Do your wurst here
AN ANCIENT city of castles, cathedrals and cobbled streets, at one time Nuremberg gloried in the name ‘the capital of the Holy Roman Empire’.
It’s often described as the most beautiful city in Germany with its spires and weather-worn statues, and its tangle of flagged alleyways lined with buskers, cosy pubs and candle-lit cafes.
This has always been a city of writers, philosophers, musicians and artists. It was the birthplace, in 1471, of Albrecht Dürer, one of the foremost artists of the Renaissance. For the full Dürer experience head for Albrecht Dürer’s House, Albrecht Dürer Strasse 39.
But, as you will know, as well as being a European centre for culture and the arts, this city has had bleak episodes in its history. Terrible events unfolded here in the 20th century, and ‘Nuremberg’ became a byword for barbarity.
This was the city of the Nazi rallies, and in steady progression, the city of the Nuremberg trials, then the executions. For further elucidation, visit the Nazi Documentation Centre, built inside the unfinished shell of Albert Speer’s Kongresshalle. This abandoned coliseum was to be a Nazi rallying ground before the Allies intervened and flattened the city in their continuing contribution to German town planning.
Meanwhile the Germanisches Nationalmuseum tells how Nuremberg was rebuilt brick by painstaking brick. Further Dürers are on show, and the main gallery boasts the world’s oldest existing globe from the 1490s.
There is also an engraving of a Flute of Shame. In medieval Germany, bad musicians were punished by making them wear a heavy iron ‘flute of shame’ shackled to a person’s neck. Presumably, there could still be a use for such an implement.
The old town, which is extensive, has an important claim to fame: the oldest sausage kitchen in the world —
Zum Gulden Stern in Zirkelschmiedsgasse. The specialty is the Nürnberger bratwurst, a pork sausage so micro-local that it’s protected by the EU geographical indication. That means, unless a sausage is made to a recipe laid down by the city’s butchers’ guild in the 15th century, and produced within the old medieval walls of the city, it can’t call itself a Nürnberger.
If you’re into sausages, this is the epicentre of the art — they’ve been making Nürnbergers for 600 years. That really is a lot of sausagery. The first wooden beams were put in place in the scullery and cooking over beech fires began in 1379.
In Zum Gulden Stern your wurst will be served with sauerkraut made from a secret family recipe and served with Franconian horseradish. Franconia, by the way, is a sub-region of Bavaria, with a very distinctive character of its own — Catholic, conservative, certainly, but markedly outgoing. The fact that it has Germany’s highest concentration of breweries perhaps helps.
Once you’ve been fortified by sausages and beer, you might consider a jaunt out into the Bavarian countryside. I can recommend Basilika Vierzehnheiligen, about an hour’s drive north from Nuremberg.
Near Bad Staffelstein, the Basilika is an exuberant, baroque church — a chocolate box study of what a church should look like.
But it’s a melancholy place too, with the churchyard dotted with headstones erected to local Wehrmacht soldiers killed in World War II.
Straight across the valley is the façade of the Benedictine Banz Monastery, the two glorious religious buildings facing each other, purely in an ‘up yours’ style of architecture. There’s probably a Sunday Miscellany story in it.