He just won’t let go of the city. The fact that great artists not only leave their marks in their homeland, but also cause debates, may be taken for a rush. Nuremberg’s relationship with Albrecht Dürer, however, can be regarded as a special case. The 500th anniversary of his death will be celebrated there in the foreseeable future, the time has come in 2028. Of course, anyone who questions the archive almost five centuries after the master’s death about Dürer-Zoff, Dürer’s excitement, Dürer’s discourse in Nuremberg will not be able to complain about a lack of hits. Should one issue Dürer’s copies? Is his most popular work transportable within Bavaria, even from Munich to Nuremberg? Is someone like him a good airport name? Should one decorate the town hall with a “Disney Dürer”? Nuremberg residents are definitely not considered notoriously aroused – but when it comes to Dürer, things can quickly get emotional.
What is good. Dürer, that is the best way to describe it, is at the same time the pride of the city for the people of Nuremberg – and an open wound. Because of course you can also admire a few originals by the master in the metropolis of the late Middle Ages. A visit to the city is much more suitable for a melancholy search for traces. After all, most of Dürer’s work is scattered around the world – which is why to-go handouts for the international audience, also in short-form, are all the more important for Dürer’s discovery.
The regional historians from the “History for All” institute have now made an outstanding contribution to being one of the good ones. The volume “Albrecht Dürer. Searching for traces in Nuremberg” (published by Sandberg-Verlag) by Manuel Teget-Welz as well as Thomas Eser and Thomas Schauerte combines scientific expertise with an overview that is also useful for tourism. In the broad field of Dürer, in which overview work likes to take up significant parts of the bookshelf, this can be considered an exception. So Dürer for those in a hurry – but those with ambitions.
On the excursion to the “distant genius”, a formulation by Thomas Schauerte, it is certainly not the worst idea to culminate a tour on the Burgberg. And not just because historical copies of Dürer’s work can be seen there in a brutalist extension from the 1970s. At Tiergärtnertorplatz – a cobblestone dream with trendy bars integrated into the city wall on the one hand, sausage specialists on the other – the hail of bombs of World War II left little standing. However, the house on the corner where Dürer lived and worked was essentially preserved. In 1828 the first memorial for a visual artist on this side of the Alps was set up here. In the little house you can learn how the 19th century Biedermeier imagined the age of the master. Which says a lot – even if it is only about the sometimes cult-like admiration that the master has received. This can also be seen on the Dürer monument (the first official artist monument in Germany in public space) and at the Johannisfriedhof, where Dürer was buried in 1528, a death mask was removed from him as an act of veneration and a lock of hair was cut off.
Albrecht Dürer was buried in the Johannisfriedhof in 1528.
(Photo: Olaf Przybilla)
The master died childless, and when his wife Agnes was no more, his house was given to residents who had preferences other than the culture of remembrance of the 21st century. One rebuilt. Exactly here is the master supposed to sleep, there he should receive guests, should he have pushed on his work under the roof? That used to be true. Since building researchers were in the house, much of the earlier certainty has given way. Other things from the Dürer’s environment are now more free than ever, and this search for clues also provides a brief but illuminating explanation. It was probably the special society on the mountain below the imperial castle that turned a craftsman’s son into a free artist. The National Museum (also a stage on the 16 stations) traced the traces of 350 residents in more than 140 residential buildings – and established a topography that identifies the castle hill as the exclusive quarter of the intellectuals of the late Middle Ages.
There was Anton Koberger, who worked his way up from a baker’s son to a media tsar and played a key role in the distribution of Dürer’s prints. There was Michael Wolgemut, in whose painting workshop one of the neighbour’s son’s earliest drawings was made; and of course Willibald Pirckheimer, humanist, very wealthy patrician and intellectual patron of the young master from Nuremberg.
The town hall is also Dürer’s station, but this is where the compressed brevity of the depiction is most painful. Dürer had provided the templates for the painting of the Great Hall of the City Hall, a work which, as some researchers believe, “already exceeded all of Dürer’s other works put together in terms of surface area”. The world war left nothing of that; which is why in 2014 reconstruction friends not only initiated the city’s first request for a council – but many even feared that this vote would have a direct impact on the mayoral election taking place at the same time. In the end, Ulrich Maly friends (the mayor at the time had clearly spoken out against a Dürer Disney) clearly prevailed against reconstruction supporters: 68 percent rejected a large-scale Dürer imitation in the representation room of their city. This is not dealt with in this way in the volume, which is a shame – it shows how the old master continues to heat the minds in modern Nuremberg.
The Albrecht Dürer Airport has meanwhile become an important bearer of the master’s name. In the search for clues through Nuremberg, however, he did not make it.
(Photo: Daniel Karmann / dpa)
The Albrecht Dürer Airport, on the other hand, did not even make it to a station. The idea provider, Markus Söder, should particularly regret that. On the other hand: That the renaming of the airport was probably not the worst marketing idea in the history of this old city, even those blasphemers admit today.