Reconstructing Rothenburg

From The Stories Old Towns Tell: A Journey through Cities at the Heart of Europe, by Marek Kohn (Yale U. Press, 2023), Kindle pp. 150-153, 162-163:

By establishing its place on the tourist map of Europe, Rothenburg ob der Tauber connected itself to an international network through which it built up a stock of admiration and affection. Although that was an intangible kind of capital, it turned out to be the saving of the enterprise. If John McCloy’s mother had not been one of the many foreigners who visited Rothenburg before the darkness closed over Europe in the 1930s, and took spell-casting pictures home with them, the whole of the town might have suffered the same fate that the American bombers visited on four-tenths of it.

One of the artists inspired by images of Rothenburg ob der Tauber was Adolf Hitler, who had initially hoped to pursue a career as a painter. On a visit there in 1934, a few weeks after adopting the title of Führer, he recalled how he had seen many pictures of Rothenburg in his youth, and had greatly enjoyed drawing the town himself. A few years later, he made funds available for the preservation of the town walls, stretches of which were in danger of collapse. His affection for Rothenburg was shared by the Nazi movement in general, for whom the ‘Germanest’ (‘deutscheste’) of towns became something of a pilgrimage destination.

The feeling was mutual. Rothenburgers took to Nazism even before the party took power. At the election in July 1932, when the Nazis became the party with the most seats in the Reichstag with 37 per cent of the national vote, they took 60 per cent of the vote in Rothenburg. After Hitler became Chancellor the following year, Rothenburgers flocked to join his National Socialist German Workers’ Party. Two-thirds of the town’s population became members. Unlike Würzburg, whose Catholic traditions and associated political sympathies dampened enthusiasm for the radical new National Socialist movement, Rothenburg was a small Protestant town in a relatively poor part of Germany. In that respect it fitted the profile of Nazi-supporting localities, but it was more than merely typical. Rothenburg had a very special place in the landscape of the Third Reich.

That place was inscribed principally through the activities of the Kraft durch Freude (Strength through Joy) organisation, which strove to instil National Socialist values in the German people through recreation and exercise. Kraft durch Freude – KdF for short – offered ideological tourist excursions to the town it described as ‘an everlasting witness to the glorious German history of the Middle Ages, a shining monument to German community in olden times’. Rothenburg became a theatre in which Nazi illusionists conjured the spectacle of an ideal folk community magically preserved within its walls, where modern Germans would believe they were ‘seeing a fairy tale of a long-gone golden age resurrected’, as the Nazi party newspaper put it. Among the steps that the town took to enhance the magic was the institution of a Christmas market, without which the fairy tale would not have been complete.

As well as providing affordable domestic holidays for Germans of modest means, KdF made a point of reaching out to members of the ‘Volk’ on the edge of the Reich or beyond its borders. The first contingents came from lands in the west. Under the peace settlements that followed the First World War, the Saar region had been placed under the control of the League of Nations. In 1935, voters in the territory opted to be reunified with Germany, by a majority of over 90 per cent. KdF transported Saarlanders to Rothenburg, where the organisation encouraged them to recharge their feelings of national pride and community. It also brought people from the Rhineland region, which was barred to military forces under international treaties. Hitler sent his troops into it the following year, to huge national acclaim.

From the opposite direction, a thousand Austrians came on a ceremonial day trip after their country was incorporated into the Reich in 1938, marching into the town from the railway station to be greeted by ranks of Nazis chanting ‘Sieg Heil’. They departed in the same fashion after seeing the town’s quintessentially Germanic sights, completing an occasion hailed by the local newspaper as the ‘deepest expression of connection between people of the same tribe and same blood’. Germans from the Sudetenland made a similar procession after the Reich seized the region from Czechoslovakia later that year.

The Reich’s revanchist ambitions further east were implicit in the organisation of visits from Danzig and the Memel territory. Danzig had been designated a Free City, kept separate from both Germany and Poland under the protection of the League of Nations, because it found itself in the corridor through Baltic Prussia that gave Poland access to the sea. Memelland was a strip of eastern Prussia that Germany had been obliged to give up under the Versailles Treaty in 1919; Hitler strong-armed the Lithuanian government into returning it in 1939. The symbolism of the trips was clear enough: the Reich had brought its people to the ideal German home town, and soon enough they would be living in the homeland as well, once its borders were extended to embrace them.

Rothenburg also offered the Nazi regime a means to project soft power abroad, in the form of the Shepherd Dancers, a group founded in 1911 to revive a local tradition on the basis of a historical claim dating back to 1517. They danced at the Albert Hall in London, and paraded through Hyde Park bearing the Third Reich’s swastika flag. Back home, they performed in the market square for crowds on excursions from the huge Nazi rallies in Nuremberg, less than two hours away by train. Although there was no question of imposing the standard Nazi urban ensemble – a grand avenue, a vast assembly space, a massive Party building – as Hubert Gross had planned to do in Würzburg, there was no need. Rothenburg was homely, but on a scale that tended to the monumental. Its houses’ proportions spoke of burgher prosperity; its main streets were straight and wide enough for marching columns. And if there was no space for the Nazi cohorts within the walls, they could always camp beneath them. The location was popular with the Hitler Youth, which at one point massed 1,400 of its members, drawn from more than 27 countries, in a tent city along the base of the town’s fortified perimeter.

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One of  [the town’s former Nazi mayor, Friedrich] Schmidt’s initiatives as a councillor was an attempt to revive the Christmas market, which had lapsed since its inception during his term as mayor in the 1930s. He was assisted in the bid by Ernst Unbehauen, the artist who had made the antisemitic ‘warning’ plaques that had been installed at the town’s gates....

A person would not have to be a fascist or an ultranationalist to agree with Unbehauen that brash modern advertisements should be kept off Rothenburg’s streets. Conservation societies in historic towns all over Europe would sympathise with his view and applaud his efforts. But in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, denying the twentieth century had a subtext that went beyond Unbehauen’s personal record as a Nazi and an antisemitic propagandist. A town that looked as though the twentieth century had not happened offered an enticing illusion to Germans who wanted to pretend that the century’s fourth and fifth decades had not taken place. Joshua Hagen, the American historian who has examined Rothenburg’s career as ‘the most German of towns’, observes that ‘in the 1950s and beyond it came to represent opportunities for relatively untroubled engagement with Germany’s past’. People could follow the town’s history as far as the twentieth century ‘and then fast-forward to 1950, because as the tourist guides will tell you, nothing happened. It was asleep, timeless, and nothing ever changed.’