Information Service

People associate Nuremberg with many things: gingerbread, grilled sausages, and the Christmas market, but also with Albrecht Dürer and Hans Sachs. In addition the Franconian metropolis with a population of half a million is burdened, as scarcely any other German city, by the legacy of National Socialism

Nuremberg is not only a place of culinary delights. Nuremberg gingerbread (Lebkuchen) and the tasty grilled sausages may be eaten everywhere, and are of course much in evidence at the pre-Christmas market which attracts two million visitors every year. But that is only one aspect of this industrial and trade fair city.

Mediaeval Cosmopolitan City

The people of Nuremberg have played a part in world history for around 950 years now. As a centre of German humanism Nuremberg was viewed as a "mediaeval cosmopolitan city". It was here that Martin Behaim devised the first globe, that Peter Henlein made the first pocket-watch, that Albrecht Dürer’s celebrated copperplate engravings were produced, and that Hans Sachs perfected the music of the Mastersingers. The city owed much of its importance to Karl IV who in the Golden Bull of 1356 – the Basic Law of the Holy Roman Empire – decreed that every newly elected German King should hold his first Imperial Diet in Nuremberg, "the most distinguished and best-situated city in the Reich". And that happened until the year 1543.

The Imperial Treasure Chest

As with many other German cities, Nuremberg’s decline got under way with the Thirty Years War. It only recovered in the early 19^th century. The romantics wove a myth transfiguring the city as an embodiment of old German art and culture, known as the "treasure chest of the German Reich".

The Legacy of National Socialism

In the 20^th century association with "Nuremberg" was particularly favoured under the Nazis. From this darkest chapter in the city’s history there derives a legacy which still weighs on Nuremberg today. The Reich party rallies were held here from 1933 to 1938; the anti-semitic "Nuremberg Laws for Protection of German Blood and Honour" were proclaimed here in 1935; and finally leading Nazis had to answer for their war crimes in the "Nuremberg Trials" from 1945 to 1949. The fact that Hitler chose Nuremberg – "the most German of all German cities" – as the "city of the Reich Party Rallies" has left visible marks down to the present day. Hitler’s favourite architect Albert Speer worked together with Ludwig Ruff on plans for monumental development of the 11 sq. km. party rally area just outside the city. Even though much – including the gigantic congress hall – remained uncompleted, fascist aesthetics and National Socialist megalomania are manifested all too blatantly. The Zeppelinfeld with the "Führer’s Tribune" offered the Nazis a suitable setting for their parades and propagandistic stagings.

Coping with the Legacy

The Allies reduced the "Führer’s City" to rubble in 1945, but the people of Nuremberg were left with the Nazi buildings. For decades they sought a convincing concept for utilization of the architectural remnants of the Third Reich. This was found in the nineties. Since November 2001 the Reich Party Rally Area Documentation Centre, established in part of the Kongresshalle, presents a permanent exhibition entitled "Fascination and Power", devoted to the history of this area and the propaganda mechanisms used by the Nazis.

City of Human Rights

However it is not just with this documentation centre that Bavaria’s second-largest city acknowledges its historical responsibility. Nuremberg is particularly committed to observation of human rights. The "Sculpture Street of Human Rights", opened at the Germanic National Museum in 1994, is intended to bear witness to that. So too is the Nuremberg International Human Rights Prize, awarded every other year since 1995 to individuals or groups dedicated in exemplary fashion to this cause. Nuremberg thus hopes to be able in the not too distant future to exchange the epithet "City of the Reich Party Rallies" for another one: "City of Human Rights".