Perhaps you could start the new illustrated book from the Nuremberg City Archives on page ten, in the chapter “Nuremberg’s Heart: The Old Town”. The photo there is by Ray D’Addario, a man whose work pretty much everyone has seen, even if perhaps without knowing it. D’Addario was an American army photographer; after the end of the Second World War, his clients asked him to travel to Germany and document the Nuremberg Trials. D’Addario delivered hundreds of pictures from Nuremberg, and became the photographer of this world event par excellence.
Of course, D’Addario was not only interested in what was happening in Room 600. He also turned his camera on contemporary life in Germany, or rather in Nuremberg. His picture of the main market – in the front, consumers with vegetables from the Knoblauchsland, the Schöne Brunnen in the center, in the background a backdrop of destruction, the scaffolded towers of the Sebaldus Church and a construction crane – is symbolic of the impending “economic miracle”. If you look closely, you can see critical shoppers and an emaciated-looking man in a cap. This is what everyday life in Germany must have looked like in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
And as is the case with good pictures, this one also goes beyond itself. In Nuremberg, an increasingly irreconcilable dispute is raging these days about who can, is allowed to, and should sell vegetables outdoors, when, where, how often, and under what conditions. A look at this picture would do everyone involved some good; it would lower their blood pressure all by itself.
In general, the illustrated books in this series from the Nuremberg City Archives can definitely be recommended for prescription. The new one is called “Nuremberg in the Economic Miracle Years” (Sutton Verlag, Tübingen 2024); previously, the archive collected and commented on photos from 1935 to 1975 (Volume 1) and, with a small overlap in time, from the years 1970 to 1995 (Volume 2). These three books may not leave the viewer feeling humble. But they do leave them feeling humbler.
In the new volume, one only has to look at the town hall, photographed in 1955: a façade that is more reminiscent of the particularly ruined parts of Heidelberg Castle than of the central building of the city.
Ruth Bach-Damaskinos, head of the image, film and sound department at the city archives, is responsible for this volume. If you call her, you can take a look at her workplace on page 59 of the volume: an exposed concrete building constructed between 1965 and 1969, one of the most controversial buildings within the old town ring.
Bach-Damaskinos is aware of the optical concerns that are still widespread today and the misconception that people speak of brutalism because this type of building looks so brutal at first glance. “I like going to work,” says the archivist, she likes it. And she’s not the only one: architectural history has long been very fond of buildings like the city archives.
Which certainly doesn’t apply to everything that was built at that time. The Plärrer? To this day, it remains a semi-debacle in terms of urban development, dreary, harsh, loud, hot – and getting hotter. At least the city’s transport hub is due to be redesigned soon, but it will be late enough.