2020. Corona. Travelling is a different game. Yet our Fernweh acted up too often. So we arranged a train trip to Germany and Austria. Specifically to Leipzig in Saxony, several spots in Bavaria and returning home with ÖBB‘s Nightjet from Innsbruck in Tyrol to Brussels in Belgium.

Nuremberg is – perhaps inevitably – associated with the NSDAP. The city is home to the Reichsparteitagsgelände or Party Congress Grounds. Part of it is the Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände, officially translated as Documentation Center Nazi Party Rallying Grounds. The Germans though don’t use ‘nazi‘ in German, they use NS. 

(I also used ‘NS’ in the title because my gut feeling says social media such as Facebook will not like the letter combination nazi in the title).

The center is located in the never finished, gigantic Congress Hall (Kongresshalle). 

Its permanent exhibition ‘Fascination and Terror‘ is concerned with the causes, connections, and consequences of Nazi Germany. Topics that have a direct reference to Nuremberg are especially taken into account. Attached to the museum is an education forum. 

The exhibition is quite comprehensive, but I didn’t lear something new. Bot Danny and I missed a bigger emphasis on the Party Congress Grounds themselves. 

To illustrate: at the end there’s a text telling how the Zeppelin Field (Zeppelinfeld) was used for “many activities” after the war. But it doesn’t tell us which. Why not? Can’t the museum mention the existence of the Norisring circuit? 

So yes, the museum is well made, but it also left us dissatisfied. 

Sidenote

Our dissatisfaction was also a bit fueled by a coronavirus countermeasure ‘incident’. Apparently we entered through the exit but the attendant insisted we go back down, and enter through the entrance.

Fair enough. But we ended up less than a meter away from were we were inside. And really, there was no-one other waiting. We could have just crossed a physical line without risking infecting anyone whatsoever.