NUREMBERG”? WHY “NUREMBERG”? The question actually has two parts: one about a word designating a city in Germany, and the other about a set of quotation marks around that word. Almost as important as the word that designates the city are the quotation marks around it. So let me start at the beginning: why the quotation marks? After all, Nuremberg is not just something that somebody said once or twice or even many times. It is a real place filled with real people doing real things. That place has no need of quotation marks.

True enough, but my book is not primarily about Nuremberg as an urban conglomeration, as real and as worthy of study as it is. By putting quotation marks around Nuremberg I am not trying to cast the city's existence in doubt. Nuremberg does exist, and it has every right to exist. It also has every right to be written about. In fact there are a great many books about Nuremberg's politics, history, and social structure. There is even a very thick Stadtlexikon Nürnberg, an encyclopedia of Nuremberg, which provides anyone interested in the city with alphabetically ordered access to a vast store of information, most of it about things that are now or once were real, not just assertions or assumptions.

This is not one of those books. Instead, this is a book about another kind of city, a shadow city that from the beginning has existed alongside the real one. It is a city that is made of myths and dreams and above all words. If I had titled my book Atlantis or Eldorado, it would be clear enough that I am not writing about a real city but rather about an imaginary city, a city that exists primarily or exclusively in people's discourse about it. The confusion comes from the fact that Nuremberg exists on both planes, as a real metropolis and as a city of dreams. It is very much a real place, but it is also a dream that a great many people had about it. One can think of the physical city as Nuremberg1 and of the dream city as Nuremberg. There are other real cities that share Nuremberg's dual status. Venice, for instance, is as famous in literature and film as it is in reality.