Stephen Brockmann. Nuremberg: The Imaginary Capital. Rochester: Camden House, 2006. xi + 345 pp. $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-57113-345-8.

Reviewed by David Choberka (Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Museum of Art, University of Michigan)
Published on H-German (October, 2007)

Germany's "Imaginary Capital"

Most people with some familiarity with German history know that the city of Nuremberg occupies a special place in the national and global imaginary of Germany. Even if they have only a vague awareness of the Nazi Party rallies or the post-World War II war crimes trials, people who do not know much about Germany at all are still aware of this special significance. Scholars of German history know the walled medieval city of Nuremberg as a persistent and unique presence in nostalgic representations of German identity, and they have some idea that the Nazis were trying to associate themselves with a well-established symbol of the nation when they chose to hold their rallies there. Nevertheless, before Stephen Brockmann's Nuremberg: The Imaginary Capital, the unique role of the symbol of Nuremberg in the cultural history of the German nation was often taken for granted.

Held together tightly by the straightforward thesis that Nuremberg has been the "imaginary capital" of Germany since the beginnings of its modern national consciousness, Brockmann's book ranges through an impressive array of primary sources to illuminate the many ways that scholars, writers, artists, and politicians have represented Nuremberg as a "synecdoche" of Germany over the past two hundred years (pp. 180, 249). An important trading city in the thirteenth century, Nuremberg was granted status as an imperial city by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in 1219. By the sixteenth century its economic prosperity and cultural vivacity had fostered such luminaries as poet and singer Hans Sachs and painter Albrecht Dürer. From 1424 to 1796 the imperial insignia of the Holy Roman emperor were housed in Nuremberg, giving it unique status as both a geographic and symbolic center of the empire. By mid-sixteenth century, however, changes in the economic geography of Europe initiated a centuries-long decline. The decline, ironically, left the walled medieval city in a kind of preserved state, waiting to be rediscovered as a relic of a glorious German past by Romantics and nationalists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, at the very time that Napoleon's invading forces precipitated both the removal of the insignia to Vienna for safe-keeping and the awakening of modern German nationalism.

The first chapter provides an impressively synthesized survey of Nuremberg's social, economic, cultural, and political history from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, but the majority of the book focuses on representations of the city in discourse about the nation and German identity beginning in the late eighteenth century. Brockmann does not, however, focus solely on discourse. The entire book feels solidly situated in the city itself, so that throughout his consideration of the ways that Nuremberg functions as a kind of "dream city" for the nation, Brockmann reminds us of the relationship of this discourse to a real place, its physical environs, and its local politics (p. 5).

While the book is specifically about Nuremberg, it is more broadly about German nationalism. Brockmann's treatment of nationalism obviously draws on Benedict Anderson's model of "imagined community," but he specifically references Eric Hobsbawm's concept of "the invention of tradition," which perhaps more fittingly describes the kind of close attention that Brockmann gives to human agents who used the symbol of Nuremberg to shape national identity and promote patriotism (p. 54). From an impressive number of angles, Brockmann shows how Nuremberg functioned in nationalist discourse as a symbol of a uniquely German model of harmony in economic and cultural life and among social classes. Despite the number of voices, however, the discussion is largely a monologue. Although Brockmann does discuss how democratic nationalists used the symbol of Nuremberg in 1848, he mostly shows that Nuremberg served consistently to center nationalist discourse on a nostalgic, politically reactionary view of the past--on a pre-capitalist, pre-democratic German golden age that often attracted interest as a form of ideological compensation for the changes wrought by modernizing processes such as industrialization (pp. 54-55, 60, 72). Following George Mosse's treatment of nationalism as a kind of secular religion, Brockmann is keen to explore what he calls the "quasi-religious" form of the nostalgic nationalism that made Nuremberg its imaginary capital (p. 51). While it is certainly a result of the book's admirably consistent focus, German nationalism comes through in Brockmann's analysis as rather uniformly oriented toward recreating the kind of authentically German way of life loaded into the image of Nuremberg. That result may occlude some political variety in nationalist discourse(s). Not all articulations of national identity looked to Nuremberg or a nostalgic past. But Brockmann makes a compelling case that Nuremberg served as a unique presence in the national imagination, emitting a kind of gravitational pull toward nostalgia. Because of its special status, no other site could have assisted the Nazis better in their effort to identify themselves with the dream of a united modern nation thriving on its rootedness in a glorious, authentically German past. While Brockmann avoids suggesting that all roads in German nationalism lead through Nuremberg to National Socialism, he makes it possible to see how the Nazis made it appear so by staging their movement in the powerfully symbolic city. One of the most interesting parts of Brockmann's book is the last chapter, in which he considers representations of Nuremberg after World War II. The chapter provides a local history perspective on the problem of dealing with the Nazi past. In considering local efforts to deal with the physical legacy of the monumental Nazi rally grounds, Brockmann highlights how Nuremberg began to function as the "imaginary capital" of a new kind of post-nationalistic German self-consciousness, oriented toward education and activism in the sphere of global human rights.

The multiple levels on which Brockmann operates and the variety of sources he explores, including travelogues, political discourse, art and art criticism, festivals and celebrations, film, opera, academic scholarship, and architecture, make the book thorough, enjoyable to read, and full of material that should be of interest to a wide variety of scholars. Readers interested in German cultural history or nationalism in general will find in Brockmann's wide-ranging but sharply focused study a fresh narrative of many of the major and minor trends of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Scholars of art history and architectural criticism will find interesting material in the second chapter, with its consideration of Romantic-era writings about Nuremberg's medieval architecture and the cultic celebration of Albrecht Dürer. Analyses throughout the book of various celebrations and festivals, including singers' festivals and a substantial discussion of the Nazi Party rallies, along with discussion of performances such as operas and plays, make Brockmann's book valuable to anyone who studies performance culture either in the German context or comparatively. Extensive considerations of the representation of Nuremberg in Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger (1867) and of several different performances in the city itself are likely to be of value to scholars of Wagner and opera. The two chapters on Nuremberg and National Socialism will be essential reading for those who study National Socialist ideology. The author's examination of the ways that discourses about the nation were concentrated on Nuremberg allows him to put the Nazis' focus on the city solidly in context and to provide a satisfying analysis of what the party and the thousands of Germans who came to the rallies thought they were doing there. One of the chapters on Nazism deals with the significance of Nuremberg to the party and its leadership. Another looks at mass participation in the National Socialist version of the myth of Nuremberg and considers how the myth was constructed and supported by academics and fiction writers, the assembled masses themselves, and most thoroughly by filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl. Brockmann touches in interesting ways on other topics too numerous to enumerate here, including the Allied bombing of Germany, which destroyed the "dream city"; the history of the Germanic National Museum in Nuremberg; and the relationship between national collective memory and public space. On the latter point, the last chapter is especially interesting, with its consideration of the ways that debates over the Nazi past have been waged over the city's unique National Socialist architectural legacy.

Brockmann's book is worth reading in its entirety and for its many specific and insightful considerations of diverse topics. While providing the kind of thorough study of representations of Nuremberg in nationalist discourse that he sets out as his purpose, Brockmann also presents a concise narrative of two centuries of German cultural and political history from a unique perspective and makes significant contributions to a wide range of studies.

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Citation: David Choberka. Review of Brockmann, Stephen, Nuremberg: The Imaginary Capital. H-German, H-Net Reviews. October, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13763

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