We have already mentioned the term “Nuremberg’s local history museum”, which has become so widespread on radio, television – and yes – even in the most serious print media that the Southgerman newspaper in March 2018, felt compelled to declare capitulation on its own behalf. The reason for this was that at that time, the inventor and implementer of the Bavarian “Homeland Ministry” in Nuremberg, Horst Seehofer, as one of the last loyal fighters, had stopped his bitter resistance and had also begun to speak of the “Homeland Museum”.
“I founded the local museum, er, the local ministry, in Bavaria,” explained the then-serving prime minister about the office of the then finance minister Markus Söder. The SZ newspaper then made a fundamental decision and communicated it very clearly to the outside world: “Everyone is always talking about the museum. And if the inventor now creates it too, then there will be no stopping it in the future. So. The thing is called a museum. Period.”
And this brings us to another case of linguistic synapse formation that is clearly irreversible. Imagine a very thought-provoking event, a person from the Nuremberg city council at a microphone and serious people in the audience, their brows furrowed in keeping with the occasion. The speech is about the depths of German history, about the NSDAP dictator and his various residential bastions in the brown Reich – and about what became of these “Führer” quarters after 1945.
There is no room for humor in such a speech, and for good reason. And so no one laughs when the “Dürer headquarters” is mentioned for the first time on the microphone; not even a suppressed giggle can be heard in the hall. And even when “Dürer headquarters” is mentioned for the second time – as far as can be seen – no one bats an eyelid.
Which, and this is also true, is a major group effort at this moment. You have to know that the term “Dürer headquarters” is a kind of conceptual samizdat in Nuremberg. Many people know it, but it has been used publicly (i.e. not in private conversations) almost exclusively by the easy-going Nuremberg Evening News: much too delicate, much too incorrect.
In the AZ, “Dürer headquarters” was the technical term introduced for the Nuremberg cultural department, which – or so the suggestion goes – is constantly grappling with Dürer years, Dürer routes and Dürer memorabilia. Well, the Nuremberg AZ no longer exists, but the term lives on. Even if only behind closed doors. Or (which was to be proven) when someone’s synapses take on a life of their own.
The copyright on “Dürer Headquarters”, says the archive, cannot, by the way, Evening News He was already mentioned in a satirical poem in the SZ in 1971. However, he had no significant impact.