Nuremberg: The Imaginary Capital (review)

This important study charts how the various representations of "Nuremberg" evolved for Germans into their "imaginary capital." As author Stephen Brockmann explains in the introduction, it is not the aim of the book to offer a more traditionally defined history of the lived, experienced city of Nuremberg itself. Brockmann has chosen wisely, since in the case of Nuremberg, the former option is clearly the more fascinating story to tell. The challenge that the author thereby sets himself is demandingly interdisciplinary. Most literary scholars would not wish to engage the broad spectrum of cultural-historical inquiry that underpins Nuremberg's uniquely German signification spanning across the early and late modern, and ultimately postmodern, eras; and most historians or urbanists, in turn, would not be willing to consider the concomitant panoply of aesthetic output that has been focused on this city. Brockmann accomplishes and blends both approaches with aplomb.

In the nineteenth century, Nuremberg, with its then-extant architectural ghosts of late medieval German culture, became a convenient focal point for the Romantic German literary, artistic, and musical imagination in search of a nationalistic staging of its desires. Brockmann painstakingly investigates how this emergence of the "mass culture of Nuremberg historicism" serviced the national imaginary (123). He dedicates his nuanced and fully researched chapters to a variety of stand-alone topics: the ascendance and decline of Nuremberg's inter-urban status by the beginning of the nineteenth century (chapter 1); the city's re-emergence, minus the urban referent, as a tool for German Romanticism's search for a German symbolic capital (chapter 2); the utilization of the myth of Nuremberg as an emblem of German cultural spirit by Wagner in his operatic staging of the Meistersinger and by other monuments and festivals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (chapter 3); the staging in Nuremberg of the NSDAP party rallies from 1933 to 1938, including Leni Riefenstahl's famous documentary of the 1934 rally (chapters 4 and 5); and Nuremberg's postwar ruins, international war crimes trials, and museal self-reinventions (chapter 6).

Among these splendidly readable chapters there is much of great originality and merit, such as the sections in chapter 2 relating the significance of the ritualization of Albrecht Dürer in the early nineteenth century and the founding of the city's Germanic National Museum in 1853 (45–52, 67–71). In chapter 4, Brockmann brilliantly articulates the book's key set of questions concerning the significance of Hitler's decision, in 1933, to henceforth hold party rallies in Nuremberg and thus change the city's representational status forever (133–46); and in chapter 5, Brockmann relates the impact of the Nazified city's culminating event, five years later, of the return of the crown jewels of the Holy Roman Empire from Vienna to Nuremberg (186–190). In the discussion in chapter 6 of the aftermath of World War II, Brockmann astutely assesses the reactions of writers like W.H. Auden and Alain Robbe-Grillet to a broken, bombed-out Nuremberg; the chapter also includes a fascinating account of Nuremberg's ongoing reckoning with the remnants of its Nazi architectural legacy. In such instances, Brockmann displays a clear understanding of how urban representation and urban memory, whether textual or architectural, have everything to do with not just a city's re-statement of itself but with an entire country's. However, the book could be identified as having a structural weakness: half the chapters are oriented toward one major representational feature of Nuremberg (the party rally grounds designed by Albert Speer as well as Ludwig and Franz Ruff); and yet the planning and architectural significance of the Reichsparteitagsgelände could nonetheless have been expanded by Brockmann into a more widely contextualized analysis, such as a comparative discussion of Nuremberg as one among five idealized "Führer-cities" (forty such cities were planned overall).

Overall, it is to Brockman's credit that he has achieved such a compelling analysis of Nuremberg as Germany's urban-mythic icon. Brockman's...