Photo Pest: Holy Roman Emperor Hotel

Monday, October 9, 2023

Holy Roman Emperor Hotel

As I learned at the Documentation Center, Nuremberg hosted a nationalist event attended by a 34-year-old Hitler on September 2, 1923, almost exactly a century before my visit. "German Day," a prototype of the infamous Nuremberg rallies, took place in the Old Town and occurred just two months prior to the Beer Hall Putsch in Munich that brought Hitler to the wide attention of the German people and resulted in a prison sentence. He used his down time to write Mein Kampf, which explicitly identified the importance of propaganda in furthering his political goals. In many respects, Nuremberg can be considered the symbolic birthplace of Naziism, and its citizens paid dearly for this distinction in early 1945 when 521 British airplanes bombed the shit out of it, almost completely destroying the Old Town. Curiously, however, the Allies chose to try Nazis in Nuremberg not because of its symbolic value, but for logistical reasons which included the fact that airplanes carrying both participants and spectators could land on Albert Speer's Great Road. Irony is everywhere you look in Germany.

When I checked in, the innkeeper at the Smile hotel had seemed taken aback when I told her I was going to the Memoriam after just visiting the Documentation Center. She urged me to visit the burgh, especially at night when it and many of the city's landmarks are illuminated. I entered the Old Town through the gate just across the street.

Much of it, like the stores and the "Way of Human Rights"--a 1993 attempt to re-brand the city, an almost surreal example of turning a lemon into lemonade--looks new.

But a lot doesn't, begging the question: how much of the Old Town has been restored and how in hell did they do it, if so? Where there's a triumphant will, I guess there's a way.

St. Lorenz Church

Pegnitz River View

Church of Our Lady

Schöner Brunnen

Rathaus

St. Sebaldus Church

Maybe I was exhausted but I didn't even notice the burg until I asked two young women for directions. "It's right up the hill," they said pointing to what I thought must be another city gate.

In fact, the burg was among Europe's most heavily fortified castles in the Middle Ages, when it was temporarily inhabited by various Holy Roman Emperors on their way to and fro (the empire lacked a capital), as a kind of royal hotel. Although the burg lost its importance after the Thirty Years War, the Nazis "returned it to its original state" for propagandistic reasons, and it was rebuilt again after World War II. Some history dies hard.