BR series “1806: The Nuremberg Saga” – about the fall and rise of the city – Bavaria

It is September 15, 1806, at exactly ten o’clock in the morning, when a French representative hands over the city of Nuremberg to a Bavarian Commissioner General, flanked by the ringing of bells and the thunder of cannons. Four years earlier, the local businessman Paul Wolfgang Merkel had scribbled in his diary that God himself had secured Nuremberg as a free imperial city and that the proud metropolitan Franks would enjoy their “imperial civil liberty” now and forever with an ever “increasing perfection”. And now, a few years later? The proud free people from what is probably the most respected imperial city in southern Germany fall to the Bavarians. Bayern, of all places.

What a shame, a humiliation. And what a sentence that the wife of the bustling Merkel – an avid chronicler on her own behalf – feels compelled to say at this epoch-making moment. Weeping she is said to have fallen on the neck of her children, seven words on trembling lips: “You poor children, now you are servants of a prince.”

The incident (regardless of whether it happened exactly like that) has become the founding legend of a Nuremberg lifestyle – a scene as a city trauma. The self-confident freedom of the Nuremberg citizen, who only knew the emperor about himself, was gone; not to mention dreams of perfection. Instead: royal servants of a southern tribe who apparently knew nothing better than to sell off the accumulated wealth of the city, fine art from several centuries, to the highest bidder as quickly as possible. And at ridiculous prices, due to the oversupply of traditional Nuremberg trinkets suddenly for sale. A humiliation; and what – according to the not unjustified perspective of the people of Nuremberg – an obviously banausal approach to the traditional culture of one of the metropolises of Europe, albeit heavily indebted, yet most powerful in history.

215 years later, Bayerischer Rundfunk has made the honorable businessman Merkel the main character of the three-part film “1806: The Nuremberg Saga”. On December 29th, the opulently produced docudrama will be broadcast on BR, and from Christmas Eve it can already be seen in the media library.

Merkel is not just that mythical figure whose wife uttered the brazen sentence about the sudden royal servants. He is also the man whose notes can be narrated along with scenes, so that a full-length work does not wither into a thin history soup soap. Two experts on the subject, historians Georg Seiderer and Günter Dippold, worked on the production, and a second use is already in sight: After the TV broadcast, the career as teaching material beckons, a pars pro toto for the Napoleonic era and its upheaval potential, which is still shaping today .

This may seem daunting to some, but it doesn’t have to be. When, for example, the devastatingly bad-tempered Matthias Egersdörfer – in his prime role as a Frank-grumpy citizen – comments on the invading troops from Bavaria at the beginning of the second episode with the footnote “What worse couldn’t have happened to us, we’re the people of Nuremberg”, that’s the way it is not just amusing. But also refreshing: Bayern fooling around has not a very robust tradition in the BR for obvious reasons.

But this saga takes on the opposite perspective of those who, for understandable reasons, were allowed to count themselves for a long time among the free, noble and self-confident – only to find themselves in the must of a Bavarian provincial town. In this saga you can learn a lot about traditional inner Bavarian conflict potential and breaks in the history of mentality. The Nuremberg always struggling for self-confidence? It wasn’t always like this, on the contrary.

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Franconian-Bavarian coming to terms with the past of the enjoyable kind, almost a kind of inner-Bavarian family constellation. And one, for the form of which it may have played a certain role that the BR Franconian studio manager Tassilo Forchheimer, who has been in office since 2019 and who came up with the idea of ​​this saga, is a studied historian – and was also born in Munich. He is well armed against the accusation of frenzy. This trilogy noticeably doesn’t fear them: Occasionally the images indulge in the old Franconian style, as if they had come straight from the city’s marketing department, the camera flight to the Imperial Castle is a defining stylistic element.

That can be annoying, apparently affects others in their inner coordinate system (the astonishing sentence could be read in a newspaper review, since “Leni Riefenstahl” had “nobody else wrapped Nuremberg so beautifully in a visual medium”), but it is not without function: The extent of historical hurt becomes tangible especially when the city, the actual protagonist of this saga, is not given the modern interpretation of a southern German underdog as a sympathetically eccentric one second city. But those who made them the genius loci of kings and emperors, traders and artists and meanwhile one of the intellectual centers of the old continent. The Kaiserburg simply symbolizes the height of fall. The fact that the one in the camera flights sometimes seems like a feverish dream of Ludwig II shortly after consuming Wagner music may be bearable.

The public service broadcaster has not always made friends when it comes to filmed history from Franconia. The low point for locals is the ZDF multi-part series “Tannbach”, which tells the story of a Franconian village on the inner-German border, but in which the characters speak crude gibberish that has as much to do with Franconian as the Nuremberg castle and castle Neuschwanstein.

They had not found enough dialect speakers, it was said to justify – but it tended to fuel the Franconian confusion. So this cliff had to be circumnavigated, after all, according to the BR itself, wants to reveal old inner Bavarian wounds in the saga in order to participate in the healing process. And don’t open new ones, least of all through dialectal ignorance.

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On the whole, it works out well: the protagonist Andreas Leopold Schadt (as a businessman Merkel) is anyway native speaker, as well as the documentary presenter Kadda Gehret, others at least don’t sound out of place. Three extras in mini roles were specially retubed;

That may illustrate how sensitive you thought you had to proceed. From an old Bavarian point of view, the selected period of the drama is sensitive: not only the turning point of 1806 is described, the story goes back to 1835, when the “eagle” rattles from Nuremberg to Fürth and a new era in German industrial history is heralded from northern Bavaria . So not only the fall of the city of Nuremberg is illustrated – but also its rise. Under Bavarian aegis.