Master Builder

Incidentally, of all Europe cities, scarcely any had received as much attention from local historians in the last century as Nuremberg. Anyone who only has a cursory knowledge of the literature of Nuremberg history will be astonished at the amount of contributions, investigations, materials, etc. that were brought together by patriotic citizens of the old imperial city in order to present their past to their descendants, at least in pictures, after the real size had long since sunk. But anyone who gets to know this literature better will also have to admit that despite the many writings that we have about Nuremberg, basically, with the exception of the documented publications, which for the most part turned out to be bad enough, of course, from the scientific standpoints from the history of Nuremberg has been far too little illuminated and researched. For the most part, one has limited oneself to excerpts, to modernized descriptions of the original records, in part the archives, which the patriciate supervised with great strictness, were most difficult to access, especially for those men who would have had the desire and skill to research the history of the ancestral city; in short, apart from Murr's work, we have very little about Nuremberg's early days, which would only approximate the current position of research.