The Lorenzer Passage was the last place so far where you could still use your 50-pfennig pieces. And now? Tempi passati.
So far, Nuremberg has certainly had a superlative. Nuremberg, that was the city in which one was asked in the underground station shortly before visiting the Christkindlesmarkt to equip a locker with the good old D-Mark or with 50 pfennigs. (D-marks and pennies, only for the younger ones, were once a means of payment in this country, shortly after the Reichsmark.) Oh, it was a great facility for tourists from all over the world. Simply a place that was of no use, where you could stroll past without the pressure of commercial expectations and – for example – ponder love in the times of the Kohl era.
Tempi passati, because the beautiful has no place on earth and in the present case was also disparaged in the most shameful way by this newspaper. The entire Lorenzkirche underground station – the most central in the city of half a million – looked something like a “forgotten dungeon of a rogue state that is as aesthetically unsuspecting as possible”. There it seems as if Nuremberg wants to confidently signal to the guest: “It’s great that you are here. But it would have been really nice at home – almost even more beautiful, right?”
Unsightly, nasty words not appropriate to the Christmas peace. And so nobody should be surprised if this gem of Franconia, a unique selling point par excellence, is no longer there. In the course of a renovation project of almost Adenauer’s dimensions, the passage is to be turned inside out in the future. Fortunately, there are still staircases there that are as lovely as one would imagine an industrial wasteland in Duisburg-Ruhrort in the late 1940s. But the charm of the ailing, decaying, morbid should just be done away with. And so it started with the former “suitcase locking system”.
There you throw in one euro. Can then open one of the 48 compartments, look at modern art and get his euro back. A “module gallery” by the artist couple Kasia and Olaf Prusik-Lutz, with which – according to the city – “a first step towards upgrading the Lorenzer Passage” is to be taken. And what do you do now with your 50-pfennig pieces?