes Herz.” 124 Cited in Klee, “ ‘Evangelische Diakonie und Nationalsozialismus gehören zusammen,’ ” 121. Original German: “Unser Führer leitet uns sicher und aufopfernd durch alle Fährnisse hindurch, Gott selber hat ihn ausgerüstet, darum können wir uns getrost seinem Wege anvertrauen.” 125 An early form of this ceremony with the “blood flag” is extensively documented in von Schirach’s 1929 documentary; an intertitle for that film explains that “Hitler consecrates the new standards and flags by touching them with the blood flag of November 1923” (“Hitler weiht die neuen Standarten und Fahnen, in dem er sie mit der Blutfahne vom November 1923 berührt”). My transcription. Interestingly enough, the “blood flag” does not seem to have played a role in the 1927 consecration ceremony, at least as documented in the 1927 film Parteitag der NSDAP Nürnberg 20.–21. August. In that ceremony it appears that Hitler consecrates the flags by the mere touch of his hand, without the help of the “blood flag.” 126

Dietzfelbinger and Liedtke, Nürnberg — Ort der Massen, 46.

127

Cited in Rusinek, “Die deutscheste aller deutschen Städte,” 96. Original German: “wie betäubt.” 128 Cited in Rusinek, “Die deutscheste aller deutschen Städte,” 96. Original German: “Nazis wollen wir nach wie vor nicht werden, aber solche Massenaufmärsche, solche Organisationsleistungen sind wie Hypnose. Man verliert jeden Glauben, daß dieses System noch einmal gestürzt werden kann.”

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129 Cited in Dietzfelbinger and Liedtke, Nürnberg — Ort der Massen, 35; from André François-Poncet, Als Botschafter in Berlin, 1931–1938 (Mainz: Florian Kupferberg, 1947), 273. French-language original: Souvenirs d’une ambassade à Berlin Septembre 1931–Octubre 1938 (Paris: Flammarion, 1946), translated into German by Dr. Ema Stübel: “Aber erstaunlich und nicht zu beschreiben ist die Atmosphäre der allgemeinen Begeisterung, in die die alte Stadt eingetaucht ist, dieser eigenartige Rausch, von dem Hunterttausende von Männern und Frauen ergriffen sind, die romantische Erregung, mystische Ekstase, eine Art heiligen Wahns, dem sie verfallen. Während acht Tagen ist Nürnberg eine Stadt, in der die Freude herrscht, eine Stadt, die unter einem Zauber steht, ja fast eine Stadt der Entrückten.” 130 William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), 20. 131

Shirer, Berlin Diary, 17–18.

132

Cited in Loiperdinger, Der Parteitagsfilm “Triumph des Willens,” 114, from Michael Sandner, “Es gab nichts Negatives beim Reichsparteitag,” Abendzeitung, Munich, 3 November 1976. Original German: “Was hätte ich denn Negatives drehen sollen, was gab es denn Negatives. An allen Ecken in Nürnberg war Begeisterung.” 133 Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1.2, Abhandlungen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980), 471–508; here, 508. In English: Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” trans. Harry Zohn and Edmund Jephcott, in Selected Writings, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Belknap, 2003), 251–83; here, 270. Original German: “Ästhetisierung der Politik”; “Politisierung der Kunst.” 134 Bertolt Brecht, Werke: Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, ed. Werner Hecht, Jan Knopf, Werner Mittenzwei, and Klaus-Detlef Müller, vol. 26, Journale 1, 1913–1941 (Berlin and Frankfurt: Aufbau & Suhrkamp, 1994), 443. Original German: “Theatralisierung der Politik durch den Faschismus.” 135 “Der Reichsparteitag 1933 der NSDAP im Film,” Kinematograph 27, no. 168 (31 August 1933): 1. Original German: “Dem Film ist im neuen Deutschland eine ganz andere Aufgabe zugefallen als vordem”; “Dadurch wird allen Volksgenossen, selbst denen, die in den entferntesten Winkeln unseres Reiches wohnen, die Möglichkeit gegeben, optisch an den Vorgängen teilzunehmen, die sich in einem ganz anderen Landesteil abspielen und die trotzdem von großer Bedeutung für alle Volksgenossen sind.” 136


137

Cited in Loiperdinger, Der Parteitagsfilm “Triumph des Willens,” 146, from Karlheinz Schmeer, Die Regie des öffentlichen Lebens im Dritten Reich (Munich: Pohl, 1956), 70. Original German: “Der Proklamation des Volksgemeinschaftsgedankens haben wir nunmehr das praktische Exerzieren dieser Gemeinschaft folgen lassen.”

138 Loiperdinger, Der Parteitagsfilm “Triumph des Willens,” 150. Original German: “Die Appellfunktion der vom Faschismus betriebenen Staatspropaganda fällt beim Ritual unmittelbar mit ihrer Erfüllung zusammen, indem sich die

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Adressaten durch ihre motorischen Aktivitäten im Ritualverhalten zugleich als Teilnehmer zu erkennen geben.” Emphasis in the original. 139 Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” 508; Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 270. Original German: “die Vollendung des l’art pour l’art.” 140


141

In fact the Nazis sometimes described the party rally as a “Reichsthing,” with “Thing” being an archaic German word for a public meeting; the same archaism is present in the word “Thingspiel.” See “Reichsthing zu Nürnberg,” in Feuilletons für Triumph des Willens (Berlin: Ufa, 1934), no page number. This was a book of materials sent free of charge for public relations purposes by Ufa to newspaper cultural editors. See also Der Kongreß zu Nürnberg, 6. Here the rally is described as the “Reichsthing der deutschen Nation.” Emphasis in the original. 142

Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” 508; Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” 270. Original German: “hat jenen Grad erreicht, der sie ihre eigene Vernichtung als ästethischen Genuß ersten Ranges erleben läßt.” 143 Cited in Loiperdinger, Der Parteitagsfilm “Triumph des Willens,” 136; from Der Kongreß zu Nürnberg, 22. Original German: “Es gibt kaum eine Demonstration politischer Art in der Welt, die so sehr wie diese charakteristisch und eigenartig die herrschende politische Idee und die in ihr fundierte Staatsgewalt zum Ausdruck bringt.” 144


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M

NAZIS, FROM HISTORIANS TO THE authors of popular books and pamphlets, imagined and explained Hitler’s party rallies as successor events to the medieval German Reichstage (imperial diets). One typical title of a book about the city was Nürnberg die deutsche Stadt: Von der Stadt der Reichstage zur Stadt der Reichsparteitage (Nuremberg, the German City: From the City of the Imperial Diets to the City of the Reich Party Rallies). This title, the name of an exhibition put on at the Germanic National Museum in 1937 and organized by Alfred Rosenberg’s ideological bureau, made explicit the Nazis’ claim that the Third Reich was a successor to the first one, and that Hitler was the modern equivalent of the Holy Roman Emperors. With Hitler’s rise to power Nazi historians took pains to point out that Moeller van den Bruck’s dream of a millennial Third Reich had become a reality. One year before the annexation of Austria and the creation of a Pan-German Reich, Heinrich Ritter von Srbik, one of Germany’s leading historians, called the first Reich “the embodiment of the universalistic and Central European idea,” an idea, he wrote, that had suffered a severe blow in 1806 with the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire.1 The second, Bismarckian Reich, Srbik claimed, had destroyed the idea of the first, universalistic, Reich. The Third Reich, he concluded, fulfilled the deepest aspirations of the first two: “What beckons to us as a guiding star is a new, a Third Reich and with it a Central Europe that is governed by German spirit and German power. These are notions already ignited by the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, and we must continue to think them anew today.”2 In Srbik’s view, “by holding up to the people a mirror of their past and preparing the way for a future, more perfect form of existence in a unified country, history is a servant of the nation and its future.”3 Srbik’s historical conception suggested an almost Hegelian teleological triad, with the second Reich as the antithesis of the first Reich and the third as the ultimate synthesis that would at once replace and preserve the best elements of the previous two empires. The prominent Nazi historian Otto Westphal, whose survey of German history was published after the outbreak of the Second World War, was even more adamant in insisting that the Third Reich was the ultimate goal of all of German history. He saw German history not as a Hegelian development of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis but rather as an inexorable and almost Nietzschean path towards Germanic fulfillment. For ANY

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Poster for the exhibition “Nürnberg, die deutsche Stadt” (Nuremberg, the German City). Provided by and © museen der stadt nürnberg, Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände.

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him, the task of German history was for Germany to became ever more itself, to become identical with the essence that lay within it, casting aside everything superficial and non-essential. In his view Hitler’s Reich had revealed the purpose and goal of German history. Hitler’s deeds, he claimed, “have removed the veils that until now hid the architecture of German history from view.” This claim, Westphal argued, was no “conformism or miserable state-sponsored scholarship but rather the conscious acknowledgement of the fundamental harmony between politics and scholarship. Only in and through the National Socialist spirit can German history be seen as a logical and goal-oriented series of events from the beginning onward, because only National Socialism has made it possible to view German history as a unity.”4 From any position but the National Socialist position, Westphal believed, the course of German history was indecipherable, a series of unconnected, seemingly random events. Westphal saw Hitler, “the unknown soldier, the private first class of the Great War,” as the embodiment of a mystical belief in the mission of the German Volk itself. He had awoken the “furor teutonicus that had lain fallow since the age of the Hohenstaufens.”5 He was, in effect, the fulfillment of the old German legend that one day the lost emperor Barbarossa would return to lead his people in a time of need. The new task of German historians was to discard the arid historicism of the nineteenth century, with its insistence on logic, facts, and criticism, and move toward a new, mystical monumentalism, “from historiography to myth, from the system of states to the cosmos.” As he put it, “the goal of this book is to demonstrate that the more mystically and cosmically history is viewed, the more logical it becomes.”6 The Third Reich was hence not just the ultimate goal of German history but also the only position from which German historiography itself was scientifically feasible. Hitler was simultaneously a great statesman and the greatest of German historians, since only he had given German history, and therefore the work of German historians, a meaning. Westphal wrote enthusiastically of Hitler’s journey through Germany’s Gaue and his proclamation of a “holy election” after the annexation of Austria and the creation of the so-called “Pan-German Reich” (Großdeutsches Reich), and he spoke of the moment when “the Führer and Reich chancellor [walked into] the hall of the Römer in Frankfurt for the first time,” thus coming face to face with the images of the great emperors of the Holy Roman Empire. Evidently Westphal knew precisely what Hitler had been thinking at that moment: “The three empires . . . appeared to his eye as one grand, sacred, necessary connection.”7 Nuremberg, of course, did not go unnoticed in Westphal’s history of the German Reich, as his discussion of the imperial crown jewels proved. Explaining their significance, he wrote: “it is forever noteworthy that . . . in 1424 the imperial insignia, whose security at the Bohemian [fortress] of Karlstein was in doubt after the Hussite attack, were given to Nuremberg

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as a lasting trust. Nuremberg thus became the symbolic capital of the Reich.”8 Westphal’s description of Nuremberg’s significance at the end of the Middle Ages, during the first Reich, prefigured its significance for the Third Reich. In general, the larger Hitler’s Reich became, the more he and his fellow Nazis, including Nazi historians, sought to establish a connection between the “third” and the “first” Reich. After the occupation of Bohemia in 1939 Hitler is said to have proclaimed in his speech at the castle in Prague: “the Holy Roman Empire has been resurrected!”9 Of course Hitler secretly declared his own Reich to be superior to the “Roman” empire of the Middle Ages, because, unlike the uncomfortably international Catholic empire of Barbarossa, the Third Reich would be racist and nationalist, a “Germanic Empire of the German Nation” (Germanisches Reich Deutscher Nation), as he proclaimed in a secret speech at the Sonthofen Order Castle, a special leadership school for elite Nazi youth, on 23 November 1937.10 This would not simply be a return to the Middle Ages; it would be a push forward to a new golden age in which the best aspects of the past would be combined with modern racist and nationalist thinking. In the museum catalogue for the 1937 exhibit at the Germanic National Museum curators took pains to point out the connection between Nuremberg the part and Germany the whole. The old imperial city, the curators argued, had been “the symbolic middle point of the German Reich.”11 With the selection of Nuremberg as the city of the Nazi rallies, “the old claim of Nuremberg to be the symbolic center of the Reich” had been fulfilled.12 Nuremberg, the curators argued, represented Germany itself. It was difficult to comprehend the entire history of a great nation taken as a whole, but if, instead of trying to understand all details and all places, one studied the nation through its most significant historical city, then suddenly the contours of German development became manageable and clear: One must select, from the multifaceted destiny of an entire people, one grand and shining example. The example of a community created by the ties between a nation and its political leadership. Nuremberg, the German city, the city of the imperial diets and of the Reich party rallies, should serve as this example. Nuremberg has become a symbol of our German people and of their state identity. We love this city because we love Germany, our larger homeland.13

When the German Reich found itself in a period of decline, the exhibition guide suggested, then too the city of Nuremberg found itself in decline; conversely, when the Reich was strong, Nuremberg itself prospered. Unlike so many other German cities, Nuremberg had never been beset by particularism; it had always seen its own fate as intimately connected to

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the fate of the German whole. Nuremberg was indeed a synecdoche for Germany itself. A year earlier, in a book entitled Nürnberg die ehemalige Reichsstadt (Nuremberg, the Former Imperial City), Wilhelm Schwemmer, a prominent local historian, had made similar claims about Nuremberg as the symbolic German capital, arguing that under Emperor Karl IV Nuremberg had become “the Kaiser’s city, the capital of the Reich itself,” and that with the 1424 decision to keep the crown jewels in Nuremberg the city had also become the keeper of the very “symbols of Germany.”14 Under the Nazis Nuremberg had, Schwemmer declared, once again become a “symbolic capital of Germany” — indeed, it had acquired a national significance that in some ways even transcended its significance in the early modern period.15 “Through its elevation to city of the Reich party rallies, Nuremberg has once again become the midpoint, indeed the symbolic capital of the Reich, thereby gaining a significance comparable only to the best years of its glorious past.”16 In 1937 another Nuremberg enthusiast who happened to have the same last name as Wilhelm Schwemmer — his first name was Gottlieb — also argued that Nuremberg stood symbolically for all of Germany. The city had traditionally fought with grim determination against the Jews, Gottlieb Schwemmer argued, and the full significance of the northern renaissance that had born such impressive fruit in Nuremberg could not be understood without the recognition that its artistic excellence was a racial expression “of the Nordic essence.”17 Even in its years of suffering and decline, he wrote, Nuremberg had exhibited a praiseworthy resistance to foreign influences, such as the counterreformation, French absolutism, or Baroque architecture.18 The city’s fate had always been inextricably intertwined with the fate of the German Reich, he argued, and “today, when once again the power of the Reich is strong, we see Nuremberg rising to a new and extraordinary significance among the cities of the Reich.”19 Throughout the years of urban and national deprivation in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, Schwemmer insisted, “the glorious notion of the city’s eternal mission had never died out; it had flowed continuously like an underground stream in the emotions and conscience of all Germans.”20 In 1933 that underground stream had broken out into the open: When, finally, on 9 March 1933 the swastika flag was raised high over the old imperial castle, Nuremberg’s historic hour had struck again. The Führer and Reich chancellor Adolf Hitler proclaimed that Nuremberg — in which so many and so noteworthy imperial diets were held, and which, over the course of almost a thousand years of history, was favored by the leaders of the Reich at almost every opportunity — would be the city of the Reich party rallies.21

Nuremberg’s Nazi mayor Willy Liebel, who had taken control of the city in March of 1933 and ousted the liberal mayor Hermann Luppe, was

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a tireless promoter of Nuremberg’s significance for the Nazi Reich. As Liebel declared proudly in a special 1935 issue of the Bavarian tourist magazine Das Bayerland, Hitler had brought the dreams of German patriots like the poet of national liberation Max von Schenkendorf to fruition. “Nuremberg, the city of the Reich party rallies, the proud imperial city of yore, which Dr. Martin Luther once called ‘the eyes and ears of Germany,’ has once again, in the National Socialist Germany, become the focal point of German history and German culture.”22 In the new Nazi Reich the present and future promised to become even greater than the past: “Thus Nuremberg will combine the testimony of a glorious German past with the testimony of a possibly even greater present, and it will bear its former honorary title with renewed justification: ‘the little treasure chest of the German nation!’ ”23 Each year when Hitler came to Nuremberg for the party rallies, Liebel presented Hitler with a special gift on behalf of the city. These gifts were always intended to stress the extreme importance of the city for the Reich. In 1933 Liebel presented Hitler with the aforementioned engraving by Dürer, “Knight, Death and the Devil.” The following year Hitler received an original copy of a famous pamphlet distributed by the Nuremberg bookseller and printer Johann Palm, Deutschland in seiner tiefsten Erniedrigung (Germany in Its Deepest Humiliation), a protest against the Napoleonic invasions for which Palm had been executed in Braunau am Inn, the future town of Hitler’s birth, on 28 August 1806. In 1935, when the Nazis reinstituted the military draft and thus achieved what they called “Wehrhoheit” (military sovereignty), Hitler was greeted in Nuremberg’s city hall by the “Awake” chorus from Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, and Liebel symbolically gave Hitler a copy of the German imperial sword, the so-called “Reichsschwert,” part of the insignia of the Reich that had been kept with the crown jewels in Vienna since the beginning of the nineteenth century. At the “Party Rally of Honor” in 1936, after Hitler’s reoccupation of the Rhineland, Liebel gave Hitler a four-hundred-year-old document about Nuremberg’s defensive fortifications. And in 1937, for the “Party Rally of Labor,” Hitler received a smaller silver copy of a massive statue planned for the Nuremberg rally grounds by Josef Thorak, Hitler’s favorite sculptor. In 1938 what awaited Hitler in the great hall of Nuremberg’s municipal building was not so much the city’s gift to him as his gift to the city: the insignia of the Holy Roman Empire themselves, brought back to Nuremberg from Vienna, which was now part of the Pan-German Reich.

Fictionalizing Nuremberg The 1930s also saw various attempts to popularize Nuremberg’s image in fiction and prose for children and others. Werner Dittschlag published a

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book about Nuremberg in 1937 in a series called “Bagels Bücherei für deutsche Mädel” (Bagel’s Library for German Girls). In that book Dittschlag compared Nuremberg to Sleeping Beauty in the Grimm Brothers fairy tale, and he told his readers that it was no king or emperor who had awoken the city from its sleep but rather Adolf Hitler himself: It was not until our own day that the redeemer hero came, the man who awakened the sleeping city to new life with his brave deeds. Our Führer Adolf Hitler awakened our whole German nation, but especially Germany’s Nuremberg, from its fairy-tale sleep — just like the prince who awakened Sleeping Beauty with a kiss. And the proud old imperial city is coming to life again. The old heroic spirit of honor and bravery has come back inside its walls. The strength of Germany’s forefathers is joyfully resurrected. As the “city of the Reich party rallies” Nuremberg again has a worldwide reputation and significance. And Nuremberg is again a “middle point of the Reich,” of the Third Reich.24

Just as Sleeping Beauty and her prince had lived together happily ever after, so too the city of Nuremberg and its princely “Führer” would remain inextricably, and eternally, intertwined.25 In his book Nürnberg: Der Roman einer Stadt (Nuremberg, The Novel of a City, 1935), Karl Bröger, a former Social Democrat who was cooperating with the Nazis, tried to present the city’s history in the form of an easily readable fictional entertainment. The protagonist of his book was Ernst Schlichte, a student from the “historyless” (geschichtslosen) city of Mühlheim in the industrial Ruhr region, who comes to Nuremberg for the Nazi party rally as a Labor Service man “passionately filled . . . with images of a glorious past.”26 Schlichte’s goal is to become a history teacher at a secondary school; he wants to instill in his pupils his own love of German history. Bröger describes his protagonist as “no romantic dreamer like Wilhelm Wackenroder and others, who experienced all this beauty a century ago and rediscovered it for the German people.” Instead, Schlichte (whose name means “simple” or “straightforward”) is a product of his era, which is “hard and sober, entirely focused on service and sacrifice, and relentless in the demands it makes of people.”27 Of course Schlichte finds exactly what he is looking for in Nuremberg: after the end of the party rally he stays on in the city, whose history, readers are told, “resonated . . . in every stone of the old town.”28 His host, a retired university professor, helps him to understand Nuremberg’s history by giving him a manuscript written by an unnamed “simple craftsman of history,” that is, a man without a university position or education; he is, in fact, a wood turner. This manuscript, Schlichte is told, is the “the liveliest and most comprehensible history of Nuremberg.”29 Most of the novel consists of this mysterious manuscript, all of which the protagonist reads with great excitement. In the manuscript the Nazi takeover of the city government in March of 1933 is described as the beginning of “a new chapter in the history of

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Nuremberg,” and Adolf Hitler’s choice of Nuremberg as the city of the party rallies is described as historically appropriate. “As long as Germany lives — and Germany will live forever! — there will be a Nuremberg blossoming and thriving in Germany, bringing Germany pride and fame.”30 At the end of the book Ernst Schlichte has the opportunity to meet the author of the manuscript, and as his visit in Nuremberg draws to a close, his host takes him to the two places that for him symbolize the historical path and significance of the city. The first is St. John’s cemetery, where Albrecht Dürer and the other great figures of Nuremberg’s medieval and early modern past are buried. The second is the monument to Nuremberg’s war dead at the Luitpoldarena, part of the Nazi rally grounds. Here Schlichte learns that his host lost two sons, one about his own age, in the First World War. These two places symbolize for the protagonist and his host — and, by implication, for Bröger and his intended audience — Nuremberg’s great past and its supposedly even greater present. Schlichte leaves Nuremberg on foot, as Wackenroder and Tieck had over a century earlier, and the novel ends with him, like so many of the figures of romantic literature, looking at the outline of the city and its ancient towers in the distance — but this time with the addition of modern industrial buildings to the skyline. It is this combination of old and new, the novel implies, that constitutes the essence and meaning of German history. As the novel ends Schlichte hears the cheerful singing of a group of boys about the same age as his own future pupils. Also in 1935 the local Nuremberg poet Paul Rieß, who wrote under the pseudonym Pausala, frequently in the Franconian dialect, published a book of humorous poems entitled Festtage im lieben alten Nürnberg (Days of Celebration in Merry Old Nuremberg). Rieß dedicated his book of “comical and reflective verses” to Willy Liebel, Nuremberg’s Nazi mayor, who defended him from party censors’ criticisms that the book was too humorous and disrespectful of fascist seriousness. The book’s poems dealt with the experiences of Engelbrecht Knoll, a fat and fun-loving Nazi party functionary from “Hinterfürnberg” who comes to “Nürnberg” to experience the excitement of the party rally: Everywhere he turns his eye, Flags and banners fill the sky, Wreaths and streamers say hello. And Herr Knoll feels a happy glow Upon arrival in the city, Since it looks so very pretty. Trumpets and drums are everywhere, And singing and laughing fill the air. It’s a symphony of joy Knoll hears, And he’s happier than he’s been in years.31

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Because Rieß depicts his protagonist as not particularly impressive physically or mentally and focused primarily on pleasure, officials at the Nazi party “Examination Commission for the Protection of NS Literature” argued that he did not capture the essence of the party rally, which was, they claimed, no mere carnival or fair (Volksfest) but rather “an address by the Führer to his fighters and his followers.”32 Moreover, they asserted, Knoll seemed more like a party hack (“Bonze”) than an admirable representative of Nazi officialdom. Rieß defended himself and his poems by arguing that among other things the Nazi rallies were indeed Volksfeste, “incomparable celebrations of joy and festivals of the people.”33 Indeed, Rieß claimed, he himself was a National Socialist out of conviction, and his only goal in writing the poems had been to paint “a warm and lifelike depiction of the joyful and festive activity in Nuremberg during a Reich party rally.”34 In the end Rieß was forced to change the title of the book from the originally planned Knoll auf dem Reichsparteitag in Nürnberg (Knoll at the Reich Party Rally in Nuremberg), and to alter a few lines, but the book was published nevertheless. Far from attacking the Nazi party, it celebrated the party’s roots in German folk traditions, and it painted a heroic picture of Nuremberg and its role in German history: Nuremberg! What a magical place! My friend, have you ever seen its face? Have you looked into or guessed What’s in the nation’s treasure chest?35 Rieß included a paean to the city’s prominent role under the National Socialists: When things looked grim for the fatherland, People in Nuremberg took a stand. Flying the swastika and beating the drum, The masses knew that a change must come. The victory of faith was on our side, And an empty system fell and died! Because of its brave struggle Nuremberg therefore Will host the Reich party rallies forever more!36 Paul Rieß was not the only poet to publish paeans about Nuremberg. In honor of the 1938 Nazi rally, which celebrated the “reunification” of Austria with Germany, Heinrich Anacker composed a poem entitled “Ewiges Nürnberg” (Eternal Nuremberg) in which he proclaimed: Nuremberg, you are our source of strength each year! When we’re tired and empty from the fighting so near That we can hardly go on to more struggle and strife,

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You straighten us up, awake and clear, Ready anew for the battles of life!37 Those who had never experienced the miracle of Nuremberg would never understand it, Anacker continued, since it was a “myth and a mystery” (“Mythos und Mysterium”) coming directly from the blood and soil of the German people. And for this reason young and old, combined in unity for the National Socialist cause, would forever come to Nuremberg in holy pilgrimage. Even after the beginning of the Second World War such depictions of Nuremberg for a non-academic audience continued. In 1940 Franz Bauer published his children’s book Sonne über Nürnberg (The Sun Over Nuremberg), a book also dedicated to Nazi mayor Willy Liebel, which told the story of a brother and sister from Nuremberg, Peter and Lisette, who are visited by two children of the same age who have come to the city of the Reich party rallies on their vacation. Peter’s guest Günther is from the “Ostmark” (eastern march) — the Nazis’ typically archaic way of referring to Austria — while Lisette’s guest Helga is from Hamburg. The geographical origins of the children symbolize the togetherness of the Reich from south to north and east to west: all directions meet in Nuremberg. Peter and Lisette take great pains to teach Günther and Helga as much as they can about the fascinating history of their beloved city, showing them everything from the old town with its churches and half-timbered houses to the new airport and the Nazi rally grounds. As a result of their visit to Nuremberg, Günther and Helga come to know not only the city itself but their homeland Germany better. After all, Where else do the past, the present, and the future reach out their hands to each other as intimately and powerfully as in Nuremberg? And where else do the golden years of the past, the glories of the present, and our hopes and dreams for the future meet in such a remarkable way?38

In Nuremberg’s old town the children have experienced “the sunny noontime and the quiet evening glow of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.” But at the Nazi rally grounds they can experience “the dawn of the new fatherland that Adolf Hitler created: Pan-Germany.” As the novel ends Peter receives an eagerly awaited letter from Günther, his new-found friend from the “eastern march,” who recalls the beauty of his arrival in Nuremberg: “Do you remember, Peter,” goes the letter, “the way we walked out of the train station? The city walls were glowing in the light, and the flag on the tower of the royal gate was glistening. The sun was shining over Nuremberg. And so I hope that the sun will always shine on the glorious town of your fathers. Heil Hitler!”39

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The Return of the Crown The most prominent embodiment of the Nazis’ claims for Nuremberg and Nuremberg’s cultural traditions came in the wake of the annexation of Austria in 1938. For the “Reichsparteitag Großdeutschlands” (Rally of Pan-Germany), which took place from 5–12 September 1938, Hitler ordered that the crown jewels of the Holy Roman Empire, which had been kept in Austria since the beginning of the nineteenth century, be returned to Nuremberg, where Emperor Sigismund had declared in 1424 that they should be kept in perpetuity. For over a century Nuremberg’s authorities had wanted to retrieve the jewels, and since the beginning of the Third Reich, the return of the crown jewels had been one of mayor Willy Liebel’s primary objectives. For the first party rally after the Nazi rise to power, in 1933, he ordered that a so-called “Heiltumsstuhl” (reliquary throne) be erected at the site where, during the Middle Ages, the crown jewels had been placed on display once a year, at the market square — now called Adolf-Hitler-Platz — in front of the so-called “Schoppersche Haus.” In giving this order, Liebel was making a direct link between medieval and contemporary Nuremberg, and, by implication, between the imperial diets of the Middle Ages and the Nazi party rallies of the twentieth century — as well as, of course, between the Holy Roman Emperor and Hitler. Liebel had the imperial reliquary shrine (Reichsreliquienschrein) brought from the Germanic National Museum and placed on display in the great hall of the municipal building, and in his speech of greeting to Hitler and other visitors of the party rally on 30 August 1933 he reminded his listeners of Nuremberg’s ancient claim to the crown jewels.40 A year later, in 1934, Liebel borrowed the copies of the crown jewels that were in storage in Aachen, the site of Charlemagne’s tomb, and had them placed on display in the great hall of Nuremberg’s municipal building. In his opening speech at that year’s party rally, Liebel reminded his listeners that “over half a millennium ago the insignia of the empire were officially entrusted to the city for all time,” and he made sure that Hitler was informed of Nuremberg’s historical right to keep the crown jewels.41 An observer of this ceremony described it thus: “There is a very solemn mood in the historic hall of the municipal building, a reminiscence of the long-gone era of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. The imperial insignia, symbols of the power and glory of this Reich, remind us of this epoch.”42 A year later, when Liebel presented Hitler with a copy of the imperial sword at the 1935 party rally, the mayor proclaimed: “In the name of the city of Nuremberg I place into your hands, as a gift from the city, the treasure — recreated with the noblest of materials — that the old imperial city of Nuremberg was allowed to protect and watch over inside its walls over the course of many centuries as a symbol of the unity, greatness, power, and strength of the German nation. The German imperial sword to the Führer

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of all the Germans!”43 Once again Liebel reminded Hitler of Nuremberg’s claim to the crown jewels, and, as Liebel reported later, Hitler agreed “that immediately after the reunification of the eastern march with the Reich the insignia would be transferred to Nuremberg.”44 It was no surprise, then, that after the “Anschluß” of Austria in March of 1938, Liebel sought to ensure that his dream would become a reality. Hitler had written about the symbolic value of the crown jewels in his book Mein Kampf, noting that “the insignia of former imperial glory, preserved in Vienna, still seem to cast a magic spell,” and that the crown jewels were a kind of embodiment of the Austrian people’s “longing to return to the never-forgotten ancestral home,” that is, for reunification with Germany.45 Thirteen years later, when that “longing” was fulfilled, Hitler had not forgotten the significance of the crown jewels; he took symbolic possession of them on 15 March 1938 during his triumphant visit to Vienna. Less than a week after Nazi troops had marched into Austria, Liebel traveled to Berlin and arranged, together with the most prominent Austrian Nazi (aside from Hitler himself), Arthur SeyßInquart, for a final decision to have the crown jewels of the Holy Roman Empire returned to Nuremberg. The head of the Germanic National Museum, Heinrich Kohlhaußen, was asked by Liebel to write an essay on the history and significance of the crown jewels, and Kohlhaußen obliged him by stressing “the touching concern shown by the imperial city for the imperial insignia over the course of four and a half centuries,” concluding that: At the site of the political pilgrimages of the Third Reich the age-old imperial insignia would bear witness to many Pan-German dreams over the centuries, thereby illustrating the historical significance of the new Pan-German Reich. . . . They would rest on the traditions of an independent city that was always concerned for the furtherance of the Reich, and they would be the crowning display of the Germanic National Museum — and thus of an exhibition of a thousand years of our German culture, a culture that has so thoroughly proven its worth, and that is so full of incomparable achievements. In this context the imperial insignia are on their way to a new and deeper significance.46

In July of 1938 Liebel went to Bayreuth to consult with Hitler — who was there, as usual, for the beginning of the Richard Wagner Festspiele — on plans for bringing the crown jewels back to Nuremberg. He reported back that Hitler was in agreement that the jewels should be displayed in St. Katherine’s church (the Katharinenkirche), the so-called “Meistersingerkirche” where Wagner had located the first act of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and that Hitler planned to have the jewels displayed later in the congress hall at the party rally grounds, which was then under construction. On 28 August 1938 a special train was dispatched to Vienna to pick up the crown jewels. That train left Vienna with its treasure on the following

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day, 29 August, under the protection of an SS commando consisting of seven men, as well as Mayor Liebel and other representatives of the city of Nuremberg and its cultural institutions. On the last day of August 1938 the special train arrived at Nuremberg’s main train station. The crown jewels were then taken unobtrusively to St. Katherine’s and put on display, under the protection of two commanders and twenty-one SS men. When Hitler arrived in Nuremberg on Monday, 5 September 1938, the key insignia of the Reich were waiting for him in the great hall of Nuremberg’s municipal building. As an article in the Fränkischer Kurier described the scene, The center of attention is a high glass shrine at the head of the hall. It contains the outward signs of German power and glory, the symbols of the Reich: the crown, the scepter, the orb, and the sword, which now, after the creation of Pan-Germany, have returned to the middle of the Reich.47

On both sides of the crown jewels SS men stood guard, and on the balcony of the great hall stood trumpeters dressed in the heraldic costumes of Nuremberg’s early modern period. Hitler was greeted, of course, by the “Awake”-chorus from Wagner’s Meistersinger.48 Mayor Willy Liebel ceremonially welcomed Hitler to “the most German of all German cities,” thanked him for having achieved the “reunification of Germany’s eastern march with the old Reich,” and declared that, with the annexation of Austria, Nuremberg had once again truly become the city in Germany’s middle that it once had been — a city that was “then, just as it is again now, a bulwark of the German spirit, a center of German art and German culture, and a powerful monument in stone to German greatness.”49 In his response to Liebel Hitler agreed with the mayor’s sentiments, declaring that “there is no other German city where the past and the present of the Pan-German Reich are combined in such symbolic unity and expressiveness as in Nuremberg, the old and at the same time the new imperial city.” Like Liebel, Hitler acknowledged Nuremberg as “an expression in stone of German power and German greatness in a new German Reich.” He ended his speech with “our old cry: Nuremberg Sieg Heil!”50 That night, at the traditional operatic opening of the Nazi rally, Wilhelm Furtwängler directed the Vienna Philharmonic, now part of the PanGerman Reich, in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. The ceremonial handover of the crown jewels by Austria to the city of Nuremberg took place on the second day of the 1938 Nazi party rally, 6 September, in St. Katherine’s church. Seyß-Inquart declared on this occasion that Austria had not in fact given up the crown jewels, since Austria too was now part of the Reich that the crown jewels symbolized: Almost 140 years ago the imperial crown left a Germany that was no longer a Reich; far away from small-Germany it resided in Vienna as a symbol of the lost Reich. Today it has returned with its undying dignity

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to its old site in the larger Reich. And therefore we citizens of the eastern march are not saying goodbye to this national treasure, because the Reich has become our Reich.51

Both Austria and the crown jewels had, in a sense, been brought back into the Reich. In his own speech at St. Katherine’s church, Mayor Liebel expressed the hope that the crown jewels, now once again in “the festival site of the German nation,” would be able to “continue to act as a magical invocation of the great German past and as a guaranty of the eternal German community that has now become a reality!”52 One partisan commentator on this rally declared that “it is as if the Third Reich had now permanently and perfectly inserted itself into the flow of history, from the Germans’ first appearance in the bright space of history to the present day.”53 The crown jewels were not simply inert, antiquated relics, he proclaimed, because “the myth of the first Reich lives on in this imperial treasure,” and it was now connected to Hitler’s “Third Reich.”54 Present-day Germans, he wrote, stood in awe of the symbols that embodied the power and majesty of the first Reich, but they were determined that the “Third Reich” would be even greater and more wonderful, as the harvest of all German history. Nuremberg’s recovery of the crown jewels was made much of during the final Nazi party rally in 1938 and in the popular press. As Fritz Traugott Schulz declared in a booklet put out on the crown jewels in that same year, the return of Austria to the German Reich was “an act of truly historic proportions,” and it had made possible Hitler’s recovery of the jewels in the name of the entire German people. “As in olden times, Nuremberg, the city in the middle of the Reich, is the keeper and trustee of these historic symbols,” he declared. “But they themselves are thus a single sacred document of the German will to unity and the purest expression of the German essence and of German identity.”55 An article in the Fränkischer Kurier proclaimed that “the holy empire of the German nation has arisen in a new form, and the insignia of the former Reich once again have life and meaning.”56 The crown jewels were on display at St. Katherine’s church for about a year, from the beginning of September 1938 to the beginning of September 1939. When war broke out, the crown jewels were packed away and placed first in a secure part of the St. Katherine’s cloister, then in the vault of a former bank, and finally, at the end of February 1940, into a special, dry bunker underneath the imperial castle itself. Here the crown jewels were kept throughout the war. As American troops approached the city in March and April of 1945, the jewels were sealed up in a special niche in one of the bunkers. Mayor Liebel ordered an SS officer to drive away two large empty containers on April 5, 1945 in order to create a rumor that the

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crown jewels had been spirited out of Nuremberg, and just two weeks before the Americans marched into Nuremberg’s old town on 20 April 1945, Hitler’s fifty-sixth and last birthday, the remaining walls of the house that stood above the bunker were destroyed in order to make it extremely difficult for the Americans to find the crown jewels. Mayor Liebel himself, a member of the SA who reached the rank of senior group leader (Obergruppenführer), fought against the invading American army; he put a bullet through his head in the bunker from which the battle against the Americans was being directed on the day the Americans marched into the old town; his body was discovered five days later, on 25 April 1945.57

Filming Nuremberg Without a doubt Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph des Willens is the most vivid visual documentation of the Nazi party rallies in Nuremberg. This film is sometimes deemed one of the greatest propaganda films of all time. At any rate it plays an important role not only in German but in world film history. It is important both as a film and as a primary source for information on the Nazi period and on Adolf Hitler. The latter is true because Riefenstahl was granted unprecedented access to the “Führer,” and hence the film provides a wealth of close-ups of Hitler in various poses and activities. “Never before have we seen the face of our Führer so close, never before have we been able to explore his expressions, never before have we read so much in his eyes,” wrote Ewald von Demandowski rapturously in the film section of the Nazi party’s major press organ, Völkischer Beobachter, in 1935.58 And Demandowski was right. There is no other film, let alone any other kind of document, that provides this wealth of visual information on Hitler and his interactions with the masses, and hence Triumph des Willens has had a long and influential afterlife; shots from it are frequently used in clips, documentaries, or feature films about the Nazis and the Third Reich, as well as in books, magazines, and newspaper articles. Until the time of her death at the age of 101 on 8 September 2003, Riefenstahl stubbornly maintained that Triumph des Willens was not a propaganda film but rather a documentary; that is, that she had done nothing but film what was actually taking place in Nuremberg. “I have so often been accused of having made propaganda films, but such charges are misguided. This film was a factual documentary, which is something very different. No one, not even the Party, gave me any sort of instructions on what to do,” Riefenstahl contended.59 The contrary position, most forcefully articulated by the late Susan Sontag in a famous essay on Riefenstahl entitled “Fascinating Fascism” (1974), has been that Triumph des Willens is a film not just about Nazis but also a Nazi film; that is, a film that was

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intended to further the interests of the Nazi party and that actually achieved this goal. As Sontag argued, Triumph des Willens was “a film whose very conception negates the possibility of the filmmaker’s having an aesthetic conception independent of propaganda.”60 The anti-Riefenstahl position is heavily influenced by Siegfried Kracauer’s claim that the 1934 Reich party rally, far from being an objective reality that Riefenstahl simply filmed, was actually created and produced for the specific purpose of being filmed. As Kracauer argued, “from the real life of the people was built up a faked reality that was passed off as the genuine one; but this bastard reality, instead of being an end in itself, merely served as the set dressing for a film that was then to assume the character of an authentic documentary.”61 The entire Nazi party rally, Kracauer argued, was little more than a show, and it differed from other shows only in that it pretended to actually be reality. In Kracauer’s view the Nazis had de-realized reality itself, blurring the difference between truth and fiction, so that spectators of Riefenstahl’s film found themselves lost in a “series of reflected images in a mirror maze.”62 The Nazis, in other words, had “counterfeited life after the manner of Potemkin,” but “instead of pasteboard . . . they used life itself to construct their imaginary villages.”63 Kracauer’s analysis of Triumph des Willens has had a powerful impact on conceptions both of the film itself and of Nazi aesthetics more generally. Together with Benjamin’s notion of the fascist “aestheticization of politics,” it suggests an interpretation of fascist aesthetics as centered on performance and spectacle, and on what Kracauer called the “complete transformation of reality.”64 Kracauer’s approach had an impact, among others, on Karsten Witte, who in 1979 analyzed Triumph des Willens as a kind of revue film,65 and on Eric Rentschler, whose analysis of Nazi film in his 1996 study The Ministry of Illusion proposes that the blurring between truth and fiction, and between reality and film, is at the heart of the Nazi motion picture industry specifically, and of the Third Reich more generally, which, he claims, was not just “movie mad” but also “movie made.”66 Likewise Kracauer’s position probably had an influence on Sontag, who argued that Triumph des Willens achieved a “radical transformation of reality: history become theater,” and that the film was not just “the record of reality but” also “one reason for which the reality has been constructed.”67 Riefenstahl herself argued in her memoirs that Sontag had simply been “rehashing . . . Siegfried Kracauer.”68 Kracauer’s thinking has also influenced that of historians of the Reich party rallies themselves, such as Hans-Ulrich Thamer, who stresses the sheer theatricality of the events, stating that Hitler was not only the “leading actor” but also the “director.”69 Riefenstahl’s position on Triumph des Willens (that is, that it was not a propaganda film but simply an objective documentary) is untenable for a variety reasons, not the least of which is that Hitler himself chose the title of the film.70 Moreover, as Martin Loiperdinger points out in the most

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thorough analysis of the film to date, the Nazi party itself was the producer of the film; that is, they financed it. Given the fact that the producer and the subject of the film are identical, it is hardly reasonable, even from a purely economic standpoint, to assert objectivity. No person or organization can be expected to finance a film that will view that person or organization in a negative light. However it is not just economics but also Riefenstahl’s own statements of the 1930s that militate against any conception of the film as purely objective. In a book created to complement the film and published by the Nazi party publishing company in 1935, Riefenstahl openly acknowledged that her film had been created in order to avoid mundane chronicling (Chronik) or “Reportage,” which she associated with “filmed facts, a report with sound.”71 Such “reportage,” she claimed, could not do justice to “an experience like ‘Nuremberg’ ” because it would not capture the “heroic style” or “the inner rhythm of what was actually happening.” And a mere “chronicle” would simply bore spectators “with its repetition, with its photographic faithfulness.”72 Instead of “reportage” or “chronicle,” Riefenstahl wrote, what she had done, at the behest of the Führer himself, was “artistic structuring.”73 Riefenstahl declared that more than any other world leader Hitler had recognized the significance and “suggestive power of film.”74 Indeed, she insisted, “The belief that the genuine and strong experience of a nation can be experienced anew in film was born in Germany. Thus the Führer has given films about the present their meaning and their mission.”75 In the context of a book about her own film Triumph des Willens, these assertions could hardly be more clear. Riefenstahl here makes no distinction between propaganda and documentary, but rather she sees her documentary as a fundamental part of propaganda, something intended to give the entire German nation “a new experience through film.” Indeed, Hitler himself is presented as having given film in general, and this film in particular, its mission and its meaning. Riefenstahl writes that her goal had been not to give an exact, minute-by-minute account of actual events — an account that would necessarily have bored the film’s viewers — but rather to construct a dramatic architecture that would “spur the listener and observer on to ever more powerful emotions.” She concludes: Thus, from the basic motif of this victorious title emerges a film about the German present — a triumphal march of recognition, of courage and power to fight and achieve victory for our German people. A heroic film about the facts — in the will of the Führer his nation triumphs.76

These words give the lie to any later claims Riefenstahl made about documentary objectivity. While her wish, in later years, to distance herself from the Nazis and from her own most famous film, as well as from this book, is understandable, it is clear from the historical record that Riefenstahl

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herself was a great admirer of Hitler and of the Nuremberg rallies, and that she willingly and even eagerly sought to portray the 1934 party rally in the best possible light. The Nazi party and the Ministry of Propaganda went out of their way to promote the film. An entire section of a promotional booklet released along with the film is devoted to “propaganda measures and general guidelines for cooperation with party offices.”77 The first point made under this heading is: “The propaganda leadership in the various regions is directed to support the film Triumph des Willens in every possible way.”78 The Berlin premiere of Triumph des Willens occurred in the Ufa-Palast, which was covered with swastika flags in honor of the occasion. In view of the efforts made by the party and the government to promote the film as propaganda, it is absurd to suggest that the film was in some way not propaganda. Riefenstahl’s distinction between supposedly pure documentary and propaganda, however, is itself spurious; many propaganda films are also documentaries in the sense that they claim to document reality. The two terms are in no way mutually exclusive. In fact almost by definition propaganda claims to present an accurate picture of reality; if it did not, it would not be propaganda.79 Moreover, the Nazis themselves made no particular distinction between propaganda and documentary, because for them the word propaganda did not have a negative meaning. Riefenstahl made the 1933 film Sieg des Glaubens at the specific behest of the “Reich propaganda leadership of the NSDAP,” and it was simultaneously understood to be a documentary of the 1933 party rally, showing “pictures of the Führer the likes of which we have never seen before,” as one reviewer wrote.80 If neither the Nazis nor Riefenstahl herself saw any distinction between propaganda and documentary in the 1930s, there is no reason for critics to accept such a distinction now. To do so is to attribute contemporary notions of objectivity to a time and a place where they played no role. The most powerful evidence that Triumph des Willens is not objective in the sense of being unbiased comes, however, from the film itself, which, as Loiperdinger has noted, is filmed and edited in such a way as to construct a kind of “ideal spectator,” an observer who can effortlessly witness the party rally in a way that no single real observer, even Hitler himself, ever could have.81 This had already been the case with Sieg des Glaubens in 1933, which, as one observer had written, was well worth seeing even for those who had had the pleasure of being at the party rally itself, because the film establishes “the connection among specific things, and no participant could see and hear them all.”82 It was even more the case for Triumph des Willens. As Otto Kriegk wrote in 1943, viewers of Triumph des Willens “suddenly recognized that the thirty-two eyes of a camera see a thousand times more than the two eyes of a single individual in Nuremberg were capable of registering.”83 Riefenstahl’s ideal observer is sometimes just

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behind Hitler’s back, sometimes looking up at him from below, and sometimes standing with him and observing the adoring masses. This is an observer who flies to Nuremberg with Hitler on his plane, but who is also able to observe the plane flying over Nuremberg from down below, and to witness the plane landing. Riefenstahl’s ideal spectator is also present for unofficial events that Hitler never attended, such as the nocturnal SA rally that took place on the fourth day of the 1934 party rally or the fun and games in an SA and Labor Service encampment one morning, where the ideal spectator can watch young men horsing around and eating.84 It is only in her book and not in her film that Riefenstahl goes “behind the scenes” (“hinter den Kulissen”), that is, reflects upon those aspects of the party rally that are not part of the Nazi self-image. She does not ask her cameramen to film the rigging of lights or the sound system for the rally, or to witness practicing for the marching. She does not even film the less flattering aspects of the party rally that Paul Rieß was to write about in his book of poems published that same year — drunkenness, flirtation, and so on. Instead Riefenstahl focuses on the most important mass rituals, and on the individuals who take part in them. When a little Hitler Youth boy looks too self-conscious, she puts her arm around him and talks to him until he gets it right, so that the final image that the ideal spectator sees is one of a Hitler Youth boy looking forward as if into a glorious future rather than self-consciously into the present of a film camera.85 Rother and others have pointed out that in many ways the film is structured along the lines not of a documentary but of a feature film, with shot-countershot sequences that add dramatic intensity and create the impression of a love affair between Hitler and the crowds that witness his arrival in Nuremberg.86 In reality the Reich party rally of 1934 took six and a half days. In order to pack the rally into a compelling film, Riefenstahl created a kind of imaginary chronology of three and a half days. She does not even necessarily show events in chronological order; rather, through editing she orders them for maximum dramatic effect. What one observer wrote of Riefenstahl’s film Sieg des Glaubens is also true of Triumph des Willens: “What matters in this film is not the chronological progression of the rally — what matters is something more important: making visible and tangible the electrifying rhythm of the greatest movement of the people that has ever taken place on German soil.”87 For instance, in reality the Wehrmacht serenaded Hitler on his final night in Nuremberg, at the very end of the rally; but Riefenstahl moves the serenade to the day of Hitler’s arrival in Nuremberg for dramatic effect. In general, as Loiperdinger has noted, Riefenstahl constructs the film so that the ideal spectator’s appetite to see Hitler is constantly whetted in the first half of the film and then thoroughly satisfied in the second half. In the first part of the film Hitler’s appearances before the camera tend to be brief; by the end of the film he is completely dominant. The camera tends to look up at Hitler, while it tends to look

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A Hitler Youth boy as Riefenstahl wanted these boys be seen in her film Triumph des Willens, from Riefenstahl’s book Hinter den Kulissen des Reichsparteitag-Films. down at the masses who adore him. Rother has suggested that the first part of the film constructs a love affair between Hitler and the mostly female citizens of Nuremberg who appear on screen, whereas the second part of the film constructs a relationship of command and obedience/duty

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Three photographs, together with original captions from Riefenstahl’s book Hinter den Kulissen des Reichsparteitag-Films, showing Riefenstahl coaching a Hitler Youth boy to look better for her camera.

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Adolf Hitler and Ernst Röhm after laying down a wreath at the memorial for the dead, 1933. Provided by and © museen der stadt nürnberg, Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände. between Hitler and the exclusively male, uniformed members of the party formations that march in his name.88 The relationship between Hitler and the SA plays a particularly important, albeit not always explicitly articulated, role in the film, since two months before the 1934 party rally, on 30 June Hitler had ordered the murder of the major SA leaders, including Ernst Röhm, with whom he had appeared together in apparent harmony at the party rally a year earlier; in fact Riefenstahl’s first party rally film, Sieg des Glaubens, had included images of the two men standing in Nuremberg’s central market square greeting the storm troopers marching by, as well as images of the two men proceeding down the “Strasse des Führers” in the “Luitpoldarena” to honor the Nazi dead and the dead of the First World War. A promotional brochure for Sieg des Glaubens had claimed that “one of the most impressive pictures of the national movement is the one where Hitler and his chief of staff [Röhm] march alone past the long columns of the faithful to the monument for the dead, where they stand for several minutes in silent prayer.”89 Now, one year later, Röhm himself was one of the Nazi dead, at Hitler’s order. The “night of the long knives,” as the murder of Röhm and his chief lieutenants came to be known, is not openly thematized in Triumph des Willens, but it is implicitly articulated when Hitler declares to the SA and SS, “Several months ago a dark shadow fell across the movement,” proclaiming that the SA has nothing to do with that black shadow, and that anyone who believes “that there is even a single tear in the fabric of our unified movement” is mistaken.90

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In the shooting and editing of Hitler’s speech to the SA and SS, Hitler completely dominates the screen: he takes up as much space on the screen as the tens of thousands of other men to whom he is speaking. At key points in his speech, including the end, the camera looks up to the swastika flag, as if to visually reinforce the identity between the Führer and the Nazi party, and as if the camera itself were enacting the adoration and devotion that party members are to feel for Hitler and his flag. Riefenstahl’s filmic depiction of the nocturnal SA campfire celebration that took place on the fourth day of the party rally also underlines the SA’s continuing loyalty to Hitler, in spite of the latter’s decision to annihilate the SA leader and his chief lieutenants. In this sequence the SA celebrate their new chief of staff Lutze, who declares to them that just as he had been an SA man in the very early years of the Nazi “movement,” so he is still an SA man now, and that “we SA men have always known just one thing: loyalty to the Führer and struggle for the Führer.”91 Riefenstahl’s ideal spectator is also an admirer of Nuremberg and its medieval beauty. The camera takes in the skyline of the city at the beginning of the film; as one contemporary description of the scene relates: “The powerful airplane races forward. The deafening rhythm of the motors cries into the wind: Nuremberg . . . Nuremberg . . . Nuremberg . . .”92 On the morning of the film’s second day the camera travels through the old city, lovingly taking in images of Nuremberg’s beautiful buildings and bridges, all to the tune of the “Awake”-chorus from Wagner’s Meistersinger. A contemporary description of this scene relates: “The mild glow of the morning sun shines on the rooftops, glistening around the century-old towers of this, the most German of German cities: Nuremberg. Soft plumes of smoke climb into the still hazy sky. Bells ring out into the land. The old, beautiful city, decked out in colorful, waving flags, . . . waits in anticipation of the grandiose spectacle.”93 Riefenstahl is also at pains to show not just Hitler and the party but also the citizens of Nuremberg themselves greeting Hitler; and she includes footage of Hitler greeting German civilians, mostly women, dressed in traditional German costumes. Taken together with the many images of the party rally grounds and uniformed troops marching in formation, these more relaxed images of German civilian life in the old town suggest a harmony between the German people and the Nazi party, and between old German traditions and the modern Nazi “movement,” as well as between female civilians and male soldiers. It is Hitler himself who provides the connecting link: like Hans Sachs in Wagner’s opera, he is the man who is able to overcome all dichotomies and reconcile all differences. Perhaps the most obvious sign that Triumph des Willens is not an objective, disinterested film about the party rally comes in the final sequence of the film, when uniformed Nazi storm troops are shown marching through the streets of Nuremberg at the end of the party rally to

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the singing of the “Horst Wessel Lied” (Horst Wessel Song), the battle hymn of the SA, which runs: Raise high the flag! Close ranks with those around you! Storm troopers march with steps both firm and true. Our comrades killed by enemies on Left and Right March in our ranks in spirit and join the fight.94 As this song is sung, Riefenstahl’s ideal spectator no longer sees individual, clearly identifiable men but rather ghostlike soldiers, as if the song’s words were actually becoming a reality, and as if the ghosts of dead SA men really were marching together with the real-life SA and SS men of 1934. This ending mimics the endings of other Nazi party epics, such as Hitlerjunge Quex of 1933, about a Nazi boy martyr who lives on in the loving memory of his party comrades. All such films suggest that the individual achieves immortality through his complete immersion in the group, which is itself associated with the almost divine power of Adolf Hitler. Riefenstahl’s film has become synonymous with the 1934 party rally, and in fact it has come to obscure the memory of the event itself. Even some prominent Nazis, such as Nuremberg’s mayor Willy Liebel, subsequently confused Riefenstahl’s film with the party rally. The actual 1934 party rally became officially known as the “Parteitag der Einheit und der Stärke” (Party Rally of Unity and Strength), a call to overcome the split in the party that was feared after the “night of the long knives.” Subsequently, however, Liebel referred to the 1934 rally as the “Triumph des Willens.”95 A 1938 film entitled Nürnberg — Stadt der Reichsparteitage (Nuremberg — City of the Reich Party Rallies) likewise referred to the 1934 rally as the “Parteitag des Willens” (Party Rally of Will).96 Even official Nazi party sources referred to the 1934 party rally as the “Reichsparteitag des Willens” (Reich Party Rally of Will) or as “Triumph des Willens” (Triumph of the Will).97 Riefenstahl made the same mistake in her memoirs, and at least one film scholar has followed suit.98 Such mistakes both outside and even within the Nazi party indicate that soon after its release Riefenstahl’s film came to serve as a substitute for written documents or people’s actual memory of the experience of the 1934 rally itself. And it is no wonder that the film had such a profound impact. Not only was it a brilliant piece of propaganda, but it was released with an unprecedented publicity campaign. That campaign included laudatory articles in the popular press, Leni Riefenstahl’s aforementioned book, Hinter den Kulissen des Reichsparteitag-Films (Behind the Scenes of the Reich Party Rally Film), press conferences, radio interviews, and the gala premiere that took place in the presence of Hitler and other party leaders as well as the diplomatic corps in Berlin on 28 March 1935. The Nazi party newspaper Völkischer Beobachter called Triumph des Willens “the greatest

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work of film that we have ever seen,” and other German newspapers followed suit.99 And it was no wonder the Nazis loved the movie. It was, after all, a movie that loved them. As Joseph Goebbels proclaimed when he presented Riefenstahl with the German National Film Prize in May of 1935, “the hero of this film is our German people, embodied by the incomparable appearance of the Führer.”100 How could a Nazi not like a movie whose hero was the Führer himself?

Was “Nuremberg” Real? As powerful as Riefenstahl’s film is, and as much as it has come to represent not only the 1934 party rally but all of the Nazi rallies of the 1930s in historical imagination, it is still incorrect to suggest, as Kracauer does, that the film is somehow fictional, or that the party congress itself was not a reality but rather just a “Potemkin village.” Nor is Sontag correct when she claims that the 1934 party rally “was from the start conceived as the set of a film spectacle.”101 It is true that Hitler wanted this film to be made, and that planners for the party rally cooperated with Riefenstahl. But there were a great many aspects of the party rally that never made it into Riefenstahl’s film, even though they happened in reality; and had Riefenstahl’s film never been made, the party rally would still have occurred. The contention that Triumph des Willens is somehow fictional rather than a documentary echoes film scholars’ professional tendencies to see even historical documentaries — and perhaps also history itself — primarily in terms of representation, as well as the understandable desire of left-liberal German intellectuals in the 1930s to save ordinary German people — the masses of supposedly oppressed people who the Communists had expected to rebel against their oppression — from the stigma of sympathy and even enthusiasm for the Nazis.102 For Steve Neale, part of what makes scholars uncomfortable with Triumph des Willens is that it demonstrates “that documentary is a process of construction, rather than a process of reflection.”103 This means that the dubiousness of Triumph des Willens is a function of the dubiousness of all purportedly objective documentaries. It is true that Triumph des Willens, like all documentaries, was constructed; but that does not mean it reflected nothing. Sophisticated analyses of documentary unreliability and constructedness form an easy conjunction with German emigrants’ reluctance to acknowledge the extent of Hitler’s very real popularity. For left-liberal and particularly socialist or Communist observers such as Kracauer the spectacle of tens of thousands of German workers in the Labor Service shouting out their adulation for Hitler and marching in formation just like the Nazi storm troopers must have been extremely painful, as the secret reports of the illegal SPD confirm. The idea that the whole thing was nothing but a spectacle must, in

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contrast, have been comforting. It was no doubt easier for Kracauer to see Germans as will-less sleepwalkers acting out the orders of an omnipotent Caligari-like hypnotist than to see them as willing participants in a spectacle of organized rapture and controlled violence. Kracauer was probably closer to the truth of the popular impulse that underwrote the Nuremberg rallies in a brief essay he wrote a quarter of a century earlier, when he attempted to explain Germans’ seemingly inexplicable enthusiasm for the First World War by noting: “It is the most natural state for human beings to serve an ideal in the ecstasy of a goal. Even the smallest action is thereby sanctified, and one’s life-feeling is intensified immeasurably.”104 The Nuremberg rallies can be thought of as a systematic attempt to synthesize that “most natural state for human beings” and make it reliably available to Nazi leaders. In spite of Kracauer’s and Benjamin’s arguments of the 1930s and 1940s, the most striking fact about the Nazi party rallies is not that they were in some way fictional but that, on the contrary, they were in almost every sense real. Hundreds of thousands of Germans really did gather willingly every year in Nuremberg to demonstrate their adulation for Hitler, they really did march in formation, and they really did exert themselves in ways that might today seem unimaginable for similar numbers of people. These hundreds of thousands of people were not simply extras on a movie set or will-less automatons. If they were under an enchantment, then they themselves had played a role in the process of spell-making, and if they were sleepwalkers then they themselves had helped to create the hypnosis. The Nazi party rallies preceded Riefenstahl’s most famous film and went on for years after it, in spite of the fact that there was no famous film being made about them, and that historians therefore now have no equivalent visual documentation of them. Nevertheless, the documentary evidence we have suggests that all of the Nazi rallies in Nuremberg, even the ones that took place before 1933, were characterized by vast masses of people and adulation for Hitler. Riefenstahl herself had already made one previous documentary of a party rally, in 1933, and she was to make another documentary of part of the 1935 party rally. Moreover, there are film documentaries and/or newsreels of all the other Nuremberg rallies as well, from 1927 and 1929, before the Nazis came to power, all the way to 1938, after the annexation of Austria.105 All of these documentaries suggest that the Nuremberg rallies were extraordinary and very real celebrations with many thousands of active and generally happy participants. After Riefenstahl had witnessed and filmed the 1933 rally she proclaimed: “What I witnessed in Nuremberg . . . is one of the most remarkable events I have ever experienced. It was all so gripping and grandiose that I can not compare it to anything I experienced before as an artist.”106 In her party rally films Riefenstahl was probably trying to communicate to spectators something of the rapture that she herself had experienced in Nuremberg. It is the height of postmodernist denial of reality to

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insist that somehow the rallies and the rapture they invoked were fictional. At the same time, it is distinctly comforting. The reality is far more troubling: what happened in Nuremberg was real. The hundreds of thousands of people moving in formation through the rally grounds and the old town were acting of their own free will. A description from 1935 is partisan but accurate: “Throughout this seemingly impersonal mass, every single man picked out by the camera is brimming in almost impossible fullness with joy and faith, loyalty and courage, comradeship and confidence. They stand there not as some random mass, but of their own free will, motivated by their mutual love of the Führer.”107 The Nazi rallies were an annual expression of the mutuality of Hitler’s, and his people’s, will. It was not so much Riefenstahl’s film that was, in Karsten Witte’s words, “the most sweeping deployment of the wish for ‘heaven on earth’ ” promised by the Nazi entertainment industry; rather it was the party rally itself, which sought to bring heaven to earth not just on celluloid but in reality.108 The film was a reflection, not a creator, of that reality. As one observer wrote, “in this film the political and organizational work of art that is the party rally has found expression for all time in a worthy aesthetic document.”109 In the first section of his first book, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music, 1872), Friedrich Nietzsche describes a state of ecstatic collective overcoming of the everyday world through aesthetic experience that he identifies as the “Dionysian” after the Greek god of wine, Dionysus. In a state of Dionysian ecstasy revelers feel part of a larger, primordial unity that goes far beyond their particular identities. They are no longer separated into individual, self-contained units but rather part of something much greater than themselves. Their surrender of individual identity is experienced as both pleasurable and painful. “Let your imagination conceive the multitudes bowing to the dust, awestruck — then you will approach the Dionysian,” writes Nietzsche. “Now . . . each one feels himself not only united, reconciled, and fused with his neighbor, but as one with him.” In the state of Dionysian ecstasy, each member of the collective is spellbound; “his very gestures express enchantment.” The individual “is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art,” and what Nietzsche calls “the noblest clay, the most costly marble, man, is here kneaded and cut” in worshipful devotion to its god and master.110 Nietzsche’s description of Dionysian ecstasy, written almost six decades before the first Nuremberg rally, identifies the source of the power at work behind those rallies, which seems otherwise so inexplicable. Riefenstahl was therefore correct in asserting that her film was a documentary — albeit a partisan one — of reality rather than a fictive performance of something that would not have existed without the film. The Nazi party rallies were real: they involved hundreds of thousands of people, extensive organization, large sums of money, vast amounts of space, food,

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lodging, and so on. From the standpoint of sheer size, it was like seven or eight Super Bowls happening all day every day in one city for about a week. But the party rallies involved a good deal more planning and organization than the Super Bowl or similar spectacles in contemporary American or European culture, because in the Nazi rallies the spectators were themselves part of the action, and their movements were just as ritualized and choreographed as those of Hitler and his chief henchmen. In contemporary spectacles spectators tend to be passive, and all the action is performed by a few people; in Nazi spectacle the masses themselves were mobilized. It is this mobilization of the masses that is extraordinary; the “wave” at football, soccer, or baseball games is only a weak suggestion of the kinds of visual and emotional effects that can be achieved through such synchronization and coordination of masses of people. While contemporary political rallies occasionally demonstrate enthusiasm, they do not demonstrate the sheer ecstasy and the unity of leader and led that were on display at the Nuremberg rallies. What Riefenstahl’s film, and the party rallies in general, eloquently demonstrate, is that the German people did indeed, incredibly and uncomfortably (for us, at least) love Hitler. Sontag provocatively sums up this erotic element by declaring that Hitler “makes the crowd come”; Rother more circumspectly notes the “erotic foundation” of the party rallies.111 Imagine the American President or any other world leader spending a week at such close quarters with hundreds of thousands of strong young men, many of them armed, and one imagines an impossibility. But this is exactly what happened in Nuremberg: Hitler was surrounded in Nuremberg by vast throngs of people, many of whom would have been quite capable physically of hurting or even killing him if they had actually wanted to; but not one of them ever tried to do so. As William Shirer, an eyewitness to the 1934 rally, wrote after sitting in a room with fellow journalists and watching Hitler drive by: We were in Pat’s room, overlooking the moat. Hitler drove by, returning from some meeting. And we all agreed how easy it would be for someone in a room like this to toss a bomb on his car, rush down to the street, and escape in the crowd. But there has been no sign of an attempt yet, though some of the Nazis are slightly worried about Sunday, when he reviews the S.A.112

But on Sunday, when Shirer had thought some of the SA men might try to avenge their murdered leader Ernst Röhm, Hitler went unscathed: “We wondered if just one of those fifty thousand brownshirts wouldn’t pull a revolver, but not one did.”113 And it was not just in 1934, two months after the murder of Röhm, that the imagined attack on Hitler failed to occur, but at all the subsequent party rallies as well. Can there be more eloquent evidence that, in a profound sense, at least these Germans wanted Hitler?

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Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens is disquieting not just as a document of Germans’ love of Hitler, but also because when watching it even contemporary spectators see events from the viewpoint of those Germans who loved Hitler. The film was intended to reach Germans all over Germany, transforming the “party rally in Nuremberg” into a “party rally in all of Germany,” as an article in the Dresdner Anzeiger put it.114 However Triumph des Willens extends Nuremberg not just in space but also in time, making the excitement and the rapture experienced at the 1934 rally palpable to contemporary viewers as well. As the same article in the Dresdner Anzeiger had noted with foresight, anyone who saw the film “now and in the future” would have “the same experience of the Führer of the party and of the German people.”115 In Triumph des Willens Hitler exercises his hypnotic powers from beyond the grave. When Hitler looks into the camera, it is as if he is looking directly at the spectator, transforming mere onlookers into part of what Mark Potocnik has called an “unio mystica between Hitler and every individual audience member.”116 For Hitler’s rapturous followers in the 1930s this mystical union was exactly what they wanted; however, for contemporary observers and scholars watching the film it is distinctly unsettling. Hence critics’ separation between the film and reality, and between aesthetics and politics, acts as a kind of firewall between them and the dangers of the film itself. In watching the film a contemporary spectator can not only see but feel the real power of Nuremberg. Of course the Germans’ love for Hitler was not universal, and of course the party rallies, and Riefenstahl’s film, as well as all the other filmic documentaries, were carefully planned in order to maximize the impression of unity between Hitler, the Nazi party, and the German people. Of course many of the Nazis in Nuremberg during the party rallies were, like Paul Rieß’s fictional Engelbrecht Knoll, more concerned with food, drink, and women than with the high seriousness of Nazi ideology. Of course the Nazi party warned its members against drunkenness, and against visiting brothels, and so on. And of course there was a “gulf between claim and reality, between cult pathos and ordinary everyday existence,” as Thamer has observed.117 But that is always and everywhere the case. The 1937 documentary Festliches Nürnberg documents some of the drinking and dancing, and roller skating, that occurred in the context of that year’s party rally, indicating that such activities were not particularly embarrassing to the Nazis. Even Riefenstahl’s film documents some of the everyday, mundane aspects of the party rallies. None of these aspects militate against the real Nazi achievement in Nuremberg, because what the Nazis wanted was not the banishment of physical or psychological reality but rather the reconciliation of that reality with something they viewed as greater and more important: the unity of the German people through the Nazi messiah Adolf Hitler. In the Nazi hierarchy, only one man was called upon to

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be perfect, and that man was Hitler. The fact that his followers were not similarly unblemished did not detract from his “perfection”; it added to it.

Finis Norimbergae In 1939 the Nazis were planning to hold another massive rally in Nuremberg from 2–11 September. The rally was already scheduled, and most of the preparations for it had been completed, when Hitler suddenly called it off on 27 August. Five days later, on 1 September, the day before the party rally had been scheduled to begin, Germany invaded Poland. The Second World War had begun. The 1939 party rally was, perhaps not coincidentally, to be called the “Parteitag des Friedens” (Rally of Peace). Even after the beginning of the war, however, Nuremberg continued to attract visitors with its status as “city of the Reich party rallies” (Stadt der Reichsparteitage), and as the best-preserved major German medieval city. Some of the visitors the city was now trying to attract were German soldiers on home leave from the war. In a brochure put out in 1940 the city’s PR office pointed out to potential visitors that “today like long ago” Nuremberg was “one of the decisive middle points of the Reich. All of its multiplicity found lively expression in the silent image of this city. To those who read its lines, the city unveils a profound inner harmony. This essence can be summed up in a single phrase: authentically German!”118 Homecoming soldiers might understandably worry that somehow the war would have a negative impact on Nuremberg, the brochure noted, but one look around the beautifully preserved city would reassure Germany’s fighting men: “With a quick glance one assesses the image offered to one’s eye, and then a single word fights its way to one’s lips: Nuremberg! And in this word lies everything, and one forgets all one’s questions. Any open questions are swept away by this single image and word. Nuremberg has stayed the same.”119 Five years later, on January 2, 1945, the city that Wackenroder, Tieck, Hoffmann, Wagner, Riefenstahl, and so many others had celebrated was obliterated by British bombers, which unloaded 2,300 tons of explosives over the city, thirty-eight tons for every hundred square meters of the old city.120 After less than an hour the cityscape built up over the course of nine hundred years, including the Hans Sachs house and St. Katherine’s church, where Wagner had set the first act of Die Meistersinger and where the Nazis had placed the crown of the Holy Roman Empire on display, was wiped out. Nuremberg, the supposed epitome of German identity, no longer existed except as a pile of rubble. When he saw the city again later that year, William Shirer wrote “It is gone! The lovely medieval town behind the moat is utterly destroyed. It is a vast heap of rubble, beyond description and beyond hope of rebuilding.”121 He went on:

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All that loving, knowing hands had wrought here in stone and wood, in shape and color, for nine hundred years, had been pulverized into dust and ashes in a brief, fiery moment by a flick of the hands of youths from the distant Anglo-Saxon lands whose short lives, probably, had never been touched by this particular flowering of civilization. . . .122

As Jörg Friedrich has written, “the history that had been transformed into a cult” represented by Nuremberg “was bulldozed.” Friedrich suggests: “Evidently this was intentional,” since cities like Nuremberg “present the German people with an image of their origins.”123 Now that “origin” had been destroyed. Alfred Kerr wrote, “Nuremberg . . . it was once a city, and now it’s a pile of rubble.”124 Peter de Mendelssohn noted that even in its destruction the city was characterized “by a terrible beauty. It has the divine charm of grand, in every sense otherworldly horror.”125 It was almost as if the Allies had heeded Wilhelm Kunze’s 1928 warning that the city, in search of its final destiny, was being suffocated by its own past, and that “the path to the end can not be completed without sacrifices.”126 Now, it seemed, that journey had truly come to an end. But if Kunze had claimed, in 1928, that “today Nuremberg is dead, preserved as a mummy of its past greatness,” then it was clear in 1945 that even the mummy had disappeared.127 Even the ghosts that writers like Kunze and Rodenberg had invoked appeared to be gone. Rodenberg had claimed in 1874 that in Nuremberg the dead came alive, allowing the living to converse with them.128 Now it was as if even the dead had permanently been killed, and that any possibility of their resurrection had been short-circuited. With the physical city and thousands of its inhabitants had disappeared not only a specific urban conglomeration but also the very symbol of German identity, its not-so-secret imaginary capital. It was entirely appropriate that in that same year the victorious Allies proclaimed that the German Reich itself had ceased to exist.

Notes 1 Heinrich Ritter von Srbik, Die Schicksalsstunde des alten Reiches: Österreichs Weg, 1804–1806 (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1937), 5. Original German: “die Verkörperung der universalen und mitteleuropäischen Idee.” 2 Von Srbik, Die Schicksalsstunde, 57–58. Original German: “Ein neues, ein drittes Deutsches Reich und mit ihm ein von deutschem Geist und deutscher Kraft geleitetes Mitteleuropa stehen uns als Leitsterne vor Augen. Es sind Gedanken, die schon durch die Auflösung des Heiligen Römischen Reiches lebendig angefacht wurden — und die bis heute stets neu gedacht werden müssen.” 3 Von Srbik, Die Schicksalsstunde, 58. Original German: “Die Geschichte übt ein Amt am Volk und seiner Zukunft, wenn sie ihm den Spiegel der Vergangenheit vor das Antlitz hält, und wenn sie eine Wegbereiterin zu kommenden, vollendeteren Daseinsformen der einheitlichen Nation wird.”

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4 Otto Westphal, Das Reich: Aufgang und Vollendung, vol. 1, Germanentum und Kaisertum (Stuttgart and Berlin: W. Kohlhammer, 1943), 6. Original German: “hat die Schleier, die die Architektur der deutschen Geschichte bisher verhüllten, weggezogen”; “Gleichschaltung und öde Staatsschreiberei, sondern die bewußte Einstellung auf den Urakkord von Politik und Wissenschaft. Eine Schau auf die deutsche Geschichte als ein von den Wurzeln her sinnvoll-zielstrebiges Geschehen kann nur aus nationalsozialistischem Geist heraus versucht werden, weil der Nationalsozialismus es erst möglich gemacht hat, deutsche Geschichte als Einheit zu sehen.” 5

Westphal, Das Reich, 1:xii. Original German: “der unbekannte Soldat, der Gefreite des Weltkrieges”; “furor teutonicus, der seit der Stauferzeit brachgelegen hatte.” 6 Westphal, Das Reich, 1:xv. “von der Historie zum Mythos, vom Staatensystem zum Kosmos”; “Dies Buch will davon überzeugen, daß, je mystischer und kosmischer die Geschichte gesehen wird, es desto logischer in ihr zugeht.” 7 Westphal, Das Reich, 1:5. Original German: “heilige Wahl”; “der Führer und Reichskanzler zum erstenmal den Saal des Römers zu Frankfurt am Main [betrat]”; “Die drei Reiche . . . erschienen vor seinem Auge als ein großer, heiliger, notwendiger Zusammenhang.” 8

Westphal, Das Reich, 1:628. Original German: “Und es bleibt immer denkwürdig, daß . . . die Reichskleinodien, die seit dem Hussitensturm auf dem böhmischen Karlstein nicht mehr in sicherer Verwahrung waren, den Nürnbergern in dauernde Obhut gegeben worden sind, 1424. Nürnberg wurde damit zur symbolischen Hauptstadt des Reiches.” 9 Karl Schwarzenberg, Adler und Drache: Der Weltherrschaftsgedanke (Vienna: Herold, 1958), 360. Original German: “Das Heilige Römische Reich ist wiedererstanden!” 10 Karl Dietrich Bracher, The German Dictatorship: The Origins, Structure, and Effects of National Socialism (New York: Praeger, 1970), 265. The concept of a “Heiliges Germanisches Reich Deutscher Nation” came from Alfred Rosenberg, who had invoked it in Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts: Eine Wertung der seelischgeistigen Gestaltenkämpfe unserer Zeit (1930; Munich: Hoheneichen, 1933), 521. 11

Nürnberg die deutsche Stadt: Von der Stadt der Reichstage zur Stadt der Reichsparteitage (Berlin: Wilhelm Limpert, 1937), 20. Original German: “sinnbildlich der Mittelpunkt des Deutschen Reiches.” 12

Nürnberg die deutsche Stadt, 8. Original German: “der alte Anspruch Nürnbergs, ein symbolischer Mittelpunkt des Reiches zu sein.” 13

Nürnberg die deutsche Stadt, 8. Original German: “daß man aus der Fülle des Schicksalhaften eines ganzen Volkes ein großes und leuchtendes Beispiel herauzustellen habe. Das Beispiel einer Gemeinschaft, die durch die Bindung eines Volkes und einer politischen Führung gegeben war. Nürnberg, die deutsche Stadt, die Stadt der Reichstage und der Reichsparteitage sollte dieses Beispiel abgeben. Nürnberg ist ein Symbol unseres deutschen Volkes und Staatswesens geworden. Wir lieben diese Stadt, denn wir lieben in ihr Deutschland, unsere größere Heimat.”

14 Wilhelm Schwemmer, Nürnberg die ehemalige Reichsstadt (Nuremberg: Karl Ulrich, 1936), 17. Original German: “die Kaiserstadt, die Hauptstadt des Reiches schlechthin”; “Symbole Deutschlands.”

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15 Schwemmer, Nürnberg die ehemalige Reichsstadt, 24. Original German: “symbolische Hauptstadt Deutschlands.” 16 Schwemmer, Nürnberg die ehemalige Reichsstadt, 18. Original German: “Durch die Erhebung zur Stadt der Reichsparteitage ist Nürnberg von neuem zum Mittelpunkt, ja zur symbolischen Hauptstadt des Reiches geworden und hat damit eine Bedeutung gewonnen, die nur mit der in den besten Zeiten seiner großen Vergangenheit verglichen werden kann.” 17

Gottlieb Schwemmer, Nürnberg: Das Bild einer politischen Stadt (Potsdam: Poggenreiter, 1937), 7, 24. Original German: “des nordischen Wesens.”

18

Gottlieb Schwemmer, Nürnberg: Das Bild einer politischen Stadt, 29.

19

Gottlieb Schwemmer, Nürnberg: Das Bild einer politischen Stadt, 7. Original German: “Heute, da wieder eine starke Reichsgewalt hervortritt, erleben wir, daß Nürnberg aufs Neue zu einer außergewöhnlichen Bedeutung unter den Städten des Reiches emporsteigt.”

20

Gottlieb Schwemmer, Nürnberg: Das Bild einer politischen Stadt, 33. Original German: “der große Gedanke von der ewigen Sendung der Stadt war nie erstorben, sondern ständig wie ein unterirdischer Strom im Gefühl und Gewissen aller Deutschen weitergeflossen.”

21

Gottlieb Schwemmer, Nürnberg: Das Bild einer politischen Stadt, 33. Original German: “Als endlich am 9. März 1933 auf der alten Kaiserburg die Hakenkreuzflagge hochgezogen wurde, da war gleichzeitig auch die neue geschichtliche Stunde Nürnbergs angebrochen. Der Führer und Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler bestimmte die alte Reichsstadt, in der so viele und so denkwürdige Reichstage abgehalten worden waren, und die in einer fast tausendjährigen Vergangenheit von den Führern des Reiches bei jeder Gelegenheit bevorzugt worden war, zur Stadt der Reichsparteitage.”

22

Willy Liebel, “Zum Geleit,” in Nürnberg, die Stadt der Reichsparteitage (Munich: Bayerland, 1935), 1–2; here, 1. Original German: “Nürnberg, die Stadt der Reichsparteitage, die stolze Reichsstadt von ehedem, von Dr. Martin Luther einst ‘Auge und Ohr Deutschlands’ genannt, ist im nationalsozialistischen Deutschland wieder zum Brennpunkt deutscher Geschichte und deutscher Kultur geworden.” Emphasis in the original.

23 Liebel, “Zum Geleit,” 2. Original German: “So wird Nürnberg in sich die Zeugen großer deutscher Vergangenheit mit denen einer vielleicht noch größeren Gegenwart vereinigen und seinen einstigen Ehrentitel von neuem mit Recht tragen: ‘Des Deutschen Reiches Schatzkästlein!’ ” 24

Werner Dittschlag, Nürnberg, die Stadt der Reichsparteitage (Düsseldorf: August Bagel, 1937), 10. Original German: “Erst in unseren Tagen kam der erlösende Held, der die schlafende Stadt mit kühner Tat wieder zum Leben erweckte: Unser Führer Adolf Hitler hat nicht nur unser ganzes Volk wachgemacht, sondern besonders das deutsche Nürnberg aus seinem Dornröschenschlaf erlöst — gleichsam wie ein Königssohn, der das schöne Dornröschen mit einem Kuß befreite. Ein Erwachen geht durch die stolze alte Reichsstadt. Der alte Heldengeist der Tat und der Treue kehrt in ihre Mauern zurück. Deutsche Ahnenkraft hält feierliche Auferstehung. Als ‘Stadt der

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Reichsparteitage’ hat Nürnberg wieder Weltruf und Weltbedeutung erlangt. Nürnberg ist wiederum ein ‘Mittelpunkt des Reiches,’ des Dritten Reiches.” 25 It was not just in children’s books that Hitler was compared to the prince in “Sleeping Beauty.” Hanns Kerl, who edited the official National Socialist account of the 1938 party rally, declared in his foreword to the book that Hitler was “the prince” (“der Prinz”) who had “appeared and blazed a pathway to the German soul through the hedge of thorns that had sprung up around it, to Sleeping Beauty, and kissed her awake” (“erschienen und hat sich durch das um sie aufgeschossene Dornengewirr der Mißverständnisse einen Weg gebahnt zur deutschen Seele, zu Dornröschen, und hat sie wachgeküßt”). According to Kerl, “German fairy tales are the key to German history” (“Die deutschen Märchen sind der Schlussel zur deutschen Geschichte”). See Hanns Kerl, ed., Reichstagung in Nürnberg 1938: Der Parteitag Großdeutschland (Berlin: Vaterländischer Verlag C. A. Weller, 1939), ix. 26 Karl Bröger, Nürnberg: Der Roman einer Stadt (Berlin: Paul Franke & Rudolph Henßel, 1935), 5. Original German: “brennend erfüllt . . . von Bildern einer großen Vergangenheit.” 27 Bröger, Nürnberg, 7. Original German: “kein romantischer Schwärmer wie Wilhelm Wackenroder und andere, die hundert Jahre zovor alle diese Schönheiten erlebt und für das deutsche Volk neu entdeckt hatten”; “hart und nüchtern, ganz auf Dienst und Opfer gestellt und unerbittlich in ihren Forderungen an die Menschen.” 28 Bröger, Nürnberg, 10. Original German: “raunte . . . um jeden Stein in der Altstadt.” 29

Bröger, Nürnberg, 18. Original German: “einfache[r] Handwerker von Geschichte”; “lebendigste und verständlichste Geschichte Nürnbergs.” 30 Bröger, Nürnberg, 334. Original German: “ein neuer Abschnitt in der Geschichte Nürnbergs”; “Solange Deutschland lebt — und Deutschland wird immer leben! — , wird in Deutschland auch ein Nürnberg blühen und gedeihen, das Deutschland zu Stolz und Ruhm gereicht.” 31

Pausala [pseudonym for Paul Rieß], Festtage im lieben alten Nürnberg: Heitere und beschauliche Verse (Nuremberg: Korn & Berg, 1935), 7. Original German: “heitere und beschauliche Verse.” “Überall, wohin er auch mag blicken, / Flattern Fahnen, sieht er Wimpel nicken, / Tücher, Bänder, Kränze, Schleifen, Birken, / Grüßen ihn, und sie bewirken, / Daß ihn Festesstimmung schon am Kragen hat, / Ehe er noch recht betritt die Stadt. / Pauken-, Trommelschlag und Hörnerklingen, / Jubilieren, Lachen, Scherzen, Singen / Mischt sich hier zur schönsten Sinfonie, / Und Herr Knoll ist angeregt wie nie.” 32 Siegfried Zelnhefer, Die Reichsparteitage der NSDAP: Geschichte, Struktur und Bedeutung der größten Propagandafeste im nationalsozialistischen Feierjahr (Nuremberg: Stadtarchiv Nürnberg, 1991), 258. Original German: “Prüfungskommission zum Schutz des NS-Schrifttums”; “ein Appell des Führers an seine Kämpfer und an seine Gefolgschaft.” 33 Zelnhefer, Die Reichsparteitage der NSDAP, 259. Original German: “einzigartige Freudenkundgebungen und Feste des Volkes.”

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34 Zelnhefer, Die Reichsparteitage der NSDAP, 258. Original German: “eine lebenswarme Schilderung des frohbewegten Festtreibens in Nürnberg während eines Reichsparteitages.” 35

Pausala, Festtage im lieben alten Nürnberg, 5. Original German: “Nürnberg! Welch ein Zauberwort! / Freundchen, warst auch Du schon dort? / Gucktest Du auch schon hinein / In des Reiches Schatzkästlein?”

36 Pausala, Festtage im lieben alten Nürnberg, 6. Original German: “Just in Deutschlands schlimmsten Tagen / Sah man kampfesfroh hier tragen / Durch die Straßen Hitler-Fahnen — / Und die Massen packt ein Ahnen, / Und der Sieg des Glaubens triumphierte, / Und ein morsch gewordenes System krepierte! / Nürnberg aber ward für wackres Streiten / Reichsparteitagsstadt auf alle Zeiten!” Sieg des Glaubens is, of course, also the name of Riefenstahl’s film about the 1933 party rally. 37 Heinrich Anacker, “Ewiges Nürnberg,” in Reichstagung in Nürnberg 1938: Der Parteitag Großdeutschland, ed. Hanns Kerl (Berlin: Vaterländischer Verlag C. A. Weller, 1939), v. Original German: “Nürnberg, du bist uns Kraftquell Jahr für Jahr! / Wenn wir im Kampfe ganz uns ausgegeben, / Bis nichts in uns als dumpfes Müdsein war, / Machst du uns wieder straff und wach und klar, / Und neu bereit zu kämpferischem Leben!” 38 Franz Bauer, Sonne über Nürnberg: Vier Kinder entdecken die Stadt der Reichsparteitage (Langensalza-Berlin-Leipzig: Julius Beltz, 1940), 324. Original German: “Wo wieder reichen sich Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft so innig und fest die Hände wie gerade in Nürnberg? Wo wieder begegnen sich in solch großartiger Weise die Blütenjahre vergangener Zeiten, der Glanz unserer Tage und die Hoffnungswünsche für das Künftige?” 39 Bauer, Sonne über Nürnberg, 330. Original German: “den sonnigen Mittag und den stillen Abendglanz des heiligen römischen Reiches deutscher Nation”; “die Morgenröte des neuen Vaterlandes, das Adolf Hitler schuf: Großdeutschland”; “ ‘Weißt Du es noch, Peter,’ so steht in dem Brief, ‘wie wir damals aus dem Bahnhof traten? Die Mauern erglänzten im Licht, und die Fahnenspitze auf dem Königstorturm funkelte. Sonne lag über Nürnberg. So möchte ich wünschen, daß immer Sonne sei über Deiner herrlichen Vaterstadt. Heil Hitler!’ ” 40

Wilhelm Schwemmer, “Die Reichskleinodien in Nürnberg, 1938–1945,” Mitteilungen des Vereins für Geschichte der Stadt Nürnberg 65 (1978): 397–413; here, 398.

41 Schwemmer, “Die Reichskleinodien,” 399. Original German: “Die Reichskleinodien wurden vor mehr als einem halben Jahrtausend der Stadt auf ewige Zeiten urkundlich vermacht.” 42

“Reichsthing zu Nürnberg,” in Feuilletons für Triumph des Willens (Berlin: Ufa, 1934), no page number. This was a book of materials sent free of charge for public relations purposes by Ufa to newspaper cultural editors. Original German: “Eine ganz feierliche Stimmung ist in diesem historischen Rathaussaal, eine Erinnerung an versunkene Zeiten des Heiligen Römischen Reiches Deutscher Nation, die Reichskleinodien, Zeichen der Macht und der Größe dieses Reiches, weisen zurück in diese Zeit.”

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43 Schwemmer, “Die Reichskleinodien,” 399. Original German: “das Kleinod, das die alte Reichsstadt Nürnberg Jahrhunderte hindurch als ein Symbol der Einheit, Größe, Macht und Stärke der deutschen Nation in ihren Mauern hüten und bewahren durfte, würdig nachgebildet aus edelstem Material, lege ich in Nürnbergs Namen als ein Geschenk der Stadt in Ihre Hände. Das deutsche Reichsschwert dem Führer aller Deutschen!” 44 Cited in Schwemmer, “Die Reichskleinodien,” 399. Original German: “daß sogleich nach Wiedervereinigung der Ostmark mit dem Reich, die Kleinodien nach Nürnberg übergeführt würden.” 45 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Munich: Franz Eher, 1934), 11. In English, Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), 13. Original German: “Die zu Wien bewahrten Kaiserinsignien einstiger Reichsherrlichkeit scheinen als wundervoller Zauber weiter zu wirken”; “Sehnsucht nach dieser Rückkehr in das nie vergessene Vaterhaus.” 46

Cited in Schwemmer, “Die Reichskleinodien,” 400. Original German: “die rührende Sorgfalt der Reichsstadt für die Reichskleinodien in viereinhalb Jahrhunderten”; “Am politischen Wallfahrtsort des Dritten Reiches würden die uralten Reichskleinodien von vielen großdeutschen Träumen über Jahrhunderte Kunde geben und dadurch den historischen Sinn des neuen Großdeutschen Reichs augenfällig machen. . . . So auf der Überlieferung einer unabhängigen, stets auf des Reiches Mehrung bedachten Stadt beruhend, als Krönung des Germanischen Nationalmuseums und damit einer Überschau unserer tausendjährigen, reichbewährten und an Leistungen unvergleichlichen deutschen Kultur gehen die Reichskleinodien einer neuen und tieferen Wirkung entgegen.” 47

“Der Empfang des Führers im großen Rathaussaal,” Fränkischer Kurier, 6 September 1938, 1–2; here, 1. Original German: “Blickpunkt des Saales ist ein hoher Glasschrein an der Stirnseite. Er birgt die äußeren Zeichen deutscher Macht und Herrlichkeit, die Reichssymbole, Krone, Zepter, Reichsapfel und Schwert, die nun, nach der Schöpfung Großdeutschlands, in des Reiches Mitte zurückgekehrt sind.”

48 The use of the “Awake” chorus in Nazi ritual, and in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens, once again set Nazi Nuremberg into the long cultural history of Nuremberg reception, since the chorus went back to one of Hans Sachs’s famous pro-Reformation poems. By using this music, the Nazis were placing Hitler in the tradition of Martin Luther, Hans Sachs, and Richard Wagner. 49 “Der Empfang des Führers im großen Rathaussaal,” 2. Original German: “die deutscheste aller deutschen Stäadte”; “Wiedervereinigung der deutschen Ostmark mit dem alten Reich”; “damals, ebenso wie heute wieder, ein Bollwerk deutschen Geistes, ein Hort deutscher Kunst und deutscher Kultur und ein gewaltiges steinernes Denkmal deutscher Größe.” 50 “Der Empfang des Führers im großen Rathaussaal,” 2. Original German: “In keiner anderen deutschen Stadt verbinden sich Vergangenheit und Gegenwart des großdeutschen Reiches zu solch symbolischer Einheit und Ausdruckskraft wie in Nürnberg, der alten und zugleich der neuen Reichsstadt”; “der Stein gewordene Ausdruck deutscher Kraft und deutscher Größe in einem neuen deutschen Reiche!” “unserem alten Ruf: Nürnberg Sieg-Heil!”

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51 “Die feierliche Übergabe der Reichskleinodien,” Fränkischer Kurier, 7 September 1938, 4. Original German: “Vor nahezu 140 Jahren verließ die Kaiserkrone ein Deutschland, das kein Reich mehr war; fern von Kleindeutschland lag sie als Symbol des verlorenen Reiches in Wien. Heute ist sie wieder zurückgekehrt mit ihrer unvergänglichen Würde an ihre alte Stätte im größeren Reich. Und darum nehmen wir Ostmärker von diesem Kleinod der Nation nicht Abschied, denn das Reich ist unser Reich geworden.” 52 “Die feierliche Übergabe der Reichskleinodien,” 4. Original German: “der Feierstätte der deutschen Nation”; “weiterwirken als ein wundersamer Zauber großer deutscher Vergangenheit und als ein Unterpfand der zur Wirklichkeit gewordenen ewigen deutschen Gemeinschaft!” 53

Kerl, Reichstagung in Nürnberg 1938, 60. Original German: “Es ist als ob das Dritte Reich nun endgültig und vollkommen sich eingefügt habe in dem Strom der Geschichte, vom ersten Auftreten der Deutschen im hellen Raum der Geschichte an bis zum heutigen Tage.” 54 Kerl, Reichstagung in Nürnberg 1938, 60. Original German: “der Mythos des Ersten Reiches lebt in diesem Reichsschatz.” 55

Fritz Traugott Schulz, Die deutschen Reichskleinodien (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1938), 60. Original German: “ein Akt von wahrhaft geschichtlicher Größe”; “Wie in alten Zeiten ist Nürnberg als die Stadt in des Reiches Mitte die Hüterin und Wahrerin dieser geschichtlichen Symbole”; “Diese selbst aber sind damit eine einzige heilige Urkunde Deutschen Einheitswillens und der reinste Ausdruck Deutschen Wesens und Deutscher Art.”

56 B. D. Kötter-Anson, “Von Nürnberg nach Nürnberg: Die Deutschen Reichskleinodien,” Fränkischer Kurier, 6 September 1938, 4. Original German: “Das heilige Reich der deutschen Nation ist in neuer Form entstanden und die Insignien des einstigen Reiches haben wieder Sinn und Leben gewonnen.” 57

Michael Diefenbacher and Rudolf Endres, eds., Stadtlexikon Nürnberg (Nuremberg: W. Tümmels, 2000), 631, 793. A front-page article in the New York Times for 23 April 1945, however, claimed that Liebel was slain by another Nazi, possibly after having urged the surrender of the city. See “Nuremberg Leader Slew Mayor, Himself,” The New York Times, 23 April 1945, 1.

58

Cited in Martin Loiperdinger, Der Parteitagsfilm “Triumph des Willens” von Leni Riefenstahl: Rituale der Mobilmachung (Opladen: Leske & Budrich, 1987), 69. Original German: “Noch nie haben wir das Gesicht unseres Führers so nah gesehen, noch nie haben wir in seinen Zügen so forschen dürfen, noch nie haben wir soviel in seinen Augen gelesen.”

59

Original German: “Der mir so oft gemachte Vorwurf, ich hätte Propagandafilme gemacht, ist abwegig. Es war ein Dokumentarfilm, was einen großen Unterschied macht: Niemand, auch nicht die Partei, hatte mir irgendeine Anweisung, wie ich den Film machen sollte, gegeben.” Leni Riefenstahl, Memoiren (Munich: Albrecht Knaus, 1987), 209–10. English translation: Riefenstahl, A Memoir (New York: St. Martin’s P, 1993), 148. (Translator not identified.) Riefenstahl is writing specifically about Sieg des Glaubens here, but her statement is clearly intended to pertain to Triumph des Willens too.

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60

Susan Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” in Sontag, Under the Sign of Saturn (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1980), 73–105; here, 79.

61 Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974), 301. See also the critique of Kracauer in Loiperdinger, Der Parteitagsfilm “Triumph des Willens,” 34. 62


63

Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler, 300. Although Kracauer probably did not know it, his discussion of the film’s reality content curiously paralleled Nazi public relations on behalf of the film, which had declared that in the film “reality itself appears to have been outdone” (“Die Wirklichkeit selbst scheint übertroffen”). Triumph des Willens: Reklame-Ratschläge (Berlin: Ufa-Werbedienst, 1935), 24.

64


65

Karsten Witte, “Gehemmte Schaulust: Momente des deutschen Revuefilms,” in Wir tanzen um die Welt: Deutsche Revuefilme, 1933–1945, ed. Helga Belach (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1979), 7–52; here, 50. In English: Witte, “Visual Pleasure Inhibited: Aspects of the German Revue Film,” trans. J. D. Steakley and Gabriele Hoover, New German Critique 24/25 (Fall 1981/Winter 1982): 238–63. 66 Eric Rentschler, The Ministry of Illusion: Nazi Cinema and its Afterlife (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1996), 1. 67

Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” 83.

68

Riefenstahl, Memoiren, 850; Riefenstahl, A Memoir, 622. Original German: “Dieselbe These hat bereits vor Jahrzehnten Siegfried Kracauer in seinem . . . geschätzten Film-Katechismus ‘Von Caligari bis Hitler’ aufgestellt.” 69 Hans-Ulrich Thamer, “The Orchestration of the National Community: The Nuremberg Party Rallies of the NSDAP,” in Fascism and Theatre: Comparative Studies on the Aesthetics and Politics of Performance in Europe, 1925–1945, ed. Günter Berghaus (Providence, RI: Berghahn, 1996), 172–90; here, 172. Although Thamer uses Kracauerian terminology such as “the ornament of the masses” (172) and Benjaminian terminology such as the “aestheticisation of politics” (173), he does not actually cite either thinker. This is probably an indication that Benjamaninian and Kracauerian thinking have become so pervasive with respect to Nazism generally and the party rallies specifically that the origins of such thinkiing are no longer reflected on and identified. They have, in a sense, become common knowledge, even if the actual origins of the thinking are no longer identified or even known. 70

“Entstehung und Sinn des Reichsparteitagfilms,” in Feuilletons für Triumph des Willens, no page number. See also Leni Riefenstahl, Hinter den Kulissen des Reichsparteitag-Films (Munich: Franz Eher, 1935), 28.

71

Riefenstahl, Hinter den Kulissen des Reichsparteitag-Films, 12. Original German: “gefilmter Tatsachen, betonter Bericht”; Riefenstahl later claimed not to have written this book, asserting that Ernst Jäger had been her ghostwriter. Even if it is true that Riefenstahl did not write the book, however, this does not mean that she disagreed with the statements made therein, which after all were put out under her imprimatur. Everyone knows, for instance, that politicians frequently do not write their own speeches, but few would claim that such politicians are therefore

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in disagreement with the contents of those speeches. Rainer Rother points out that Riefenstahl claimed the book as her own when she was admitted to the Reichsschrifttumskammer (Reich Chamber of Literature), the professional organization for writers during the Third Reich. See Rainer Rother, Leni Riefenstahl: Die Verführung des Talents (Berlin: Henschel, 2000), 215, n. 6. Moreover, Riefenstahl was quoted in the film press as saying precisely the same kinds of things about her previous party rally film, Sieg des Glaubens, over a year earlier. In an interview in Lichtbildbühne from September of 1933, just after she had finished camera work in Nuremberg for that film, Riefenstahl said: “My job in Nuremberg was to collect, from the huge number of powerful occurrences, the best possible filmic effects: to choose from the masses in the audience, the marching SA, and from the course of the imposing events the ones appropriate for the camera. Our goal was to witness moments that would enable the production of a film not just after the pattern of a newsreel report but rather of a structured film that would . . . capture audiences not merely by reproducing the images of the grandiose events in Nuremberg but especially through its artistic structuring.” (“Imposante Wochenschauberichte: Vorschau auf den Film vom Parteitag,” Lichtbildbühne, 6 September 1933, 1; “Meine Aufgabe in Nürnberg bestand darin, aus der Unsumme der gewaltigen Geschehnisse die bestmöglichen Wirkungen filmisch einzufangen, in der Masse des Publikums, der marschierenden SA, und aus dem Verlauf der imposanten Veranstaltungen die für die Kamera geeigneten Begebenheiten herauszugreifen. Wir waren bestrebt, überall Momente bildlich zu erlauschen, die die Herstellung eines Filmwerks nicht bloß nach dem Muster einer rein reportageartigen Wochenschau, sondern eines in sich geschlossenen Films ermöglichen, der nicht nur durch die rein bildmäßige Wiedergabe der grandiosen Nürnberger Ereignisse, sondern ganz besonders auch durch seine künstlerische Gestaltung . . . fesseln soll.”) The concept of “artistic structuring” (künstlerische Gestaltung) is precisely the same one Riefenstahl later used in her book Hinter den Kulissen des Reichsparteitag-Films. It would stretch credulity to suggest that in both instances words had simply been put into Riefenstahl’s mouth. 72 Riefenstahl, Hinter den Kulissen des Reichsparteitag-Films, 11. Original German: “einem solchen Erlebnis wie ‘Nürnberg’ ”; “heroischen Stil”; “dem innern Rythmus des tatsächlichen Geschehens”; “durch ihren Abklatsch, durch ihre photographische Treue.” 73 Riefenstahl, Hinter den Kulissen des Reichsparteitag-Films, 12. Original German: “künstlerische Gestaltung.” 74 Riefenstahl, Hinter den Kulissen des Reichsparteitag-Films, 15. Original German: “Suggestivkraft des Films.” 75 Riefenstahl, Hinter den Kulissen des Reichsparteitag-Films, 15. Original German: “Der Glaube, daß ein reales, starkes Erlebnis einer Nation ein Neuerlebnis durch den Film finden könne, wurde in Deutschland geboren. Der Führer gibt damit dem Zeitfilm Sinn und Sendung.” Emphasis Riefenstahl’s. 76 Riefenstahl, Hinter den Kulissen des Reichsparteitag-Films, 28. Original German: “ein Neuerlebnis durch den Film”; “daß er den Hörer und Zuschauer . . . überwältigender emporreißt”; “So erhebt sich über dem Grundmotiv dieses sieghaften Titels ein Film aus deutscher Gegenwart — ein Triumphzug der

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Erkenntnis, des Mutes, der Kraft, für unser deutsches Volk zu kämpfen und zu siegen. Ein heroischer Film der Tatsachen — im Willen des Führers triumphiert sein Volk.” Emphasis Riefenstahl’s. 77 Triumph des Willens: Reklame-Ratschläge, 26–29. Original German: “Propagandamaßnahmen und allgemeine Richtlinien für die Zusammenarbeit mit Partei-Stellen.” 78 Triumph des Willens: Reklame-Ratschläge, 26. Original German: “Die GauPropagandaleitungen werden vom Propagandaministerium angewiesen, den Film ‘Triumph des Willens’ in jeder erdenklichen Weise zu unterstützen.” 79 Rother, Leni Riefenstahl, 72. Original German: “Dokumentarfilme können selbstverständlich zugleich Propagandafilme sein.” 80 “Filmbesprechung: ‘Der Sieg des Glaubens’: Der Film vom Reichsparteitag 1933 der NSDAP; Ufa-Palast,” Lichtbildbühne, 2 December 1933, 3. Original German: “Reichspropagandaleitung der NSDAP”; “Aufnahmen vom Führer, wie wir sie noch nie sahen.” 81 Loiperdinger, Der Parteitagsfilm “Triumph des Willens,” 114. Original German: “Ideal-Zuschauer.” 82 “Gestern im UFA-Palast: Der Sieg des Glaubens: Der Film vom Reichsparteitag,” Reichsfilmblatt 1933, no. 49, 2 December 1933, 1. Original German: “die Verbindung der Einzelheiten, die der Teilnehmer nicht alle sehen und hören konnte.” 83

Otto Kriegk, Der deutsche Film im Spiegel der Ufa: 25 Jahre Kampf und Vollendung (Berlin: Ufa-Buchverlag, 1943), 218. Original German: “erkannten plötzlich, daß, was zweiunddreißig Augen der Kamera sehen, tausendmal mehr ist, als was zwei Augen des einzelnen in Nürnberg in sich aufzunehmen vermochten.”

84

Such scenes had already formed part of Baldur von Schirach’s 1929 silent documentary, which shows SA men engaging in a hefty water fight while bathing. An intertitle proclaims: “People’s good mood reaches a high point while they are washing” (“Beim Waschen erreicht die gute Laune ihren Höhepunkt” — my transcription). It seems likely that Riefenstahl was influenced by her predecessor, since other scenes from Triumph des Willens — particularly the aerial views of Nuremberg featuring a plane flying over the city — resemble scenes from Schirach’s film. 85

See Riefenstahl, Hinter den Kulissen des Reichsparteitag-Films, 70–71.

86

Rother, Leni Riefenstahl, 74–75. See also Steve Neale, “Triumph of the Will: Notes on Documentary and Spectacle,” Screen 20, no. 1:63–86, who argues that the film’s “economy of structures . . . deviates very little from that of the classic Hollywood fiction film” (81–82). 87

“Der Sieg des Glaubens,” Die Filmwoche 50 (1933): 1602–3; here, 1603. Original German: “In diesem Filmwerk kommt es nicht auf den chronologischen Ablauf des Parteitags an, — es geht um Höheres: um eine sinnfällige Sichtbarmachung des hinreißenden Rhythmus der größten Volksbewegung, die es jemals auf deutschem Boden gegeben hat.” 88

Rother, Leni Riefenstahl, 78–79.

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89 Der Sieg des Glaubens: Der Film vom Reichs-Parteitag der NSDAP, promotional brochure (Berlin: Illustrierter Film-Kurier, 1933), no page number. Original German: “Eines der monumentalsten Bilder der nationalen Bewegung ist jenes, wo Hitler und sein Stabschef allein an den langen Mauern seiner Getreuen vorbeischreiten bis zum Totenehrenmale, um dort einige Minuten im stummen Gebet zu harren.” 90 Der Kongreß zu Nürnberg vom 5. bis 10. September 1934: Offizieller Bericht über den Verlauf des Reichsparteitags mit sämtlichen Reden (Munich: Eher, 1934), 177. Original German: “Vor wenigen Monaten hat sich über die Bewegung ein schwarzer Schatten erhoben”; “daß auch nur ein Riß in das Gefüge unserer einzigen Bewegung gekommen sei.” Emphasis in the original. 91 Cited in Loiperdinger, Der Parteitagsfilm “Triumph des Willens,” 105. Original German: “Wir SA-Männer haben immer nur eins gekannt: Treue zum Führer und Kampf für den Führer.” 92 Triumph des Willens: Reklame-Ratschläge, 11. Original German: “Vorwärts rast die mächtige Maschine. Der dröhnende Rhythmus der Motoren ruft in die Winde: Nürnberg . . . Nürnberg . . . Nürnberg . . .” Ellipses in the original. 93 Triumph des Willens: Reklame-Ratschläge, 14. Original German: “Der milde Schein der Morgensonne liegt auf den Dächern, fliert um die jahrhundertealten Türme dieser deutschesten der deutschen Städte: Nürnberg. Zarte Rauchfahnen steigen in noch dunstige Höhen. Glocken rufen ins Land. Die alte, schöne Stadt, im bunten Schmuck sich bauschender Fahnen, . . . harrt des grandiosen Schauspiels.” 94 Sieg des Glaubens, made by Riefenstahl a year earlier, also ends with the singing of the “Horst Wessel Lied” and marching stormtroopers. For the full text of the song, see, among others, Sturm- und Kampf-Lieder für Front und Heimat (Berlin: Propaganda-Verlag Paul Hochmuth, 1941), 6. Original German: “Die Fahne hoch! Die Reihen fest geschlossen! / SA marschiert mit ruhig festem Schritt. / Kameraden, die Rotfront und Reaktion erschossen, / Marschier’n im Geist in unsern Reihen mit.” 95 Willy Liebel, ed., Fünf Jahre Stadt der Reichsparteitage Nürnberg: Ein Bericht über die nationalsozialistische Aufbauarbeit in der Stadt der Reichsparteitage Nürnberg (Nuremberg: K. Ulrich, 1938), 35. 96

Loiperdinger, Der Parteitagsfilm “Triumph des Willens,” 162, n. 23.

97

Loiperdinger, Der Parteitagsfilm “Triumph des Willens,” 162, n. 23.

98

Riefenstahl, A Memoir, 150. See David B. Hinton, The Films of Leni Riefenstahl (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow P, 1991), 60. 99

Original German: “das größte Filmwerk, das wir je gesehen haben.”

100

Cited in Loiperdinger, Der Parteitagsfilm “Triumph des Willens,” 59. Original German: “Der Held deses Films ist unser Deutsches Volk, verkörpert durch die einzigartige Erscheinung des Führers.”

101 102

Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” 79.

Götz Aly’s recent book Hitlers Volksstaat (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2005) is a key intervention in this debate, since it shows the way in which Hitler’s dictatorship was genuinely popular and supported by the German people themselves, often for very materialist economic reasons.

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217

Neale, “Triumph of the Will,” 84.

104

Siegfried Kracauer, “Vom Erleben des Krieges,” in Schriften, ed. Inka MülderBach, vol. 5.1, Aufsätze (1915–1926) (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1990), 11–22; here, 16. Cited in Mary-Elizabeth O’Brien, Nazi Cinema as Enchantment: The Politics of Entertainment in the Third Reich (Rochester: Camden House, 2004), 13, n. 2. Original German: “Es ist ja der natürlichste Zustand der Menschen, im Rausch des Zieles dem Ideal zu dienen. Auch die kleinste Handlung wird dann geheiligt und das Lebensgefühl unendlich erhöht.”

105 The major party rally films are the two silent films Parteitag der NSDAP Nürnberg 20.–21. August (1927) and Der Nürnberger Parteitag der NSDAP vom 1.–4. August 1929; Riefenstahl’s three films Sieg des Glaubens (1933 rally; premiered on 1 December 1933), Triumph des Willens (1934 rally; premiered on 28 March 1935), and Tag der Freiheit — Unsere Wehrmacht (1935 rally; premiered on 30 December 1935); and Festliches Nürnberg (1937), Der Marsch zum Führer (1938), and Jahre der Entscheidung (1936–39). The latter film, originally intended as a documentary of the 1936 party rally, was later transformed into a history of the entire Nazi movement, beginning with the end of the First World War and ending with the German annexation of the Sudetenland, the dissolution of Czechoslovakia, and the German annexation of the Memel region in 1939. Since work on the film was cut off at the beginning of the Second World War, it was never finished, and most of it is without a soundtrack. Der Marsch zum Führer documents the 1938 march of hundreds of Hitler Youth boys from all over Germany via various routes to the Nuremberg party rally and then to the Landsberg prison where Adolf Hitler had been incaracerated in 1924. In addition to these films, of course, the regular newsreels covered the party rallies. 106 “Imposante Wochenschauberichte: Vorschau auf den Film vom Parteitag,” 1. Original German: “Das, was ich in Nürnberg sah . . . gehört zu den eindrucksvollsten Erlebnissen, die ich je erfahren habe. Das alles war so packend und grandios, daß ich es mit nichts, was ich in meiner bisherigen künstlerischen Tätigkeit erlebt habe, vergleichen könnte.” 107 Feuilletons für Triumph des Willens, no page number. Original German: “In dieser scheinbar unpersönlichen Masse ist doch jeder einzelne Mann, wie ihn gerade die Kamera herausgreift, bis zur letzten Möglichkeit geladen mit Glück und Glauben, Treue und Tapferkeit, Kameradschaft und Zuversicht. Nicht als irgendeine zufällige Masse stehen sie da, sondern aus freiem Willen, getrieben von der gemeinsamen Liebe zum Führer.” 108

Witte, “Gehemmte Schaulust,” 51; Witte, “Visual Pleasure Inhibited,” 262. Original German: “die größte Entfaltung des Wunsches nach dem ‘Himmel auf Erden.’ ” 109

“Der Film von Deutschlands Zukunft: Begeisterungsstürme bei der Uraufführung ‘Triumph des Willens,’ ” Dresdner Anzeiger, Sat., 30 March 1935, 4. Original German: “das politische und organisatorische Kunstwerk des Parteitages [hat] in dem Film ein würdiges und küstlerisches Dokument für alle Zeiten erhalten.” Emphasis in the original. 110

Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie, oder: Griechenthum und Pessimismus, in Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. Giorgio Colli and

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Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1972), 3.1:3–152; here, 25, 26. In English: Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967), 37. Original German: “Man verwandele das Beethoven’sche Jubellied der ‘Freude’ in ein Gemälde und bleibe mit seiner Einbildungskraft nicht zurück, wenn die Millionen schauervoll in den Staub sinken: so kann man sich dem Dionysischen nähern”; “Jetzt . . . fühlt sich Jeder mit seinem Nächsten nicht nur vereinigt, versöhnt, verschmolzen, sondern eins”; “Aus seinen Gebärden spricht die Verzauberung”; “Der Mensch ist nicht mehr Künstler, er ist Kunstwerk geworden”; “Der edelste Thon, der kostbarste Marmor wird hier geknetet und behauen, der Mensch.” Note that Kaufmann abridges the first sentence, removing Nietzsche’s invitation to his readers to imagine the literal fulfilment of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy in their minds. 111

Sontag, “Fascinating Fascism,” 102. Rother, Leni Riefenstahl, 73. Original German: “erotische Grundierung.” 112 William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934–1941 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1941), 21. 113

Shirer, Berlin Diary, 22.

114

“Der Film von Deutschlands Zukunft,” 4. Original German: “Parteitag in Nürnberg”; “Parteitag in ganz Deutschland.” 115 “Der Film von Deutschlands Zukunft,” 4. Original German: “jetzt und in Zukunft”; “das gleiche Erlebnis vom Führer der Partei und vom deutschen Volke.” 116 Mark Potocnik, “Hitlers Hand oder Triumph des Willens — ein Propagandafilm,” Der Schnitt, March 1996, 97. Original German: “unio mystica zwischen Hitler und dem Zuschauer.” 117


118

Wehrmacht-Urlauber Willkommen in Nürnberg (Nuremberg: Verkehrsverein Nürnberg, 1940), 3. Original German: “heute wie einst”; “einer der entscheidenden Mittelpunkte des Reiches. Diese ganze Mannigfaltigkeit fand ihren lebendigen Ausdruck im stummen Bilde dieser Stadt. Wer in ihm liest, dem offenbart sich eine tiefe innere Harmonie. Dies Wesen läßt sich auf einen einzigen Nenner bringen: Urdeutsch!” 119 Wehrmacht-Urlauber Willkommen in Nürnberg, 2. Original German: “Mit einem raschen Blick umfängt man das Bild, das sich dem Auge bietet, und dann ringt sich ein einziges Wort von den Lippen: Nürnberg! Alles liegt darin — und man hat plötzlich alles Fragen vergessen, alle offenen Fragen sind mit diesem einzigen Blick und Wort verweht. Nürnberg ist das alte geblieben.” 120

Jörg Friedrich, Der Brand: Deutschland im Bombenkrieg, 1940–1945 (Munich: Propyläen, 2002), 320–21.

121

William L. Shirer, End of a Berlin Diary (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), 287. 122 123

Shirer, End of a Berlin Diary, 289–90.

Friedrich, Der Brand, 321. Original German: “die in Kult überführte Geschichte”; “ist planiert worden”; “Allem Anschein nach ist dabei Verstand am Werk”; “stellen dem Volk der Deutschen seine Herkunft dar.”

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124 Alfred Kerr, “Nürnberg eine Schutthalde 1947,” in Nürnberg in alten und neuen Reisebeschreibungen, ed. Barbara Fürst (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1990), 227–28; here, 227. Original German: “Nürnberg . . . — Das war eine Stadt, und ist eine Schutthalde.” Ellipsis in the original. 125

Peter de Mendelssohn, “Nürnberg/Dezember 1945,” in Peter de Mendelssohn, Überlegungen: Vermischte Aufsätze (Hamburg: Wolfgang Krüger, 1948), 20–35; here, 20. Original German: “von schreckenerregender Schönheit. Sie hat den himmlischen Zauber großen, ganz und gar unirdischen Horrors.” 126 Wilhelm Kunze, Nürnberg: Schicksal einer Stadt (Nuremberg: Ernst Frommann & Sohn, 1928), 19. Original German: “Nicht ohne Opfer kann der Weg zu Ende gegangen werden.” Kunze (1 September 1902–1 July 1939) did not live to see the destruction of his city. He died of heart trouble at the age of thirty-six. 127

Kunze, Nürnberg: Schicksal einer Stadt, 17. Original German: “Nürnberg ist heute tot, als Mumie vergangener Größe bewahrt.”

128

Julius Rodenberg, In deutschen Landen: Skizzen und Ferienreisen (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1874), 285.

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American troops in April of 1945. For almost half a century it was part of the American zone of occupation, which included most of southern Germany. Immediately after the occupation of Nuremberg, the American army began using the vast spaces of the Nazi rally grounds for its own purposes. The Große Strasse became a runway for American aircraft, and the former SS barracks now housed American soldiers. The Zeppelin field remained a parade ground, filled now with American, not with Nazi troops. On 22 April 1945, after staging a victory parade at the Zeppelin field, the U.S. Army symbolically blew up the massive swastika that had loomed over the Zeppelin tribune. This was a message to the entire world that Nazism had been destroyed. On the same day Richard J. H. Johnston reported in The New York Times that “there is no more hideous spot in Europe today than Nuremberg, shrine city of the Nazis.” “After five days and nights of the roar and clatter of battle,” he noted, “a deathly silence was holding this irregular pile of debris in its grasp today.” Nuremberg’s residents, meanwhile, were “like timid ground creatures” coming “up from their shelters, caves, and cellars . . . to blink in strong sunlight and stare unbelieving at the awful mess that was their town.”1 A day earlier, Johnston had announced on the front page of the Times that “Nuremberg no longer exists as a city. It is a scene of desolation. This pile of wreckage is the Nazis’ birthday gift to Hitler and it is Hitler’s gift to the world.”2 The front-page article featured a picture of Harold L. Hershey of the U.S. Seventh Army standing “where once the Fuehrer stood” on the Zeppelin tribune, “using a comb as a mustache” and giving “his impression of Adolf Hitler making a speech,” complete with the Nazi salute.3 The task facing the United States was immense. It not only had to cope with the conquered Germans and the logistics of supporting its own troops; it also had to cooperate with the three other conquering Allies, Great Britain, France, and — most problematic of all — the Soviet Union in the establishment of a postwar German order. Ernst Wiechert, a German “inner emigrant” writer who had been imprisoned for several months in the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1938, declared in January of 1946 that “the mission that the American people have taken on with the defeat of barbarism and the occupation of Germany represents the greatest and most difficult task of their history.”4 Wiechert was probably not too far off the mark. Transforming a National Socialist Germany into a democratic UREMBERG WAS OCCUPIED BY

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Harold L. Hershey, attached to the Seventh Army, using a comb as a mustache and giving his impression of Adolf Hitler making a speech on the Zeppelin tribune in Nuremberg. This picture, which appeared on the front page of the New York Times on April 21, 1945, was probably taken on April 20, 1945, Hitler’s fifty-sixth and last birthday, the day when Nuremberg’s old town was occupied by American troops. Picture provided by the National Archives. Germany was indeed a profoundly difficult task. Nuremberg and its inhabitants were a symbolically important part of that task.

Enter: A British Poet Since the massive bombardment of cities from the air had been a new military tactic in the Second World War, one of the first things the United States Army tried to do after occupying Germany was to ascertain what effect such aerial bombardments had actually had on civilian populations and on industrial production. In order to learn from the prosecution of the war and perhaps draw appropriate conclusions for future wars, the army created the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSBS), which sent officers of its so-called Morale Division into German cities that

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had been bombed in order to conduct interviews with surviving German civilians. One of the members of the USSBS Morale Division who came to Nuremberg in May of 1945 was the British poet W. H. Auden, who wore the uniform of a major in the U.S. Army. Auden later described his work with the citizens of Nuremberg and other German cities with unconcealed derision: “We asked them if they minded being bombed. We went to a city which lay in ruins and asked if it had been hit. We got no answers that we didn’t expect.”5 In a letter to the wife of a friend, Auden described the Germans living in these bombed-out sites as “sad beyond belief” (110). Germans were not alone in their sadness. Auden himself was devastated by the condition of Germany’s cities. “You can’t imagine” what a city that, like Nuremberg, was over ninety percent destroyed “looks like,” he wrote, “unless you see it with your own eyes.” He acknowledged that “the work is very interesting but I’m near crying sometimes” (109). Auden complained to his friend the composer Nicholas Nabokov that “this Morale title still makes me squirm . . . it is illiterate and absurd. . . . Morale with an ‘e’ at the end is psycho-sociological nonsense” (108). It was also, perhaps, more than a trifle cynical to use the word “morale” in connection with a city like Nuremberg at the end of the Second World War. Nuremberg was one of the many German cities that the German Catholic writer Gertrud von le Fort described in one poem as The high, joyful names of age-old fame As inscriptions on their graves: City upon city and bone upon bone — O nothing but naked bones now — ashes on ashes: The martyred corpses of the churches, the bodies of the mighty towers. . . .6 As the USSBS was drawing to a close, Auden complained, according to his friend Nabokov, that “we had nothing to do except to wait to get paid and attend debriefing sessions led by Ken Galbraith and other ‘inventors’ of the USSBS operation. Auden said that at these sessions ‘a lot of mid-witted folk talked high-minded trash in bogus socio-political jargon with a most obscene German accent.’ ” In fact the economist John Kenneth Galbraith was just as critical of the bombing of Germany as Auden, arguing that it was “perhaps the greatest miscalculation of the war” and had done nothing to significantly lower German morale, which was already low anyway. Galbraith also noted that the bombing of German cities appeared to have had little negative impact on industrial production, since “German war production had, indeed, expanded under the bombing.”7 Auden’s own reaction to the bombing of Germany, according to Nabokov, was entirely negative:

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“I know that [the Germans] had asked for it,” he would say, but still, this kind of total destruction is beyond reasoning. . . . It is absolutely ghastly. . . . is it justified to reply to their mass-murder by our mass-murder? It seems terrifying to me, don’t you agree? . . .” He would drop into silence for a while and add in a quieter tone: “Well . . . I’ve done my do . . . and I’m glad to leave. . . . It is, all of it, a sorry mess.”8

A photograph taken of Auden in Nuremberg in May of 1945 shows him sitting in uniform in the driver’s seat of an army jeep in the left foreground of the picture, while behind him, in the background, one can see the ruins of Nuremberg in the streets leading up to the old imperial castle, with German civilians making their way through the rubble. Incongruously intact amidst the devastation, and positioned as if it were looking at Auden’s army jeep, stands the statue of Albrecht Dürer designed by Christian Daniel Rauch in 1828 for the three-hundredth anniversary of Dürer’s death. Friedrich Campe’s book Dürers Reliquien and a Bavarian coin with a picture of King Ludwig I, which had been placed into the foundation stone of the statue on the day after Easter in 1828, were probably still there, archeological remnants of a bygone era. The statue had been officially unveiled in 1840 and was Germany’s first public monument to an artist. This product of so much effort and planning in the first half of the nineteenth century had somehow survived the destruction of the city for whose glory it had been erected. Now, a little over a century after its unveiling, it stood amidst the ruins of that city. A few blocks away Dürer’s house had also survived, thanks to the efforts of Nuremberg citizens who had prevented the house from burning by keeping it wet during bombing raids. In his 1947 book The Hidden Damage, James Stern, who had traveled with Auden through Germany as a member of the USSBS, described the incongruous statue of Dürer in the midst of the ruins of Dürer’s city: “As usual — and again no one knows why — a few statues remained. Surrounded by deep holes full of twisted, broken drain-pipes, Albrecht Dürer stood high up, erect, like a lonely saint in his stone [sic] robes.”9 In his 1949 poem “Memorial for the City” Auden invoked a blasted cityscape that might have corresponded with his experiences in Nuremberg and other similarly devastated German cities in 1945: “Among the ruins of the Post-Vergilian City / Where our past is a chaos of graves and the barbed-wire stretches ahead / Into our future till it is lost to sight.”10 As Cornelia D. J. Pearsall has suggested, that barbed wire seems to run forward into any imaginable future: Across the square, Between the burnt-out Law Courts and Police Headquarters, Past the Cathedral far too damaged to repair,

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Around the Grand Hotel patched up to hold reporters, Near huts of some Emergency Committee, The barbed-wire runs through the abolished City.11

The French Were Here Auden and his companions in the U.S. Army were not the first foreigners to witness the devastation of Nuremberg. Even before its occupation by the U.S. Army in April of 1945, many foreigners were already living in Nuremberg, including about twenty thousand French men and women working as involuntary or voluntary laborers in the so-called Service du Travail Obligatoire (STO, or obligatory labor service), created by the Vichy government in France in 1942–43. The STO mobilized over half a million French men and women to work in Germany in the last two and a half years of the war. Most of these workers were simply drafted and required to serve, but some volunteered for various reasons, ranging from the desire to win the release of French prisoners of war, through the simple desire to find a job, to active collaboration with the Nazi regime.12 One of the French workers living in Nuremberg when it was bombed was the Catholic priest Joseph Gelin, who had joined the STO in 1943 at the behest of church authorities in order to minister to French Catholics in Germany. Gelin’s 1946 memoir Nüremberg, 1943–1945: L’Expérience d’un prêtre-ouvrier (Nuremberg 1943–1945: The Experience of a WorkerPriest) is a moving account of his life in Nuremberg, and of the destruction of the city. Gelin saw the music museum and the museum of torture in Nuremberg’s old town as symptomatic expressions of a schizophrenic German soul: “Two sides of Germany: Germany as the homeland of music (posters on the walls of the opera house announce Tannhäuser) — and as the homeland of the concentration camps. And here’s a third aspect: the magnificent Gothic . . . flowering of the churches evokes the mystical face of the German soul.”13 Gelin was enchanted by the old town, which he described as a “proud and beautiful city, still intact in its wall of ramparts, flanked by mighty towers, with the Pegnitz running through it, traversed by bridges of all sizes, and bristling with gables and spires” (29). The French priest was also impressed by the solidarity of his German brethren, who had held religious services for French workers near the Nuremberg post office, “at the foot of an immense bronze eagle holding the swastika in its clenched talons. Today the great eagle fell from its pedestal, symbolically beheaded by the bombs” (7). Gelin was less positively impressed by the Nazi party rally grounds, although he acknowledged that they were indeed colossal. But they were not, he insisted, grand, because “grandeur has human dimensions” (31). The colossal proportions of the rally

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grounds, he suggested, appeared to have been created precisely so that individual human beings would feel lost among them and search “instinctively for refuge inside the group” (31). Gelin also described the destruction of Nuremberg at the beginning of January, 1945, which he lived through: The most terrible bombardment of Nuremberg happened yesterday evening at 7:25. Within twenty minutes, a square kilometer of continuous destruction. At ten o’clock I left the ruins of my house with my portable altar and altar cloth, the last vestiges of my wealth, and I stood there for a few seconds holding my breath: everything was burning, gigantic flames were shooting from the windows, and a powerful wind prevented me from walking up the street where the sparks were flying. Amongst the ruins that blocked the street, pathetic shadows were scurrying around in the smoke. (83)

In the small hours of the morning Gelin sees the people who have managed to survive this disaster: “On the sidewalk, exhausted people are sleeping on whatever treasures they were able to save, quilts, jars of jam, little bits of furniture” (84). Most public amenities have ceased to exist: “No more streetcar, no more water, no more light, the restaurants are closed or in ruins. People line up at the soup kitchens. People hurry to wherever there are any signs of bread” (84). When Gelin, whose eyes are hurting terribly from the fires he has lived through, walks to the old town, he finds that it is nothing but “smoking ruins” (85). Gelin dedicated his book “to the sacred memory of those French who died in exile and who now repose at the Südfriedhof cemetery, at the charnel house of Langenzenn, and under the ruins of Nuremberg” (5). Also among the French workers in Nuremberg in the last years of the war was the young intellectual Alain Robbe-Grillet, later to become one of the greatest postwar French novelists and the theorist of the nouveau roman (new novel). Robbe-Grillet’s 1984 memoir Le Miroir qui revient (The Returning Mirror, translated into English as Ghosts in the Mirror) draws in part on the writer’s experiences as a conscripted worker in Nuremberg in 1943–44. In this memoir Robbe-Grillet describes two opposing views of French history during the Nazi period. One imagines “a nation of heroes” that bravely resisted the Nazis, while the other describes France as “a pack of cowards and traitors” who collaborated with the Nazis and betrayed the Jews.14 Neither of these two views conforms to his own experience, Robbe-Grillet writes, suggesting that the truth lies somewhere in between the extremes. Robbe-Grillet acknowledges that he was “a good son” of right-wing anti-Semitic and anti-British parents who supported the Pétain regime and sympathized with the Germans, and he concedes that during his sojourn in Nuremberg he “hadn’t learned much about the real nature of the Nazi regime,” because he basically had a good time there and

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Streets near the castle in Nuremberg (1946). From the volume Wieder Leben: Nürnberg vor 50 Jahren: Fotografien von Ferdinand Vitzethum, ed. Helmut Beer (Nuremberg: W. Tümmels, 1997), 19. Permission to reproduce image courtesy of the Stadtarchiv Nürnberg.

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enjoyed the city, in spite of all its problems (35, 93). When he came to Nuremberg in the summer of 1943, he writes, there were not yet many air raids, and in the forests surrounding the city “we could go right up to the wild does who watched us with large, mild eyes — as it will be, they say, in the Kingdom of Heaven” (95). But even at the coming of winter, when working conditions got worse, Robbe-Grillet writes, the imagery of order reigning over dear old Germany remained intact. Little blond children still smiled by the roadside; the public sidewalks were still clean and nature fair, whether green or white; the impeccable soldiers of the Wehrmacht still marched with a heavy tread, singing in unison in their deep voices; trains arrived on time; foremen carried on in dutiful drudgery. (95)

Even the German officers waiting in the Nuremberg train station turned out to be fans of French literature and culture who were willing to share their apples with hungry French students like himself. His time in “Nuremberg, city of Hans Sachs and the Meistersingers” was, RobbeGrillet writes, basically “my first vacation abroad,” and in spite of the hard work and the unpleasant conditions, he could not help feeling a little like a tourist, even when he was helping to make tanks for the German army (110, 112). His foreman at the M.A.N. factory even allows Robbe-Grillet to leave work early in order to hear Beethoven’s sonatas for piano and cello at St. Katherine’s church, “a small white and gold baroque church, and a ravishing setting for chamber music,” as Robbe-Grillet describes it (12). After all, Robbe-Grillet notes, he and the Germans love the same music. It was only after his return to France in the summer of 1944 and after the end of the war in 1945, the writer claims, that he came to understand what was going on behind the façade of law and order in Germany: And suddenly everything falls apart. The upright generous soldiers, the neat pretty little nurses, the apples of friendship, the tame does and the children’s fair smiles — it was all a hoax. Or rather, it only represented half the system, the half visible from the outside, the shopwindow, as it were; and now we were stupefied to discover the back of the shop, where demented soldiers silently slit the throats of children, nurses, and does (voiceless screams and mute laughter — the stuff of nightmares). (96)

These revelations lead Robbe-Grillet to think back to his time in Nuremberg and look for signs that might in retrospect appear to have hinted at the horrors lurking behind the pleasant, orderly German façade. He finds little in his memory except a sign in a Nuremberg bakery that proclaimed: “No Cakes Sold to Jews or Poles” (96). However the disjunction between not getting strudel on the one hand and being methodically murdered on the other hand appears too great for Robbe-Grillet to fully comprehend. And at any rate, he writes, he did not see many Jews in Nuremberg. It is only now, much later, that he understands why.

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The only chaos that actually disturbed his time in Nuremberg, RobbeGrillet writes, was caused by the British RAF and the U.S. Air Force, which “with no visible effect on the war effort (the incendiary bombs seemed to prefer our modest barracks to the imposing M.A.N. factory) methodically destroyed the tidy medieval city and considerably disturbed what sleep was left to us in our new conscript life, making it all the more exhausting (95).” Robbe-Grillet cultivates an attitude of distantiation and alienation from the outside world that allows him to feel that everything that happens, no matter how horrible, is happening primarily to and for other people, not to him: “I didn’t feel in any way committed to the business because I should never have been doing this job: I wasn’t a real worker, I wasn’t German, he wasn’t my Führer, and in any case this eventual victory wouldn’t be mine either” (113). This feeling of distantiation and coldness, which he calls extraterritoriality (114), allows Robbe-Grillet to feel removed from everything unpleasant that happens in Nuremberg, including the methodical destruction of the city, which threatens his own life. It is a feeling of disconnection that is not entirely dissimilar to that of the German writers who referred to themselves as “inner emigrants,” thus separating themselves psychologically and intellectually from the Nazi regime.15 However Robbe-Grillet’s attitude is cooler and more sober than that of the German inner emigrants. This coolness seems to numb him and thus prevent him from feeling vulnerability. It is only after the bombing raids, when he walks through the city of Nuremberg, that he has a sensation of pain: Maybe it was only in the morning, back in the damaged city, that I felt as if I’d lost something, a part of myself gone forever, or at least I felt a pained sympathy — although useless, impotent, and therefore of no practical help — in front of the shapeless ruins of a pretty baroque church that had been lovingly maintained for centuries, or beside the clear waters of the Pegnitz, facing the charred remains of big wooden houses with flowered balconies dating from the Middle Ages. Every night a little piece of old Europe was disappearing in dust and smoke.16

These lines make it clear that in spite of his protestations of non-involvement Robbe-Grillet sees the devastation of Nuremberg as the destruction of part of himself. The writer’s description of the ravaged city is by no means cool; it is invested with love and sorrow. Robbe-Grillet, whose conservative father had been an amateur translator of Schiller’s works, not only enjoyed his stay in Germany, but loves German culture and finds the Germans themselves to be for the most part friendly and open. The physical destruction of Nuremberg and Robbe-Grillet’s later discoveries about the Holocaust and other German crimes against humanity are an assault on his previous German-connected feelings of happiness and contentment, because they seem to invalidate them retroactively. And yet Robbe-Grillet

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Business signs in the rubble near the main train station (April 1948). From Wieder Leben: Nürnberg vor 50 Jahren: Fotografien von Ferdinand Vitzethum, ed. Helmut Beer (Nuremberg: W. Tümmels, 1997), 49. Permission to reproduce image courtesy of the Stadtarchiv Nürnberg. is unwilling retrospectively to change the description of his feelings and experiences in Nuremberg. Out of this experience of disjunction RobbeGrillet cultivates a feeling of non-involvement on the one hand and, on the other, a belief that order and beauty are often misleading façades hiding an underlying truth of horror and shame. The world is not all it appears to be, Robbe-Grillet suggests. The inverse reflection of order is murder and genocide. If given the choice between chaos and order, therefore, RobbeGrillet chooses chaos. His experiences in Nuremberg and afterward lead him to a view of the world as fundamentally inhospitable and misleading, where order amounts to a vast criminal conspiracy, with chaos as the only other possibility. At the same time this universe is a fundamental break with the happiness and seeming beauty of the world of Robbe-Grillet’s childhood and the previous European world, whose apparent harmony had merely prefigured the destruction to come. Robbe-Grillet dedicates his writerly practice to an ethos of honesty in describing this world in all its complexity and unpleasantness. Claude Ollier, another French writer and an acquaintance of RobbeGrillet, was also in Nuremberg in the last years of the war and also used his

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experiences there as part of a book he wrote decades later: Déconnection (Disconnection, 1988), a semi-autobiographical novel that tells two stories, one of them set in Nuremberg in the final years of the war and another set at the end of the twentieth century, in a dystopian near-future. Ollier, who had studied German in school, was, like Robbe-Grillet, an admirer of the German cultural tradition, and his novel describes what he sees as the contrast between medieval Nuremberg, with its ancient and honorable traditions, and Nazi Nuremberg, which for the novel’s protagonist Martin represents a radical break from those traditions. Unlike Robbe-Grillet, who does not achieve an understanding of the disjunction between Nuremberg and its cultural traditions on the one hand and Nazi crimes on the other until after his return to France at the end of the war, Martin is aware of the disjunction in Nuremberg itself, and hence from the very beginning he is tormented by a sense of rupture. It is this break that forms the “disconnection” of the novel’s title. Ollier describes Nuremberg prior to its destruction as a place of enchantment and beauty. As his protagonist Martin crosses a bridge into the part of the old town that surrounds the Church of St. Lorenz, he passes from the reality of Nazi barbarism, represented by a fanatical speech given by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels in the city’s market square on the other side of the river, into the world of his imagined Nuremberg: Something happens inside him, he reaches the theater, there’s the stage, he finds it again, the scene of his readings, recaptures what he’s read, looked at, listened to, what he knew about this country when he was fifteen, used to read this country’s books, the tales, stories, formed his own personal idea about it, the idea persists in spite of everything, in spite of what the war has taught him, he forgets the war upon passing the bridge, he’s on the other side of the bridge, the ghosts come to meet him, melodies and songs, myths, novels, mad dashes through the white forest, Burg soon in sight between the fantastical trunks, clouds sinisterly swift upon the skylights, the sharp angles of the house frames and the flowered balconies. Here are found the names for restoring the aura, restoring it romantically, the names that once composed this country’s marvelous image, knights out of magic, Gothic engravers and makers of stringed instruments, philosopher-kings, musicians of language and writers of sounds.17

By walking into this part of Nuremberg, Martin has entered the world rediscovered by Wackenroder and Tieck and celebrated even by nonGermans like the Swedish poet Per Daniel Amadeus Atterbom in the early nineteenth century. The Nazi Nuremberg of the mid-twentieth century disappears, to be replaced by the Nuremberg of Martin’s literary dreams. Several months later when he finally makes his way up to the imperial castle and stops to observe the city from above, Martin has a vision of Nuremberg’s complete destruction: “Leaning on his elbows, he has a sudden vision, a hallucination, the whole city destroyed, flattened, burnt

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down, and not a human being left, not a sound, nothing but the birds, he hears the birds, momentary fissure, a swaying, and everything is restored, alive” (51). Martin realizes, upon reflection, that all along he has been living in two cities that exist as if in two different dimensions in the same time and place: “He understands all at once that he’s living upon two territories here within the same time frame, continuously, upon two spaces within one, lodged in the same place, the same city, one within the other, and these spaces don’t join, don’t communicate, don’t coincide at any point” (52). As jarring as it is, this is a more reassuring picture than the one painted by Robbe-Grillet. Whereas Robbe-Grillet later came to see the very order and beauty of Nuremberg as the necessary reverse side of German crimes against humanity, for Ollier’s protagonist Martin there is no connection whatsoever between the evil Germany represented by Goebbels and the Nazi rally grounds on the one hand and the good Germany represented by music and literature on the other. The rupture between the two cities, although disconcerting, protects Romantic Nuremberg from guilt by association. In Ollier’s description there are two parallel breaks: the one is between the intact city and the ruined city of Martin’s dream, and the other is between Nazi Nuremberg, symbolized by the rally grounds, and the medieval Nuremberg of the German culture that Ollier loves and respects, symbolized by the old town. The latter disjunction becomes particularly clear for Martin when, like Robbe-Grillet, he attends a concert at St. Katherine’s church, “a shrine of the Meistersingers in the past, setting of the first act of the famous opera” (63). It is here, in this former house of Christian worship, while he is listening to a concert of music by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, that Martin sees not the Christian but the twisted cross, the swastika, and not the words of the Bible but rather the words “Kraft durch Freude” (Strength through Joy), the name of the Nazi leisure organization. For Martin the profanation of the church by the swastika is an indication that the very concept of culture has been bastardized and made meaningless by the Nazis: “Haydn falsified . . ., Mozart tainted, the emblem’s hooks quashing the quavers of the minuet, disguising the élan, the verve; Beethoven scoffed in his hymn, joy corroded by a strength held in contempt” (64). Again, this vision of a ravished culture distinguishes Ollier from Robbe-Grillet, who had seen crimes against humanity as in a sense the essence and telos of an orderly German culture. The ruined city that Martin saw in his dream becomes a reality later, when the city is bombed. Leaving the smoke-filled air raid shelter where he has managed to survive, Martin witnesses Nuremberg’s utter destruction: Opposite, the houses are burning, the whole street is burning, in the near silence, no sound but the gentle crackling everywhere on the roofs, the dull thud of a beam, the hissing of flames in the wind, everywhere a violent wind.

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Between the paving, incendiary tracers have lodged sideways, the stone blackens in the sizzling phosphorus, Martin advances to the corner of the building and along Neudorferstrasse sees the neighborhoods burning on the hills on the other side of the river, a gigantic inferno looming westward. He stands there shattered, emotionless, not even incredulous, mindful of this gap inside, sees himself at the intersection of two streets, observing, listening. The city blaze doesn’t make much noise, very unexpectedly, he’d never have imagined such a thing, the whole city is burning, as far as the eye can see, and he hears nothing but the sound of the wind. (101)

This horrific scene, of course, closely resembles what Martin had imagined in his dream about the destruction of Nuremberg — except no birds are singing. Now, walking through the dead city, Martin tries to remember what the city looked like while it was still a living organism. The rupture is now between the reality of the dead city and the fantasy of the living one, a city that now exists only in his imagination. Previously the old town had provided a physical entry into that romantic dream-space, but now the old town is gone. This final end of Nuremberg, this finis Germaniae, Martin believes, is the teleology of his entire stay in Nuremberg. From the moment of his arrival in the city, everything seems to have been moving toward this dead zone. “Martin has the feeling of a perfect climax, it couldn’t be any other way in the end, this is the real end, everything was pointing to it from the beginning, signified it with veiled words” (104). This is a powerful French description of the German zero hour. The obliteration of Nuremberg experienced by Martin prefigures the catastrophe of Europe that is depicted in the novel’s other half, which tells a story of widespread devastation at the end of the twentieth century. The two catastrophes, with their old and young protagonists, exist in the same literary space at the same time, seemingly separated and yet strangely interconnected, because the catastrophe of Germany prefigures the catastrophe of Europe — and perhaps the world — itself.

Where Are the Germans? These French novelists provide descriptions of the city of Nuremberg and its destruction that are far more vivid and emotionally laden than the descriptions of most German writers. While W. G. Sebald’s 1998 claim that German writers for the most part failed to address the bombing of their cities is not completely accurate, it does hold true for Nuremberg.18 There are no German descriptions of the destruction of the city that have a similar emotional intensity or impact. The emigrant Peter de Mendelssohn describes his own fascination with the city’s destruction, “the fascination

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of horror, the irresistible attraction of agony and death!”19 However, this devastation has a quality of unreality for him, so that his fascination purportedly has nothing to do with “sentimentality, sadness, mourning for the lost and irreplaceable treasures.” Mendelssohn writes, “I felt profoundly hurt, but I didn’t feel like crying.”20 This sense of disconnection and depersonalization resembles Robbe-Grillet’s coolness, but it is entirely different from Ollier’s agonized description of Nuremberg’s destruction. The power of Ollier’s descriptions of Nuremberg’s destruction comes from the fact that Ollier also lovingly describes the city in its prior state, as a dreamcity of his protagonist Martin’s imagination. The emotional intensity of Martin’s love of the city and its legends makes its destruction all the more painful. Robbe-Grillet is cooler in his descriptions, but even his prose reveals a warmth of affection for the ruined city. It is noteworthy that German writers, steeped in a tradition that had viewed Nuremberg as the apotheosis of German national culture, do not provide similarly heartrending descriptions of the city’s destruction. After all, Julius Rodenberg had written in 1874 that Nuremberg was irreplaceable because “it preserves for us a shining image of what no description can do justice to and what, once it is gone, not even the cleverest imitation would be able to replace.”21 And yet it is French and not German writers who give the most powerful descriptions of the loss of this essential German tradition. One is tempted to conclude that it is precisely the power of that tradition in the past that has prevented so many German writers from taking it up in the present. One German description of Nuremberg’s destruction is provided by Sebald himself in his 1988 poem Nach der Natur (After Nature). Here Sebald depicts the city as the source of his own personal zero hour. He recounts how his mother visited Nuremberg in 1943, and how, shortly after she left, she witnessed one of the air raids that transformed the city into a pile of rubble: During the night of the 28th 582 aircraft flew in to attack Nürnberg. Mother, who on the next day planned to return to her parents’ home in the Alps, got no further than Fürth. From there she saw Nürnberg in flames, but cannot recall now what the burning town looked like or what her feelings were at this sight. On the same day, she told me recently,

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from Fürth she had traveled on to Windsheim and an acquaintance at whose house she waited until the worst was over, and realized that she was with child.22 On the day that she witnesses Nuremberg’s destruction, Sebald’s mother discovers that she is pregnant with him. Nuremberg and its destruction are part of a perverse annunciation whose ultimate outcome is Sebald himself: heir to a ravaged Germany. In this description Sebald provides an account of the destruction of Nuremberg and connects it with himself, but that description is devoid of all emotion, since his mother purportedly no longer knows “what her feelings were / at this sight.” It is as if both Sebald’s mother and Sebald himself were somehow numb and unable to feel the pain of the city’s destruction. In Sebald’s 2001 novel Austerlitz the eponymous protagonist Jacques Austerlitz describes Nuremberg as a symbol for all of Germany. However, precisely as such, Nuremberg is incomprehensible to him: “And so, said Austerlitz, Germany was probably more unfamiliar to me than any other country in the world, more foreign even than Afghanistan or Paraguay.”23 Nuremberg is an alien city, Austerlitz declares, not only because of its Nazi past but also because that past has been erased and replaced by spanking new pedestrian malls: “Looking up at the façades on both sides of the street, even those of the older buildings which, judging by their style, must date from the sixteenth or fifteenth century, I was troubled to realize that I could not see a crooked line anywhere, not at the corners of the houses or on the gables, the window frames or the sills, nor was there any other trace of past history.”24 This erasure of the past in contemporary Nuremberg stands in an uneasy relationship with Austerlitz’s knowledge of his father Maximilian’s visit to Nuremberg during the Nazi rallies in the 1930s, when his father had witnessed the masses’ fanatical reception of Hitler and experienced the Germans in Nuremberg as “a single living organism racked by strange, convulsive contractions.”25 Austerlitz’s father had experienced Nuremberg’s old town as threatening, full of houses that, “with their pointed and crooked gables, their occupants hanging out of the windows like bunches of grapes, resembled a hopelessly overcrowded ghetto into which, so Maximilian had said, the long-awaited savior was now making his entry.”26 For both Sebald’s fictional character Austerlitz and for the author himself, Nuremberg’s past and its present prevent any kind of emotional identification with the city, in spite of the fact that it is connected with Sebald’s own birth. The Nuremberg of Romantic tradition is connected to the Nazis, and postwar Nuremberg is a sterile pedestrian mall that has been cleansed of all unpleasantness. Both are completely alienating.

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Sebald is not the only postwar German author to provide an essentially negative image of the city’s present and past. For the East German writer Wolfgang Hilbig, who came to live in Nuremberg in 1986, Nuremberg was a rather sterile but nevertheless welcome refuge from the German Democratic Republic. Hilbig sees Nuremberg’s materialism and superficiality as representative of all of West Germany. For Hilbig’s autobiographical protagonist in the novel Das Provisorium (Provisionality, 2000), “Nuremberg was a city of reminiscences, a city of imitations; it looked as if in this city every bit of humanity’s essence had been copied in order to sell it in boutiques.”27 This is a city of pure commerce without any authenticity; everything is a mere copy of something else, created purely for the purpose of making money. Several decades earlier, Hilbig’s colleague, the East German writer Rolf Schneider, had seen Nuremberg not as inauthentic but as threatening. In 1968 Schneider described the remnants of Nuremberg’s medieval past as simply evil. They were not remnants of “Novalis’s gentle Romanticism,” he argued, but rather an indication of the barbaric way Nurembergers had lived in the Middle Ages: “crowded together, without joy or color, and with nothing but eschatological comforts.”28 Schneider’s negative description suggests that two centuries after Wackenroder’s and Tieck’s positive rediscovery of medieval Nuremberg the city was once again becoming known as old-fashioned, unmodern, and threatening, just as it had been known in the Enlightenment. Three years after Schneider wrote his description, the West German writer Wolfgang Koeppen went to the church of St. Lorenz, where, as he recounts, he failed to have a religious or even aesthetic epiphany: “God did not come to me in his church in Nuremberg. And aesthetic pleasure, the mere contemplation of the beautiful . . . left me cold at this cold noontime hour.”29 It is only in a discount department store that Koeppen finds energy and life, not in the medieval church. The American store Woolworth, not the church, is the representative of West Germany’s contemporary religion. For Schneider, Nuremberg’s medieval remnants are threatening, and for Koeppen they are unreal. Neither one really identifies with the city. Nuremberg is no longer part of the German literary self. The notable lack of emotional identification with Nuremberg and its destruction in postwar German literature is at least a partial substantiation of Sebald’s controversial claim of a taboo on depictions of urban destruction in Germany. However, it appears that the taboo is not so much on depictions of the destruction of the city itself as on the loving recreation of the medieval Nuremberg cityscape that was destroyed. What is missing in German accounts of the bombing of Nuremberg is the powerful Romantic myth of Nuremberg so prominently featured in Ollier’s novel. It is as if the entire domain of Romantic longing for medieval Nuremberg created by Wackenroder and Tieck had now migrated, after the destruction of the city, to foreign lands. What remains for German-language writers is, at the most,

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what Alfred Kerr calls “a terror without tragedy: only something unpleasant. Something shaggy. Something ugly.”30 No matter how accurate or how detailed a description of Nuremberg’s destruction a writer gives, the description remains emotionally distanced if it is not coupled with a portrayal of exactly what has been lost. That loss is briefly but eloquently articulated by a character in the American writer Thomas Berger’s 1958 novel Crazy in Berlin, who mourns the loss of Nuremberg and its myth: “Dirty Nazis! They made it impossible to lie about the Germans. Thus Martin Luther and Frederick the Great and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe are swine, too, because they helped to make all this. Nürnberg, were you ever in Nürnberg? I used to think there was something fine there — ”31 Foreign authors like Berger and Ollier seem more willing to entertain the notion that “there was something fine there” than German authors. One German artist has bucked the general trend of ignoring Nuremberg and its cultural significance. But Anselm Kiefer is a painter, not a writer. In a series of large-scale canvases created during the early 1980s, Kiefer somberly meditated on the city and its fate. These works bear titles like Nürnberg and Die Meistersinger.32 Like much of Kiefer’s other works, these paintings are reflections on German cultural history and the path that led Germans to National Socialism and physical and moral devastation. Kiefer’s Nuremberg canvases are full of charcoal and blackness, suggesting the burning of the city. In one canvas the contours of the old cityscape seem to be suggested in a crude drawing, but below them are splotches of red and yellow suggesting flames. The presence of straw in some of these paintings implies, however, that the city still has combustible material, and that it might burst into flame again unexpectedly. In the paintings scribbled words and numbers seem to refer to Wagner’s mastersingers, including Hans Sachs. It is as if Hans Sachs and all the other mastersingers had been transformed into mere ciphers, and as if the city itself had become simply a piece of graffiti or a blackened landscape. One of the paintings, with the graffiti-like inscription “Dein goldenes Haar, Margarethe” (Your Golden Hair, Margarethe), invokes Paul Celan’s famous poem “Todesfuge” (Fugue of Death) about the Nazi concentration camps.33 In these paintings Kiefer seems to be suggesting that Wagner and his mastersingers, all of them German masters, are implicated in a historical nexus that led both to the physical destruction of the city and to the murder of the Jews of Europe. Death, in Celan’s poem and in Kiefer’s paintings, is a master from Germany. And the fire that destroyed the city and its traditions is still capable of doing harm. Kiefer’s paintings suggest that a great catastrophe has occurred, and that a proud tradition has come to an agonizing end. But Kiefer’s works do not separate themselves from the tradition that they both mourn and criticize. Rather, they seem to be part of it; they are a commentary from the inside, not the outside. In mourning the loss of a beautiful but problematic tradition, Kiefer allows himself to

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become more emotionally involved in loss than most of his literary counterparts.

Nuremberg on Trial Less than two months after W. H. Auden’s visit to Nuremberg in May of 1945 another member of the American armed forces, General Lucius Clay, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s right-hand man, flew from Munich to Nuremberg on a U.S. military Dakota transport plane. Accompanying him was Robert Jackson, an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. The previous month Jackson had received a request from the new President of the United States, Harry S. Truman, to serve as the chief American prosecutor at a proposed war crimes trial of the surviving major leaders of Nazi Germany. After giving the matter careful consideration, Jackson accepted the offer. On 2 May, just five days before Germany surrendered unconditionally to the United States, Truman named Jackson the chief American prosecutor. Now, after a meeting in London with representatives of Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and France to negotiate procedures for the coming trial, Jackson was in Germany looking for an adequate venue. Clay had suggested the intact grand duchy of Luxembourg, located between Germany and France, but Jackson insisted that the best place to put German war criminals on trial was Germany itself. Jackson’s acquaintance General William J. Donovan, founder and head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a fledgling military intelligence service created in 1942 that was to become a precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA, created in 1947), knew that the Russians would insist on Berlin, but General Clay suspected that it would be difficult to find housing in that city. Besides, Berlin was in the middle of the Soviet occupation zone. Clay told Jackson that he knew a better place. Jackson went to sleep after boarding the plane in Munich. He was woken by Clay as the Dakota began its descent. Jackson looked outside and saw a mass of rubble. Where, he wondered, were they? This, said Clay, was Nuremberg, and it was here that Jackson would find his courthouse.34 Although vast portions of Nuremberg had been destroyed, one massive structure had survived: the Palace of Justice in the western part of the city. It was not, like the Law Courts in Auden’s later poem, “burnt-out.” Behind the Palace of Justice were prison buildings that could handle up to twelve hundred inmates; one of those buildings could easily be turned over to the proposed military tribunal and dedicated to housing its defendants. Moreover, Nuremberg’s Grand Hotel, like Auden’s poetic Grand Hotel, was also still standing and could be used to house reporters and trial personnel.

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Given the destruction of the city and the piles of rubble lying everywhere, Jackson wondered out loud how he would be able to persuade the British, French, and Russians that Nuremberg was the right place for a trial. Clay replied that he would help by having General Patton order fifteen thousand German POWs to clear the streets of the city. And he was as good as his word. When Jackson returned to Nuremberg a few weeks later, the rubble was gone. It was, in fact, carted to the former party rally grounds, where it would soon become a new hill, called the Silberbuck, overlooking the former construction site for the German Stadium. Nuremberg offered a number of significant advantages to American authorities as a venue for the International Military Tribunal (IMT), as the trial of major German war criminals was officially known. It was, first and foremost, in the American zone of occupation and hence under American control. It had an intact court building, intact prison space, and sufficient housing for press and staff. It was also, of course, symbolically important, and the IMT was to be in a profound sense a symbolic trial. It was not just going to be about a few German leaders and their crimes against humanity; it was to set a precedent for the entire world, serving notice to future leaders everywhere that crimes against humanity could be punished, and that political leaders could be held personally responsible for their criminal actions. Nuremberg had been the imaginary capital of the Nazi Reich, and it was here that Germany’s major leaders had come to celebrate the unity of party and people with their Führer. It was, hence, entirely appropriate that in Nuremberg the surviving leaders of Nazi Germany would be tried for their war crimes. Jackson was able to convince the French and the British that Nuremberg was an appropriate venue, and the three western Allies simply outvoted the Soviets, who preferred Berlin. Even Soviet observers, however, recognized the symbolic importance of Nuremberg. As the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg noted, by choosing Nuremberg as the seat of the IMT the United Nations had decided “to judge the criminals in the same place where they committed their crimes.”35 In August of 1945 the Allied powers agreed on four counts on which twenty-three surviving leaders of the German Reich, including Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second-in-command, as well as Field Marshal Wilhelm von Keitel, Wehrmacht general Alfred Jodl, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, one of the major SS leaders responsible for the Holocaust, and Julius Streicher, the former Frankenführer and editor of the anti-Semitic tabloid Der Stürmer, could be tried: first, conspiracy to wage a war of aggression; second, actually waging a war of aggression; third, any wartime killing not justified by military necessity; and fourth, crimes against humanity, especially atrocities against civilians such as the mass murder of European Jews. The idea of putting the former leaders of a nation, including military leaders, propagandists, and industrialists, on trial individually for crimes such as these was a new

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one. As Erich Kästner, who reported on the trial for Munich’s Neue Zeitung, observed, politicians had usually not been held accountable for their actions: “Human beings are uncanny people. A man who kills his mother-in-law is beheaded. That is an age-old and understandable custom. But a man who kills hundreds of thousands gets a monument. Streets are named after him.”36 Not everyone agreed that the IMT was a good idea. The Russian government would have preferred simply to execute the relevant German leaders, and Winston Churchill agreed. The idea for the IMT came from a few idealists within the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, who, via the tribunal, hoped to create a precedent that would dissuade future political leaders from conspiring to wage and actually waging wars of aggression. Gregor von Rezzori, who reported on the trial for the Northwest German radio, called the IMT “a desperate attempt to raise the value of the phrases on which our civilization rests, a noble and pathetic Don Quixote raid by European fictions against the reality of human nature.”37 Jackson declared in his eloquent opening statement that this idealism had military power behind it: “That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that power has ever paid to reason.”38 This tribute, Jackson insisted, would set a precedent for the future that would bind all nations, including the victors themselves: “And let me make clear that while the law is first applied against German aggressors, the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose, it must condemn, aggression by any other nation, including those which sit here now in judgment.”39 For von Rezzori, meanwhile, Jackson’s speech and everything else about the trial had something uncanny and silly but nevertheless moving, because it was “built upon phrases . . . and therefore has nothing but phrases to fight with.”40 In choosing Nuremberg as a venue for the IMT, Jackson and his associates were beginning a process of rebranding the city and reshaping its image. If Nuremberg had been known in the nineteenth century as a center of traditional German identity and under the Nazis as a crucible for the fusion of new and old nationalisms, it was now, in the postwar period, to become known as a city where the criminal excesses of nationalism would be punished. If in the past Nuremberg had been the quintessential German city defined by Germans for Germany, now it would be an international city with a broader meaning for the entire world. It was no longer Germans who were in charge of Nuremberg and its discursive shadow, “Nuremberg.” Both had been occupied by foreigners. The Nuremberg trials were and still are controversial because they raised a great many difficult legal problems. One of the fundamental principles of law is nulla poena sine lege (no punishment without law), which essentially means that a person cannot be found guilty for having committed

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an act that was not defined as a crime at the time that he committed it. The Nazi legal system in the 1930s and 1940s had defined most of the actions of Nazi leaders as legal. Hans Frank, the Nazi legal scholar who was now on trial at the IMT, had declared at the 1934 Nazi party rally in Nuremberg that the basic task of law was to serve the people, and that “in law the individual’s importance is only as great as his value to the community.”41 And of course it was Hitler and his paladins who defined what serving the people meant and how much any individual was worth to the community. The principle of identity between Volk and Führer meant that what was good for Hitler was good for Germany. Therefore by definition, according to Nazi law, what the Nazis did cannot have been a crime. The most difficult problem faced by the Nuremberg tribunal was that it appeared to violate the principle nulla poena sine lege, punishing people ex post facto for actions that were legal at the time they were taken. Jackson got around this problem by arguing that in fact the actions of German leaders had not been legal at the time they were taken. He noted that Germany had been a signatory to a great many international treaties that it subsequently violated, such as the Kellog-Briand Pact of 1928, which had outlawed war. As for murder and other crimes against humanity, Jackson argued, “Let’s not be derailed by legal hair-splitters. Aren’t murder, torture, and enslavement crimes recognized by all civilized people? What we propose is to punish acts which have been regarded as criminal since the time of Cain and have been so written in every civilized code.”42 Another significant problem for the Nuremberg tribunal was the socalled tu quoque (“you too”) defense, which, although not denying criminal actions, argues that such actions are committed by others as well, including those sitting in judgment on the defendants, and that it is therefore unfair and hypocritical to single out a particular perpetrator while leaving others unpunished. It is not appropriate for one murderer to sit in judgment on another murderer, because no murderer has the moral authority to condemn murder. In the case of the IMT in Nuremberg, for instance, a tu quoque argument could claim that Soviet judges had no right to try Germans for crimes that the Soviets themselves had frequently committed, such as aggressive war or the murder of civilians. The most egregious instantiation of this problem occurred when Soviet prosecutors in Nuremberg charged that German leaders had executed thousands of Polish officers in the Katyn forest in 1941; in fact it was the Soviets, not the Nazis, who had executed the Polish officers there in 1940, before the Germans ever got to Katyn.43 Jackson got around this problem by simply declaring in the statute that created the IMT that the tribunal would not consider the tu quoque defense.44 At worst the IMT, which took place in Nuremberg from November of 1945 to October of 1946, has been criticized on both the left and the right for being victors’ justice, a hypocritical affair in which the winners of the

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Second World War sought to cast their vengeance against the losers in the self-righteous light of law and justice. At best the IMT has been seen as the birthplace of a new kind of international law. In Germany in 1945–46 opinions varied widely between these two extremes. However opinion surveys carried out by the U.S. military government in Germany showed that most Germans in the American zone not only knew about the IMT, which was widely publicized at the time, but also saw it in a positive light.45 One of the main reasons for Germans’ generally positive reaction was that the IMT, as a trial of specific people, localized guilt, working against the much-discussed concept of a generalized German collective guilt for Nazi crimes against humanity. In his opening statement at the tribunal Jackson made this explict. He noted that the Allies did not intend to place the entire German nation on trial, just those defendants guilty of specific crimes. Robert Kempner, one of Jackson’s assistants and the head of the Defense Rebuttal Section of the U.S. prosecution staff in Nuremberg, conducted an opinion survey and found that almost all Germans wanted the defendants to be found guilty. Kempner believed this attitude was understandable, as he noted in a memo to Jackson: “If the leaders are found guilty then the onus of guilt is removed from those who merely did their bidding.”46 If the Nuremberg defendants were criminals, then ordinary German citizens could even be perceived as their victims. A report in the Toronto Star cited one German housewife’s response to the trial, “Oh, these Nazis! Of course they’re guilty! Just look at the mess they’ve gotten us into! They promised us paradise on earth, and instead they brought us hell.”47 For the German author Erik Reger, writing in the newly-created journal Aufbau (Rebuilding), what was happening in Nuremberg was “the first court of world history,” and its “singular significance” lay “in the fact that here for the first time the planning and execution of a war of aggression has been branded a crime, and conspiracy against human rights is being subjected to more than just rhetorical prosecution.”48 In Reger’s view Nuremberg was leading the way to a wholly new understanding of the law, since it held individual leaders and not just their subordinates or collective entities responsible for crimes against humanity. It was unfortunate, Reger wrote, that Germans had proven unable to organize the trials on their own. However, fate itself had determined Germans to be unworthy, Reger believed, since “someone unable to muster the strength for freedom can not sit in judgment.”49 There was a degree of truth, Reger acknowledged, in the criticism that the Allied powers were playing two roles in the tribunal, that of prosecutor and that of judge, and it was also true that the trial was, in a sense, victors’ justice, since it could not be occurring if the Allies had not won the war. Nevertheless, Reger argued, the IMT represented “the ethics of the human race.”50 Moreover, he pointed out, if the IMT had been a purely German court, then the problem of dual roles

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would have been compounded, since Germans would have had to play prosecutor, judge, and defendant as well. The crimes being prosecuted at Nuremberg were of such terrible scope, Reger explained, “that the English word ‘homicide,’ murder, did not suffice and a new one had to be invented, ‘genocide,’ the wiping out of ethnic groups or races.”51 Everywhere in the world, Reger argued, petty criminals are punished for their crimes. At Nuremberg for the first time, however, large-scale criminals would be held responsible for their far worse deeds. “For the future every statesman, every general, every factory-owner, and every writer and speaker of hate-filled words has been warned. The international law experts of the future will be able to build upon this a new international system of criminal law.”52 The fact that the judicial and the political were being mixed up in this trial was hence, Reger believed, not a disadvantage but an advantage, because it meant that political actions were being held to ethical and legal standards: The less the Nuremberg court wraps itself in the toga of formal law, and the more honestly its political aspects are spelled out, the greater and more instructive will be its verdict in the eyes of history. And the place in which it is taking place will move more and more from the sphere of an arbitrary symbol into the realm of ethical power and the overcoming of evil.53

Like Reger, Erich Kästner hoped that the Nuremberg trial would ultimately lead to the end of war, which might die out “like the plague or cholera.”54 The very first article in the newly created journal Die Gegenwart (The Present), published in Freiburg in the French zone of occupation, was an editorial that voiced regret about Germany’s inability to carry out the trial on its own.55 Even though Germans were not worthy of rendering judgment on the war criminals, however, Die Gegenwart suggested that Germans were capable of exploring and coming to terms with the truth of their own historical failings, since it was only through self-recognition that a genuinely new life would be possible.

Dürer Redux Die Gegenwart even invoked the artist Albrecht Dürer as a kind of patron saint of German introspection. In looking with determination at their own failings and problems, Germans could, the journal suggested, be comforted by the memory of one of Nuremberg’s greatest sons: Maybe the Germans’ spirit will remember the man who engraved his marks on a copper plate over four hundred years ago, not far from the hall in which the world is searching for justice. The man does not look up, he does not know what is happening outside; but he sees all the more clearly

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Albrecht Dürer, Melancholia. Copperplate engraving, 1514. Provided by the Germanisches Nationalmuseum. what is happening inside. He looks into the depths of the human soul and knows that the abyss lurks there. The creature he is drawing has let the compass, the instrument of calculating reason, fall from her numbed hand; her head, wreathed and overshadowed by so much glory, does not move, as if she were petrified. Only her eyes glow, magnificent flames of sadness. The man in whose soul this figure surfaced, Albrecht Dürer, did not deprive his people of the last hope, which lies in reflection, even as he let the word “Melancholia” sever the brooding sky.56

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This invocation of Dürer is a clear sign that even in the midst of ruins the power of historical and cultural memory still served as a guidepost for many Germans. Just as Dürer’s statue and Dürer’s home had survived the obliteration of Dürer’s city, so too Dürer as a kind of historical-cultural discourse was still alive and well. The Dürer portrayed by Die Gegenwart foresees the devastation of history and the problems in which Germans now find themselves; from out of the past, he reaches his hand to Germans in the present. There is a small but significant change in Dürer reception, however. Whereas the Nazis had invoked the artist’s “Knight, Death and the Devil,” Die Gegenwart invokes Dürer’s “Melancholia” as a far more appropriate symbol of the current German situation. Again it is foreigners who are more likely to make use of the cultural artifacts no longer invoked by Germans. In the aforementioned novel Crazy in Berlin by Thomas Berger, the character who is asked whether he has ever been to Nuremberg replies in the negative, but immediately adds that although he has not been in Nuremberg physically he has been there in his imagination, via his admiration of Dürer’s art: “I was never there, naturally. I saw a book once. Albrecht Dürer’s house stands to this day, Albrecht Dürer, the old artist of the Middle Ages. He made one etching called ‘Ritter, Tod, und Teufel.’ ”57 This character’s description of the copperplate engraving is not as pompous as Nazi descriptions, but it has a kind of tough sentimentality as it invokes the knight’s “wonderful tough face, sure of itself, looking not at the airy castle or horseshit Death or the mangy Devil, because they’ll all three get him soon enough, but he doesn’t care. He is complete in himself — isn’t that what integrity means? — and he is proud of it, because he is smiling a little.”58 This description of a German icon that is “complete in himself” and full of integrity and pride would be virtually unthinkable from a serious German author in the postwar period. For foreigners, however, as for the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg, Nuremberg’s treasures belong to all of humanity, and “it’s not Dürer’s fault that the Führer came.”59 Germans are not quite so sure.

The Trial as Drama Although the IMT was intended, among other things, to make guilt for crimes against humanity palpable by attaching it to specific people, one of the most aggravating problems for the prosecutors and for the many reporters assembled in Nuremberg to cover the trial was that the defendants, stripped of their power, in no way seemed to correspond to the gravity of the crimes for which they were being prosecuted. Peter de Mendelssohn, the German emigrant who reported on the trials for The Nation, called the defendants “almost out of proportion” to the crimes against humanity of which they stood accused. “One can’t help feeling one would have liked

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to see bigger men — bigger in every sense — answer for the calamity which will be unfolded by the evidence laid before the tribunal,” he admitted. The defendants, de Mendelssohn observed, were “a ragged, spiritless, motley crew of second-rate characters.”60 Admirals Dönitz and Raeder reminded him of “a couple of discharged street-car conductors on the dole,” Frick resembled “a dismissed school teacher,” Seyß-Inquart looked like “the second-rate suburban lawyer that he was,” and even the supposedly formidable Göring looked more like a servant than a leader of men in his “strange light-gray uniform with shining brass buttons that looks like a cinema usher’s coat.”61 Taken all in all, the defendants were simply a “pack of nobodies,” de Mendelssohn believed.62 For Erich Kästner, meanwhile, Baldur von Schirach, the former leader of the Hitler Youth, looked like “a badly prepared schoolboy during the final exam.”63 Kästner complained that the crimes for which the defendants were being tried were invisible behind their relatively bland exterior. They were, he wrote, “wholesalers of murder.”64 Robert Haerdter, writing in Die Gegenwart, was also astounded by the disjunction between the crimes being prosecuted and the criminals who had committed them. For him this disjunction was connected to what he saw as a failure of the IMT itself. Because the defendants “leave absolutely no impression,” he argued, the trial was fundamentally “ineffective.”65 Gregor von Rezzori summed up the problem by observing that “evil does not allow itself to be captured,” because “the accused in Nuremberg cannot be brought into proper dimension and proportion with the crimes for which they stand accused.” In essence, he concluded, their crime was their mediocrity and lack of imagination, “the exact literal interpretation of guidelines and rules. They did nothing but their duty.”66 In his journal Die Wandlung (Transformation) Dolf Sternberger, who had observed the cross-examination of one of Goebbels’s assistants at the IMT, remarked on a kind of servility that he viewed as partly responsible for Germans’ commission of crimes against humanity: “It is no doubt the style of the personal assistant who is always at his master the minister’s beck and call, day or night, at the office, at home, or while traveling.” This kind of attitude was “always useful and ready to serve. For the propaganda directives of Dr. Goebbels as well as for the reeducation of his comrades in an English POW camp.”67 The fact that the trial provided little dramatic tension, since it was primarily based on documentary evidence, was also a problem for the prosecution. Jackson responded to this problem by ordering the screening of film footage documenting what the American army had found in the concentration camps it liberated: starving, emaciated prisoners and piles of corpses. In addition the prosecution showed film footage taken by the Germans themselves documenting the actual killing of prisoners. After these films were shown, Hans Fritzsche, on trial for being the Nazis’ chief

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The courtroom in Nuremberg. The defendants are at the far left, the judges at the right. The witness stand is at the rear. In front of the defendants are the defense counsels. In the far left corner are the interpreters. The prosecutors are in the foreground. Picture provided by the National Archives. of radio propaganda, remarked: “No power on heaven or earth will erase this shame from my country. . . . Not in generations, not in centuries.” And General Jodl wrote to his wife: “These facts are the most fearful heritage which the National Socialist regime has left the German people,” because they “besmirch everything, the enthusiasm of our youth, the entire German Wehrmacht and its leaders.”68 The images that were shown in Nuremberg of bulldozers pushing piles of bodies into mass graves have by now been shown again and again all over the world. They are therefore no longer as surprising and shocking as they once were. But in Nuremberg in 1946 the pictures were new. They had not yet been shown to the world. Nuremberg was the first audience for these pictures. It was here that they entered public consciousness. They were shocking to the defense, the prosecution, and the judges. According to Erika Mann, Thomas Mann’s daughter, one defense lawyer remarked after seeing the film: “The sooner my client is hanged, the better.”69 After the showing of this documentary film footage, the mass murders perpetrated by the German government and its leaders during the Second World War became more concrete. However precisely because of the vast extent of the murders it was still difficult for observers to comprehend them, in spite of photographic evidence. As Gregor von Rezzori wrote:

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One murder is horrific and reprehensible. The murder of ten people is a monstrosity. The murder of 100 people already verges on the limits of what is imaginable. The murder of several million is an abstraction that can be registered only statistically. Crime becomes a question of quantities.70

Murder on such a vast scale, von Rezzori believed, made a just punishment unimaginable, since the relationship between the criminal and his crimes was so disproportionate. For Robert Haerdter meanwhile, the concrete evidence of massive crimes against humanity made it even more difficult to reconcile the puny and insignificant defendants with their crimes: The higher and darker the mountain of guilt piles up around them — especially personal guilt for which they are directly responsible, and not just objective guilt — the more abstract their historical image becomes. They are no longer history! They, who once reckoned themselves among the men who make history, have been erased by history itself, transformed into nothingness. They have become nothing.71

For Haerdter the puniness of the defendants made the whole trial seem somehow unreal, fictional. Rezzori, too, complained that the trial was a “ghostly spectacle,” and that “nothing seems authentically real.”72 The unimaginability of the crimes, which is a function of their sheer scope, was at the center of the psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich’s reflections on the Nuremberg trials and the problem of understanding them. Mitscherlich was later to become famous for his diagnosis of postwar Germans’ inability to mourn or even acknowledge their emotional attachment to Hitler and what he represented.73 In 1946 Mitscherlich complained that the Nazi crimes being tried in Nuremberg exceeded “human understanding” because of their sheer size, arguing that “the process of inhumanity has today become almost fully mechanized.”74 For Mitscherlich the most important task of historians and psychoanalysts was to try to make history comprehensible by once again bringing it into some sort of meaningful relationship with human dimensions. Humanity, he believed, must combat the unimaginability of large numbers. In essence, Mitscherlich wanted to roll back Rezzori’s numbers from the millions to the figure one, which was, he believed, understandable and emotionally powerful. History, as a comprehensible subject, he insisted, is not an abstract, impersonal, plural process but rather the concrete, personal, “remembered history of human beings and the account of the ways and means by which they arrange themselves in the world.”75 As such, history is simply a series of stories, and whoever wants to understand history must understand the reasons why individual people make the specific choices they do. The whole point of Nuremberg, Mitscherlich wrote, was to explore the reasons why the defendants did what they did, and to try to get the defendants themselves to explore and explain their own motivations. Out of this

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process of analysis, Mitscherlich hoped, would come learning. The fundamental question, he explained, was: “Can one learn from history?”76 To answer that question in the negative would be to deny human freedom and thus the very existence of history as something created by human beings. Nevertheless it was true, he acknowledged, that people have learned very little from the study of history in the past. The reason, he suggested, was that history is most often presented as an abstract process with little specific relationship to individual human beings and their decisions; it generally lacks a human dimension that allows people to learn lessons from it. Hence the task of historians is to move from abstract complexity to concrete simplicity, from large to small numbers. Writers and poets have generally done a better job of this than historians, Mitscherlich acknowledged: “Shakespeare and Schiller have accomplished more . . . than generations of historical scholarship.”77 But Mitscherlich believed that with the modern tool of psychoanalysis, which was in essence the science of telling and interpreting stories, it might be possible for scholars to study the defendants and get them to explain their actions. It was not so much a question of outward observation, such as the much-discussed way that particular defendants had reacted to the showing of the concentration camp films, or the experimental observations of American prison psychologists studying the defendants. These outward reactions revealed very little, Mitscherlich wrote, because they could have been made by anybody, including the innocent. Nor was it helpful to make fun of the defendants’ pitiful outward appearance, because one could learn very little from that either. The only way to learn something from the defendants, Mitscherlich believed, was to get them to tell their own inner stories in a long and complex process of psychoanalysis. Not all defendants had the mental ability to engage in such analysis, but some of them, because of their high intelligence, did, and much could be gained for history if they could be persuaded to tell their stories. Weakness and defeat were, Mitscherlich wrote, much better preconditions for psychological selfquestioning than strength and victory, and hence Germany’s defeat represented a genuine opportunity for psycho-historical understanding. Psychoanalysis was fundamentally “training in memory,” and therefore it could be an important handmaiden for history and the attempt to learn from it.78 And “one can learn from history only by precisely understanding the human gestures that give history its impulses.”79 Mitscherlich’s observations reflect one of the fundamental priorities of the IMT, which was intended to make the abstract horror of Nazism concrete in the form of the twenty-three defendants and their individual actions. The tribunal, Peter de Mendelssohn observed, was a result of people’s insistence that something meaningful had to come out of the history of the Nazi Reich; it existed “because we still have not given up trying to make it all mean something, to finally distil out of the boiling witch’s cauldron of insanity and craziness a little reason and clarity.”80 The IMT was

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about staging history in such a way that it could be grasped and understood not only by the international community but by Germans themselves. If Nuremberg had for a long time been a kind of synecdoche for Germany, rendering the otherwise incomprehensible fate of the country palpable in the fate of a single city, then the Nuremberg trial was to serve the same function. The twenty-three defendants represented Nazism itself, and the destroyed city in which the trial took place represented the Germany that they had led into defeat and ruin. Hence many writers and reporters remarked on the theatricality of the trial. For the returned emigrant writer Alfred Döblin, who worked in the French zone, the IMT was “theater on a massive scale . . . and along with the other nations we are watching the performance — with particular excitement.”81 Even the beginning of the trial was for Robert Haerdter rather like the beginning of a movie: “As I look for my seat, I’m struck by the feeling that I’m in a movie theater and the show has already begun.”82 Haerdter even finds himself bending down as he looks for his seat, “as if all of a sudden my shadow could appear on the imaginary screen,” and as he gropes for his seat he tilts his head forward “exactly like in a movie theater,” in order to see what is happening up front.83 The bright lights of the courtroom seem to make the scene even more unreal for Haerdter, as if it were “occurring on a far-away planet in an atmosphere inhospitable to life,” or even as if “here the vacuum into which the German nation fell and from which it has not yet found an exit has itself become visible.”84 Of course not all Germans were interested in the tribunal. Erik Reger acknowledged that “It is still difficult to assess the resonance of these proceedings among the German people. One encounters a certain interested curiosity and occasionally even skeptical amazement, but rarely real satisfaction.”85 The Berlin radio commentator Max Seydewitz complained on the air in September of 1946, shortly before the verdict of the IMT was handed down: We unfortunately have to admit that most Germans do not yet recognize the great political and historical importance of the Nuremberg trial and show far too little interest in the trial and its outcome. In vehicles of public transportation or wherever else people come together, they talk far more about any other subject than about the Nuremberg trial. The general topic of conversation is everyday problems, the shortages of life’s necessities and the results of the occupation.86

This lack of interest among some Germans continued even after the verdict had been handed down and eleven former Nazi leaders were sentenced to death, with three acquitted, three sentenced to life imprisonment, and four sentenced to various terms of imprisonment. In 1947 the reporter Kurt Fischer, who was exploring the situation in the U.S. occupation zone, witnessed the following scene:

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In a cigarette store where paper is also sold, a customer wants to buy a typewriter ribbon — “Yes, but only if you bring back 500 grams of old paper.” — He looks at a pile of brochures: The Verdict in the Nuremberg War Crimes Trial. — “How much does that cost?” — “1.30.” — “Can I have two?” — “Yes — of course — ” And so he takes two brochures, tears them up in front of the eyes of the shocked saleswoman, and gives her what’s left: “There you go, 500 grams of old paper!”87

In spite of its criticisms of the trial, Die Gegenwart praised it for having had at least one important result: it had been a useful lesson in German history, “an unprecedented documentation of an unprecedented era.”88 Future historians would not be able to do without these documents. Also in the pages of Die Gegenwart, however, Benno Reifenberg, one of the journal’s editors, cautioned that the trial would not be able to bring about the spiritual salvation of Germany. The Allies could not accomplish that, Reifenberg argued. Only the Germans could. As for the international community, Reifenberg wrote, only the future would tell to what extent the IMT might have a genuine impact. If future political leaders remained true to the principles proclaimed in Nuremberg, then the principles would prove meaningful. However, Reifenberg wrote, the legal institutions had not yet been created that would be able to give the Nuremberg trial a more lasting international impact.89 In spite of all criticism of the Nuremberg trial, the so-called “Nuremberg principles,” which were based on the four main accusations against the defendants in the IMT, were adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in November of 1946 in Resolution 95 (I), which reaffirmed “the principles of International Law recognized by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the judgment of the Tribunal.”90 The IMT was followed by twelve subsequent trials in Nuremberg from 1946 to 1948, in which various specific groups of German leaders — military leaders, doctors, lawyers, industrialists, and so on — were tried in front of American military courts.

Dramatizing the Trial Given the theatricality of the Nuremberg trial, it is not surprising that writers and filmmakers subsequently made it into film and theater in order to spread its message to the world even more clearly, and in order to smooth out whatever dramatic flaws the IMT had suffered from. Nor is it particularly surprising that it was primarily non-German writers who took up the challenge of fictionalizing the IMT and the other Nuremberg trials in the postwar period. The IMT itself had been an object lesson in history and ethics. Movies, plays, and books about the trial sought to make that lesson even more comprehensible by moving from the abstract to the concrete

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and showing the process of history in the lives and actions of individual human beings. Mitscherlich had argued for the importance of bringing abstract and therefore incomprehensible material, ex post facto, back to its origins in the individual, and he had also acknowledged that writers have in general been more successful at doing this than historians. Making history come alive is exactly what movies, plays, and books about the Nuremberg trials have, for the last half century, attempted to do. The most famous depiction of the Nuremberg trials is Stanley Kramer’s 1961 film Judgment at Nuremberg, based on a 1959 television drama written by Abby Mann about one of the Nuremberg successor trials, the trial of Nazi judges. Judgment at Nuremberg places the question of the law, and judgment, at the center of attention. It is a highly dramatic trial movie. The hero of the movie is a judge who must weigh the arguments of the prosecution — represented by a U.S. Army colonel present at the liberation of the Dachau and Belsen concentration camps — and the defense — represented by a smart young German lawyer adept at tu quoque arguments pointing out the hypocrisy of American and British selfrighteousness and at connecting the fate of his clients with the fate of Germany itself. This judge must render judgment on other judges, and hence he is forced to reflect ethically on his own activities as a judge. Judgment at Nuremberg starred Spencer Tracey as Dan Haywood, a backwoods judge from Maine who is, as he avers, “a rock-ribbed Republican who thinks Roosevelt was a great man.”91 Judge Haywood is an incarnation of justice having to reflect on itself, and since he is an ordinary Everyman played by one of the most popular American actors of the time, he is easy for American audiences to identify with. Judgment at Nuremberg is a filmic Bildungsroman telling the story of Judge Haywood’s learning process, at the end of which he is able to come to a new understanding of the law, of guilt, and of responsibility. In addition to listening to the arguments of the prosecution and defense, Haywood is also subjected to the blandishments of an all-too-attractive German widow — played by Marlene Dietrich — whose husband, a general in the Wehrmacht, was executed as a war criminal as a result of a previous trial, and — as if that were not enough — whose home the U.S. military government has requisitioned as Haywood’s own residence while he is in Nuremberg. Toward the end of the trial, after the Soviet blockade of West Berlin has begun and the Communists have seized control of Czechoslovakia, Haywood is also subjected to the arguments of cold war strategists in the U.S. government and military itself, who urge him to be lenient on the German defendants, since the United States now needs the help of the Germans in its struggle with its former ally, the Soviet Union. As a U.S. Senator tells Haywood while they are eating strudel in the lobby of the Grand Hotel shortly before Haywood renders judgment, America is faced with

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A fight for survival. Maybe the next ten years. Maybe the next twenty. (pause. Significantly) Germany is the key to that survival. Any highschool history student in geography can tell you that. HAYWOOD (crisply) What are you trying to say, Senator? SENATOR BURKETTE What I’m trying to say is this. (pause) While no one’s trying to influence your decision, it’s important that you understand this because it’s a fact of life. Let’s face it, gentlemen. The writing is on the wall. We’re going to need all the help we can get here. We’re going to need the support of the German people. WAITER passes them again. Speaks with heavy accent. WAITER Some more strudel, gentlemen?

Under pressure himself from the U.S. government to twist justice by exonerating the defendants, Haywood begins to understand the kinds of pressure exerted on German jurists during the Nazi period. The way in which important matters of politics and influence peddling are mingled in the above scene with the mundane aspects of everyday life, and with a kind of blandly pleasant but nevertheless vaguely threatening Germanness, is representative of the film as a whole. The waiter speaking in a heavy German accent while offering Haywood some more strudel immediately after Senator Burkette has told Haywood that “we’re going to need the support of the German people” reinforces the idea that Haywood is being placed under great pressure to render a soft verdict, and to twist justice so that the German defendants essentially get away with their crimes. The Germans, who had once been the enemy and who are guilty of crimes against humanity, are now the allies of the United States in its struggle with the Soviet Union, and that treacly, unpleasant, servile friendship is represented by the strudel that Haywood does not want and that, according to Robbe-Grillet, was denied to Jews only a few years earlier in at least one Nuremberg bakery. At the end of the film, as Haywood is about to leave Nuremberg after having rendered a harsh verdict, his equally servile housekeeper Mrs. Halbestadt again pushes strudel on him: “But it’s strudel, Judge! The way you like it” (175). Mrs. Halbestadt represents the kind of German described by Dolf Sternberger in Die Wandlung: the kind who is willing to serve any master, whether the Nazis or the Americans. She insists that “we were not political,” and that “we knew nothing about” the concentration camps, and also that “Hitler did some good things. . . . He built the Autobahn” (51, 52, 53). The primary defendant in this fictional trial is Ernst Janning, a respected legal philosopher who is described as one of the authors of the

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Weimar constitution. Janning represents the liberal, good Germany that has been seduced by power and fear into providing a fig leaf for Nazi crimes; during the Third Reich he served the Nazis as Minister of Justice, but his defense lawyer Oskar Rolfe, played by Maximilian Schell, is quick to point out that Hitler ultimately forced Janning to resign. Rolfe argues that Janning is a great man who represents what is best in Germany, and that if he is found guilty, then all of Germany is guilty. “All Germany is on trial, Your Honour. This Tribunal placed it on trial when it placed Ernst Janning on trial” (39). Haywood is impressed by Janning’s erudition and credentials. He says that the prosecution is going to have to work very hard to prove its case against Janning. Haywood’s task of judgment is made easier by the fact that at the end of the trial, in the most dramatic moment of the movie, Janning himself admits his guilt. He has watched his defense lawyer justify the sterilization of a left-wing man because of the man’s supposedly low intelligence — demonstrated by the man’s in-court failure to put three words together into a sentence — and at the end of the trial he observes Rolfe try to prove that it was legal to execute a Jewish man for supposedly having sexual intercourse with a non-Jewish woman. As Rolfe is cross-examining and browbeating the emotionally vulnerable woman (played in the film by the emotionally vulnerable Judy Garland) and trying to prove that her relationship with the Jewish man had been more than just affectionate, Janning dramatically intervenes, asking his lawyer: “Are you going to do this again?” (139). This question implies that Rolfe is putting the Nuremberg race laws into effect again. At this point Rolfe is put into the impossible position of trying to defend a client who does not wish to be defended, and who admits that what he did was a crime: JANNING (continuing with emotion) But if there is to be any salvation for Germany those of us who know our guilt must admit it no matter the cost in pain and humiliation. (pause) I had reached my verdict on the Feldenstein case before I ever came into the courtroom. I would have found him guilty whatever the evidence. It was not a trial at all. It was a sacrificial ritual in which Feldenstein the Jew was the helpless victim. (148)

All of the other defendants are despicable, Janning proclaims, but he himself is “worse than any of them because he knew what they were and went along with them,” thus making “his life . . . excrement because he walked with them” (151). Janning indicates a critical distance to his own past acts by speaking in the third person. It is here, at the latest, that the abstract becomes concrete, and the film’s viewers understand the connection between one man’s weakness and the footage of Nazi concentration camps shown in the middle of the movie. The incomprehensibly large has been reduced to a comprehensible, human scale. Instead of bulldozers pushing

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bodies into mass graves we have a handsome young German lawyer attacking a beautiful and vulnerable young woman for possibly having had a sexual relationship with a Jew. Janning’s dramatic in-court confession differs significantly from the actual Nuremberg trials, in which almost all of the defendants tried to prove their innocence. These defendants, unlike Janning, did not actually acknowledge legal guilt during the trials. In this sense Mann, who presents most of the German — and many of the American — characters in the movie as ethically weak, is perhaps too generous to his main defendant, showing him to have a power of reflection and ratiocination that Alexander Mitscherlich had called for, but that was mostly lacking at the IMT and the subsequent trials. However Janning’s courtroom confession has great dramatic effect, since it comes after he has maintained silence throughout most of the film, a silence in which viewers of the film have watched Nazi judicial practices not just recalled but actually repeated, and in which Judge Haywood himself is placed under pressures not entirely unlike those placed on Nazi jurists. Because of Janning’s confession, Haywood has a solid case for rendering a strict but fair verdict. As he declares in his summation, national security considerations such as the onset of the cold war and the need to win the West Germans over as allies of the United States against the Soviet Union cannot be allowed to twist justice: A country isn’t a rock . . . and it isn’t an extension of one’s self . . . it’s what it stands for, when standing for something is the most difficult. Before the people of the world — let it now be noted in our decision here that this is what we stand for: Justice, Truth . . . and the value of a single human being. (171)

Judgment at Nuremberg was an appeal to the liberal conscience of the United States to make good on the promises of justice made at Nuremberg. At the height of the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union — the year that it premiered was also the year the Berlin Wall went up — it argued for the integrity of the law, and it insisted on the subordination of national security concerns. There was no national security justification for the twisting of justice, the film argued. Likewise the film showed that justice in the United States could be subject to the same kinds of political pressures exerted on justice in Germany during the Third Reich. Although most of the Germans in the film are depicted as negative or problematic, Janning himself is pictured as finally gaining insight into his own fate, just as Mitscherlich had hoped the defendants at the IMT ultimately would. At the end of the movie Janning demonstrates his respect for Haywood and the judicial integrity for which Haywood stands by giving him his memoirs, and by assuring him that his “verdict was a just one” (180). At the same time, however, Janning tries to solicit Haywood’s understanding for his actions by claiming plaintively, “I did not know it

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would come to that. You must believe it. You must believe it.” Haywood’s compassionate but firm response is: “Herr Janning. It came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent” (181). Once again the unimaginably large-scale has been rendered comprehensible and small-scale. It is not the mass of Janning’s crimes against humanity that draws Haywood’s attention but rather the very first crime. Four decades after it was made into a film, Judgment at Nuremberg became a Broadway play in the spring of 2001. This time Maximilian Schell played not the young German defense lawyer Oskar Rolfe but rather the ageing defendant Ernst Janning. As a play, Judgment at Nuremberg had essentially the same plot and dialogue as the movie, but it was slightly abridged to allow for the demands of live theater. Mann also amended some aspects of the script in order to conform to the contemporary American political situation. Judge Haywood, for instance, is now a Republican from North Carolina rather than Maine; improbably, however, he still thinks that Roosevelt was a great man.92 Once again Mann used his work to appeal to the liberal conscience of America, this time arguing for U.S. participation in the International Criminal Court and against President George W. Bush’s recent withdrawal from the court, which is thematized in the play’s prologue. As Mann asks in an introduction to the play, “Were they afraid that one day members of our own government might be defendants? Unfortunately, Judgment at Nuremberg seemed to be more timely than ever.”93 The implication is that in the aftermath of the cold war the United States is shying away from the principles of justice it introduced and affirmed in the aftermath of the Second World War. As a play Judgment at Nuremberg ran, among other places, in Nuremberg itself, where it was premiered in October of 2002. Audience members in Nuremberg had to pass through fake metal detectors to get into the theater, and ushers dressed in American military police uniforms examined their personal belongings. The Nuremberg program for the play made prominent use of Mann’s critique of U.S. refusal to participate in the International Criminal Court. That refusal had a particularly unpleasant and ironic ring in Nuremberg itself, where the United States government had submitted Germans to judgment in 1945–46. It now seemed that the U.S. was unwilling to submit itself to those same standards, thus making a hypocrisy of Robert Jackson’s highminded proclamation in 1945 that “the law includes, and if it is to serve a useful purpose, it must condemn, aggression by any other nation, including those which sit here now in judgment.” In the context of the creation of the International Criminal Court and the trials of war criminals from Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the last decade of the twentieth and the first decade of the twenty-first century, the IMT and its precedents were very much on the world’s mind. Another literary treatment of the subject matter was conservative publicist William F. Buckley’s novel Nuremberg: The Reckoning (2002), which tells the fictional tale of

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Sebastian Reinhard, a German-born member of the American army who arrives in Nuremberg in September of 1945 to work as an interpreter at the IMT. Sebastian’s father was a German architect prevented by the Nazis from leaving the country who, it turns out, had wound up supervising the design work on a crematorium at a Nazi concentration camp in Poland and ultimately been executed for the crime of trying to assist in the escape of a Polish librarian who had tried to keep library books from being burned. Given his father’s involvement in the construction of concentration camps, Sebastian, whose mother, as it turns out, is of Jewish ethnicity, is ultimately forced to see Nazi criminals in a somewhat more differentiated way than he had previously. In the end he tries to help one war criminal to commit suicide: the fictional concentration camp commander Kurt Amadeus, who had been his father’s commanding officer, and who had done his father the favor of having him shot rather than hanged. But Amadeus recovers from the evidently insufficient dose of cyanide that Sebastian had smuggled in, and he winds up being hanged after all. “They heard the thump, and then Sebastian’s weeping came, uncontrolled. He imagined at this moment not the scene . . . [in Nuremberg], but the scene after a springtime dawn at Camp Joni, his father led from his cell, relieved — the final marginalization of human reliefs! — to see a firing squad waiting for him, not a hangman, thinking no doubt in his final moments of his wife and of Sebastian.”94 Both the Nuremberg trials and Abby Mann’s movie and play, as well as William F. Buckley’s novel, were non-German interventions in conceptions of Nuremberg and Nuremberg discourse. So too were the novels by Thomas Berger and Claude Ollier, and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s memoir. These works suggested that, in the aftermath of the Second World War, Nuremberg discourse had gone beyond Germany itself and become the property of the entire world. In the immediate aftermath of the war Germans were primarily reacting to the changes in that discourse rather than creating a new discourse themselves. As the decades of the postwar period continued, Germans did not necessarily create a new discourse. Instead they appropriated the postwar Nuremberg discourse for themselves, a process well illustrated by the German ushers dressed up as American military police for the German premiere of Mann’s play at Nuremberg’s city theater in October of 2002. Here Germans were literally play-acting the roles of the American occupiers in 1945–46.

Nuremberg Comes to Terms with Itself The Nuremberg premiere of Abby Mann’s play — which was also the German premiere — demonstrated that by the first decade of the twentyfirst century “the most German of all German cities,” as Nuremberg’s Nazi mayor Willy Liebel had called Nuremberg, was willing to directly confront

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the legacy of its Nazi past. Almost all major German cities had significant reminders of the Nazi past for anyone who bothered to pay attention — from burned synagogues in many cities to Nazi party office buildings in Munich to Berlin’s Tempelhof airport to the offices of the Gestapo or SS in Berlin and elsewhere — but the remnants of Nuremberg’s Nazi past were far more prominent and took up more space than those of any other city. Moreover, it was exceedingly difficult to find a use for Nuremberg’s Nazi remnants. Berlin’s Tempelhof airport could and did serve as an airport in the postwar period, most famously during the Berlin air lift of 1948–49; Berlin’s Olympic stadium could be and still is used as a soccer stadium; and office buildings could and were used as office buildings. But what was one supposed to do with a vast space that had been designed exclusively for Nazi parades? Yes, American troops could hold victory parades there, but there was a natural limit to the frequency with which such parades could be held. After all, it wasn’t every day that the United States defeated Nazi Germany. What was one to do with the space otherwise? The very building project that had been a source of such jingoistic pride in the Nazi “city of the Reich party rallies” (Stadt der Reichsparteitage) became a source of embarrassment in Nuremberg after 1945. City fathers would have been happy to forget about the whole thing. Their policies demonstrate a desire to cover over and remove the past from view. The most prominent result of this policy was the transformation of Hitler’s “Luitpoldarena” into a city park that is now once again called the “Luitpoldhain.” The “Straße des Führers” where Hitler and Ernst Röhm had marched to pay their respects to the dead of the First World War and the “martyrs” of the beer hall putsch in 1933 was eliminated, along with the parade grounds for the SS and the SA, which were transformed into a grassy park in the 1950s. Now instead of hosting the Nazis’ bizarre flag consecration ceremony, the Luitpoldhain hosts Nuremberg’s “Klassik Open Air” concerts every summer. The Luitpoldhalle, where the party rallies had been officially opened, and where Rudolf Hess had proclaimed that “Hitler is Germany, just as Germany is Hitler” had been bombed in the Second World War and survived only as a ruin. In 1950 the city destroyed that ruin and transformed it into a parking lot. In another part of the Luitpoldhain the so-called “Meistersingerhalle” was built as a major concert hall and conference space. The space where the Nazis had begun building the Märzfeld was turned first into a refugee camp in the second half of the 1940s and then into a new suburb called Langwasser in the 1950s, which the melancholic writer Wolfgang Koeppen called a “drawing-board suburb” in 1971, during the celebrations of Albrecht Dürer’s five-hundredth birthday.95 For Horst Krüger, Langwasser with its “white towers, white apartment houses, little skyscrapers, the shopping center, suburban air” was the uninspired teleology of Nuremberg’s centuries of history, the banal contemporary answer to the genius of the old town — “the beautiful, terrible vision of our future. That’s the way we will

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World congress of the Jehovas Witnesses at the Zeppelin field (August 1953). From the volume Wieder Leben: Nürnberg vor 50 Jahren: Fotografien von Ferdinand Vitzethum, ed. Helmut Beer (Nuremberg: W. Tümmels, 1997), 86. Permission to reproduce image courtesy of the Stadtarchiv Nürnberg. all live someday, and in Langwasser you can take a look at it.”96 Not far away from Langwasser was Albert Speer’s Zeppelin field, which remained in the hands of the U.S. Army for decades. It was here that the U.S. Army invited Nuremberg’s citizens to come and witness military parades every year, and the army also made the Zeppelin field available for major events such as union rallies, motorcycle races, or religious revival meetings, such as one organized by Billy Graham in July of 1963. In all of these uses the city fathers by specific intent or by benign neglect allowed the Nazi rally grounds gradually to be reappropriated for purposes far removed from the intentions of their designers. By the 1960s virtually nothing remained of large parts of the rally grounds, such as the Luitpoldarena or the Märzfeld.

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Motor sport event at what later became known as the “Norisring” around the Zeppelin tribune (middle of the 1950s). From the volume Wieder Leben: Nürnberg vor 50 Jahren: Fotografien von Ferdinand Vitzethum, ed. Helmut Beer (Nuremberg: W. Tümmels, 1997), 90. Permission to reproduce image courtesy of the Stadtarchiv Nürnberg. Other parts, such as the Große Strasse, the Zeppelin field, and the congress hall, stubbornly persisted. Allied bombing raids had destroyed Albrecht Dürer’s medieval city, but they had left these structures maddeningly intact. What is a city to do with such structures? Nuremberg was not the only Nazi city in Germany, and yet more than any other city it bears the visible marks of Germany’s Nazi past. One of the most important figures in the postwar redefinition of Nuremberg’s identity was the city’s Social Democratic cultural commissioner (Kulturreferent) Hermann Glaser, who, in the 1960s, initiated a series of national and international conferences in Nuremberg called the “Nürnberger Gespräche” (Nuremberg dialogues).

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The first such conference, held in 1965, dealt with the topic of “Haltungen und Fehlhaltungen in Deutschland” (Attitudes and Wrong Attitudes in Germany) and its specific focus was on addressing the problems of the German past in order to achieve a more hopeful future. The idea was that it was possible to learn from the mistakes of the past. The “Nürnberger Gespräche” continued into the 1970s and aroused a good deal of public interest, contributing to a liberalization of the urban public sphere specifically, and also to a general climate of left-liberal change in Germany at the end of the 1960s and in the 1970s, when both Germany and Nuremberg were governed from the left. The stereotypical image of Nuremberg for a century and a half had been one of old-fashioned architecture and antiquated beauty — what Wolfgang Koeppen grumpily called “pretty German history, pretty German values, pretty German religion, pretty German art.”97 Nuremberg was supposed to stand for German traditions and history, not for the present or the future. As Koeppen noted, “Nuremberg, they say, is the Germanic National Museum, and the Germanic Museum is Nuremberg.”98 Even though most of the medieval and early modern city had been destroyed in 1945, the equation of Nuremberg with a romanticized or nazified past still survived. One of Hermann Glaser’s most important initiatives for combating the stereotypical image of the city was the creation of a new museum, the socalled Centrum Industriekultur (Center for Industrial Culture), which was founded as an organization in 1979 and opened its doors as a museum in 1988. The basic idea behind this museum was that Nuremberg was not just a center of medieval or early modern Germany but also the most important industrial center in southern Germany, and that it was not just a city full of people like Julius Streicher and other Nazis, but that as a workers city it had also been a major stronghold of workers’ unions and of the left-liberal Social Democratic Party, of which Glaser himself was a prominent member. History, Glaser and his colleagues argued, is not just about the quaint and the old-fashioned; it is also about the real lives of ordinary people, and one of the most important aspects of Nuremberg’s history, Glaser insisted, was its history as an industrial center. For Glaser, as for Alexander Mitscherlich, the historian’s most difficult problem is to make history comprehensible to ordinary people so that they can actually learn from it. If ordinary citizens do not see the history of their own families reflected in public museums, Glaser argued, then they lose faith in those museums. The museum, and the history that it is intended to represent, he wrote, thus become separated from the actual lives of human beings. Glaser argued: “in complex state entities, culture and therefore also cultural policy have the important task of creating social and also national identity.”99 Since the Federal Republic was “the best democracy that Germany has ever had,” citizens’ identification with it needed “targeted support and enhancement.”100 It was not particularly conducive for the development of democracy in Germany for

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citizens to conceive of their history and traditions only in the ways that the Nazis and the nationalists of the nineteenth century had defined it. It made much more sense, Glaser argued, to search out those elements of German and Nuremberg history that had helped contribute to democratic traditions, and to make those elements more familiar to citizens. Instead of myths and glorifications, the new approach to public history would place the previously overlooked or ignored “anonymous man, his mistakes and accomplishments, his significance and tragedy in the spotlight.”101 Culture and aesthetics would no longer be understood simply as the products of the aristocracy or the patrician bourgeoisie; instead, they would be seen as creations of all people, rich and poor. Cathedrals and castles might be worthy of preservation, of course, but they were the products of a specific class and a specific social system, and hence they did not tell the whole story of Nuremberg’s history and its people. Moreover, in the postindustrial period there was a real danger that the primary remnants of Nuremberg’s and other cities’ industrial past could be lost simply because people did not yet understand their value. A factory might not be as quaint or as pretty as the mad Bavarian King Ludwig’s Neuschwanstein castle with its Wagnerian interior design, but it was every bit as much a part of German history and hence worthy of preservation. Therefore, Glaser argued, “at least a few of the industrial, residential, and social structures of the last 150 years ought to be preserved as examples in every city, so that the roots of our life can be illustrated in a way that is ‘sensually’ comprehensible.”102 Just as the Germanic National Museum had been a genuinely bourgeois museum for a bourgeois age, so too Nuremberg’s new museum of industrial culture would be a post-bourgeois museum for a post-bourgeois age. Glaser’s museum of industrial culture was a significant intervention in the image of Nuremberg and helped to spread the idea of “industrial culture” as worthy of preservation throughout Germany. Following the creation of Nuremberg’s Centrum Industriekultur, the concept of industrial museums, and of the industrial past as worthy of preserving and learning about, spread throughout Germany’s current and former industrial cities and regions, such as the Ruhr, where politicians and planners undertook large-scale efforts to preserve some of the major monuments of Germany’s industrial heritage. The protectors of these monuments sought to redefine the concept of what it meant to be a German or a citizen of Nuremberg. German identity was not just about Romanticism, they seemed to say; it was also about modernization, industrialization, and democratization.

The City of Peace and Human Rights The Germanic National Museum — created by Baron Hans von Aufsess in 1853 as a center for the study and propagation of German cultural identity

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and criticized by Wolfgang Koeppen over a century later as a center of the Romantic conception of Nuremberg’s identity — was at the center of the rethinking of Nuremberg’s identity in the postwar period. The most dramatic signal of that rethinking occurred when the museum underwent expansion in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In preparation for the expansion of the museum the city sponsored a design competition in 1988, inviting various artists to submit bids for the redesign of a formerly insignificant alley, Kartäusergasse, which would now house the main entrance to the museum. Plans for the redesign called for the erection of a new wing of the museum on the other side of the Kartäusergasse, and this meant that the small street would now serve as a bridge over the underground passageway that was to connect the two wings. On November 29, 1988 the jury met to decide among four submissions for the redesign of the Kartäusergasse; it unanimously chose a design by the Israeli artist Dani Karavan. Karavan’s design was symptomatic of the way that Nuremberg and its city fathers were now trying to redefine themselves and their history. It called for a “Straße der Menschenrechte” (Street of Human Rights) featuring twenty-seven white concrete columns, two plaques in the ground, one oak tree, and a white concrete gate that would close off the Kartäusergasse at one end and serve as a reflection of the gate in the old city wall at the other end. Engraved on each of the twenty-seven white columns and the two plaques in the ground, and associated with the oak tree, was one of the thirty articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights passed by the United Nations on December 10, 1948, guaranteeing freedom of religion, freedom from slavery, civic equality, and so on.103 Except for the oak tree, which bore only a German inscription, all of the other columns and plaques bore the articles of the declaration of human rights in both German and one of twenty-nine other languages representing a place where or a people whose human rights have been or are being violated: Yiddish, Polish, English, Russian, Tibetan, Chinese, Navajo, Vietnamese, Spanish, and so on. The tree represented all the other languages of the world not represented in the other inscriptions. Its inscription of article 21 called for free and equal elections.104 Karavan’s Street of Human Rights, which was opened on 17 July 1993, was an intervention in the urban design of Nuremberg, inscribing the universal declaration of human rights into the landscape of the city itself. At the same time it forced anyone going into the major museum of German history and identity to physically walk through that declaration of human rights. With the erection of this monument to human rights, Nuremberg and its city fathers were trying to transform their city from the city of the Nazis’ Nuremberg laws into a city of human rights. It was as if they were trying to demonstrate that to be German at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century was to be a proponent of fundamental human liberties. In order to stress the importance of this new

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View of the Straße der Menschenrechte (Street of Human Rights) looking toward the north with the row of columns representing articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on the left side of the street. To the left of the columns is the new wing of the Germanic National Museum. On the right side of the street is the older section of the Germanic National Museum. The arch at the end of the street provides closure and also mimics the gate in Nuremberg’s old town wall at the other end of the street. Provided by the Germanisches Nationalmuseum.

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German identity, Nuremberg’s city government also created, in 1993, an annual festival called the “Fest der Menschenrechte” (festival of human rights), which usually occurs in the late summer of every year. As then mayor Ludwig Scholz declared in 1998, when the city was trying unsuccessfully to attract the new International Criminal Court to Nuremberg, “the city is trying to become a center of human rights.”105 Two years after the Street of Human Rights was opened, Nuremberg also, for the first time, awarded its newly created international prize for human rights; the recipient was the Russian human rights activist Sergei Kovalyov. This prize is now awarded every two years. In addition, Nuremberg has its own metropolitan human rights office, which organizes regular conferences on human rights, an international human rights film festival, and an international media forum. Under the aegis of the P.E.N. club’s “writers in exile” project, Nuremberg also awards fellowships to persecuted writers; the first writer to come to Nuremberg as part of this project was the Vietnamese exile Vu Thu Hien, who arrived in 2001 for a two-year stay in the city. All of these efforts are part of a conscious process of rebranding spearheaded by municipal initiatives like the “Nürnberg — Stadt des Friedens und der Menschenrechte” (Nuremberg — City of Peace and Human Rights) foundation in which Nuremberg, instead of trying to escape from its past as a Nazi city, acknowledges but tries to transcend it. As Nuremberg’s official website declares: “Nuremberg — A City Faces up to Its Past.”106 In February of 2003 mayor Ulrich Maly declared that the city was attempting to show “that today’s Nuremberg has absolutely nothing to do with Nuremberg under the swastika.”107 Partly as a result of these activities, Nuremberg became the first city in the world to win the UNESCO prize for human rights education in 2000. Of course the attempted rebranding of Nuremberg has not been unproblematic or unambiguous. In 2001 the historian Gregor Schöllgen, in an article entitled “Die Meisterverdränger von Nürnberg” (The Master-Repressers of Nuremberg), controversially accused the city’s politicians of seeking to escape the Nazi past precisely via such rebranding.108

What to Do With the Nazi Rally Grounds? One of the most prominent aspects of Nuremberg’s rebranding has been the difficult process of coming to terms with the Nazi rally grounds. These were a permanent problem for city planners throughout the postwar period, and they were highlighted by a brief documentary film by Alexander Kluge and Peter Schamoni in 1960 entitled Brutalität in Stein (Brutality in Stone), a film that represents, as Eric Rentschler has argued, “Young German Film’s earliest sign of life.”109 At the beginning of the film comes the declaration:

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Every edifice left to us by history emanates the spirit of its creator and its age, even when it no longer stands in the service of its original function. The forsaken edifices of the National Socialist Party, as testaments in stone, allow memories to come alive of that epoch which led to the most terrible catastrophe in German history. (24)

Interestingly enough, the central thrust of this statement, about memories being allowed “to come alive,” recalls the function that Nuremberg served for nationalist historiographers in the nineteenth and early twentieth century as a concrete embodiment of history. Now, however, the same mechanisms of memory previously utilized in the service of nationalism were being called into service for a critical film project. As the camera explores the ruins of the Nazi rally grounds, the film’s soundtrack features acoustic reminders of a bygone era: Hitler speaking, the crowds exulting, and a voice-over reading a passage from Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss’s memoirs about the “processing” of Jews (34). All of these elements suggest a vast constellation of images and sounds that, while they may seem to conflict jarringly with each other, nevertheless belong together. Kluge and Schamoni seek to demonstrate that German identity in the postwar period has to be predicated, not on forgetting, but on remembering a difficult past. The film’s subtitle was “Die Ewigkeit von gestern” (The Eternity of Yesterday), suggesting that there is no way for Germans to get rid of their Nazi past, or of that past’s physical remnants in Nuremberg (36). Kluge’s and Schamoni’s Brutalität in Stein was an urgent reminder of the importance of remembering the past. However at the beginning of the 1960s most Nurembergers were not yet ready to heed its call. The Nazi rally grounds had been so thoroughly ignored in the first three decades after the Second World War that up until the late 1970s the city provided no information to help tourists or even the citizens of Nuremberg themselves locate and explore the most prominent physical remnants of Hitler’s megalomania. There were no signs to direct tourists to the rally grounds or to let them know exactly what they were seeing if they managed to find them. One city politician argued in the 1960s that there was no point in trying to preserve the relics of Nuremberg’s Nazi past, such as the hall of columns on the Zeppelin tribune, since the structure itself had no aesthetic value: “We’re talking about a structure that has no value except as a curiosity. . . . The Zeppelin tribune’s value as a tourist attraction is more than questionable; the values that Nuremberg has to offer its guests lie in a very different terrain.”110 Almost four decades later, the attitude of one former city politician was similar: “Well, I have a conflicted attitude to a preservation policy that conserves the documents, the structures of the Third Reich, because I don’t ascribe any significance to them.”111 As a result of this cavalier attitude to the Nazi rally grounds, the city government ordered the destruction of the decrepit hall of columns on the Zeppelin tribune in 1967. The destruction of the columns caused a controversy

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between Germans who wanted to preserve the relics of the Nazi past and Germans who wanted to destroy them. As one observer wrote at the time, “Nuremberg is trying to erase the memory of its past as the city of the Reich party rallies. Cracks in the roof of the gallery of columns on the great tribune of the Zeppelin field offer a good opportunity to tear down yet another part of the heritage of the National Socialist past.”112 A group of young Germans organized themselves to oppose the destruction of the hall of columns, arguing: “This structure is a historical document. It is wrong to get rid of historical relics even if they come from a reprehensible epoch.”113 It was not just young democrats who organized against the destruction of Nazi relics, however; the radical right-wing NPD (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands, or National Democratic Party of Germany) protested against the destruction as well. In spite of all protests, however, the hall of columns was destroyed in May of 1967. Not quite a decade earlier, in 1959–60, the tribune area of the former Luitpoldarena had already been eliminated to make way for the Meistersingerhalle, and in 1966–67 the towers of the Nazis’ planned Märzfeld had been destroyed to make way for the new suburb of Langwasser. It was not until six years after the destruction of the hall of columns on the Zeppelin tribune, in 1973, that the state of Bavaria finally included the surviving structures of the Nazi rally grounds into its law for historic preservation, requiring the city of Nuremberg to preserve what was left of the structures.114 Whether they wanted to or not, the city fathers and mothers now had to live with the remnants of their difficult past. By this time there was increasing interest among both tourists and the citizens of Nuremberg themselves in the Nazi past and its remnants. In 1978 a group of concerned citizens calling themselves the “Bürgerkomitee gegen Neonazismus” (Citizens Committee Against Neo-Nazism) organized to combat what it saw as growing neo-Nazism in Germany; one of its goals was to provide alternative tours of Nuremberg in order to educate tourists and citizens alike on the dangers of Nazism. The implicit fear was that without such educational efforts, the Nazi rally grounds might provide a tempting magnet for neo-Nazi groups. The journalist Helge Cramer, one of the group’s founders, proposed the creation of an institution for the study of fascism and of a document center akin to the Berlin Document Center in the congress hall. As Cramer argued in a letter to Nuremberg’s cultural commissioner, Hermann Glaser, in June of 1980: “No city in the Federal Republic shows as many clear traces of the National Socialists’ brutal rule as Nuremberg.”115 It was crucial, Cramer and others felt, to make use of Nuremberg’s historical remnants in order to deepen the commitment of German citizens, and particularly German youth, to democracy. The city responded to the growing interest in the Nazi past by creating an informational brochure on Nuremberg in the Nazi period; and Hermann

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Glaser created a working group to organize a major educational exhibition in preparation for the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi rise to power on January 30, 1983. Glaser’s working group ultimately proposed the creation of a museum of National Socialism that would respond to popular demand for information about the Nazi rally grounds and capitalize on that popular interest in order to strengthen Germans’ commitment to democracy. The working group proposed housing the museum initially in the Zeppelin tribune and then, once funding was secured, in the congress hall. Although this proposal was not universally popular with all of Nuremberg’s political parties — and particularly not with the conservative Christian Social Union (Christlich-Soziale Union, CSU) — it was accepted by the city council.116 Nevertheless, the city government provided only minimal funds for the project. For this reason the proposed exhibition in the Zeppelin tribune to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Nazi rise to power did not take place; what did occur was a small exhibit at the Nuremberg city archives from the end of January to the end of February 1983. After further wrangling and financial difficulties, the city of Nuremberg was ultimately able to open an instructional sound-and-light program on Nazism in the Zeppelin tribune on 17 November 1984. This program had the programmatic title “Faszination und Gewalt” (Fascination and Violence). The point of the title was to acknowledge Nazism as “fascinating,” to use Susan Sontag’s word, but simultaneously to see that fascination as part and parcel of a larger project of violence. In 1985 the city opened a semi-permanent exhibition, also entitled “Faszination und Gewalt,” in the Zeppelin tribune. Nuremberg’s mayor Andreas Urschlechter declared at the exhibition’s opening that the exhibition was not an attempt to dispose of the past but rather to face historical truth and to ensure “that National Socialism and fascism are never repeated.”117 Meanwhile Hermann Glaser explained why even Social Democrats like himself had not been eager to preserve the remains of the Nazi past. “We hesitated on this space, because we thought it should disintegrate on its own. . . . We thought we would let it survive as a mausoleum. But it has become clear that many visitors come without information and are amazed at this space,” Glaser admitted.118 Therefore he and other city leaders had been forced to acknowledge the need for more useful and focused information about the city’s Nazi past and its architectural remnants. The exhibition “Faszination und Gewalt” was quite popular, drawing many thousands of visitors to the Zeppelin tribune every summer during the rest of the 1980s and 1990s. Because the rooms in the Zeppelin tribune were unheated, however, the exhibition could be open only during the summer months. Starting in 1985 Nuremberg’s Pedagogical Institute — a municipal agency involved in the training of teachers — also organized a series of symposia on the history of National Socialism and of Nuremberg itself in the Third Reich.

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In 1987 controversy erupted again about the former Nazi rally grounds when a group of real estate investors, with support from the city government, proposed transforming the congress hall, the most massive remnant of the Nazis’ monumental architecture, into a shopping and recreation center that would include luxury apartments, retirement homes, a hotel, businesses, a discotheque, a medical clinic, a swimming pool, a jogging track, and various stores and businesses. As Wolf Michael Wünsche, the leader of the investment group, declared: “From the beginning, our goal for our project was to increase the flow of purchasing power to Nuremberg.”119 Facing up to the German past in general or to Nuremberg’s past specifically were of secondary importance for him and his group, and for the city government as well. In response to this plan for the architectural erasure of the Nazi past, another Nuremberg citizens’ initiative was formed; the members of this initiative accused both the developers and the city’s politicians of the willful neglect of their historical and ethical responsibilities. Eckart Dietzfelbinger, a political scientist who was one of the members of the citizens’ initiative, argued that “a confrontation with fascism has never really taken place in this country.”120 Erika Sanden, a historian who was also a member of the citizens’ initiative, complained that the city of Nuremberg in particular had repressed its Nazi past “quite reprehensibly.”121 In an article in Nuremberg’s entertainment magazine Plärrer, Sanden argued that the plan for transforming the congress hall into a shopping center was typical of a general trend in the Federal Republic toward “repressing, forgetting, and getting rid of” the past half a century after the end of National Socialism.122 She suggested that the city government’s plan could be explained “only by a lack of historical consciousness. Even today Nuremberg has not accepted its history as the ‘City of the Reich Party Rallies.’ ”123 Nuremberg’s Nazi remnants might belong to the city in a technical legal sense, Sanden argued, but in a larger sense they were “historical monuments of the German people,” and therefore the city had no right to interfere with them.124 She concluded: “the remaining structures of the Reich Party Rally grounds are historical monuments like the castle, the churches, and the Germanic National Museum.”125 As it happened, the Bavarian state government agreed, declaring that the congress hall was one of “the most important documents of the gigantomania of National Socialism,” and thus also a “monument of a conception of the state that has become unimaginable for today’s generation. A monument, also, to the destruction caused by that conception.”126 Because of widespread resistance to the plan for transforming the congress hall into a shopping center, the city government ultimately withdrew its support from the project. Partly in response to this controversy, Nuremberg’s cultural commissioner Hermann Glaser asked the city’s Pedagogical Institute to organize a public conference on the question of what to do with the architectural

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remnants of the Nazi past. In July of 1988 historians, city planners, and politicians met at a symposium entitled “Das Erbe: Vom Umgang mit NSArchitektur” (Our Heritage: Dealing with Nazi Architecture) to discuss the ways that cities like Nuremberg could approach the monumental relics of their Nazi past. Hermann Glaser argued that the neglect of the Nazi rally grounds was entirely justified, since, in his view, the use of these structures for banal everyday purposes took away from them the aura of majesty and awe that the Nazis had tried to achieve. Glaser proclaimed: “No destruction, but also no cosmetic repairs. At the most restoration for reasons of safety. Beyond that: extensive information about the original purpose of the buildings, and a utilization that is as trivial as possible.”127 Others argued that a different, more proactive approach to the past had to be found. In December of 1988 Hans K. Frieser, a city councilor for Nuremberg’s CSU, argued that the remnants of the Nazi rally grounds constituted a “history book in stone” and therefore needed not only to be preserved but also to be used actively for pedagogical purposes.128 Moreover, Frieser argued, if the city simply let the Nazi relics decay it would in a sense be fulfilling the program of Hitler and Speer with their “theory of ruin value.”129 Frieser’s suggestion demonstrated that by the late 1980s a broad consensus on the need to preserve and work with the Nazi rally grounds was beginning to emerge among the major political parties. A month later, in January of 1989, the Nuremberg SPD proposed its own comprehensive concept for the Nazi rally grounds. The SPD concept called for turning both the Zeppelin tribune and the northern end of the congress hall into a historical museum, and it suggested that the Berlin Document Center should ultimately be housed in Nuremberg, since it would be hard to find a better place for studying the Nazi past than “the city of the Nuremberg trials.”130 Horst Schmidbauer, a local SPD official, acknowledged that even his own party had all too often ignored Nuremberg’s Nazi past. He insisted, however, that Nuremberg needed financial assistance from the German federal government in facing its Nazi legacy; after all, he pointed out, that legacy was part of Germany’s national heritage and not unique to Nuremberg.131 Discussions in Nuremberg in the 1980s about what to do with the former Nazi rally grounds as a whole produced at least one concrete result in addition to the exhibition “Faszination und Gewalt”; in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall fell, the city erected four information columns that finally provided visitors to the site with basic information about it. In 1990 Eckart Dietzfelbinger, who had been part of the 1987 citizens’ initiative against transforming the congress hall into a shopping center, and who was an employee of Nuremberg’s Pedagogical Institute, published a detailed study and critique of the city’s approach to the former Nazi rally grounds. In general, Dietzfelbinger argued, the city’s approach

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to the Nazi relics had been ahistorical and opportunistic, creating a kind of blank space in municipal history. Not only had Nuremberg’s political leaders made mistakes in the past, but they were continuing to make them in the present. It was true, Dietzfelbinger acknowledged, that Nuremberg was not the only German city to neglect or even ignore its past; but Nuremberg’s mistakes weighed more heavily than those of other cities, he believed, because of the city’s former status as the Nazis’ symbolic capital. However Nuremberg’s prominent position was not just a curse but also an opportunity, Dietzfelbinger argued: if it were to proactively work to improve its approach to the remnants of the Nazi past, Nuremberg could ultimately become a model for all of Germany.132 Dietzfelbinger’s critique, which appeared at the beginning of the 1990s, at the moment of German reunification, helped to lay the foundations for a new approach to the Nazi past in Nuremberg that would become dominant in the next decade. It was now clear that the city had both a responsibility to preserve the past and an opportunity to demonstrate to other German cities what a more productive approach to the architectural past and its significance might look like. By the middle of the 1990s there was general consensus among the city’s leaders on the need to preserve and take advantage of the remnants of the Nazi rally grounds. But it was still not entirely clear what that preservation should look like. The question as to how to preserve Nuremberg’s Nazi remnants dealt not with the technology to be used in their preservation but with the ideological function that the surviving Nazi structures should play in a democratic Germany. Should the Nazi monuments be preserved in the same way, say, that the Dürer house was preserved, or should they, instead, be subjected to a kind of against-the-grain preservation that, while maintaining them physically, worked against them ideologically? In 1992 KlausJürgen Sembach, director of Nuremberg’s Center for Industrial Culture, argued against a simple mechanical preservation and in favor of an active, critical approach to Nazi architecture. The questions raised by the Nazi past could never simply and definitively be answered, he asserted, and it would never be possible to dispose of the topic permanently. Architecture, Sembach argued, was “the weightiest evidence” of Nazi rule, and the continuing challenge posed by Nazism was most evident in that architecture’s oppressive presence throughout Germany.133 It was high time, he believed, for Nuremberg and other municipalities in Germany to give these Nazi remnants the attention they deserved, no matter how awkward or embarrassing they continued to be. Sembach complained that “obviously, the tangible awkwardness caused by the complex challenge of National Socialist aesthetics has not just hindered real understanding and historical analysis but also paralyzed any active confrontation with Nazi relics.”134 It was not sufficient, he argued, simply to physically preserve Nazi monuments uncritically, as had been done, he claimed, with Munich’s “Haus der

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Deutschen Kunst” (House of German Art). If mere preservation and authenticity were the goal, Sembach slyly noted, then it would be only logical to fill the Nazi art museum with the Nazi art it had been created for. Nuremberg, he argued, was typical of Munich and other German cities in its unimaginative approach to the past, but that failure was particularly pronounced in the Nazis’ former symbolic capital: “Nuremberg’s destiny is to be the focal point of everything we have neglected.”135 Nuremberg, in other words, was an exemplary model of German failure to deal adequately with the Nazi past; but under the right circumstances the city could become an exemplary model of a different, more productive approach. What Sembach suggested was an active dialogical criticism of the Nazi remnants: “The Zeppelin tribune, which now seems so depressing, since it was simply left in place, could be understood as a monument in a very different way if modern architecture were to aggressively and brusquely interrupt its cascading stairways, partially blowing them away.”136 What Sembach was arguing for, in essence, was a kind of Brechtian alienation of the Nazi monuments. They would be left essentially intact, as Bavarian law required; however this preservation would not occur passively or as a celebration of a brilliant past worthy of emulation but rather as an active intervention that would encourage spectators and tourists to criticize and understand the spaces through which they were walking. Such a critical preservation could be created not by destroying elements built by the Nazis but by adding new elements that would place the Nazi relics in a critical light. Julius Heinrich Mihm, a young engineer from Hanover, suggested a similar approach to the Nazi monuments in 1993. Mihm implicitly criticized Hermann Glaser’s notion of rendering the Nazi monuments ridiculous by using them for banal everyday purposes. The point, he argued, was not to prevent spectators from succumbing to the “fascist pose” but rather to permit them “an inner path out of it . . . that would allow for a critical return.”137 In essence the problem was the same one addressed by Alexander Mitscherlich in 1947: how to make Nuremberg and the history that it represented comprehensible to individual human beings. Mihm argued that this goal could be achieved not by preventing an identification with the Nazi past but precisely by allowing a critical identification. Spectators would be encouraged to enter into the Nazi sites emotionally, but they would be given the intellectual tools to criticize their own emotional attachments. “Viewed from a broader historical perspective,” he argued, “the architectural objects present at the site are among the grand absurdities of world history.” This absurdity was not a problem, Mihm argued, but rather a great opportunity for an “open work of art” characterized by “dialectical interventions” that Mihm called “nonarchitecture.”138 His plan offered no easy answers to the problems posed by the remnants of the Nazi rally grounds, because such answers were

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impossible, he claimed. In particular, Mihm argued, the brutal symbolic structure of the space could not simply be negated “with a ‘countersymbolism,’ no matter how it is constructed,” such as a statue, because any counter-symbol would be lost in the vastness of the rally grounds.139 Instead, visitors should be offered a way to gain access to the “structural logic of the existing remains, which continue to emit propagandistic radiation.”140 Specifically, Mihm called for the creation of a series of trenches through the rally grounds that would allow viewers to experience the space as if from a military battleground, suggesting not only the overwhelming power of the Nazi aesthetic but also its ultimate teleology in war. Part of the Zeppelin field would be sunk one and a half meters, forming a kind of field-within-the-field that would represent both the absent masses who used to parade there and the place where so many of them ended up: the grave. This intervention also would have made the Zeppelin field useless for everyday purposes such as rock concerts, motorcycle races, and inline skating outings. In 1994 an institutional reorganization within Nuremberg’s city government transferred responsibility for the exhibition “Faszination und Gewalt” from Nuremberg’s Pedagogical Institute, where it had previously been located, to the city’s museums, which had a significantly broader cultural and political mandate.141 From this moment onward the director of Nuremberg’s museums, Franz Sonnenberger, sought to achieve a more permanent solution to the problem of the Nazi rally grounds. Six years after Eckart Dietzfelbinger’s critique of the city’s policies, Sonnenberger officially took up the suggestions that citizens’ initiatives had been making for two decades and proposed the creation of a “Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände” (Reich Party Rally Grounds Documentation Center). Whereas other Nazi relics, such as concentration camps, reminded visitors of the Nazis’ victims, Nuremberg’s rally grounds were unique, Sonnenberger argued, in that they were “the place of the perpetrators. Here the Nazi movement celebrated itself in an almost obscene way.”142 Sonnenberger argued that it was ethically imperative to create a new museum, and to make that museum an architectural counterpoint to the Nazis’ architecture. The creation of a documentation center, Sonnenberger argued, could help “Nuremberg and thereby Germany as a whole” to present itself favorably to Europe and the world.143 Of course the city of Nuremberg insisted that the state of Bavaria and the federal government of Germany should also be involved in the financing of this new museum. After all, the city government argued, the Nazi past represented so vividly in Nuremberg was not specific to Nuremberg but was a problem for all of Germany. In April of 1996 the federation of German cities, meeting in Nuremberg, agreed that the funding of a museum at the former Nazi party rally grounds should indeed be a national project. Sonnenberger suggested that the documentation center

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should occupy the northern end of the unfinished but nevertheless very solid and inhabitable congress hall, and that a new entrance hall should be built on columns over the Dutzendteich, the nearby lake. With its glass and steel, the new entrance would provide a modern counterpoint to Nazi neo-classicism. Sonnenberger hoped that the proposed documentation center would be ready to open by the year 2000, when Nuremberg would be celebrating the 950th anniversary of its founding in 1050. A year later Gregor Schöllgen, a professor at the nearby University of Erlangen — the same scholar who was later to criticize Nuremberg’s politicians as the “Master-Repressers of Nuremberg” — wrote an essay suggesting a format for the content of the proposed new museum. Its focus, he argued, should be the question why Nuremberg, as a largely Social Democratic industrial city, had become a symbolic capital of National Socialism. Schöllgen wanted to study history as a process rather than a product, making it more comprehensible for visitors to the museum. He argued that “the creation of a museum of contemporary history on the Reich Party Rally grounds in Nuremberg that would correspond to the historical significance of the space is one of the great remaining challenges still to be mastered in our approach to the National Socialist past.”144 Schöllgen’s ideas for the contents of the museum met with general approval. Nuremberg’s architects rebelled against Sonnenberger’s suggestion for a relatively simple and unambitious architectural design for the proposed museum, however, and insisted on a public competition. That competition was held in the summer of 1998, and the winner, announced that November, was the Austrian architect Günther Domenig. Domenig’s design essentially heeded the deconstructionist interventions of Klaus-Jürgen Sembach and Julius Heinrich Mihm from 1992 and 1993. His plan was simple. It called for breaking up the architectural monotony of the congress hall by piercing it with a gradually ascending diagonal line. This diagonal would form the main entrance to the new museum and would ultimately lead visitors up to the interior courtyard, where they would be able to view the Nazi architecture from the inside. Whereas the building was primarily composed of brick, Domenig’s additions were of lighter materials like glass and steel — like the architectural concept proposed by Sonnenberger in 1996. Domenig called his design “the opposite of what I found there,” and he noted that he had distanced himself everywhere “from what already existed.”145 One critic called this architectural intervention an “arrow of glass that one can walk through,” declaring it to be “a most impressive architectural metaphor. By cutting with such apparent ease through an NS structure intended to appear so massive, he lays bare its empty pathos.”146 Another critic wrote that “Domenig thus opens up the structure — a misshapen cadaver of brick covered over by natural stone — to a viewing of the corpse.”147

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Dokumentationszentrum (Documentation Center). Provided by and © museen der stadt nürnberg, picture by Mile Cindric.


Dokumentationszentrum (Documentation Center). Provided by and © museen der stadt nürnberg, picture by Heiko Stahl.

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Franz Sonnenberger’s hope that the new museum could be opened in time for Nuremberg’s 950th anniversary was not fulfilled. Instead the Documentation Center was opened to visitors in November of 2001. The Documentation Center was not a comprehensive solution to the problem of what to do with the vast remnants of the Nazi rally grounds, but it was a respectable beginning. Critics overwhelmingly praised Domenig’s architectural design, but they were less positive about the exhibition itself, which did little to answer Gregor Schöllgen’s fundamental question as to how a center of German Social Democracy had been transformed into the symbolic capital of Nazism. The museum’s permanent exhibition focuses less on Nuremberg specifically than on the entirety of the Nazi period. This is an effective strategy for schoolchildren and others with little knowledge of the Nazi past, but it largely sidesteps the issue of Nuremberg and its Nazi connections. However it is reasonable to argue that the primary audience for such a museum is not experts but rather the general public, especially children and young people; and undoubtedly the museum serves them well, as demonstrated by their comments in visitor books and by the hundreds of thousands of visitors who have come to the museum since its opening.

In Search of an Ending The city of Nuremberg has not yet come up with a solution to the problem of the rest of the party rally grounds, although there have been several efforts to do so, in particular a failed architectural contest carried out by the city in 2001. None of the entrants to this contest was deemed to have satisfactorily solved all the many problems posed by the site, from historical documentation and commemoration to sporting and recreational events.148 It is possible that the vast scope of the Nazi rally grounds, whose remaining eleven square kilometers still take up a significant chunk of the city itself, will prevent any kind of ultimate closure to the problem in the near or mid-term future. For the foreseeable future the bizarre remnants of Nuremberg’s Nazi past will have to inhabit the same space as leisuretime and other activities in the present. Glaser’s project of trivialization will coexist with Sembach’s and Mihm’s project of against-the-grain understanding. In view of the World Cup soccer tournament scheduled to take place in Germany in 2006, mayor Ulrich Maly argued in 2003 that the city must do something about the rest of the rally grounds, because the stadium in which some of the soccer games would occur was located on the Nazi rally grounds, in the very space where the Nazi Führer had once addressed his Hitler Youth. “At the latest by 2005,” Maly argued, “the cameras of the world will be focused on our stadium. It is essential for the city of Nuremberg to be able by then to offer a visible, meaningful

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approach to the architectural heritage of the Nazis that goes beyond the Documentation Center.”149 One of the suggestions made by Maly and his team was to hold a series of regular exhibitions at the Nazi rally grounds, similar to Kassel’s prestigious international Documenta art exhibit, at which scholars, artists, and city planners from around the world could address the various challenges posed by the area “in order to demonstrate the significance of the site for the world community.”150 The key point of Maly’s suggestion was that, as the failed architectural contest had shown, there could be no single city-planning or architectural solution to the problems posed by the former Nazi rally grounds, and that a democratic, pluralistic society should respond to those problems in a democratic, pluralistic way. Maly proclaimed: “In Nuremberg we do not want any ‘counter-monumentalism’ à la Eisenman’s design for the Holocaust monument in Berlin.”151 Above all, Maly argued, the city should learn to view the Nazi rally grounds not just as an unpleasant reminder of a difficult past but as a genuine opportunity for learning and dialogue: “The historic space offers Nuremberg the chance to think self-confidently and openly about its own and Germany’s past.”152 In January of 2004 Maly and the city of Nuremberg held a meeting at which various experts once more discussed possible solutions to the problem of the Nazi rally grounds. The solution that Maly and others proposed was in concert with their ideas of 2003: in essence not to provide a solution and simply to accept the uncomfortable legacy of the rally grounds in all of its complexity and with all of its contradictions.153 This was a problem that was in essence too large to be solved, they seemed to be arguing; but at the very least the problem could be made apparent in all its complexity. Maly’s invocation of the Berlin Holocaust memorial is rhetorically significant. Whereas that controversial national site — which opened in May of 2005 in conjunction with the sixtieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War — was to provide a central, permanent, and solemn location for the commemoration of the Holocaust, Maly was proposing that Nuremberg’s Nazi rally grounds should provide an uncentered and ever-changing, flexible approach, with a variety of uses ranging from solemn commemoration to banal recreation and entertainment. Maly jokingly but accurately referred to Nuremberg’s rally grounds as the “largest Nazi open-air museum in the world.”154 In May of 2004 Maly’s proposals for the Nazi rally grounds were accepted by Nuremberg’s city council, and the city officially committed itself to the concept of a flexible but historically conscientious approach to the area. Certain of the major sites, such as the Zeppelin tribune and the congress hall, would be protected from any further destruction, but other areas would be open to cautious and reasonable change. Meanwhile, the city would make additional information about the site available on twentyfive columns located strategically throughout the area, and visitors would also, it was hoped, ultimately have the opportunity to borrow electronic

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tour guides at the Documentation Center that would give them further insight into the history of the rally grounds, enhancing self-guided tours.155 Maly’s proposed non-solution is intentionally provisional, leaving itself open to other solutions, suggestions, and interventions. It is a reflection of how difficult Nuremberg’s — and Germany’s — attempts to come to terms with the Nazi past have been. And yet in a sense the openness and indecisiveness of this solution are fitting. The party rally grounds themselves were a Nazi attempt to eliminate discussion and provide a monumental legacy that would endure and impress for all time. The solution that the city of Nuremberg and its leaders were groping towards in the first years of the twenty-first century was a very different one — one that would encourage an active, critical, and open confrontation with a difficult legacy.

Notes 1

Richard J. H. Johnston, “Nazi Shrine City Now Hideous Spot,” New York Times, 21 April 1945, 4. 2 Richard J. H. Johnston, “Desolate Nuremberg Taken on Hitler’s 56th Birthday,” New York Times, 21 April 1945, 1, 4; here, 1. 3

Johnston, “Desolate Nuremberg,” 1.

4

Ernst Wiechert, “Über Kunst und Künstler: Aus einer ungesprochenen Rede,” Aufbau 2, no. 1 (January 1946): 1–8; here, 5. Original German: “die Mission, die das amerikanische Volk mit der Niederkämpfung der Barbarei und mit der Besetzung deutscher Gebiete auf sich genommen hat, die schwerste und größte Aufgabe seiner Geschichte darstelle.” 5 Cited in Cornelia D. J. Pearsall, “The Poet and the Postwar City,” Raritan 17, no. 2 (Fall 1997): 104–20; here, 108. Further references are given in the text using the page number alone. 6 Gertrud von le Fort, “Vergessenes Vaterland,” in Gertrud von le Fort, Gedichte (Munich: Ehrenwirth, 1970), 35–39; here, 38. In German: “Die hohen, heiteren Namen jahrhundertealten Ruhms / Als Grabschrift zu Häupten: / Stadt neben Stadt, Gebein an Gebein gedrängt, — / O nichts mehr als nackte Gebeine — Asche bei Asche: / Die Märtyrerleichen der Kirchen, die Leiber der mächtigen Türme. . . .” 7

Cited in Pearsall, “The Poet and the Postwar City,” 109.

8

Pearsall, “The Poet and the Postwar City,” 110.

9

James Stern, The Hidden Damage (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947), 286. Of course the statue was and is made of bronze, not stone; however it stands on a pedestal of stone. 10

W. H. Auden, “Memorial for the City,” in Auden, Collected Shorter Poems, 1927–1957 (New York: Random House, 1964), 289–93; here, 289–90. 11 Auden, “Memorial for the City,” 292. Also cited in Pearsall, “The Poet and the Postwar City,” 111–12.

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12 See Colin W. Nettelbeck, “Robbe-Grillet and Friends in Nuremberg: Exorcizing the Service du Travail Obligatoire,” French Cultural Studies 3, no. 3 (October 1992): 235–51. 13 Joseph Gelin, Nüremberg, 1943–45: L’Expérience d’un Prêtre-Ouvrier (PetitClamart (Seine): Les Documents du Centre Jeunesse de l’Église, 1946), 29–30. Citations from this work are my own translations. Further references to this work will be made in the text using page numbers alone. 14

Alain Robbe-Grillet, Ghosts in the Mirror, trans. Jo Levy (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1988), 35. Spelling corrected. Further references to this work will be made in the text using the page number alone. 15

On the concept of inner emigration, see my book German Literary Culture at the Zero Hour (Rochester: Camden House, 2004), 90–114; and Neil H. Donahue and Doris Kirchner, eds., Flight of Fantasy: New Perspectives on Inner Emigration in German Literature, 1933–1945 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2003). 16

Robbe-Grillet, Ghosts in the Mirror, 114–15.

17

Claude Ollier, Disconnection, trans. Dominic Di Bernardi (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive P, 1989), 19. Further references to this work will be made in the text using page numbers alone. 18 See W. G. Sebald, Luftkrieg und Literatur (Munich: Hanser, 1999). In English, Sebald, “Air War and Literature,” in On the Natural History of Destruction, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2003), 1–104. 19 Peter de Mendelssohn, “Nürnberg/Dezember 1945,” in Peter de Mendelssohn, Überlegungen: Vermischte Aufsätze (Hamburg: Wolfgang Krüger, 1948), 20–35; here, 21. Original German: “die Faszination des Schrecklichen, die unwiderstehliche Anziehungskraft der Agonie und des Todes!” 20

Mendelssohn, “Nürnberg/Dezember 1945,” 22. Original German: “Sentimentalität, Trauer, Klage über die verlorenen, unerstzlichen Schätze”; “Ich fühlte tief verletzt, aber nach Weinen war mir nicht zumute.” 21

Julius Rodenberg, In deutschen Landen: Skizzen und Ferienreisen (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1874), 282.

22 W. G. Sebald, Nach der Natur: Ein Elementargedicht (Nördlingen: Franz Greno, 1988), 73–74. In English, W. G. Sebald, After Nature, trans. Michael Hamburger (New York: Random House, 2002), 86. Original German: “In der Nacht auf den 28. flogen / 582 Maschinen einen Angriff / auf Nürnberg. Die Mutter, / die am anderen Morgen / nachhause ins Allgäu / zurückfahren wollte, / ist mit der Bahn bloß / bis nach Fürth gekommen. / Von dort aus sah sie / Nürnberg in Flammen stehn, / weiß aber heut nicht mehr / wie die brennende Stadt aussah / und was für Gefühle sie / bei ihrem Anblick bewegten. / Sie sei, so erzählte sie neulich, / von Fürth aus am selben Tag noch / nach Windsheim zu einer Bekannten / gefahren, wo sie das Schlimmste / abgewartet und gemerkt habe, daß / sie schwanger geworden sei.” 23 W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (Munich: Carl Hanser, 2001), 317. In English, W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2001), 222. Original German: “also war Deutschland, sagte Austerlitz, für mich das wohl unbekannteste aller Länder, fremder sogar als Afghanistan oder Paraguay.”

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24 Sebald, Austerlitz, 318; Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Bell, 223. Original German: “Es beunruhigte mich, daß ich, wenn ich emporblickte an den Fassaden zu beiden Seiten der Straße, selbst an den ihrem Stil nach älteren, bis in das 16. oder 15. Jahrhundert zurückgehenden Gebäuden nirgends, weder an den Eckkanten, noch an den Giebeln, Fensterstöcken oder Gesimsen eine krumme Linie erkennen konnte oder sonst eine Spur der vergangenen Zeit.” 25 Sebald, Austerlitz, 242; Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Bell, 168. Original German: “einem einzigen Lebewesen zusammengewachsenen und von sonderbaren Kontraktionen durchlaufenen und durchzuckten Menge.” 26 Sebald, Austerlitz, 242–43; Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Bell, 168–69. Original German: “spitz- und krummgiebelige Häuser mit den traubenweise aus den Fenstern heraushängenden Bewohnern einem hoffnungslos überfüllten Ghetto glichen, in das nun, so habe Maximilian gesagt, der Heilsbringer einzog, auf den man so lange geharrt hatte.” 27

Wolfgang Hilbig, Das Provisorium (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2000), 14. Original German: “Nürnberg war eine Stadt der Reminiszenzen, eine Stadt der Nachbildungen; er hatte den Eindruck, jedes Gran des menschlichen Wesens sei in dieser Stadt vervielfältigt worden, damit man es in den Boutiquen anbieten könne.” 28

Rolf Schneider, “Miniatur über Nürnberg,” in Nürnberg in alten und neuen Reisebeschreibungen, ed. Barbara Fürst (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1990), 240–41; here, 241. Original German: “sanfte Novalis-Romantik”; “eng und verbissen und glanzlos und mit bloß eschatologischen Tröstungen.”

29 Wolfgang Koeppen, “Proportionen der Melancholie,” in Fürst, Nürnberg in alten und neuen Reisebeschreibungen, 247–51; here, 247. Original German: “Gott kam nicht zu mir in seiner Kirche in Nürnberg. Und die ästhetische Freude, die bloße Betrachtung des Schönen . . . ließen mich kalt an diesem kalten Mittag.” 30 Alfred Kerr, “Nürnberg eine Schutthalde 1947,” in Fürst, Nürnberg in alten und neuen Reisebeschreibungen, 227–28; here, 227. Original German: “ein Grauen ohne Tragik: nur noch was Unangenehmes. Eine Ruppigkeit. Eine Häßlichkeit.” 31 Thomas Berger, Crazy in Berlin (1958; New York: Delta/Seymour Lawrence, 1982), 359. 32

For reproductions of these works, see Mark Rosenthal, Anselm Kiefer (Chicago and Philadelphia: The Art Institute of Chicago and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1987), 100–105.

33 Paul Celan, “Todesfuge,” trans. Christopher Middleton, in Modern German Poetry, 1910–1960, ed. Michael Hamburger and Christopher Middleton (London: Macgibbon & Lee, 1966), 318–21. 34

Joseph E. Persico, Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial (New York: Penguin, 1995), 37.

35

Ilja Ehrenburg, “In Nürnberg,” in Der Nürnberger Lernprozess: Von Kriegsverbrechern und Starreportern, ed. Steffen Radlmaier (Frankfurt: Eichborn, 2001), 160–72; here, 161. In my German-language source: “die Frevler dort zu richten, wo sie ihre Freveltaten vorbereiteten.” 36 Erich Kästner, “Streiflichter aus Nürnberg,” in In Deutschland unterwegs: Reportagen, Skizzen, Berichte, 1945–1948, ed. Klaus R. Scherpe (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1982), 312–20; here, 313. Original German: “Die Menschen sind unheimliche

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Leute. Wer seine Schwiegermutter totschlägt, wird geköpft. Das ist ein uralter verständlicher Brauch. Wer aber Hundertausende umbringt, erhält ein Denkmal. Straßen werden nach ihm benannt.” 37

Gregor von Rezzori, “Das Schlußwort von Rudolf Heß,” in Radlmaier, Der Nürnberger Lernprozess, 287–300; here, 291. Original German: “der verzweifelte Versuch der Aufwertung der Phrasen, auf denen unsere Zivilisation beruht, die noble und klägliche Donquichotterie der abendländischen Fiktionen gegen die Wirklichkeit der menschlichen Natur.”

38

Cited in Persico, Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial, 135–36.

39

Cited in Persico, Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial, 137.

40

Rezzori, “Das Schlußwort von Rudolf Heß,” 291. Original German: “auf Phrasen aufbebaut . . . und also nichts anderes ins Feld zu führen hat als eben Phrasen.” 41

Reichsjustizkommissar Dr. Frank, “Die Einwirkung des nationalsozialistischen Ideengutes auf das deutsche Rechtsleben,” in Der Kongreß zu Nürnberg vom 5. bis 10. September 1934: Offizieller Bericht über den Verlauf des Reichsparteitags mit sämtlichen Reden (Munich: Eher, 1934), 187–92; here, 189. During the war Frank had also been the governor-general of Poland. Original German: “Der einzelne kann im Recht nur soviel gelten, als er der Gemeinschaft wert ist.” 42

Persico, Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial, 33–34.

43

See Persico, Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial, 250 and 358–59.

44

Persico, Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial, 35.

45

Anna J. Merritt and Richard L. Merritt, eds., Public Opinion in Occupied Germany: The OMGUS Surveys, 1945–1949 (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1970), 34–35.

46


47

Michael Salzer, “Deutsches Schuldbewußtsein,” in Radlmaier, Der Nürnberger Lernprozess, 34–36; here, 35. In my German-language source: “Oh, diese Nazis! Natürlich sind sie schuldig. Schauen Sie sich nur den Schlamassel an, den sie uns beschert haben. Sie haben uns den Himmel auf Erden versprochen und brachten uns statt dessen die Hölle.” 48

Erik Reger, “Das Weltgericht in Nürnberg,” Aufbau 2, no. 1 (1946): 18–22; here, 18. Original German: “der erste Gerichtshof der Weltgeschichte”; “einzigartige Bedeutung”; “in der Tatsache, daß hier zum ersten Male Vorbereitung und Führung eines Angriffskrieges als Verbrechen gebrandmarkt und Verschwörung gegen die Menschenrechte unter eine andere als nur rhetorische Anklage gestellt wird.” 49 Reger, “Das Weltgericht in Nürnberg,” 19. Original German: “Wer nicht die Kraft zur Freiheit fand, kann auch kein Urteil sprechen.” 50 Reger, “Das Weltgericht in Nürnberg,” 20. Original German: “die Ethik des Menschengeschlechts.” 51

Reger, “Das Weltgericht in Nürnberg,” 21. Original German: “daß das englische Wort ‘homicide,’ Menschenmord, nicht ausreichte, sondern ein neues erfunden werden mußte, ‘genocide,’ Ausrottung von Geschlechtern und Rassen.” 52

Reger, “Das Weltgericht in Nürnberg,” 21. Original German: “Für die Zukunft ist auch jeder Staatsmann, jeder General, jeder Fabrikant, jeder hetzerische

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Schreiber und Redner gewarnt. Die Völkerrechtler der Zukunft werden darauf ein neues internationales Strafrechtssystem gründen. . . .” 53 Reger, “Das Weltgericht in Nürnberg,” 21–22. Original German: “Je weniger das Nürnberger Gericht sich in die Toga formalen Rechtes hüllt, je ehrlicher das politische Element zum Ausdruck kommt, desto größer und belehrender wird sein Urteil vor der Geschichte dastehen, desto mehr wird der Ort, an dem es stattfindet, aus der Sphäre eines gesuchten Symbols in die einer sittlichen Kraft, der Überwindung des Bösen, rücken.” 54 Kästner, “Streiflichter aus Nürnberg,” 320. Original German: “wie die Pest und die Cholera.” 55

“Nürnberg,” Die Gegenwart 1, no. 1 (24 December 1945): 1–2; here, 1. Author not named. 56 “Nürnberg,” 2. Original German: “Vielleicht erinnert sich der Geist der Deutschen an den Mann, der, unweit jenes Saales, in dem die Welt das Recht ergründet, vor über vierhundert Jahren seine Zeichen in die Kupferplatte ritzte. Er sieht nicht auf, er weiß nicht, was draußen geschieht, er sieht um so deutlicher das innere Ereignis. Er blickt in die Tiefe der menschlichen Seele und weiß, daß da auch der Abgrund lauert. Das Wesen, das er zeichnet, hat aus der erlahmten Hand den Zirkel, das Gerät des rechnenden Verstandes, sinken lassen; das von soviel Ruhm bekränzte und beschattete Haupt rührt sich nicht, als sei es versteint. Nur die Augen glühen, großartige Fackeln der Trauer. Der Mann, in dessen Seele diese Figur aufgetaucht ist, Albrecht Dürer hat seinem Volk das letzte Hoffen, das in der Nachdenklichkeit liegt, auch dann nicht geraubt, als er das Wort ‘Melancholia’ den brütenden Himmel zerschneiden ließ.” 57

Berger, Crazy in Berlin, 359.

58

Berger, Crazy in Berlin, 360.

59

Ehrenburg, “In Nürnberg,” 172. Original German: “Dürer ist nicht schuld daran, daß der Führer kam.” 60

Peter de Mendelssohn, “The Two Nuernbergs,” The Nation 161, no. 22 (1 December 1945): 569–70; here, 569.

61

Mendelssohn, “The Two Nuernbergs,” 570.

62

Mendelssohn, “Nürnberg/Dezember 1945,” 24. Original German: “Bündel von Niemanden.” 63 Kästner, “Streiflichter aus Nürnberg,” 317. Original German: “ein schlecht vorbereiteter Abiturient im Examen.” 64 Cited in Klaus R. Scherpe, “Erzwungener Alltag: Wahrgenommene und gedachte Wirklichkeit in der Reportageliteratur der Nachkriegszeit,” in Nachkriegsliteratur in Westdeutschland, 1945–1949: Schreibweisen, Gattungen, Institutionen, ed. Jost Hermand, Helmut Peitsch, and Klaus Scherpe (Berlin: Argument, 1982), 35–102; here, 70. Original German: “Mordgrossisten.” 65 Robert Haerdter, “Gerichtstag in Nürnberg,” Die Gegenwart 1, no. 4/5 (24 February 1946): 17–20; here, 20. Original German: “überhaupt keinen Eindruck machen”; “unwirksam.” 66 Rezzori, “Das Schlußwort von Rudolf Heß,” 289. Original German: “Das Böse will sich nicht fassen lassen”; “Die Angeklagten von Nürnberg sind nicht in die

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rechte Dimension und Proportion zu bringen, wofür sie vor Gericht stehen”; “die buchstabengetreue Auffassung von Vorschriften und Regeln. Sie haben nichts anderes getan als ihre Pflicht.” 67 Dolf Sternberger, “Tagebuch: Die reine Wahrheit und das Köpfchen,” Die Wandlung 1, no. 8 (August 1946): 643–48; here, 645. Original German: “Es ist wohl der Stil eines persönlichen Referenten, der immer bereit ist auf den Wink seines Herrn, des Ministers, tags oder nachts, im Amt oder zu Hause oder unterwegs”; “stets dienlich und nützlich. Für die Propaganda-Anweisungen von Dr. Goebbels ebenso wie für die Umschulung der Kameraden im englischen Gefangenenlager.” 68

Persico, Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial, 144–55.

69

Erika Mann, “KZ-Filme,” in Radlmaier, Der Nürnberger Lernprozess, 121–25; here, 125. Original German: “Je eher man meinen Mandanten hängt, desto besser.” 70 Rezzori, “Das Schlußwort von Rudolf Heß,” 296. Original German: “Ein Mord ist entsetzlich und verwerflich. Der Mord an zehn Personen ist eine Ungeheuerlichkeit. Der Mord an 100 Menschen treibt schon an die Grenzen des Vorstellbaren. Der Mord an mehreren Millionen ist ein Abstraktum, das sich nicht mehr anders als statistisch fassen läßt. Das Verbrechen wird zu einer Angelegenheit von Quanten.” 71 Haerdter, “Gerichtstag in Nürnberg,” 20. Original German: “Je höher und finsterer sich der Berg der Schuld um sie türmt, gerade auch der persönlichen, der unmittelbar zu verantwortenden und nicht nur der objektiven Schuld, desto schemenhafter wird ihre historische Gestalt. Sie sind nicht mehr Geschichte! Sie, die sich einst zu den Männern zählten, die Geschichte machen, sind von der Geschichte selbst zunichte, zur Nichtigkeit, zum Nichts geworden.” 72 Rezzori, “Das Schlußwort von Rudolf Heß,” 291. Original German: “gespenstischen Spektakel”; “nichts hat eigentlich Wirklichkeit.” 73

Alexander Mitscherlich and Margarete Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern: Grundlagen kollektiven Verhaltens (Munich: Piper, 1991). In English: The Inability to Mourn: Principles of Collective Behavior, trans. Beverley R. Placzek (New York: Grove P, 1975).

74 Alexander Mitscherlich, “Geschichtsschreibung und Psychoanalyse: Bemerkungen zum Nürnberger Prozeß,” Die Fähre 1, no. 1 (1946): 29–39; here, 29. Original German: “menschliches Fassungsvermögen”; “der Prozeß der Unmenschlichkeit heute nahezu vollmechanisiert.” 75 Mitscherlich, “Geschichtsschreibung und Psychoanalyse,” 30. Original German: “erinnerte Geschichte der Menschen und Darstellung der Art und Weise, wie sie sich auf der Welt einrichten.” 76 Mitscherlich, “Geschichtsschreibung und Psychoanalyse,” 31. Original German: “Kann man aus der Geschichte lernen?” 77 Mitscherlich, “Geschichtsschreibung und Psychoanalyse,” 32. Original German: “Shakespeare und Schiller haben . . . mehr geleistet als Generationen von historischen Arbeitern.” 78 Mitscherlich, “Geschichtsschreibung und Psychoanalyse,” 37. Original German: “eine Schulung im Erinnern.”

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79 Mitscherlich, “Geschichtsschreibung und Psychoanalyse,” 38. Original German: “Lernen kann man aus der Geschichte nur, wenn man genaue Kenntnis von der menschlichen Gebärdung hat, durch welche sie befördert wird.” 80 Mendelssohn, “Nürnberg/Dezember 1945,” 29. Original German: “weil wir noch immer nicht den Versuch aufgegeben haben, der ganzen Sache einen Sinn einzuflößen, aus dem kochenden Hexenkessel von Verrücktheit und Wahn schließlich doch noch etwas Vernunft und Klarblick zu destillieren.” 81

Alfred Döblin, “Der Prozeß beginnt,” in Radlmaier, Der Nürnberger Lernprozess, 43–47; here, 45. Original German: “Riesentheater . . ., und mit den andern Nationen folgen wir der Darbietung, und wir in einer besonderen Spannung.” 82

Haerdter, “Gerichtstag in Nürnberg,” 19. Original German: “Während ich meinen Platz suche, ist mir zumute wie im Kino, wenn die Vorstellung schon begonnen hat.” 83 Haerdter, “Gerichtstag in Nürnberg,” 19. Original German: “als könnte plötzlich mein Schattenbild auf der eingebildeten Leinwand erscheinen”; “genau wie im Kino.” 84 Haerdter, “Gerichtstag in Nürnberg,” 19. Original German: “auf einem entfernten Gestirn in keimfreier Atmosphäre”; “hier sei das Vakuum selber sichtbar geworden, in das die deutsche Nation geraten ist und aus dem sie noch keinen Ausweg gefunden hat.” 85 Reger, “Das Weltgericht in Nürnberg,” 22. Original German: “Die Resonanz, die die Verhandlungen im deutschen Volke finden, ist noch schwer abzuschätzen. Man erkennt ein gewisses neugieriges Interesse, zuweilen auch zweifelndes Staunen, selten echte Befriedigung.” 86

Christine Bartlitz, “Der Nürnberger Prozeß in Reportagen und Kommentaren des Berliner Rundfunks 1945/46,” in Schuld und Sühne? Kriegserlebnis und Kriegsdeutung in deutschen Medien der Nachkriegszeit, ed. Ursula Heukenkamp, vol. 2 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), 555–66; here, 565–66. Original German:”. . . müssen wir leider eingestehen, daß die meisten Deutschen die große politische und geschichtliche Bedeutung des Nürnberger Prozesses noch nicht erkannt haben und sich für den Prozeß und seine Ergebnisse viel zu wenig interessieren. In allen öffentlichen Verkehrsmitteln oder wo sonst Menschen zusammenkommen, wurde in den vergangenen Monaten über alle möglichen Fragen unendlich viel mehr diskutiert, als über den Nürnberber Prozeß. Das allgemeine Gesprächsthema sind die bedrückenden Alltagssorgen, der Mangel an allem Lebensnotwendigen und die Auswirkungen der Besatzung.” 87 Kurt J. Fischer, “US-Zone 1947,” in So lebten wir, ed. Hans A. Rümelin (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1997), 3–27; here, 19. Original German: “In einem Zigarettengeschäft, in dem auch mit Papier gehandelt wird, will ein Käufer ein Farbband erstehen — ‘Ja, gegen 500 Gramm Altpapier.’ — Er sieht auf einen Stapel Broschüren: ‘Das Urteil im Nürnberger Kriegsverbrecherprozeß.’ — ‘Was kostet das?’ — ‘1,30.’ — ‘Kann ich zwei haben?’ — ‘Ja — bitte —’ So nimmt er zwei Broschüren, zerreißt sie vor den Augen der entsetzten Verkäuferin und gibt ihr die Reste: ‘Bitte, 500 Gramm Altpapier!’ ” 88 “Vor dem Nürnberger Spruch,” Die Gegenwart 1, no. 18/19 (24 September 1946): 1. No author named. Original German: “eine beispiellose Dokumentation zu einer beispiellosen Epoche.”

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89 Benno Reifenberg, “Epilog zu Nürnberg,” Die Gegenwart 1, no. 24/25 (31 December 1946): 9–11. 90


91

Abby Mann, Judgment at Nuremberg: The Script of the Film (London: Cassell, 1961), 79. Further references to this work will be made in the text using page numbers alone. 92

In reality, of course, it would have been highly unlikely for a Republican to have been elected judge in North Carolina in the 1940s. At that time the state, like the entire South, was dominated by the Democrats. 93

Abby Mann, Judgment at Nuremberg (New York: New Directions, 2002), xix.

94

William F. Buckley, Nuremberg: The Reckoning (New York: Harcourt, 2002), 365–66. 95 Wolfgang Koeppen, “Proportionen der Melancholie,” in Fürst, Nürnberg in alten und neuen Reisebeschreibungen, 247–51; here, 251. Original German: “Reißbrettsatellitenstadt.” 96 Horst Krüger, “Nürnberger Augenblicke,” in Fürst, Nürnberg in alten und neuen Reisebeschreibungen, 242–46; here, 246. Original German: “weiße Türme, weiße Wohnsilos, kleine Wolkenkratzer, das Einkaufszentrum, Satelittenluft”; “die schöne, schreckliche Vision unserer Zukunft. So werden wir alle einmal leben, und draußen in Langwasser ist das zu besichtigen.” 97 Koeppen, “Proportionen der Melancholie,” 249. Original German: “schöne deutsche Geschichte, schöne deutsche Sitte, schöne deutsche Religion, schöne deutsche Kunst.” 98 Koeppen, “Proportionen der Melancholie,” 249. Original German: “Nürnberg, sagt man, sei das Germanische Museum, und das Germanische Museum wäre Nürnberg.” 99 Hermann Glaser et al., Museum und demokratische Gesellschaft: Vorüberlegungen zum Konzept eines historischen Museums für Nürnbergs Industriekultur (Nuremberg: Medien und Kultur, 1979), 9. Original German: “In komplexen Staatswesen hat Kultur und damit auch Kulturpolitik die wichtige Aufgabe, gesamtgesellschaftliche und auch nationale Identität herzustellen.” 100 Glaser et al., Museum und demokratische Gesellschaft, 9. Original German: “die beste Demokratie, die Deutschland je hatte”; “zielgerichteter Förderung und Verstärkung.” 101

Glaser et al., Museum und demokratische Gesellschaft, 11. Original German: “anonymen Menschen, seine Irrtümer und Leistungen, seine Bedeutsamkeit und Tragik in den Mittelpunkt.”

102

Glaser et al., Museum und demokratische Gesellschaft, 13. Original German: “Von den Industrie-, Wohn- und Sozialbauten der letzten eineinhalb Jahrhunderte müßten zumindest exemplarisch in allen Städten so viele erhalten werden, daß auf diese Weise die Wurzeln unseres Lebens auf ‘sinnlich’ nachvollziehbare Weise dargelegt werden können.”

103

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, UN General Assembly Resolution 217A (III), 10 December 1948. http://www.hrw.org/universal.html

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104 See Gerhard Bott, ed., Straße der Menschenrechte, exhibition catalogue (Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 1993); and Peter Laub and Konrad Scheurmann, eds., Straße der Menschenrechte: Dani Karavan⫽Way of Human Rights (Bonn: Arbeitskreis selbständiger Kulturinstitute, 1995). 105

“Alles spricht für Nürnberg: Der Internationale Strafgerichtshof sucht ein Domizil — Fragen an den Oberbürgermeister der Stadt der Kriegsverbrecherprozesse,” Die Zeit, 16 April 1998, 19. Original German: “Die Stadt bemüht sich, zu einem Zentrum der Menschenrechte zu werden.” Scholz, who governed Nuremberg from 1996–2002, was the city’s only CSU mayor to date. 106

http://www.menschenrechte.nuernberg.de/index.php?navi⫽1&rid⫽ 94314e96060e06d3959841982e37c57f. Accessed on 4 April 2005. Original German: “Nürnberg — eine Stadt stellt sich der Geschichte.”

107 Andreas Franke, “ ‘Documenta’ für das Reichsparteitagsgelände,” Nürnberger Nachrichten, 8–9 February 2003, 13–14; here, 14. Original German: “dass das Nürnberg von heute mit dem Nürnberg unterm Hakenkreuz nicht das Geringste mehr zu tun hat.” 108 Lisa Wandt, Stummzeiten: Deutsche Erinnerungskultur nach 1945 am Beispiel des Umgangs mit dem Reichsparteitagsgelände Nürnberg (Diplomarbeit, Freie Universität Berlin, Otto-Suhr-Institut für Politikwissenschaft, 2005), 95. Wandt cites from the Süddeutsche Zeitung, 24 August 2001. 109

Eric Rentschler, “Remembering Not to Forget: A Retrospective Reading of Kluge’s Brutality in Stone,” New German Critique no. 49 (Winter 1990): 23–41; here, 23. Further references to this work will be made in the text using the page number alone. 110

Cited in Eckart Dietzfelbinger and Gerhard Liedtke, Nürnberg — Ort der Massen: Das Reichsparteitagsgelände — Vorgeschichte und schwieriges Erbe (Berlin: Christoph Links, 2004), 110. I am indebted to this book for much of my account of developments and debates surrounding the party rally grounds. Original German: “Es handelt sich um ein Bauwerk, das nur den Wert eines Kuriosums besitzt. . . . Der Wert der Zeppelintribüne als Attraktion für den Fremdenverkehr ist mehr als fragwürdig; die Werte, die Nürnberg seinen Gästen zu bieten hat, liegen wohl auf wesentlich anderem Gebiet.”

111

Wandt, Stummzeiten, 73. Original German: “Also ich habe ein gespaltenes Verhältnis zu einer Denkmalspflege, die die Dokumente, die Bauformen des Dritten Reiches konserviert, weil ich dem keine besondere Bedeutung zumesse.” Although Wandt keeps her sources anonymous, it is clear from the context that this interview partner is Hermann Glaser, Nuremberg’s former cultural commissioner.

112

Cited in Dietzfelbinger and Liedtke, Nürnberg — Ort der Massen, 111. Original German: “Nürnberg ist bemüht, die Erinnerung an seine Vergangenheit als Stadt der Reichsparteitage auszumerzen. Risse in den Decken der Pfeilergalerie auf der großen Steintribüne am Zeppelinfeld bieten eine gute Gelegenheit, wieder ein Stück des Erbes nationalsozialistischer Vergangenheit niederreißen zu lassen.”

113 Cited in Dietzfelbinger and Liedtke, Nürnberg — Ort der Massen, 111. Original German: “Das Bauwerk ist ein Dokument der Geschichte. Es ist falsch, historische Relikte zu beseitigen, auch wenn sie aus einer verabscheuungswürdigen Epoche stammen.”

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Dietzfelbinger and Liedtke, Nürnberg — Ort der Massen, 111–12.

115

Cited in Eckart Dietzfelbinger, Der Umgang der Stadt Nürnberg mit dem früheren Reichsparteitagsgelände, Beiträge zur politischen Bildung no. 9 (Nuremberg: Pädagogisches Institut, 1990), 26. Original German: “Keine Stadt der Bundesrepublik hat so deutliche Spuren der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft aufzuweisen wie Nürnberg.” 116 The CSU was and is the governing party of Bavaria; it exists only in Bavaria, and at the federal level it works together with the Christian Democratic Union (CDU, Christlich-Demokratische Union), which has, for most of the Federal Republic’s postwar history, been the governing party. Nuremberg, on the other hand, has generally been governed by the Social Democratic Party (SPD, Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands). 117

Cited in Dietzfelbinger, Der Umgang der Stadt Nürnberg, 31. Original German: “daß sich Nationalsozialismus und Faschismus nie mehr wiederholen.” Urschlechter, a member of the Social Democratic Party until 1982, governed Nuremberg for an unusually long time, from 1957 to 1987.

118

Cited in Dietzfelbinger, Der Umgang der Stadt Nürnberg, 31. Original German: “Wir haben hier auf diesem Gelände gezögert, weil wir dachten, es sollte von selbst zerfallen. . . . Wir haben gedacht, man lasse es als Mausoleum überstehen. Es ist aber deutlich geworden, daß sehr viele Besucher hier ohne Informationen dieses Gelände bestaunen.”

119 Cited in Dietzfelbinger, Der Umgang der Stadt Nürnberg, 41, n. 22. Original German: “Unser Ziel für unser Projekt war von Anfang an, eine Belebung der Kaufkraftströme nach Nürnberg zu erreichen.” 120

Siegfried Ruckdeschel, “Plädoyer für den Verfall,” Nürnberger Nachrichten, 23–24 May 1987, 13. Original German: “Die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Faschismus hat in diesem Lande ja nie richtig stattgefunden.”

121 “Kongreßhalle als Mahnmal im Verfall,” Nürnberger Zeitung, 23 May 1987, 13. Author listed as “we” but not spelled out. Original German: “ganz fürchterlich.” 122

Erika Sanden, “ ‘Leben in die Bude,’ ” Plärrer 10, no. 7 (July 1987): 18. Original German: “Verdrängen, vergessen, entsorgen.”

123 Sanden, “ ‘Leben in die Bude,’ ” 18. Original German: “nur aus fehlendem Geschichtsbewußtsein. Nürnberg hat seine Geschichte als ‘Stadt der Reichsparteitage’ bis heute nicht angenommen.” 124 Sanden, “ ‘Leben in die Bude,’ ” 18. Original German: “Geschichtsmonumente des deutschen Volkes.” 125 Sanden, “ ‘Leben in die Bude,’ ” 18. Original German: “Die Restbauten des Reichsparteitagsgeländes sind historische Denkmäler wie die Burg, die Kirchen und das Germanische Nationalmuseum.” 126 Cited in Dietzfelbinger, Der Umgang der Stadt Nürnberg, 19–20. Original German: “der wichtigsten Zeugnisse der Gigantomanie des Nationalsozialismus”; “Mahnmal einer für die heutige Generation unvorstellbar gewordenen Staatsidee. Mahnmal auch für die Zerstörungen, die diese Staatsidee hervorgerufen hat.”

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127

Cited in Dietzfelbinger, Der Umgang der Stadt Nürnberg, 33. Original German: “Kein Abriß, aber auch keine Schönheitsreparatur. Allenfalls Sicherheitsrestaurierung. Außerdem unfangreich informieren über den ursprünglichen Zweck der Gebäude und möglichst trivial nutzen.”

128

Gerhard Stapf, “Geschichtsbuch aus Stein rund um den Dutzendteich: CSUStadtrat fordert Dialog über NS-Bauten,” Abendzeitung 8 Uhr-Blatt, 3–4 December 1988, 1. Original German: “Geschichtsbuch aus Stein.” 129

Siegfried Zelnhefer, “Ein bloßes Stehenlassen genügt nicht,” Nürnberger Nachrichten, 3–4 December 1988, 14. 130 “SPD will Akten: Pläne für Ex-Parteitagsgelände,” Nürnberger Nachrichten, 31 January 1989, 1. Original German: “die Stadt der Nürnberger Prozesse.” 131 Siegfried Zelnhefer, “Erstes SPD-Nützungskonzept für das Reichsparteitagsgelände: Museum im Machtbau,” Nürnberger Nachrichten, 31 January 1989, 9. The SPD paper, entitled “Denkschrift über die zukünftige Nützung der Bauten des ehemaligen NSDAP-Reichsparteitagsgeländes,” contained wording that came directly from the “Bürgerkomitee gegen Neonazismus” that had been organized in 1978. For instance, the SPD paper argued that “keine Stadt der Bundesrepublik so deutliche Spuren der nationalsozialistischen Herrschaft aufzuweisen hat wie Nürnberg,” which was precisely the wording used by Helge Cramer in his 1980 letter to Hermann Glaser. 132

Dietzfelbinger, Der Umgang der Stadt Nürnberg, 35–36.

133

Klaus-Jürgen Sembach, “Einführung in ein verwüstetes Gelände,” in Kulissen der Gewalt: Das Reichsparteitagsgelände in Nürnberg, ed. Klaus-Jürgen Sembach (Munich: Hugendubel, 1992), 7–11; here, 9. Original German: “dem gewichtigsten Zeugnis.”

134 Sembach, “Einführung in ein verwüstetes Gelände,” 8–9. Original German: “die spürbare Benommenheit vor dem komplexen Anspruch der nationalsozialistischen Ästhetik hat offensichtlich nicht nur die eigentliche Wahrnehmung und historische Einschätzung behindert, sondern auch die tätige Auseinandersetszung mit ihren Resten gelähmt.” 135 Sembach, “Einführung in ein verwüstetes Gelände,” 9. Original German: “Die Bestimmung Nürnbergs ist es nun, der Fokus aller Versäumnisse zu sein.” Citizens of Nuremberg, Bavaria’s second most populous city, tend to criticize and envy Munich, Bavaria’s capital and most populous city, which many Nurembergers see as enjoying privileged treatment from the Bavarian government. Sembach’s negative reference to Munich is typical of those made by many Nurembergers, including those with political and cultural authority. See Wandt, Stummzeiten, 109. 136 Sembach, “Einführung in ein verwüstetes Gelände,” 10. Original German: “Die jetzt so deprimierend wirkende, da einfach ‘liegengelassene,’ Zeppelintribüne wäre in ihrem Unwert, aber auch ihrer Denkmalhaftigkeit ganz anders zu erfassen, wenn eine moderne Architektur verletzend und brüsk in ihre Stufenfluten einbrechen und diese zum Teil beiseitesprengen würde.” 137

Julius Mihm, De-Komposition Reichsparteitagsgelände Nürnberg (Thesis, Fachbereich Architektur Universität Hannover, 1993); copy available in the Stadtarchiv Nürnberg (Av 5618.4). Mihm’s thesis is unpaginated. Original

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German: “faschistischen Pose”; “einen inneren Weg aus ihr heraus . . ., der eine kritische Rückkehr zuläßt.” 138 Mihm, De-Komposition Reichsparteitagsgelände Nürnberg, n.p. Original German: “Historisch weiträumiger betrachtet”; “gehören die auf dem Gelände vorhandenen Architekturobjekte zu den großen Absurditäten der Weltgeschichte”; “offenen Kunstwerk”; “dialektischen Eingriffe”; “Nicht-Architektur.” 139 Mihm, De-Komposition Reichsparteitagsgelände Nürnberg, n.p. Original German: “mit einer wie auch immer gearteten ‘Gegensymbolik.’ ” 140 Mihm, De-Komposition Reichsparteitagsgelände Nürnberg, n.p. Original German: “strukturelle Logik der vorhandenen, weiterhin propagandistisch strahlenden’ Reste.” 141

Wandt, Stummzeiten, 81.

142

Franz Sonnenberger, Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände Nürnberg: Denkschrift zur Auseinandersetzung mit dem steinernen Erbe der nationalsozialistischen Gewaltherrschaft (Nuremberg: museen der stadt nürnberg, 1996), no page number. Original German: “der Ort der Täter. Hier feierte sich die NaziBewegung auf beinahe obszöne Weise selbst.” Emphasis Sonnenberger’s.

143

Sonnenberger, Dokumentationszentrum, no page number. Original German: “Nürnberg und damit Deutschland insgesamt.”

144 Gregor Schöllgen, “Gutachten,” in Reichsparteitagsgelände Nürnberg: Projekt eines Dokumentationszentrums zur NS-Geschichte (Nuremberg: museen der stadt nürnberg, 1997). Unpaginated. Original German: “Die Einrichtung eines zeitgeschichtlichen Museums auf dem Reichsparteitagsgelände in Nürnberg, das der historischen Bedeutung des Ortes angemessen ist, zählt zu den verbliebenen großen Herausforderungen, welche im Umgang mit der nationalsozialistischen Vergangenheit noch zu meistern sind.” 145 Cited in Steffen Radlmaier and Siegfried Zelnhefer, Tatort Nürnberg: Auf den Spuren des Nationalsozialismus (Cadolzburg: ars vivendi, 2002), 22. Original German: “das Gegenteil von dem, was ich vorfand”; “von dem Bestehenden.” 146

Dietzfelbinger and Liedtke, Nürnberg — Ort der Massen 126–27. Original German: “begehbare Pfahl aus Glas”; “eine in höchstem Maß eindrucksvolle bauliche Metapher. Indem er die ehern gemeinte Wucht des NS-Baus scheinbar mühelos durchschneidet, entlarvt er ihr hohles Pathos.”

147 Benedikt Erenz, “Im Bauch des Wahns: Gelungenes Gehäuse, holpriger Inhalt: In Nürnberg wurde das Dokumentationszentrum zum Reichsparteitagsgelände eröffnet,” Die Zeit, 8 November 2001, 48. For more on the architecture of the Documentation Center, see Bettina Brunner, Architektur als Erinnerungsträger: Das Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände in Nürnberg (Thesis, University of Vienna, 2005). Original German: “Domenig gibt so den unförmigen, nach außen natursteinverblendeten Ziegelkadaver selbst zur Leichenschau frei.” 148 See Stadt Nürnberg, ed., Städtebaulicher Ideenwettbewerb für das ehemalige Reichsparteitagsgelände: Dokumentation (Nuremberg: Stadt Nürnberg, no date). 149

Dr. Ulrich Maly, Wolfgang Baumann, Dr. Uli Glaser, and Dr. Siegfried Zelnhefer, “Ein Diskussionsbeitrag über den Umgang mit dem ehemaligen

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Reichsparteitagsgelände,” 2. This document was released by the mayor of Nuremberg on 7 February 2003 and also made available on the web at www.nuernberg.de. See also Andreas Franke, “ ‘Documenta’ für das Reichsparteitagsgelände,” 13. Original German: “Spätestens ab 2005”; “werden die Kameras der Welt auf unser Stadion gerichtet sein. Dann ist es notwendig, daß die Stadt Nürnberg einen sichtbaren inhaltlichen Umgang mit dem architektonischen Erbe der Nazis anbieten kann, der über das Doku-Zentrum hinausgeht.” 150 Franke, “ ‘Documenta’ für das Reichsparteitagsgelände,” 5. Original German: “um die Bedeutung des Ortes für die Weltgemeinschaft aufzuzeigen.” 151 Franke, “ ‘Documenta’ für das Reichsparteitagsgelände,” 3. Original German: “Wir wollen in Nürnberg keinen ‘Gegenmonumentalismus’ à la Eisenman-Entwurf für das Holocaust-Mahnmal in Berlin.” 152 Franke, “ ‘Documenta’ für das Reichsparteitagsgelände,” 7. Original German: “Das historische Areal bietet Nürnberg die Chance, selbstbewusst und offen über seine und Deutschlands Vergangenheit nachzudenken.” 153 See C. Helldörfer, “Maly will keinen ‘Hain in Kunstharz,’ ” Nürnberger Zeitung, 24–25 January 2004, 9; and Michael Kasperowitsch, “Kein ‘FinalKonzept’: Leitlinien zum Umgang mit früherem NS-Gelände,” Nürnberger Nachrichten, 24–25 January 2004, 14. 154 Michael Kasperowitsch, “Besucher ‘informieren und konfrontieren,’ ” Nürnberger Nachrichten, 12 May 2004, 13. Original German: “größten NaziFreilichtmuseums der Welt.” 155 See Kasperowitsch, “Besucher ‘informieren und konfrontieren,’ ” 13; and Michael Kasperowitsch, “ ‘Grundgesetz’ steht: Konzept der Stadt für das Reichsparteitagsgelände,” Nürnberber Nachrichten, 11 May 2004, 9.

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RANZ STERNBALD, THE FICTIONAL HERO of Ludwig Tieck’s eponymous novel, leaves Nuremberg and sets off on his journey to Holland and Italy only in order to come back to Nuremberg. Franz’s journey away from the city is in reality a journey toward the city. Godfather Drosselmeier’s namesake in Hoffmann’s story-within-the-story in “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” also leaves Nuremberg only in order to come back to that wonderful city whose houses have windows. My trajectory in this book has been a different one. I have traveled from a foreign land to diverse “Nurembergs” at divergent times only in order, now, to leave them behind. Franz Sternbald journeyed abroad in order to arrive in, and discover, Nuremberg. I have traveled to Nuremberg in order to discover the land around it. My path is more like that of Per Daniel Atterbom or Claude Ollier than that of Sternbald or Drosselmeier. Franz Sternbald’s journey was to end at Nuremberg’s major cemetery. My journey ends, in a sense, with the discovery of Nuremberg as a cemetery — Feliks Topolski, writing in the ruined city of 1946, called it “the graveyard of Nuremberg” — a monument to itself and to the dreams of its inventors.1 Like Franz Sternbald, who interrupts his journey to look back at the city from a distance and admire its outline before he continues on to other places, I too will pause and reflect on the city and its contours before I say farewell. Unlike Franz, who left the city on foot, I am leaving Nuremberg on a high-speed Inter-City Express train whose expert crew have a schedule to keep and will not stop the train’s forward progress for me to get out and look back at the city I am leaving. Therefore my survey will have to be imaginary, not real. But since the city I have been visiting, Nuremberg2, was also imaginary, that is not a problem. Franz Sternbald can only appreciate Nuremberg from a distance. It is from there, and not inside the city’s narrow streets, that its many towers can be grasped as a whole. From this perspective various drawings of the city were made in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The same perspectival limitation applies to other cities, even the city of New York, where I was born. Only from New Jersey or Brooklyn can I see Manhattan. Inside Manhattan I cannot see it. From New Jersey I used to be able to see the World Trade Center, and from New Jersey I can still see the space the twin towers once occupied. From midtown I never could see the World Trade Center, and I cannot now see the space where the twin towers are missing. In order to see New York I travel to New Jersey. Walter Benjamin once

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On Schütt island in the middle of the Pegnitz (probably during the 1935 Nazi Party rally). From the volume Wieder Leben: Nürnberg vor 50 Jahren: Fotografien von Ferdinand Vitzethum, ed. Helmut Beer (Nuremberg: W. Tümmels, 1997), 94. Permission to reproduce image courtesy of the Stadtarchiv Nürnberg. expressed this paradox by reminding his readers that a building’s façade disappears from view whenever we walk into it.2 As a Berliner who had traveled to Moscow, he wrote: “What one learns to see faster than Moscow itself in Moscow is Berlin.”3 This phenomenon of distance is all the more true for the various Nurembergs that I have visited. In order to see Nuremberg, I leave it. Only from a middle distance — not too close and not too far — can I assess the various Nurembergs in their diversity and comprehend their connection to each other and to the landscape around them. And only from inside the city can I comprehend that landscape as a landscape. What is it that I see as I pause on my journey and look back at

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the city and its towers? Or, to put it another way, what has the study of Nuremberg revealed about Germany and German culture? I see first and foremost a place. From a distance it looks relatively small. “Such a tiny place, tiny enough that one could hold it in the palm of one’s hand,” as Peter de Mendelssohn noted in December of 1945.4 A tiny river called the Pegnitz runs through it. The Pegnitz separates two halfcities, one on each side of the river, each centered on its major church. To walk at a leisurely pace from St. Sebald in the north to St. Lorenz in the south might take me about ten minutes. To walk from the center of town to the city’s outer edge might take me an additional five minutes. Of course the outer edge is no longer really the end of the city. True, Nuremberg is still surrounded by a sturdy wall. But outside the wall there are newer parts of Nuremberg. And yet everyone in those newer parts knows that the city is the place inside the walls. When people talk about going into the city, they mean they are going to the place that still lies within those walls. Nuremberg now is a city of about 400,000 people, and it is of merely provincial importance — a brief stop on an ICE train to Munich or Berlin. Other destinations like Frankfurt, Cologne, or Hamburg are now more important economically and politically. In 1500, at the beginning of the modern era, Nuremberg was less than one-tenth the size it is now. But it was, at least for its inhabitants, the center of the known world. It had about 25,000 inhabitants, but it was perhaps the most important city in Germany militarily, economically, and politically. Now Nuremberg is sixteen times larger, but it is far less significant. Looking at Nuremberg from a middle distance I see not just a place but also the importance of place. This is the city where Martin Behaim invented one of the first globes, his Erdapfel (earth apple), in 1490. It is the city at the center of so many early modern maps of Central Europe. It is the city where the German emperors held so many of their diets. It was one of the richest and most advanced cities in Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Nuremberg was not only a place, but a specific and important place, and as such it played a crucial real and imaginary role in the lives of Europeans for centuries. In a way it still does. What does it mean to see the importance of place? It means first and foremost to be aware of what is not part of the place. Nuremberg is defined by its wall. The wall divides Nuremberg from everything that is not Nuremberg. This is a distinction that Nurembergers were willing to fight and die for for centuries. Late medieval and early modern city bards like Hans Rosenplüt, Conrad Celtis, and Hans Sachs took pains to describe the city’s impressive wall and its fortifications. To be aware of place and its importance is to make geographic distinctions, to be aware of what belongs and what does not belong. Geography is a system of classification, organization. It is a way of imagining different places in my mind’s eye and putting them in relationship to each other. I commit the places to a sheet

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Erhard Etzlaub: Map of Germany and Europe, 1501. South is at the top, north is at the bottom. Nuremberg is in the middle. Provided by the Germanisches Nationalmuseum.

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of paper, and my eye can travel instantaneously from one to the other. Geography is always plural, never singular. And it is always happening in the mind, never independently of the mind. If Nuremberg is all that I know, then I have no geography. I am not aware of Nuremberg’s importance or its place. I can see the city’s importance and its location only when I am aware of Nuremberg’s relationship to the landscape around it. Nuremberg becomes a particularly important place when I imagine it as the center of an entire world of places. In Saul Steinberg’s famous 1976 drawing of the New Yorker’s view of the world, it is not the broad swath of Ninth Avenue that makes New York important but rather the thin strips identified as the Hudson River, New Jersey, the U.S.A., and the Pacific Ocean. They are, paradoxically, what make New York important. In late medieval maps of Central Europe it is not so much a particular spot on the map as the many other spots that surround and point toward that spot that give the city its importance. So too I can see the earth only from outer space. Martin Behaim was able to invent his globe because he had traveled outside Nuremberg and experienced foreign lands, including Portugal and parts of Africa. But it is only in the last half century that humans have been able to see the physical reality of Behaim’s invention. From space we can see the earth. And the earth looks small. Seeing appears to be a function of size. I cannot see what is too big or what is too small. I can only see from a middle distance. Looking at Nuremberg in my mind’s eye, I think of other places that are important symbolically, politically, or economically in Europe and elsewhere. I think of London and Paris. And yet the place Nuremberg is different from those cities. London and Paris are even older than Nuremberg, with even longer and more illustrious histories, but they are also political and economic capitals in the present. For centuries they have been capitals, and they will probably continue to be capitals for as long as there is an England or a France. London and Paris certainly speak about the past, but they also speak loudly about the present. Nuremberg speaks softly about the present and future, but it speaks loudly about the past. I see, then, a place and I see the importance of place. I see that places become important, become centers of trade, commerce, politics, art, intellectual life. Why? Because they are small, because they have human dimensions, because people in them know each other, because they are densely populated. People gravitate to such centers, and such centers begin to grow and expand. Begin to be centers of meaning. The place becomes not just a place but an imagined place, a place in the mind’s eye. Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder comes to Nuremberg in 1793, and he transforms his physical experience of the city into a literary image that, for the next two centuries, becomes an integral part of the imagined Germany. Germany is not just an abstract concept. It is a series of images related to specific places and meanings. Unrelated to those places, the nation is hard

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to grasp. Only when it is embedded in an imagination of place as a specificity does the nation begin to take on concrete meaning for its citizens. It is true that the nation-state transcends particular local identities and patriotisms; but it is still rooted in them. Germany without its cities is a thin, lifeless concept. With them it becomes palpable, real. Hence the romantic nationalist Max von Schenkendorf dedicates one of his poems to the literal enumeration of Germany’s cities, its centers of meaning. Shenkendorf’s statement If one wants to know the German land And love it in all its parts, Then one must name Nuremberg, so grand,5 is to be understood quite literally. If one is to understand the nation, one must name the city. Without such naming the nation literally cannot be understood and certainly cannot be loved. Nuremberg is a German center of meaning. It is a focal point in the sense that it bundles the imaginative energies of the nation onto one spot. Alexander Lips suggests in 1815 that Nuremberg should be the “focal point that gathers all of Germany’s power in a single spot and gives it the aura of beauty and holiness.”6 Over a century and a half later, in 1992, Klaus-Jürgen Sembach, referring to Germany’s problems in coming to terms with its Nazi past, calls Nuremberg the “focal point of everything we have neglected.”7 For Lips Nuremberg is or should be the focus of all positive energies; for Sembach the city is a focus of negativity. In each case the structural function of the city as an imagined space is the same; it is merely the meanings that have changed. The city makes the nation comprehensible. The word focus suggests the ability to see clearly: Nuremberg makes Germany visible. Nuremberg speaks about place and the importance of place, but it also speaks about time. It speaks about the past. It speaks to Germans in the early nineteenth century about a supposedly idyllic past that is now no longer present. And it speaks to Germans after 1871 about a triumphant past that forms a bridge to an even more glorious present. Nuremberg demonstrates that in the modern era, even as nations grow and expand beyond the bounds of the walled-in city, and as the imagination travels to far-away places, the place becomes even more important as a place. Tourists come to visit it and look at its churches and cemeteries and to explore the imperial castle. They walk around the medieval fortifications. These fortifications serve no useful purpose at all. In fact they are a hindrance to modern transportation. And yet the city fathers organize themselves to preserve them, even as Germany’s first train line develops just outside the city walls. The fortifications are not just part of the place; they are the place. And the walls are still defensive. Formerly they had defended Nuremberg against attacking armies. Now they defend Nuremberg

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against the onslaught of time. As Nuremberg grows and changes, as it develops factories and trains, the walls symbolize permanence and continuity. As everything in Nuremberg begins to move and change, the walls remain. By getting rid of their walls and creating broad boulevards, cities like Paris and Vienna became capitals of the nineteenth century; by keeping its wall, Nuremberg became a capital of nostalgia for a bygone time — the nineteenth century’s capital of the Middle Ages. The space of the city, the space inside those walls, became a kind of wrinkle in time, allowing one to move from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries into the late Middle Ages. In his moving memoir Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude (1921), Jakob Wassermann, who grew up not far from Nuremberg, described the city as a “monument of the Middle Ages, reposing as if enchanted in the midst of frenzied activity and feverish, constantly intensified industry.”8 “Here time turns into space,” says Gurnemanz in Wagner’s last music drama, Parsifal, first performed in Bayreuth, not far from Nuremberg, in 1882.9 Gurnemanz is describing the area around Mont Salvat, the castle of the Holy Grail. This is a space in which time becomes unreal. In Nuremberg time also seems to become unreal, or at least Nuremberg’s mythographers work to make it so. It was in Nuremberg that the Holy Roman Emperors kept the imperial insignia and holy relics: the crown, the sword, the scepter, the orb, and the spear that was said to have pierced Christ’s flesh, just as Wagner’s Grail Knights preserve the sacred relics of Christian sacrifice. Wilhelm Raabe’s novella “Des Reiches Krone” (The Empire’s Crown, 1870) tells the story of the entry of the imperial insignia into Nuremberg in 1424. On the second Friday after Easter, the feast of the Holy Lance, the holy relics used to be displayed to Nurembergers precisely as if they were part of the Holy Grail; and the lance certainly was related to it. Nuremberg seems to function in somewhat the same way as Gurnemanz’s magical space in the German imagination. Nuremberg is Germany’s Grail castle, its Mont Salvat. It is a place that permits time travel. One walks, like the protagonist in Claude Ollier’s novel Déconnection, across a bridge, and suddenly one is in the Middle Ages. Peter de Mendelssohn writes in 1945 that “here side by side are the beginning and end of the story,” and that “the overcrowded tram cars which take one from the old town to the courthouse” where the International Military Tribunal is taking place seem to be traveling as much in time as in space.10 Over a century earlier visitors like Wackenroder and Eichendorff expect to see a knight in shining armor. Such expectations are ultimately transformed into physical reality. Citizens get dressed up in medieval costumes to celebrate various festivals. To this day one can still see Albrecht Dürer and Hans Sachs, or at least their statues, in Nuremberg. They are a permanent part of the cityscape. If I want to, I can take a tour of the city with guides dressed up in costumes from the early modern period. In Dürer’s house, Frau Agnes Dürer will even tell me all about her husband and his work,

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either in person or via the headphones that I am wearing. On Saturday afternoons at 2:00 Frau Dürer can even speak to visitors in English. Time is transformed into place, and in visiting the magical space of the city I am also moving backward to a different and presumably simpler, better time. In the English language nostalgia means longing for an earlier, simpler time. In its origins, however, the word means simply homesickness. Longing for home. I long for home because I am no longer there, I am gone. To return home is to travel back in time to one’s origins. The journey through space is also a journey through time. Curiously enough it is almost never a journey into the future; it is usually a journey into the past. Home is the place I once was, almost never the place I someday will be. In observing Nuremberg from a distance I see that my conceptions of time are always also conceptions of place. I imagine the past as having a different spatial structure from the present or the future. I cannot imagine a past that is pure time without place. The past is always also a place, and for Germans in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it was a place one could actually visit physically. Nuremberg is not just a place but also a place-as-time. At the very moment when the development of German capitalism introduced radical changes in spatial and temporal perceptions — when train travel annihilated traditional notions of space and industrialization accelerated notions of time — Nuremberg and its walls provided an imaginary refuge for slowness and duration. Wassermann writes: “To me the fact that the first European railway ran between Nuremberg and Fuerth has always seemed of symbolic significance for this constellation.”11 David Harvey writes that as a result of the development of capitalism “the material bases of objective space and time have become rapidly moving rather than fixed datum points in human affairs.”12 In the midst of this acceleration and flux, Nuremberg provided an imaginary fixed point, a place that neither moved nor changed. Nuremberg carried out this function not in spite of capitalism’s compression of space-time but rather because of it. As Harvey notes, “the more global interrelations become . . . , the more spatial barriers disintegrate, so more rather than less of the world’s population clings to place and neighborhood or to nation.”13 The sociologist Zygmunt Baumann likewise observes that in response to the urbanization and modernization of contemporary life “the thought of a refuge — a home — grows into a temptation ever more difficult to resist.”14 For Germans, Nuremberg was that refuge and that home. To Germans’ questions about who they were and what place they belonged to, Nuremberg provided a ready-made answer. Of course now it is not just the Middle Ages and the early modern period that I can visit when I go to Nuremberg. Here I can travel through a thousand years of German history — “the beginning and end of the story,” as Peter de Mendelssohn put it. In St. Sebald I can see the sarcophagus where St. Sebald himself, the city’s patron saint whose legendary

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life is sometimes connected to the foundation of Nuremberg a millennium ago, is purportedly buried. Walking through the train station I can experience the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; in the museum of industrial culture I can experience the industrial revolution and the modernization of Nuremberg; and when I go to the Documentation Center and the Zeppelin field in the southwestern portion of the city I can travel back in time to the Nazi period. I can stand, like so many other tourists — and like the American soldier Harold L. Hershey on the front page of the New York Times of April 21, 1945 — on the Zeppelin tribune where Hitler himself once stood.15 There are no guides dressed in Nazi uniforms to show me around, of course. But in the Documentation Center I can see film footage with plenty of Nazi uniforms. In Nuremberg I can even visit courtroom 600 in the Palace of Justice, where the International Military Tribunal took place and imagine myself as a reporter or prosecutor or simultaneous interpreter. In Nuremberg’s city theater I can walk through fake metal detectors, be frisked, and take part in the trial itself as a spectator when I see Abby Mann’s Judgment at Nuremberg. Contemporary Nuremberg has challenged any unidirectional nostalgia for a simpler period by presenting a multi-layered city with various segments, some of them profoundly disturbing. When a nineteenth-century observer wrote that in Nuremberg “every stone tells a story about the magnificent past,” he meant his remark positively.16 This was also true when Nuremberg’s Nazi mayor Willy Liebel called Nuremberg “a powerful monument in stone to German greatness,” and when Hitler himself proclaimed Nuremberg to be “an expression in stone of German power and German greatness.”17 But when Alexander Kluge in 1963 referred to the Nazi rally grounds as “testaments in stone” or Nuremberg’s city councillor Hans K. Frieser, in 1988, called the Nazi relics a “history book in stone,” the history they were invoking was decidedly not positive.18 Nevertheless, Nuremberg’s significance as a physical and architectural embodiment of the past has remained constant. In each case, whether for good or ill, Nuremberg is a physical, architectural embodiment of German history and German identity. Nuremberg is no longer just a capital of nostalgia, although it is also that. Walking through the Nazi rally grounds, where his grandmother first met his handsome Nazi grandfather, David Wagner writes, “[I] feel as German as I possibly could.”19 Needless to say, this is not exactly a pleasant feeling. Wagner admits ironically that maybe the Nazis really were right about Nuremberg: “Maybe Nuremberg really is the most German city.” If so, too bad for Nuremberg. Wagner: “I begin to hum the prelude to Die Meistersinger, but that’s no comfort.”20 It is as if, in Nuremberg, Wagner’s Nazi forefathers — and Richard Wagner — had taken over his brain: “Sometimes it seems to me as if my naïve, excited National Socialist grandmother were sitting somewhere inside me, and sometimes I also feel as if

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my grandfather, greatly shrunken, were marching through my brain in his shiny black boots. It doesn’t feel so good.”21 Sigmund Freud would call the ancestors who have taken up residence in one’s psyche a manifestation of the superego, both individual and collective. According to Freud, there is a kind of law of preservation of psychic energy that dictates “that in mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish.”22 It is this law of preservation that explains the persistence of a past that is believed to be dead and buried. Curiously enough, Freud uses precisely the image of a city to illustrate his point about the preservation of mental life: “Now let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a similarly long and copious past — an entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist alongside the latest one.”23 Such a thought experiment would abolish the laws of physics, making it possible, for instance, for the Coliseum to stand in the same space and time as “Nero’s vanished Golden House.”24 It is difficult to imagine such a thing, Freud admits, and therefore his critics might be right in asking him “why we chose precisely the past of a city to compare with the past of the mind.” It turns out, Freud acknowledges, that “a city is . . . a priori unsuited for a comparison of this sort with a mental organism.”25 And yet if this book has demonstrated anything at all, it is that cities are, among other things, also mental organisms. It is true that they are collections of buildings and streets, but that is not all they are. They exist in the individual and collective mind, and this mental existence is at least to a certain extent independent of the city’s physical existence. This is what makes it possible for Claude Ollier’s protagonist, while walking through Nuremberg, to realize “all at once that he’s living upon two territories here within the same time frame, continuously, upon two spaces within one, lodged in the same place, the same city.”26 And it is not just in fiction that different cities can exist in the same space and time. Peter de Mendelssohn writes explicitly about “The Two Nuernbergs” that exist side by side.27 Nor is it just Nuremberg that is doubled. Traveling through another dead German city in the summer of 1945, de Mendelssohn asks a man for directions. The man willingly complies, explaining “the way in great detail. It is only when one attempts to follow his instructions,” de Mendelssohn goes on, “that one realises that the entire route, once perfectly correct, exists only in his imagination. The streets one is to follow, the turns one is to take, are simply not there. But for him they exist.” De Mendelssohn concludes: “With him thousands of rubble-dwellers live in memory-towns which have no relation whatever to reality.”28 Freud was probably more correct than he was willing to give himself credit for when he compared the human psyche to a city. Cities are always also what Freud calls psychical entities; and particularly for the collective life of the nation they have a

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tremendous importance. It is in the city that the psyche of the individual and the psyche of the nation meet. And it is in the city that the psychically and the physically real meet. That is what makes a place like Washington, DC, with its monuments and parks, or New York City, with its ground zero, so important for the psychic life of Americans. The twin towers, after all, were never so popular before they were destroyed as afterwards. Afterwards Americans, like de Mendelssohn’s Germans of the zero hour, were living in a memory-town designated as ground zero. This town may not have corresponded to reality, as de Mendelssohn notes, but the psyche can create its own realities. And even “real” cities are never just “there.” They are always the product of human construction, collective and individual. The historian Peter Fritzsche suggests that cities like Berlin forget, while nations remember; however those remembering nations localize and focus their memory precisely in cities.29 It would be more correct to proclaim that some cities, like Berlin, forget while others, like Nuremberg, remember; or, in Freudian terms, that the psychical city always remembers. In the Communist Manifesto Marx and Engels defined capitalism as the greatest revolution that has ever occurred, a permanent revolution in which “all fixed, fast-frozen relations” are broken and “all that is solid melts into air.”30 Capitalism, of course, is a product of cities. It is about control of money, not of land. In Germany capitalism developed first and foremost in Augsburg, not far from Nuremberg, where the great banking house of the Fuggers emerged. It was here that a few German bankers first discovered the productive and reproductive power of money and the way that money can circulate and self-multiply. As it grows, capital — and capitalism — expands beyond the boundaries of the city but remains centered there. It is there that the great banks and stock markets have their headquarters, there that leaders meet and make decisions. As the scale expands, so too does the city. But the city does not disappear. People travel more and more and faster and faster, but they are always traveling to and away from cities. Franz Sternbald traveled from the city to the countryside; I travel from city to city. For this reason it becomes increasingly difficult for me to see the city. I imagine that I have somehow liberated myself from it by traveling from Nuremberg to Berlin or Munich or by flying to New York or Los Angeles or Beijing. In fact I am far more a part of the city than Franz Sternbald ever was, and it is far more difficult for me to escape it. The very speed of contemporary travel increases this difficulty. Nuremberg in the late fifteenth century was an island of early capitalism in a sea of feudalism, and anyone leaving the city then was traveling from one social system to another. I can no longer leave my social system. Everywhere I go, capitalism has already gotten there before me. In this sense that early critic writing about the development of railroads in England in 1839 was entirely correct in his fears: “As distances were thus annihilated, the surface of our country would, as it were, shrivel in size until it became not much bigger than one immense

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city.”31 Now, less than two centuries later, it is not just “our country” but rather the globe itself whose surface is shriveling. Is this why Nuremberg becomes so important symbolically? Is it a snapshot of capitalism at the moment of its birth, and does it provide a glimpse of a different path that might or should have been — perhaps a kinder, gentler capitalism? Not the global metropolis but rather the town with human, comprehensible dimensions that can be negotiated by a body in the course of a short stroll? A capitalism that remains within the walls of the city, remains organic and comprehensible, and in which all that is solid remains solid, and all fixed, fast-frozen relations remain fixed and frozen? The Berliner Walter Benjamin observed that his own city, Germany’s largest, was being transformed by capitalism before his very eyes. Its previously reassuring fixity was being invaded by the countryside as the city expanded: Cities, just like everything else, are losing their essence in an irresistible process of mixing and impurity, a process that replaces the authentic with the ambiguous. The incomparably reassuring and uplifting power of large cities cuts productive people off into a fortress of peace; just as it robs them of a view of the horizon, so too it deprives them of consciousness of the elemental powers that always lie in wait. But now large cities are everywhere being penetrated by the onslaught of the countryside.32

Benjamin’s description of the “incomparably reassuring and uplifting power of large cities” suggests that it is precisely because of their limitations and boundaries that they become not only powerful but reassuring. As the development of capitalism takes away those boundaries, the city becomes just as dangerous and problematic as the countryside had been before it. Things lose their essence, their authenticity, and instead appear ambiguous, contradictory, impure. The city is no longer the city and the countryside is no longer the countryside. Identity itself is no longer really identity; it too appears to have been dissolved by consciousness of the “elemental powers.” Nuremberg, at least as an imaginary space, was for many Germans a reassuring counterpoint to Benjamin’s Berlin. In place of the real city with its ever-expanding horizons and its invasion of the countryside into the city, Germans substituted a dream-image of a walled-in, bordered city. In his Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein describes language itself as a kind of city. Its core is ancient, full of narrow, crooked paths and teeming with activity. On its outskirts we have new suburbs with straighter streets allowing faster travel.33 Wittgenstein makes this comparison because pure language in and of itself seems almost unimaginably complex. It must be compared to something we can imagine and see in our mind’s eye. What we can imagine and see is the city. It is the space of our lives and also of our dreams. It is noteworthy that both Freud, in his analysis

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of the psyche, and Wittgenstein, in his analysis of language, invoke the image of a city. Curiously enough, W. G. Sebald comes back to Wittgenstein’s description of language in his novel Austerlitz: If language may be regarded as an old city full of streets and squares, nooks and crannies, with some quarters dating from far back in time while others have been torn down, cleaned up, and rebuilt, and with suburbs reaching further and further into the surrounding country, then I was like a man who has been abroad a long time and cannot find his way through this urban sprawl anymore, no longer knows what a bus stop is for, or what a back yard is, or a street junction, an avenue or a bridge.34

As an emigrant Jacques Austerlitz feels as homeless in Germany generally and Nuremberg specifically as he does in the German language. Just as he has lost a feel for Germany’s cities, so too he has lost a feel for the German language. He no longer has a mental map of it. Freud’s, Wittgenstein’s, and Sebald’s formulations suggest that the mechanisms by which we construct and understand cities are closely connected to the mechanisms by which we construct and understand language and reality itself. If it is possible to compare a language to a city, then is it possible also to compare a city to language? Is Nuremberg also a way of communicating with ourselves and with others? Is the city itself in fact something somebody is saying, and is continuing to say? One of the findings of this book is that the answer is yes. Cities are always also linguistic and mental constructions. But stop. Why am I looking only in the direction of Nuremberg? After all, I am poised between the city and the land around it, and the original purpose of my journey was not to discover the city but to discover the land around it. If I turn my head now and look away from Nuremberg at the countryside around me — for at least in my imagination there is still a pure, unspoiled countryside — what do I see? I see a multitude of different Germans at different times facing in my direction, looking toward the city as a kind of symbol or guiding star. I see Heinrich Wilhelm Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck on their way from Erlangen, I see multitudes of German singers coming by train, I see Adolf Hitler coming in his airplane. And then I see British airmen also coming by plane and Justice Jackson only a few months later, also by plane. They are all coming to Nuremberg because Nuremberg means something to them, or because they think it means something to others. For them, too, Nuremberg is a center of discourse. They are coming here to join in the conversation, to enter into language as they enter into the city. Looking at the countryside around Nuremberg, I see Germany. I see first and foremost a backward-looking Germany, a Germany that imagines its true nature to be medieval and bygone — even and especially as it is

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undergoing rapid industrialization. I hear Monika Maron, the East German writer, proclaim that for her Germany is always something that happened in the past — never the present — something that has the romantic but slightly dangerous excitement of the Middle Ages.35 I see the Romantics themselves escaping their version of modernity by coming to Nuremberg on foot and in their writings. For them medieval Nuremberg is an escape from the rational planning and fearful symmetries of cities like Erlangen and Berlin. It is a way of returning to a supposedly more organic past. And of course I see the Nazis coming to Nuremberg. But from Nuremberg I see the Nazis from a slightly different perspective than I might see them from Berlin or Munich. From Nuremberg I see the Nazis first and foremost as participants in a specific geographic discourse about a specific city. I see the Nazis not as politicians trying to break with German traditions but rather as politicians trying to use German traditions in order to justify and perpetuate their rule. I see the Nazis as historians. I see them also as geographers and as choreographers. Looking from Nuremberg into the countryside I see myself surrounded by Germans facing the city in love and admiration. But at the same time I also see Germans turning away from the city in disgust. How, after all, is it possible for them to love a city that Hitler also claimed to love? Once again David Wagner’s laconic response to his grandfather’s and grandmother’s Nuremberg-inspired occupation of his brain: “It doesn’t feel so good.” And I hear the literary scholar Karl Heinz Bohrer speaking about contemporary Germans’ lack of memory, their failure to establish what he calls a “Fernverhältnis” (relationship to distance) with history. In Bohrer’s view National Socialism has become, for contemporary Germans, the equivalent of history, and all other histories have been forgotten. That which is relatively close, that is, National Socialism, has blotted out everything that is far away, that is, the Middle Ages and Romanticism. As Bohrer writes, “German history prior to Bismarck’s foundation of the Reich does not really exist from this perspective, and furthermore concepts like ‘German’ and ‘the German nation’ are disqualified as historically obsolete.”36 If Bohrer is right, and I think that to some extent he is, then it is understandable why so many Germans have turned away from the city their grandparents and great-grandparents once loved. Nuremberg, after all, was nothing if not a living embodiment of a German “Fernverhältnis” to history. It was a way of making that which was distant come close. If there is no more relationship to history as a longue durée, then Nuremberg loses its significance as a symbol. It becomes simply a Nazi city or simply the city of the Nuremberg trials, nothing more. But this in turn means, as Bohrer suggests, that the concept of Germany itself becomes questionable. Nuremberg had guaranteed that the nation was not just an abstraction but a reality; if Nuremberg as a space of history disappears, then the nation

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begins to lose its focus, flicker, and disappear. Unlike Bohrer, I do not believe that this has, in fact, happened. But I share with him the view that it is a possibility. And I remember a line from Hans Jürgen Syberberg’s Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland (1977) about the way that Hitler — for Syberberg, more a discursive phenomenon than a flesh-and-blood figure — killed German Romanticism and everything that was connected to a once-loved Germany: You took away our sunsets, sunsets by Caspar David Friedrich. You are to blame that we can no longer look at a field of grain without thinking of you. You made old Germany kitschy with your simplifying works and peasant pictures.37

In Syberberg’s melancholy vision, “Nothing more will grow here. An entire nation stopped existing, in the diaspora of the mind and the elite.”38 His film proclaims: “Hitler, here is your victory!”39 This is a strange echo of that April 1945 New York Times article that announced: “Nuremberg no longer exists as a city. It is a scene of desolation. This pile of wreckage is the Nazis’ birthday gift to Hitler and it is Hitler’s gift to the world.”40 And I wonder if the destruction of this city, which lies in ruins behind me, is also synonymous with the destruction of the possibility of loving Germany. Has Hitler and the destruction he wrought made it impossible to love the city and the country he claimed to love? Must one welcome the city’s destruction? Must one agree that in a sense the Germany of Romantic dreams has become impossible, even immoral? And if that Germany has become impossible, does it follow that all Germanys are impossible? Or do the various attempts at creating a different Nuremberg, such as the museum of industrial culture, suggest that it is possible to imagine a different Germany — perhaps a Germany that is not as German as Nuremberg? Perhaps a Germany that is now, finally, international? I am now getting farther and farther from Nuremberg. But I still see people looking at the city and its images. In 1983 I see the recently formed German Greens holding their own mock Nuremberg trials. Whom are they putting on trial? They are putting the governments of NATO and the Warsaw pact on trial for placing weapons of mass destruction in Europe. I see that Nuremberg as a discursive project has long since expanded beyond Germany itself. Like capitalism, it knows no political borders or boundaries. It can be put to use by the Romantics, by the capitalists, by the Nazis, by the Greens. I see a World Wide Web site called “The Nuremberg Files” that lists the names of doctors who perform abortions. The actions of those doctors, the website implies, are equivalent to those of Nazi war criminals. I see the new International Criminal Court and the dream of a justice that is not selective but fairly applied throughout the world. I see a lawyer named Jeffrey House who, in Canadian courts, is challenging the

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legality of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 based on the Nuremberg principles, which ban wars of aggression and specify that soldiers have a duty to disobey illegal orders. And I see a young Navy man named Dave Sanders who, instead of following orders and going to Iraq in the fall of 2003, headed for Toronto, where he argues that he committed no crime and is not a deserter. “I don’t think I did anything wrong by turning down an illegal order,” he argues. “I don’t know what it’s called — I think it’s Nuremberg? — that’s what I followed by leaving.”41 And I see an international conference convened in Istanbul in June of 2005 condemning U.S. President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair for what its members view as American and British crimes, including a war of aggression against Iraq.42 I see an international conference of lawyers and scholars convened in Nuremberg itself the following month to commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the International Military Tribunal and assess the legacy of the Nuremberg trials. In courtroom 600, the very place where the IMT took place, an African-American lawyer named Raymond M. Brown, whose father had been a GI, sits where the judges of the military tribunal had sat half a century earlier and argues that by invading Iraq in 2003 and arrogating to itself the right to unilateral invasions of its choice in the future, the United States government hypocritically violated and is continuing to violate the Nuremberg principles that it had done so much to promulgate in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.43 “Nuremberg” has become an international phenomenon. It is a word that is groped for by many who have never been there, and who know little about the Holy Roman Empire, Romanticism, or even National Socialism. It has gone beyond Wackenroder and Tieck, beyond Hitler and Justice Jackson. It is now part of the world itself and the world’s discourse. It is, perhaps, beyond anyone’s control. And now I stop and turn back for one last glimpse at the city itself. But that city, once so sharply in focus, is no longer visible. It has been covered over by discourse about it.

Notes 1 Feliks Topolski, “Nuremberg Notebook,” The New Statesman and Nation, 31 August 1946, 151. 2 Erhard Schütz, “Benjamins Berlin: Wiedergewinnung des Entfernten,” in Schrift Bilder Denken: Walter Benjamin und die Künste, edited by Detlev Schöttker (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2004), 32–47; here, 35. 3 Cited in Schütz, “Benjamins Berlin,” 35. Original German: “Schneller als Moskau selber lernt man Berlin von Moskau aus sehen.” 4

Peter de Mendelssohn, “Nürnberg/Dezember 1945,” in Überlegungen: Vermischte Aufsätze (Hamburg: Wolfgang Krüger, 1948), 20–35; here, 21–22.

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Original German: “So ein kleiner Ort, klein genug, daß man ihn in der Fläche einer Hand halten könnte” As if echoing de Mendelssohn’s observation, Dieter Wuttke’s essay Nuremberg: Focal Point of German Culture and History (Bamberg: Stefan Wendel, 1986) features an illustration of a hand holding the city of Nuremberg in a glass ball. 5 Max von Schenkendorf, “Die deutschen Städte,” in Gedichte, ed. F. M. Kircheisen (Berlin: Morawe & Scheffelt, 1913), 170–83; here, 177. 6

Alexander Lips, Die deutsche Bundesstadt: Eine Phantasie auf absoluter Basis (Germanien [Vienna]: n.p., 1815), 28. Original German: “Phokus, der alle Kraft Deutschlands in einem Punkte sammelt und ihm den Nimbus des Schönen und Heiligen verleiht.” 7 Klaus-Jürgen Sembach, “Einführung in ein verwüstetes Gelände,” in Kulissen der Gewalt: Das Reichsparteitagsgelände in Nürnberg, ed. Klaus-Jürgen Sembach (Munich: Hugendubel, 1992), 7–11; here, 9. Original German: “Fokus aller Versäumnisse.” Note also the title of Wuttke’s essay: Nuremberg: Focal Point of German Culture and History. 8 Jakob Wassermann, Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude (Frankfurt: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag), 2005, 41. In English: Jacob Wasserman [sic], My Life as German and Jew, trans. S. N. Brainin (New York: Coward-McCann, 1933), 68. Original German: “Monument des Mittelalters, wie durch Zauberfluch ruhend inmitten tobender Betriebsamkeit, fieberhafter, von Tag zu Tag anschwellender Industrie.” 9 Richard Wagner, Parsifal (London: John Calder, 1986), 96. Original German: “Zum Raum wird hier die Zeit” Andrew Porter’s English-language translation on the same page has “here Time is one with Space.” This erases the significance of Wagner’s verb “werden,” which signifies that time is becoming or transforming itself into space. 10 Peter de Mendelssohn, “The Two Nuernbergs,” The Nation, 1 December 1945 (vol. 161, no. 22), 569–70; here, 569. 11

Wassermann, Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude, 41; Wasserman, My Life as German and Jew, 68. Original German: “Es ist mir immer symbolisch bedeutend für diese Konstellation erschienen, daß die erste Eisenbahn Europas zwischen Nürnberg und Fürth lief.”

12 David Harvey, “Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 80, no. 3 (1990): 418–34; here, 425. 13

Harvey, “Between Space and Time,” 427.

14

Cited in Peter Fritzsche, “Cities Forget, Nations Remember: Berlin and Germany and the Shock of Modernity,” in Pain and Prosperity: Reconsidering Twentieth-Century German History, ed. Paul Betts and Greg Eghigian (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003), 35–60; here, 46. 15

Richard J. H. Johnston, “Desolate Nuremberg Taken on Hitler’s 56th Birthday,” The New York Times, 21 April 1945, 1, 4; here, 1. 16 Ernst von Mummenhoff, Das Hans Sachsfest in Nürnberg am 4. und 5. November 1894 (Nuremberg: Selbstverlag der Festleitung, 1899), 271. Original German: “jeder Stein von . . . großer Vergangenheit erzählt.”

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17 Fränkischer Kurier, 6 September 1938, 1–2; here, 1. Original German: “ein gewaltiges steinernes Denkmal deutscher Größe”; “der Stein gewordene Ausdruck deutscher Kraft und deutscher Größe.” 18 Gerhard Stapf, “Geschichtsbuch aus Stein rund um den Dutzendteich: CSUStadtrat fordert Dialog über NS-Bauten,” Abendzeitung 8 Uhr-Blatt, 3–4 December 1988, 1. 19 David Wagner, “Auf dem Reichsparteitagsgelände: Nürnberg,” in Böse Orte: Stätten nationalsozialistischer Selbstdarstellung — heute, ed. Stephen Porombka and Hilmar Schmundt (Berlin: Claasen, 2005), 116–28; here, 125. Original German: “[Ich] fühle mich so deutsch, wie ich mich nur fühlen kann.” 20

David Wagner, “Auf dem Reichsparteitagsgelände,” 126. Original German: “Vielleicht ist Nürnberg wirklich die deutscheste Stadt”; “Ich fange an, aber das ist kein Trost, das Meistersingervorspiel zu summen.” 21

David Wagner, “Auf dem Reichsparteitagsgelände.” Original German: “Manchmal kommt es mir vor, als säße irgendwo in mir meine naiv nationalsozialistisch erregte Großmutter, manchmal ist mir auch so, als marschierte mein stark geschrumpfter Großvater in seinen glänzenden, schwarzen Stiefeln durch mein Hirn. Fühlt sich nicht so gut an.” 22 Sigmund Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, in Abriß der Psychoanalyse/Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1989), 63–129; here, 69. In English: Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: Norton, 1989), 16. Original German: “daß im Seelenleben nichts, was einmal gebildet wurde, untergehen kann.” 23

Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, 69–70; Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, 18. Original German: “Nun machen wir die phantastische Annahme, Rom sei nicht eine menschliche Wohnstätte, sondern ein psychisches Wesen von ähnlich langer und reichhaltiger Vergangenheit, in dem also nichts, was einmal zustande gekommen war, untergegangen ist, in dem neben der letzten Entwicklungsphase auch alle früheren noch fortbestehen.” 24 Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, 70; Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, 18. Original German: “die verschwundene Domus aurea des Nero.” 25

Freud, Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, 70, 71; Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, 19. Original German: “warum wir gerade die Vergangenheit einer Stadt ausgewählt haben, um sie mit der seelischen Vergangenheit zu vergleichen”; “darum ist die Stadt von vornherein für einen solchen Vergleich mit einem seelischen Organismus ungeeignet.” Emphasis in the Strachey translation, not in Freud’s original German.

26 Claude Ollier, Disconnection, trans. Dominic Di Bernardi (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey Archive P, 1989), 52. 27

Peter de Mendelssohn, “The Two Nuernbergs.”

28

Peter de Mendelssohn, “Through the Dead Cities,” The New Statesman and Nation, 14 July 1945, 22–23; here, 23. 29

Fritzsche, “Cities Forget, Nations Remember.”

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30

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Das kommunistische Manifest, ed. Thomas Kuczynski (1848; Trier: Karl-Marx-Haus, 1995), 5. In English, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Penguin, 1967), 223. Original German: “Alle festen, eingerosteten Verhältnisse”; “Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft.”

31 Cited in Harvey, “Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination,” 426; from Wolfgang Schivelbusch, “Railroad Space and Railroad Time,” New German Critique 14 (1978): 31–40; here, 32. 32 Cited in Schütz, “Benjamins Berlin,” 38. Original German: “Wie alle Dinge in einem unaufhaltsamen Prozeß der Vermischung und Verunreinigung um ihren Wesensausdruck kommen und sich Zweideutiges an die Stelle des Eigentlichen setzt, so auch die Stadt. Große Städte, deren unvergleichlich beruhigende und bestätigende Macht den Schaffenden in einen Burgfrieden schleißt und mit dem Anblick des Horizonts auch das Bewußtsein der immer wachenden Elementarkräfte von ihm zu nehmen vermag, zeigen sich allerorten durchbrochen vom eindringenden Land.” 33

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 8, proposition 18.

34 W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz (Munich: Carl Hanser, 2001), 179. In English: W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (New York: Random House, 2001), 123–24. Original German: “Wenn man die Sprache ansehen kann als eine alte Stadt, mit einem Gewinkel von Gassen und Plätzen, mit Quartieren, die weit zurückreichen in die Zeit, mit abgerissenen, assanierten und neuerbauten Vierteln und immer weiter ins Vorfeld hinauswachsenden Außenbezirken, so glich ich selbst einem Menschen, der sich aufgrund einer langen Abwesenheit, in dieser Agglomeration nicht mehr zurechtfindet, der nicht mehr weiß, wozu eine Haltestelle dient, was ein Hinterhof, eine Straßenkreuzung, ein Boulevard oder eine Brücke ist.” 35 Monika Maron, “Ich war ein antifaschistisches Kind,” in Die Geschichte ist offen, ed. Michael Naumann (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1990), 117–35, esp. 128. 36 Karl Heinz Bohrer, “Erinnerungslosigkeit: Ein Defizit der gesellschaftskritischen Intelligenz,” in Ekstasen der Zeit: Augenblick, Gegenwart, Erinnerung (Munich: Carl Hanser, 2003), 10–29; here, 19. Original German: “Eine deutsche Geschichte vor der Bismarckschen Reichsgründung existiert in dieser Perspektive eigentlich nicht, mehr noch: Die Begriffe ‘deutsch’ und ‘deutsche Nation’ werden als historisch obsolet disqualifiziert.” 37 Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1978), 268. In English: Syberberg, Hitler: A Film from Germany, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1982), 242. In German: “Du hast uns die Sonnenuntergänge genommen, Sonnenuntergänge von Caspar David Friedrich. Du bist schuld, daß wir kein Kornfeld mehr sehen können, ohne an dich zu denken. Du hast das alte Deutschland verkitscht durch deine vereinfachenden Arbeiten und Bauernbilder.” 38 Syberberg, Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland, 269; Syberberg, Hitler: A Film from Germany, 242. In German: “Da wächst nichts mehr nach. Ein ganzes Volk hat aufgehört zu existieren, in der Diaspora des Geistes und der Elite.”

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39 Syberberg, Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland, 268; Syberberg, Hitler: A Film from Germany, 241. In German: “Hitler, hier ist dein Sieg!” 40 Richard J. H. Johnston, “Desolate Nuremberg,” The New York Times, 21 April 1945, 1, 4; here, 1. 41 David Goodman, “Breaking Ranks,” Mother Jones, November–December 2004, 48–55; here, 55. 42

Thomas Seibert, “Bush und Blair am Pranger: ‘Welttribunal zu Irak’ in der Türkei fordert Ermittlungen,” Nürnberger Nachrichten, 28 June 2005, 4. 43 H.-P. Kastenhuber, “Erbe verpflichtet zu Wachsamkeit: Kongress untersucht Wirkung des Nürnberger Prozesses,” Nürnberger Nachrichten, 18 July 2005, 5. The conference, which took place 17–20 July 2005 was entitled Judging Nuremberg: The Laws, The Rallies, The Trials — Returning to Courtroom 600 on the 60th Anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials.

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Index Aachen, 186 absolutism (French), 180 Adolf-Hitler-Platz (in Nuremberg), 26, 149, 150, 186 Adorno, Theodor W., 131, 163 Adriatic Sea, 16 Africa, 294 Allgemeine teutsche Burschenschaft, 61 Allies (Second World War), 5, 220, 238, 241, 250, 255, 259 Altstadt (Nuremberg). See old town Aly, Götz, 216 Anacker, Heinrich, 184, 185 Andler, Charles, 142, 143 Angelic Salutation, 25, 36 Ansbach, 64 anti-Christ, 20 anti-Semitism, 71, 96, 109, 110, 128, 143, 153, 225, 238 Anzeiger für Kunde des deutschen Mittelalters, 62, 63 Apocalypse Now, 99 architecture. See Baroque era; classical era; Gothic architecture; historicist architecture; Nazi architecture; neoGothic architecture; post-Nazi architecture Arent, Benno von, 97, 135 aristocracy, 96, 102, 104, 105, 107, 261 Arminius, 61 Arndt, Ernst Moritz, 121 Arnim, Achim von, 43 Athens, 149 Atlantic Ocean, 23 Atterbom, Per Daniel Amadeus, 45, 230, 290 Auden, W. H., 222–24, 237 Auden, W. H., works by: “Memorial for the City,” 223, 224

Aufbau, 241 Aufsess, Baron Hans von, 60–71, 74, 76, 88, 261 Aufsess, Baron Hans von, works by: Patriotische Fragen an Deutschlands Reichs- und Bundestag zu Frankfurt, 66, 67 Augsburg, 22, 23, 58, 300 Auschwitz, 265 Austria, 23, 32, 44, 70, 147, 152, 178, 184, 185, 186–89, 201; annexation of, 178, 184, 187–89, 201 Autobahn, 252 avant-garde, 162 Avenarius, Ferdinand, 118 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 132 Baden, 68 Baltic Sea, 16 Bamberg, 62 banking, 22, 99 Barbarossa, 13, 140, 178, 179 Barenboim, Daniel, 96 Baroque era, 33, 38, 180 Battle of Nations, 44 Bauer, Franz, 185 Bauer, Franz, works by: Sonne über Nürnberg, 185 Baumann, Zygmunt, 297 Bavaria, 5, 32, 33, 36, 47, 51, 52, 53, 54, 60, 61, 62, 71, 101, 103, 105, 118, 181, 266, 268, 271, 272, 286, 287 Bayerland, Das, 181 Bayreuth, 133, 187, 296 Bayreuth festival, 95, 96, 120, 133, 135, 187 Bechstein, Ludwig, 51 Becker, Rupert, 57 Beeg, Johann Kaspar, 72, 73

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Beer, Helmut, 141 “beer hall putsch,” 135, 146, 159, 257 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 132, 218, 227, 231 Behaim, Martin, 292, 294 Beijing, 300 Belgium, 23 Belsen, 251 Belushi, John, 99 Benjamin, Walter, 155, 156, 160–62, 171, 191, 200, 201, 290, 291, 301 Benjamin, Walter, works by: “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” 160–62 Berger, Thomas, 236, 244, 256 Berger, Thomas, works by: Crazy in Berlin, 236, 244 Berlichingen, Götz von, 22 Berlin, 4, 5, 8, 9, 33, 34, 48, 58, 69, 97, 134, 135, 137, 143, 152, 167, 187, 193, 199, 237, 238, 251, 257, 276, 291, 292, 300, 301, 303 Berlin Document Center, 266, 269 Berlin Wall, 254 Bible, 20, 231 Bieberstein, Baron August von, 68 Binder, Jacob Friedrich, 51 Bismarck, Otto von, 71, 74, 140, 146, 152, 176, 303 Black Plague, 26 Blair, Tony, 305 Blues Brothers, The, 99 “Blutfahne,” 159, 160, 173 Bodin, Jean, 15 Bohemia, 13, 15, 103, 131, 178, 179 Bohrer, Karl Heinz, 303, 304 Boisserée, Sulpiz, 51, 60 bombing (of Nuremberg), 3, 6, 205, 206, 219, 222, 225, 228, 231–34, 259 Borchmeyer, Dieter, 110 Börsenverein der deutschen Buchhändler, 47 bourgeoisie, 22, 53, 54, 56, 63, 72, 100, 102, 103, 104, 105, 109, 114, 115, 121, 261 Bracher, Karl Dietrich, 163

Brandenburg, 15, 23. See also Prussia Brandenburg-Ansbach, margraves of, 22, 33 Bratwurstglöcklein, 119 Braunau am Inn, 181 Brecht, Bertolt, 161, 162, 271; “Lehrstücke,” 162 Brentano, Clemens, 43 Bröger, Karl, 182 Brooklyn, 290 Brown, Raymond M., 305 Bruck, Moeller van den, 146–48, 168, 176 Bruck, Moeller van den, works by: Das dritte Reich, 146, 147, 176 Bruckner, Anton, 132 Buchenwald, 220 Buckley, William F., 255, 256 Buckley, William F., works by: Nuremberg: The Reckoning, 255, 256 Bülow, Hans von, 94, 95, 112 Bundestag, 8 Bürger. See bourgeoisie Bürgerkomitee gegen Neonazismus, 266, 287 Burgsdorff, Wilhelm von, 34 Bush, George W., 255, 305 cabala, 27 Cadiz, 16 Campe, Friedrich, 47, 50, 51, 63, 64, 223 capitalism, 21, 22, 23, 27, 28, 95, 100, 111, 297, 300, 301, 304 Carlsbad Decrees, 61 Caroline Auguste, Empress of Austria, 57, 103 Carolsfeld, Julius Schnorr von, 43 castle, imperial (in Nuremberg), xii, 25, 34, 44, 45, 51, 145, 151, 152, 180, 223, 226, 230, 295 Catholicism. See Roman Catholic church CBS, 159 Celan, Paul, 236 Celan, Paul, works by: “Todesfuge,” 236

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Celtis, Conrad, 17, 18, 19, 72, 292 cemetery. See John, cemetery of St. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 37 Centrum Industriekultur, 260, 261, 270, 298 Charlemagne, 14, 15, 186 Charles V (Holy Roman Emperor), 20 Christ, 13, 25, 26, 50, 105 Christian Social Union (CSU), 267, 269, 285, 286 Christianity, 50 Christmas, 2, 43, 44, 82 Christmas fair (in Nuremberg), 44 Churchill, Winston, 239 city council (Nuremberg), 23 classical era, 38, 40 Clay, General Lucius, 237, 238 cloisters, 18, 19 Cochlaeus, Johann, 16 Cold War, 139, 254, 255 coliseum, 149, 299 collective guilt (theories of), 241, 253 Cologne, 15, 19, 51, 60, 66, 72, 292; cathedral of, 51, 60, 66 comedy, 99 concentration camps, 149, 220, 224, 236, 245, 251, 252, 256, 265, 272; film footage of, 245, 246, 248, 253 Constance, 62 co-optation, 96 Cornelius, Peter (the artist) 51, 84 Cornelius, Peter (the composer), 84 counterreformation, 180 craftsmen (in Nuremberg), 16 Cramer, Helge, 266, 287 crimes against humanity, 238, 253 crown. See imperial insignia crown jewels. See imperial insignia CSU (Christlich-Soziale Union). See Christian Social Union cultural policy, 260 Czechoslovakia, 217 Dachau, 251 Dahrendorf, Ralf, 8 Danzig, 157 “degenerate art,” 132

333

Deinhardstein, Johann Ludwig, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 72, 76, 99, 100, 102, 103, 108 Deinhardstein, Johann Ludwig, works by: Hans Sachs, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 72, 76, 99, 100, 102, 103, 108 Dennis, David B., 110, 126, 165 Denver, 9 Dessau, 97 Deutsche Rundschau, 116 Deutscher Hof, 153, 157 “Deutscher Tag,” 120–22, 135, 136, 141, 145, 147 Dietrich, Marlene, 251 Dietzfelbinger, Eckart, 268, 269, 272 Dionysus, 202 Disney World, 3 Dittschlag, Werner, 181, 182 DNVP (Deutschnationale Volkspartei). See German National People’s Party Döblin, Alfred, 249 Documenta, 276 Documentation Center. See National Socialist Reich Party Rally Grounds: Dokumentationszentrum Domenig, Günther, 273, 275 Don river, 16 Dönitz, Karl, 238, 245 Donovan, William J., 237 dramatic festivals (in Athens), 94 Dresden, 67, 76, 96, 131 Dresdner Anzeiger, 204 Dürer, Agnes (as tour guide), 296, 297 Dürer, Albrecht, 19, 20, 23–26, 36, 39–42, 44, 46–53, 55, 58, 60, 102, 110, 118, 121–23, 144, 145, 181, 183, 242–44, 259 Albrecht-Dürer-Verein, 46 celebrations of, 45–52, 64, 120, 143, 257 Dürerbund, 118 as a fictional character, 55, 56, 72, 119 house of, 46, 51, 145, 223, 244, 270, 296 Knight, Death, and Devil, 144, 145, 181, 244

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Dürer (continued) Melancholia, 242–43 monument for, 47, 48, 49, 51, 60, 111, 120, 141, 223, 244, 296 Düringer, Philipp Jacob, 59 Dutzendteich, 273 Ehrenburg, Ilya, 238, 244 Eichendorff, Joseph von, 43, 296 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 237 Egypt, 16 Eisenman, Peter, 276 Eliot, T. S., 101 Engels, Friedrich, 300 England, 8, 11, 23, 27, 63, 294 Enlightenment, 37, 38, 42, 235 Erdapfel, 292 Erlangen, 34, 61, 112, 303 Erlangen, University of, 6, 44, 61, 66, 273 Essenwein, August von, 70 Europe, 16, 27, 33, 44, 148, 176, 228, 232, 292, 293, 304 Eve, 106 Expressionism, 132 “Faszination und Gewalt,” 267, 272 Federation of German Singers, 118 Fest der Menschenrechte, 264 Festliches Nürnberg, 135, 145, 173, 204, 217 feudal nobility, 57, 72. See also aristocracy feudalism, 21, 22, 300 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 121 film (Nazi conceptions of), 161, 191 First World War, 118, 119, 142, 143, 159, 178, 183, 197, 201, 217, 257 Folz, Hans, 26 Fort, Gertrud von le, 222 fortifications (in Nuremberg). See wall (Nuremberg city) Fraktur, 47 France, 8, 11, 32, 33, 63, 220, 224, 225, 237, 238, 294 Francis II (Holy Roman Emperor), 32, 33

François-Poncet, André, 159 Franconia, 33, 61, 62, 137, 145 Franconian dialect, 183 Franco-Prussian War, 115 Frank, Hans, 240 Frankfurt, 4, 37, 66, 70, 138, 178, 292 Frankfurt School, 131 Fränkischer Kurier, 121, 145, 146, 189 fraternity movement, German, 61 Frederick I (Holy Roman Emperor) 13, 67. See also Barbarossa Frederick II (Holy Roman Emperor), 13, 16 Frederick II (king of Prussia). See Frederick the Great (king of Prussia) Frederick III (Holy Roman Emperor), 18 Frederick the Great (king of Prussia), 38, 105, 236 French occupation (of the Ruhr region), 120, 146 French revolution, 33 French zone of occupation (in Germany), 249 Freud, Sigmund, 7, 8, 299, 301, 302 Freytag, Gustav, 68 Frick, Wilhelm, 245 Friedrich, Caspar David, 304 Friedrich, Jörg, 206 Frieser, Hans K., 269, 298 Frisch, Max, 131, 132, 163 Fritzsche, Hans, 245, 246 Fritzsche, Peter, 143, 167, 300 Fugger (family), 22 Fürth, 48, 112, 234 Furtwängler, Wilhelm, 134 Gabler, Otto, 69 Galbraith, John Kenneth, 222 Gareis, Heinrich, 136 Garland, Judy, 253 Gartenlaube, Die, 112 Gegenwart, Die, 242, 245, 250 Gelin, Joseph, 224, 225 Genée, Dr. Rudolph, 117

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genocide, 229, 242, 246 geography, 292–95 German Democratic Republic, 235 German Federal Assembly, 68, 70 German Federation, 69, 70 German language, 38, 39 German National People’s Party, 121 Germanic National Museum, xii, 3, 12, 21, 50, 65, 67–71, 74–76, 122, 144, 176, 177, 179, 186, 187, 243, 260–63, 268 Germanistik, foundation of, 66, 70 Germany, Federal Republic of, 9, 235, 260 Gesamtkunstwerk, 42, 95, 162 Gesellschaft zur Erhaltung älterer deutscher Geschichte, Literatur und Kunst, 63 Gestapo, 257 gingerbread cake (from Nuremberg), 37, 38, 44 Glaser, Hermann, 259–61, 266–69, 271, 275, 285, 287 Goebbels, Joseph, 132, 133, 157, 164, 200, 230, 231, 245 Goebbels, Joseph, works by: Michael, 157 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 4, 37, 40, 57, 59, 60, 78, 100, 115, 236 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, works by: Dichtung und Wahrheit, 60; Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 40 Golden Bull, 15 Göring, Hermann, 132, 238, 245 Gothic architecture, 34, 35, 37, 39, 45, 59, 60, 224 Graham, Billy, 258 Grand Hotel, 224, 237, 251 Great Britain, 220, 237, 238, 251. See also England Greens (German political party), 304 Grey, Thomas S., 108, 126 Grimm, Jacob, 100 Grimm, Ludwig Emil, 50, 52 Grimm, Wilhelm, 64 Grimm brothers, 33, 70, 182 Grimm brothers, works by: Deutsches Wörterbuch, 70

335

Groos, Arthur, 20, 111 “Großdeutschland,” 152, 178, 186 ground zero, 300 Guldenmund, Hans, 21 Haerdter, Robert, 245, 247, 249 Haffner, Sebastian, 2, 4, 5, 9, 133, 135 Hagen, August, 55, 56, 60, 86, 100 Hagen, August, works by: Norika, das sind Nürnbergische Novellen aus alter Zeit, 55, 56, 60, 80, 100 Halle, 138 Hamburg, 35, 152, 185 Hammermeister, Kai, 140 Händel, Georg Friedrich, 132 Hanfstaengl, Ernst, 133 Hanover, 115, 138, 271 Hanslick, Eduard, 100 Hapsburg family, 102, 103 Harvey, David, 297 Has, Kunz, 16, 17, 18 “Haus der deutschen Kunst,” 270, 271 Hauser, Kaspar, 123 Haydn, Joseph, 231 Hebrew, 27 Heidelberg, 1, 4, 7 Heideloff, Karl Alexander, 51, 52, 53, 59, 60, 63, 64, 111, 149 “Heiltumsstuhl,” 186 Herel, Johann Friedrich, 37 Herf, Jeffrey, 152 Hermand, Jost, 148 Hershey, Harold L., 220, 221, 298 Hess, Jonas Ludwig von, 35 Hess, Rudolf, 154, 257 Hessen, 128 Heydrich, Reinhard, 131, 132 Hien, Vu Thu, 264 Hilbig, Wolfgang, 235 Hilbig, Wolfgang, works by: Das Provisorium, 235 Himmler, Heinrich, 132 Hinton, David B., 216 historians (Nazi), 176–81 historical pageants, 52–55 historicism, 122, 178

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historicist architecture, 59, 60 historiography, 61–63, 176–81, 247, 248, 260, 261, 303 Hitler, Adolf, 5, 7, 8, 32, 101, 121, 132–40, 144–46, 149–60, 165, 173, 176, 179–83, 185–95, 197–205, 209, 211, 217, 220, 221, 234, 238, 240, 247, 253, 257, 265, 269, 298, 302–5; his gaze, 157; his love of Wagner, 132–36, 140 Hitler, Adolf, works by: Mein Kampf, 133, 187 Hitler Youth, 151, 153, 157, 194–96, 217, 245, 275 Hitlerjunge Quex, 199 Hobsbawm, Eric, 54 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus, 2, 7, 43, 82, 100, 107, 205, 290 Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus, works by: “Meister Martin der Küfner und seine Gesellen,” 43, 100, 107; “Nußknacker und Mausekönig,” 2, 43, 82, 290 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 100 Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, 100, 124, 126, 142 Hohenstaufen family, 178 Hohenzollern family, 33, 118 Hohlfeld, Andreas, 147, 148 Hollywood, 215 Holocaust, 131, 139, 153, 228, 236, 238, 276 Holocaust memorial (in Berlin), 276 Holy Grail, 296 Holy Lance, Feast of the, 14, 296 Holy Roman Emperors, 34, 102, 119, 176, 296 Holy Roman Empire, 13–16, 18, 20, 27, 28, 32, 33, 36, 44, 45, 48, 54, 61, 69, 103, 105, 111, 136, 140, 145, 152, 176, 178, 179, 185–87, 189, 205, 305 “Horst Wessel Lied,” 199, 216 Höss, Rudolf, 265 House, Jeffrey, 304, 305 Hudson River, 294 Humboldt, Alexander von, 64 Hungary, 103

Hus, Jan, 62 Hussite rebellion, 13, 19, 178 ideology (German), 8 imperial city (Nuremberg as), 13 imperial diets, 149, 176, 179, 180, 186, 292 imperial insignia, 13, 14, 19, 32, 67, 69, 70, 178, 180, 181, 186–90, 296; crown (of the Holy Roman Emperor), 13, 32, 33, 188, 205, 296; imperial sword, 181, 186, 188, 296; reliquary shrine, 186 IMT. See International Military Tribunal Industrial Culture, Center for. See Centrum Industriekultur industrial revolution, 3, 54, 55, 60, 298 industrialization, 48, 55, 101, 261 inflation, 120, 146 “inner emigrants,” 228, 278 International Criminal Court, 255, 264, 304 International Law, 250 International Military Tribunal, 5, 7, 237–42, 244–50, 255, 256, 296, 298, 305; in fiction, drama, and film, 250–56; verdict, 249, 250 Iraq, 305 Istanbul, 305 Italy, 13, 23, 24, 25, 42 Jackson, Robert, 7, 237–41, 245, 255, 302, 305 Jäger, Ernst, 213 Jaskot, Paul, 170 Jehovas Witnesses, 258 Jerusalem, 19, 25, 41 Jews, 26, 27, 96, 109, 110, 131, 153, 180, 225, 227, 236, 265 Jodl, Alfred, 238, 246 John, cemetery of St., 25, 41, 46, 49, 50, 51, 183, 290 John, St. (feast of), 46, 103, 106, 112, 115 John the Baptist, St., 13, 98, 105, 107, 108

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Johnston, Richard J. H., 220 Jordan (river), 107 Joyce, James, 101 Judgment at Nuremberg (the film), 251–55; as a play, 255 Jung, Edgar, 147 Jung, Edgar, works by: Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen, 147 justice (theories of), 240, 251 Kaiserreich, 111, 112, 114, 115, 116, 117, 119, 121, 140, 146, 152, 176, 303 Kaltenbrunner, Ernst, 239 Karavan, Dani, 6, 7, 262, 263 Karl IV (Holy Roman Emperor), 180 Karlstein, 178 Kartäusergasse (in Nuremberg), 262, 263 Kassel, 276 Kästner, Erich, 239, 242, 245 Katherine, church of St., 99, 105, 187–89, 205, 227, 230 Katyn forest, 240 Kaufmann, Walter, 218 Keller, Gottfried, 54, 85 Keller, Gottfried, works by: Der grüne Heinrich, 54, 85 Keitel, Wilhelm von, 238 Kellog-Briand Pact, 240 Kempner, Robert, 241 Kerl, Hanns, 209 Kerr, Alfred, 206, 236 Kershaw, Ian, 163 Keyssler, Johann Georg, 35, 36 Kiefer, Anselm, 236, 237 Kinematograph, 161 Kisch, Guido, 27 Klassik Open Air, 257 “kleindeutsche Lösung,” 117, 152, 188 Klemperer, Victor, 131, 163 Kluge, Alexander, 264, 265, 298 Kluge, Alexander, films by: Brutalität in Stein, 264 knights, 22 Koeppen, Wolfgang, 235, 257, 260, 262 Kohlhaußen, Heinrich, 187 Königsberg, 55

337

Kotzebue, August Friedrich von, 61 Kovalyov, Sergei, 264 Kracauer, Siegfried, 154–56, 171, 191, 200, 201, 213; “mass ornament” 154, 155 Kraft, Adam, 25, 26, 39, 51, 72 “Kraft durch Freude,” 231 Krakow, 25 Kramer, Stanley, 251 Kramer, Stanley, films by: Judgment at Nuremberg, 251–55 Kraußer, Konrad, 111, 112 Kriegk, Otto, 193 Krüger, Horst, 257 Kulturnation, 9, 10 Kunstwart, 118 Kunze, Wilhelm, 122, 123, 131, 142, 206, 219 Kunze, Wilhelm, works by: Nürnberg: Schicksal einer Stadt, 122, 123, 131 Kurds, 9 Landsberg, 137, 217 Lang, Karl Heinrich Ritter von, 64 Langbehn, Julius, 117 Langbehn, Julius, works by: Rembrandt als Erzieher, 117, 118 Langwasser, 257, 258 Latin, 17 Leipzig, 44, 119 Lenk, Margarete, 119, 143 Lenz, Christoph, 112 Levin, David J., 110, 126 Ley, Robert, 158, 162 Liber Chronicarum. See Nuremberg Chronicle Lichtbildbühne, 214 Liebel, Willy, 137, 140, 145, 151, 180, 181, 183, 185–90, 199, 212, 256, 298 Linz, 137 Lips, Alexander, 6, 44, 45, 295 Liszt, Franz, 94 Loiperdinger, Martin, 162, 171, 191–94, 213 London, 8, 13, 43, 294 Lorenz, church of St. (in Nuremberg), 19, 25, 36, 230, 292

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Lortzing, Albert, 58, 59, 76, 100, 102, 103, 108 Lortzing, Albert, works by: Hans Sachs, 59, 76, 100, 102, 103, 108; Zar und Zimmermann, 59 Los Angeles, 300 Louis XIV (king of France), 38 low countries, 13. See also Netherlands, the Ludwig I (king of Bavaria), 47, 48, 51, 52, 53, 54, 59, 60, 62, 223, 261 Ludwig II (king of Bavaria), 2, 71, 96, 101, 103, 105, 118 Luitpold (Prince Regent of Bavaria), 118, 137 Luitpoldarena. See National Socialist Reich Party Rally Grounds Luitpoldhain, 118, 137, 257 Luppe, Hermann, 120, 180 Luther, Martin, 19, 20, 98, 181, 211, 236 Lutheranism (in Nuremberg), 19 Lutze, Viktor, 198 Lützelberger, Ernst, 112, 114 Luxembourg, 237 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 15 Maine, 251, 255 Mainz, 15 Maly, Ulrich, 264, 275–77 M.A.N. factory (Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nürnberg), 227, 228 Manhattan, 290 Mann, Abby, 251–56, 298 Mann, Abby, works by: Judgment at Nuremberg, 251–55, 298 Mann, Erika, 246 Mann, Thomas, 1, 131, 163, 246 Mann, Thomas, works by: Doktor Faustus, 131 Mannheim, 98 Marggraff, Rudolf, 53, 54 market square (Nuremberg), 3, 26, 149, 186, 197, 230 Maron, Monika, 303 Marx, Karl, 300 Marx, Karl, works by: Communist Manifesto, 300

mastersingers (early modern), 2, 13, 56, 98, 99, 227, 231 mastersingers (Wagner’s), 2, 98, 102, 104, 107, 108, 236 Mattheson, Johann, 105 Mauthausen, 149 Maximilian I (Holy Roman Emperor), 52, 57, 58, 67, 102 Maximilian I (king of Bavaria), 33 Maximilian II (king of Bavaria), 54, 62, 68, 71 McFarland, Timothy, 101 McLuhan, Marshall, 161 medieval period. See Middle Ages medievalism, 72, 151 Meinecke, Friedrich, 9, 10 Meistersingerhalle, 257, 266 Memel, 217 Mendelssohn, Peter de, 206, 232, 233, 244, 245, 292, 296, 297, 299, 300 Middle Ages, 18, 21, 22, 25, 27, 37, 38, 42, 48, 52, 59, 61, 73, 141, 179, 186, 228, 235, 244, 296, 297, 303 Mihm, Julius Heinrich, 271–73, 275 Millington, Barry, 110, 126 Minnesänger, 104 Mitscherlich, Alexander, 247–49, 251, 254, 260, 271 modernization, 48, 261, 298 monasteries, 18, 19 money, 95, 123, 235 Monumenta Germaniae Historiae, 64 monumentalism, 122, 178 Moscow, 291 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 37, 231 Muffel, Nikolaus, 23 Mummenhoff, Ernst, 117, 118 Munich, 5, 15, 52, 53, 54, 94, 97, 131, 135, 138, 146, 237, 239, 257, 270, 271, 287, 292, 300, 303 Murr, Christian Gottlob von, 36 Nabokov, Nicholas, 222 Naples, 13 Napoleon, 44, 105

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Napoleonic wars, 32, 39, 44, 61, 70, 105, 121, 181 Nation, The, 244 National Assembly, 70 National Socialism, 4–6, 101, 118, 120, 131–62, 176–205, 209, 213, 220, 224, 225, 234, 236, 237, 246, 249, 252, 256, 266–68, 270, 275, 298, 303, 305 National Socialist German Workers Party, 131–62, 165, 176–205, 225, 241, 244, 257, 265 National Socialist Reich Party Rallies (in Nuremberg), 5, 118, 131–62, 165, 176–205, 234, 266, 268, 291 “cathedral of light,” 158, 173 films about, 135, 145, 165, 168, 173, 201, 204, 215, 217. See also Riefenstahl, Leni flag consecration ceremony, 157, 159, 160, 173 “Parteitag der Ehre,” 181 “Parteitag der Einheit und der Stärke,” 199 “Parteitag der Freiheit,” 153 “Parteitag des Friedens,” 205 “Parteitag des Sieges,” 136, 152 “Parteitag Großdeutschlands,” 186 National Socialist Reich Party Rally Grounds, 132, 134, 135, 137, 149–52, 154, 155, 159, 183, 185, 220, 224, 225, 231, 238, 258, 264–77 Deutsches Stadion, 149, 238 Silberbuck, 238 Dokumentationszentrum, 272–77, 298 Große Strasse, 152, 154, 220, 259 Kongreßhalle, 149, 267–69, 273, 274, 276 Luitpoldarena, 137, 154, 155, 159, 183, 197, 257, 258, 266 Luitpoldhalle, 257 Märzfeld, 257, 258, 266 memorial for the dead, 155, 159, 197 Strasse des Führers, 159, 197

339

Zeppelin field, 149, 154, 220, 258, 259, 266, 272 Zeppelin tribune, 154, 220, 265–67, 271, 276, 298 nationalism, 8 NATO, 304 Nazarenes, 46 Nazi architecture, 135, 148, 149, 154, 158, 162, 269–77 Nazi past (coming to terms with the) 257, 259, 264–77 Nazism. See National Socialism Neale, Steve, 200, 215 neo-Gothic architecture, 59, 60 Nero, 299 Netherlands, the, 23. See also low countries Neudörffer, Johann, 47 neurosis, 8 Neuschwanstein, 2, 261 New Jersey, 290, 294 new world, discovery of the, 23 New York City, 9, 11, 290, 294, 300 New York Times, 212, 220, 221, 298, 304 Nicholas, Lynn H., 132 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 75, 93, 98, 115, 116, 117, 122, 132, 176, 202 Nietzsche, Friedrich, works by: Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, 202; Unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen, 115, 116; “Vom Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historie für das Leben,” 122 “Night of the Long Knives,” 197, 199 Nipperdey, Thomas, 142 Nohl, Ludwig, 111 Noris (female allegorical representation of Nuremberg), 119, 121, 122, 145 North Carolina, 255, 284 nostalgia, 41, 42, 52, 62, 297 nouveau roman, 225 Novalis, 42, 235 NPD, 266 NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei). See National Socialist German Workers Party

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Nuremberg, Romantic rediscovery of, 6, 32 Nuremberg Chronicle, 12, 14, 15, 18, 34 Nuremberg city theater, 255, 256, 298 Nuremberg laws, 153 Nuremberg opera house, 117, 120, 132 Nuremberg principles, 250, 305 Nuremberg trial. See International Military Tribunal “Nürnberg — Stadt des Friedens und der Menschenrechte” (municipal initiative), 264 Nürnberger Gespräche, 259, 260 O’Brien, Mary-Elizabeth, 217 Oedipus complex, 7 Office of Strategic Services (OSS), 237 Oklahoma City, 9 Oktoberfest, 52, 94 old town (Nuremberg), 4, 75, 149–51, 182, 224, 225, 230–32 Ollier, Claude, 152, 229–33, 235, 236, 256, 290, 296, 299 Ollier, Claude, works by: Déconnection, 230–32, 296 Olympic stadium, 149, 257 Osiander, Andreas, 19, 26, 27 OSS. See Office of Strategic Services Otto I (Holy Roman Emperor), 15 Otto I (king of Bavaria), 118 Otto, Luise, 71, 72 Otto, Luise, works by: Nürnberg: Culturhistorischer Roman aus dem 15. Jahrhundert, 71, 72 Our Lady, church of, 26 Overbeck, Friedrich, 45, 46 Pacific Ocean, 294 Palace of Justice, 237, 246, 298 Palm, Johann, 181 Paris, 8, 13, 36, 43, 294 patricians (in Nuremberg), 13, 16, 20, 22, 23, 56, 57, 99, 261 Patton, General George Smith, 238 Paulskirche, 66

Pausala. See Rieß, Paul Pearsall, Cornelia D. J., 223 Pedagogical Institute (Nuremberg), 267–69, 272 Pegnitz (river in Nuremberg), 107, 224, 228, 291, 292 Pétain, Phillipe, 225 Petersen, Julius, 148 Peterwardein, 43 Petropoulos, Jonathan, 163 Piccolomini, Enea Silvio, 16 Pirkheimer, Willibald, 39 Pius II, Pope, 16 plagiarism, 108 Plärrer, 268 Poland, 25, 152, 205, 240, 256 Poles, 227 pope, 14, 20 Porges, Heinrich, 111 Porter, Andrew, 306 Portugal, 294 post-Nazi architecture, 261–63, 270–77 Potocnik, Mark, 204 Potsdam, 2, 7 Prague, 16, 179 prisoners of war, 224, 238, 245 Propaganda Ministry, 193, 230 Protestant Reformation, 18, 19, 25, 42, 114, 211 Protestantism, 19, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27 provincialism, 8 Prussia, 23, 32, 34, 44, 55, 64, 69, 70, 71, 112, 116, 117 psychoanalysis, 247–49. See also Freud, Sigmund Puccini, 97 Raabe, Wilhelm, 296 Raabe, Wilhelm, works by: “Des Reiches Krone,” 296 Rabiosus, Anselmus, 35 Racine, Jean, 38 Raeder, Erich, 245 RAF (British), 228 railroad line (in Nuremberg), 48, 292, 297 Ranke, Leopold von, 66

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Raphael, 110 rationalism, 38 Rauch, Christian Daniel, 48, 223 Rauschning, Hermann, 133 rediscovery of Nuremberg. See Nuremberg, Romantic rediscovery of Reger, Erik, 241, 242, 249 Reger, Philipp, 59 Reich Labor Service, 151, 153, 154, 182, 194, 200 Reichsmark, 120 Reichsparteitagsgelände. See National Socialist Reich Party Rally Grounds Reichsschrifttumskammer, 214 Reichstag, 153 Reifenberg, Benno, 250 Reindel, Albert Christoph Reindel, 46, 47, 111 renaissance, 24 renaissance (northern), 180 Rentschler, Eric, 191, 264 reunification (of Germany), 8, 270 “reunification” of Nazi Germany with Austria. See Austria, annexation of Rezzori, Gregor von, 239, 245–47 Rhineland, 146, 181 Riefenstahl, Leni, 135, 153, 154, 157, 159, 160, 165, 190–205, 210–14, 215–17 Riefenstahl, Leni, works by: Hinter den Kulissen des Reichsparteitag-Films, 194–96, 213 Sieg des Glaubens, 153, 157, 165, 171, 193, 194, 197, 210, 212, 216, 217 Triumph des Willens, 135, 154, 165, 173, 190–205, 211, 212, 215, 217 and documentary objectivity, 192–96, 200–205, 215 Ries, Edmund, 120 Rieß, Paul, 183, 184, 194, 204 Rieß, Paul, works by: Festtage im lieben alten Nürnberg, 183, 184, 204 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 225, 227–31, 233, 252, 256

341

Robbe-Grillet, Alain, works by: Le Miroir qui revient, 225, 227–29 Rodenberg, Julius, 3, 116, 128, 206, 233 Roeg, Nicolas, 1 Röhm, Ernst, 197, 203, 257 Roman Catholic church, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 25, 27, 105, 146, 179, 222, 224 Romanticism, 5, 32, 37, 38, 39, 42, 45, 48, 52, 76, 101, 110, 231, 234, 235, 261, 262, 303, 304, 305 Rome, 14, 19, 46, 149, 299 Römer, 178 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 239, 251, 255 Rose, Paul Lawrence, 126 Rosenberg, Alfred, 141, 142, 144, 145, 146, 176, 207 Rosenberg, Alfred, works by: Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts, 141, 142, 207 Rosenplüt, Hans, 13–18, 292 Rothbarth, Theodor, xii Rothenburg ob der Tauber, 2, 4, 7 Rother, Rainer, 195, 203, 214 Ruff, Ludwig, 149 Ruhr region, 182, 261. See also French occupation (of the Ruhr region) Runge, Philipp Otto, 45, 46 Russia, 44, 238, 239 Rwanda, 255 SA, 137, 150, 151, 190, 194, 197–99, 203, 214, 257 Sachs, Hans, 18–24, 26, 27, 39, 40, 44, 52, 53, 55, 58, 60, 74, 98, 105, 110, 115, 118, 121, 211, 227, 292 celebrations of, 111–18, 143 as a character in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. See Wagner, Richard, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg as a fictional character in other works, 56, 57, 58, 59, 72, 119

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Sachs (continued) house, 60, 109, 111, 205 synagogue near Hans Sachs house, 109, 153 monument for, 60, 94, 95, 111–16, 141, 296 Sacrament House, 25 Sanden, Erika, 268 Sanders, Dave, 305 Sängerfest (in Nuremberg). See singers’ festival (in Nuremberg) Saphir, M. G., 52, 53 Saxony, 119 S-Bahn, 4 Schamoni, Peter, 264, 265 Schamoni, Peter, films by: Brutalität in Stein, 264, 265 Scharrer, Johannes, 48, 102 Schedel, Hartmann, 11, 14, 15, 18, 34 Schell, Maximilian, 253, 254 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, 140 Schenkendorf, Max von, 44, 61, 62, 121, 295 Schiller, Friedrich, 228, 248 Schirach, Baldur von, 145, 168, 173, 215, 245 Schlegel, August Wilhelm, 40, 58 Schlögel, Karl, 9 Schmidbauer, Horst, 269 Schneider, Rolf, 235 Schöllgen, Gregor, 264, 273, 275 Scholz, Ludwig, 264, 284 Schöner Brunnen, 3 Schopersche Hause, 186 Schreiber, Konrad, xii Schubart, Christian, 35 Schuh, Georg von, 116, 117 Schuhmachervereine Alldeutschlands, 112 Schulz, Fritz Traugott, 189 Schumacher, Joachim, 151 Schütt island (in Nuremberg), 291 Schwemmer, Gottlieb, 180 Schwemmer, Wilhelm, 180 Sebald, St., 25, 297, 298; church of, 25, 35, 36, 292, 297

Sebald, W. G., 232–35, 302 Sebald, W. G., works by: Austerlitz, 234, 302; Nach der Natur, 233, 234 Second Reich. See Kaiserreich Second World War, 3, 4, 131, 149, 154, 176, 185, 205, 217, 221, 222, 241, 246, 256, 257, 265, 276, 305 Sedan, 121 Seidel, Ina, 158 Sembach, Klaus-Jürgen, 270, 271, 273, 275, 287, 295 Service du Travail Obligatoire, 224 Seydewitz, Max, 249 Seyß-Inquart, Arthur, 187–89, 245 Shakespeare, William, 248 Shirer, William, 8, 139, 159, 203, 205, 206 Showalter, Dennis E., 167 Sigismund (Holy Roman Emperor), 13, 14, 19, 32, 33, 186 Singer, Gustav, 97 singers’ festival (in Nuremberg), 72–76, 92, 93, 112, 114, 118 singing clubs (in Nuremberg), 112, 116 Sleeping Beauty, 33, 182, 209 Social Democratic Party, 5, 142, 159, 182, 200, 259, 260, 267, 269, 273, 275, 286, 287 Sonnenberger, Franz, 272, 273, 275 Sonthofen Order Castle, 179 Sorel, Georges, 142, 156 Sontag, Susan, 190, 191, 200, 203, 267 Soviet Union, 237, 251, 252. See also Russia Soviet zone of occupation, 237 Spain, 27 Speer, Albert, 132, 134, 135, 148, 149, 152, 154, 158, 258, 269 Spotts, Frederic, 133 Srbik, Heinrich Ritter von, 176 SS, 137, 150, 151, 188, 189, 197–99, 257 Staatsnation, 9, 10 Staatsoper, 134

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Stein, Baron von, 64 Steinberg, Saul, 294 Stern, Fritz, 168 Stern, James, 223 Sternberger, Dolf, 245, 252 Stettin, 114 Stock, Richard Wilhelm, 133, 153 Stoss, Veit, 25, 26, 36, 119 Strassburg, 37, 59 Straße der Menschenrechte. See Street of Human Rights (Nuremberg) Street of Human Rights (Nuremberg), 6, 262, 263 Streicher, Julius, 120, 137, 138, 143, 153, 167, 238, 260 Stromer, Baron Otto von, 114 Sturm und Drang, 37 Stürmer, Der, 137, 153, 238 Stuttgart, 137 Sudetenland, 217 Sulzer, Johann Georg, 37, 78 Super Bowl, 203 Supreme Court, 237 Sutter, Joseph, 46 swastika, 180, 184, 193, 198, 220, 224, 231, 264 Syberberg, Hans Jürgen, 140, 304 Syberberg, Hans Jürgen, films by: Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland, 140, 304 Tabulatur, 107 Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilyich, 2, 44, 82 Tempelhof airport, 257 Thamer, Hans-Ulrich, 151, 154, 161, 162, 191, 213 Therese of Saxe Hildburghausen, 52, 59 “Thingspiele,” 162, 175 Third Reich, 8, 131, 136, 140, 145, 152, 176, 179, 181, 182, 186, 189, 190, 214, 238, 248, 253, 265, 267; concept of, 146–48, 176–79 Thirty Years War, 23, 33, 105 Thorak, Josef, 181 Thuringia, 61 Tieck, Ludwig, 32–35, 39–43, 45, 46, 49, 56, 59, 76, 100, 107, 110,

343

115, 141, 183, 185, 230, 235, 290, 302, 305 Tieck, Ludwig, works by: Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen, 40–43, 46, 49, 50, 100, 290, 300 Timbuktu, 1 Toledo, 7 Topolski, Feliks, 290 Toronto, 305 Toronto Star, 241 tourism, 2, 5, 6, 32, 48, 56, 94, 143, 205, 265, 266, 295–97 Tracey, Spencer, 251 trade, international, 99, 124 tragedy, 99 Trier, 19 Truman, Harry, 239 Turner, Henry Ashby, 139 Twain, Mark, 98 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), 264 unification (of Germany), 111. See also reunification (of Germany) United Nations, 238, 250, 262 United States, 5, 9, 11, 251, 252, 255, 294, 305 United States Air Force, 228 United States Army, 189, 190, 220–22, 224, 251, 258 United States military government, 241 United States Strategic Bombing Survey, 221–23 United States zone of occupation, 220, 238, 241, 249 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 262, 263 Unteraufsess, 64 Urschlechter, Andreas, 267, 286 Vaget, Hans R., 110, 126 Valhalla, 100 Valkyries, 99 Vichy (government in France), 224, 225 Vienna, 32, 36, 56, 70, 118, 152, 187, 188

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Vienna, Congress of, 44, 61 Vietnam, 264 Vischer, Peter, 25, 26, 55, 119 Visconti, Luchino, 1 Vitzethum, Ferdinand, 226, 229, 258 Vogelweide, Walther von der, 98 Volk, 107, 108, 119, 134, 156, 178, 184, 240 Völkischer Beobachter, 190, 199 Volksfeste, 52–55, 73, 94, 184 “Volksgemeinschaft,” 161 Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich, 6, 32–37, 39–43, 45, 54–56, 59, 71, 76, 100, 110, 115, 122, 141, 152, 182, 183, 205, 230, 235, 294, 296, 302, 305 Wackenroder, Wilhelm Heinrich, works by: Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders, 32, 33, 39, 40, 41, 55, 100; Phantasien über die Kunst, 42, 100 Wagenseil, Johann Christoph, 100 Wagner, Cosmia, 94 Wagner, David, 298, 299, 303 Wagner, Richard, 2, 7, 42, 56, 59, 76, 93, 94–111, 114, 115, 117, 120, 124, 126, 132–36, 140, 153, 162, 164, 165, 181, 187, 188, 198, 205, 211, 236, 261, 296, 306; Hitler’s love of Wagner, 132–36, 140 Wagner, Richard, works by: “Das Judentum in der Musik,” 96 Lohengrin, 97, 98, 133 Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, 56, 59, 76, 94–112, 117, 120, 124, 126, 132–36, 153, 164, 165, 181, 187, 188, 198, 205, 211, 231, 236 Abgesang in, 108 “Awake” chorus in, 181, 188, 198, 211 David character in, 107, 108, 112 Eva character in, 102, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108 Hans Sachs character in, 98, 99,

102–8, 110, 111, 120, 126, 134, 135, 198, 236 Magdalene character in, 108 Sixtus Beckmesser character in, 105, 106, 108–10, 126 Veit Pogner character in, 103, 104 Walter von Stolzing character in, 102–8 Parsifal, 296, 306 Das Rheingold, 100 Der Ring des Nibelungen, 95, 96, 99 Tannhäuser, 101, 224 Tristan und Isolde, 96 Wagner, Siegfried, 134 Wagner, Winifred, 134 wall (Nuremberg city), 3, 13, 17, 18, 36, 45, 149, 185, 224, 263, 292, 295, 296 Wandlung, Die, 245, 252 Wandt, Lisa, 285 war criminals, 238 wars of aggression, 238, 241, 305 wars of liberation. See Napoleonic wars Washington, DC, 300 Wassermann, Jakob, 296, 297 Wassermann, Jakob, works by: Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude, 296, 297 Waterloo, 44 Wehrmacht, 151, 153, 194, 227, 238, 246, 251 Weimar, 2, 131, 138 Weimar Republic, 119, 120, 122, 146, 147, 253 Weiner, Marc A., 126 Weltchronik. See Nuremberg Chronicle West Germany, 254. See also Germany, Federal Republic of Westphal, Otto, 176–78 Wiechert, Ernst, 220 Wilhelm I (German emperor), 74 Wilhelm II (German emperor), 118, 146 Williamsburg, 7 Windsheim, 234 Witte, Karsten, 191, 202 Wittenberg, 19, 20

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Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 301, 302 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, works by: Philosophical Investigations, 301 Wolgemut, Michael, 24 Woodstock, 94 Woolworth, 235 World Cup, 275 World Trade Center, 290, 300

World Wide Web, 304 Wünsche, Wolf Michael, 268 Würzburg, 112 Yugoslavia, 9, 255 Zelnhefer, Siegfried, 136–38, 140 zero hour, 232, 233, 300

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Nuremberg: The Imaginary Capital

Imaginary

Nuremberg: The Last Battle

The Imaginary Caribbean and Caribbean Imaginary

Nuremberg The Last Battle

Imaginary parents

The Imaginary Gentleman

Imaginary Enemy

Imaginary Friend

Imaginary Science

Imaginary Magnitude

Imaginary Girls

Imaginary Homelands

Codigo De Nuremberg [1946]

Imaginary Magnitude

Imaginary Men

Imaginary Friends

The Topic Of The Imaginary

Le procès de Nuremberg

Not guilty at Nuremberg

The Nuremberg Medical Trial: the Holocaust and the origin of the Nuremberg medical code

The Creation of Imaginary Beings

The Imaginary Institution of Society

The Imaginary Institution of Society

Capital

Capital

Capital

Capital

Capital

Capital

Psychoanalysis and the Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier

Nuremberg: The Imaginary Capital

Imaginary

Nuremberg: The Last Battle

The Imaginary Caribbean and Caribbean Imaginary

Nuremberg The Last Battle

Imaginary parents

The Imaginary Gentleman

Imaginary Enemy

Imaginary Friend

Imaginary Science

Imaginary Magnitude

Imaginary Girls

Imaginary Homelands

Codigo De Nuremberg [1946]

Imaginary Magnitude

Imaginary Men

Imaginary Friends

The Topic Of The Imaginary

Le procès de Nuremberg

Not guilty at Nuremberg

The Nuremberg Medical Trial: the Holocaust and the origin of the Nuremberg medical code

The Creation of Imaginary Beings

The Imaginary Institution of Society

The Imaginary Institution of Society

Capital

Capital

Capital

Capital

Capital

Capital

Psychoanalysis and the Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier

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