The Greens, the SPD and the CSU rarely appear together in front of the press in Nuremberg, especially not in the large conference room of the town hall. So there must be something big going on this Friday lunchtime – and that’s what it does: Mayor Marcus König (CSU) speaks of the “largest single project since the Second World War”; they have “agreed on a common approach to deal with the renovation of the opera house and an interim venue,” says the joint press release.
This agreement provides for two key points: the opera house in the city center, built in 1905, will be renovated, the state theater will return there after an interim period of probably ten years. The functional rooms of the opera – offices, technical and workshop rooms, theater stocks and much more – are located on the former Nazi party rally grounds, in the 82,000 square meter wounds of the city, in the Nazi congress hall.
In essence, however, the similarities end there. It remains to be seen whether the venue, the performance hall for opera and dance theater, will be placed “inside or outside the congress hall”. What sounds like odds and ends is in truth the core of the heated urban debate recently.
In fact, as its parliamentary group leader Thorsten Brehm notes, the SPD did not act against culture in the Nazi ruin: there has long been a consensus in urban society that artists and creative people should move in there – which should not surprise anyone, after all, the Nazi who leaned on the Colosseum is home -Building the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra, the smaller of the two local large ensembles, for more than five decades.
Considerations to build an opera house in the inner courtyard of the gigantic ruins met with clear resistance – not least from the historians of the Document Center Nazi Party Rally Grounds, who were otherwise highly praised by the city. They fear that this would interfere with a particularly speaking source in the ensemble of the Nazi legacies of Nuremberg.
“We are building an interim”, that is, a “temporary performance location”
But such an intervention should only be temporary, “ephemeral”, that is, degradable, possibly in a lightweight construction, the city has argued against so far – apparently in order not to overly complain to the preservationists. On the podium of the supposedly great black-red-green commonality, however, it sounds completely different.
Brehm wants the interim building to be of “high quality”, while Greens parliamentary group leader Achim Mletzko even dreams of an “international architectural competition”. From the perspective of the Greens, that sounds understandable: An interim building for more than 40 million euros, which would then be demolished again, was considered neither economically feasible nor ecologically justifiable.
An international architectural competition? In the joint paper, this reads more like a local administrative process: “As part of the bidding process”, “appropriate specialist articles should be queried”. Culture advisor Julia Lehner (CSU) then makes it clear: “We are building an interim”, a “temporary performance location”. And according to the CSU parliamentary group leader, Andreas Krieglstein, it is “probably clear” that because of the shortage of time – the interim construction should be in place in 2025 – “no international competition” is due. Big consensus in Nuremberg? Only on the surface.