Germany Guide
Northern Bavaria: Franconia
Hauptmarkt
It was the Bohemian king and Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV who gave Nuremberg's city fathers permission to expel the inhabitants of its Jewish ghetto in 1349 in order to establish a market. His decision unleashed a pogrom in which at least 562 Jews were burnt to death. For all its gory origins, Hauptmarkt remains the focus of the Altstadt and the scene of the world-famous annual Christkindlesmarkt or Christmas market. Most of the buildings fringing the square are postwar, but reconstruction from wartime damage was tactful and a few key monuments survive. In the northwest corner of the square stands a multicoloured nineteenth-century copy of the aptly named Schöner Brunnen, a flamboyant Gothic skyrocket of a fountain, the fourteenth-century original of which is in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum. The forty figures on it depict Moses, the four Apostles and the seven electors of the Holy Roman Empire among others.
Presiding over Hauptmarkt on its eastern side is the Frauenkirche (Mon, Tues & Thurs 8am–8pm, Wed 8am–6pm, Fri 8am–5pm, Sat 9am–7.30pm, Sun 9am–8pm), the rather stubby Gothic church which Charles decreed should be built on the site of the destroyed synagogue and dedicated to the Virgin Mary. The result – the work of Peter Parler, the architect of Prague's St Vitus cathedral – was the first Gothic hall church in Franconia, and though the church was reduced to a shell by World War II bombs, restoration was deft, and it retains a feeling of antiquity along with fragments of the Kaiserfenster, or Emperor's Window, the oldest stained glass in the city. Foremost among the Frauenkirche's various treasures – which survived the hail of bombs by being stored underground – is the expressive Tucher Altar, the city's greatest pre-Dürer work of art. On the west front of the church, a Glockenspiel dating from 1509 re-enacts Charles's Golden Bull decree of 1536, which formalized the status of the seven electors who would choose an emperor, and enshrined in statute the Kaiserburg's role as the venue for the imperial Diet.