Ozymandias

By train it was only an hour away from where I was staying. And very beautiful, I'd been told.

So there I was on a hot July day sitting in an open air cafe in a square in central Nuremberg, munching the small sausages that were a speciality of the town. For once I had chosen to have them with sauerkraut instead of potato salad, which was my regular choice. But somehow I still couldn't get enthusiastic about this most typical of German foods.

I had walked up from the train station, popping into one vast Gothic cathedral after another as I went. At the Schöner Brunne, the so-called Beautiful Fountain on the Hauptmarkt, I obediently climbed up and twirled the gold ring on the wrought iron gate that was supposed to make wishes come true, for me and about forty school children. In St Sebald's, organ music was ringing out : familiar Bach, less familiar Messian. The organist played in the body of the cathedral. He was a blond man with a fierce expression, like a young Klaus Kinski. Whenever wandering tourists coughed or laughed or took flash photographs, he turned and looked daggers at them. For he was no mere church organist, practising for the next service. He was a virtuoso rehearsing for a concert. Posters advertised it for that very night. His thundering chords filled the nave. It was as if only the vaults of stone kept the sound confined within the building.

But before I left I bought a postcard showing how this place had been virtually bombed to the ground during the Second World War. Where I stood was no ancient structure but a recreation of the past. As was the whole city. Even the lucky fountain. Beautiful, yes. But no more than fifty years old. Younger than I was.

In fact the sausages were the one thing that had survived in the city from the fourteenth century, even if they failed to impress. But it was pleasant, on a very hot July day, to sit outside with a cold beer and watch the world go by.

There was a woman at my table who kept smiling and nodding at me. Soon we started talking. She was a Nuremberger, a doctor who had taken time out to try to paint.

"You only have one life," she said. "You have to see what you can make of it."

She asked what I was planning to do that afternoon.

I replied, after a slight hesitation – don't mention the war! -- that I was thinking of visiting the Nazi Rally Grounds and the new Documentation Centre which had been established in part of the same complex. It was in the suburbs of the city, however, and I had no idea how to get there.

"You don't want to see that," Marianne said forcefully. "Such things are better forgotten."

She told me about the striking modern art museum that had recently opened.

"Always with very interesting exhibits. Or the toy museum."

After a while she looked at her watch.

"If you really want to see the Documentation Centre I can drive you," she said.  "I have time."

In Bavaria I was constantly struck by the casual kindness of strangers.

The Centre is housed in the building which Hitler had planned to use as a Congress Hall, an unfinished replica of the Coliseum in Rome. No, not a replica because it was intended to surpass the original in size and style. Inside, an Austrian architect has designed a futuristic space with a glass walkway, and techno-wizards have created a stunning and disturbing audio-visual show. The Nazis loved to film themselves, whether prancing through the streets and squares of Nuremberg ("Just where we were sitting," whispered Marianne, pointing it out), or beating up Jews or gays or anyone they disliked. Whether it was troops returning from a glorious victory or whether it was men in absurd pyjamas breaking stones near Flossenburg concentration camp, the cameraman was always there.

"My father was sent to Flossenburg," Marianne said. "As a Catholic activist."

I could see she was upset by the place and we didn't stay too long. But long enough to watch a video of two elderly ladies giggling and reminiscing how they used to wait for hours to see Hitler pass when he came to their city.

"I saw him fourteen times," boasted one. "And once I'm almost sure he looked straight at me."

Groupies of the Third Reich.

Before we left, Marianne drove me round a big artificial lake to the spot where Hitler had stood to make his speeches at the Nuremberg rallies. Most people will recall those images of the man dwarfed by massive flags sporting swastikas, a small man ranting before an adoring mass of thousands. Coincidentally, Leni Riefenstal, who filmed that iconic, terrifying celebration of the Nazis, Triumph of the Will, died only last year aged 101. I wonder if she had ever returned to this place and seen the cracked concrete, the weeds, the desolation. A few teenagers on rollerblades where the cheering crowds once stood.

"They use it for motor racing now," Marianne said. "And the occasional rock concert."

We climbed the steps to where Hitler had stood to make his speeches. I'm not sure how I felt. Uneasy for certain. Chilled to the bone on a blisteringly hot day.

It's the poets who get it right.

"My name is Ozymandias," wrote Shelley of a broken statue in the desert, "Look on my works ye mighty and despair!/ Nothing beside remains. Round the decay/ of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,/ The lone and level sands stretch far away."