For many Americans, the most compelling of Europe’s many attractions is the tangible connection to history that it offers. Living as we do in a nation where nearly half of "the past" has been photographed—and more than a tenth of it televised—we feel a special fascination in meeting, in person, the walls and cobblestones that tell a much older part of the story. And while American diversity today has its roots and origins all over the world, to a great extent the characters and settings of Europe remain (to borrow a Hollywood term) our
"prequel."
History is everywhere and inescapable in Europe—they’ve had quite a lot of it, after all—but there are a few places which by a mix of luck and restoration, and a keen sense of their own value, have made it particularly their business to cater to the time-traveler. Brugge in Belgium and Carcassonne in France come
to mind; even though Brugge, undeniably pretty, has the flaw of being scrubbed cleaner than anything in the time of Charles V might reasonably have been; and even though Carcassonne, itself something of a Hollywood prequel, is largely the invention of a 19th-century medievalist’s imagination. It’s the thought that counts. And the thought is, this is what it looked like. This is how it felt.
Of all the reconstructions and survivals, the unquestioned jewel is Rothenburg. Nestled high above the Tauber River valley in Bavaria, it boasts of being the only walled city in Germany without a single modern construction; nothing breaks the mood set by moats, half-timbered houses, and narrow winding lanes. Like Brugge—where a silted-up harbor caused the town to stagnate, just as the wrecking ball of the Industrial Revolution began swinging everywhere else—Rothenburg owes its architectural preservation to economic failure. After thriving in its medieval heyday along a lucrative trade route, it became a ghost town when the trade moved elsewhere; for centuries nothing was built, nothing torn down, nothing changed. Only in the 1800s, when it was rediscovered by the same forces of romance and tourism that were building stage sets in Carcassonne, did Rothenburg again begin to do business. Its product, then and today, is its past.
The complaint is sometimes voiced that Rothenburg wears its past as a frozen mask, with no face behind it—that there is no there there, just a stylized performance piece for the entertainment of visitors and the extraction of their coins. It’s true that the only commerce within these walls today is the tourist trade, and true again that here (as anywhere) this trade can lack subtlety. More well known than is good for it, Rothenburg can be much too cute and much too crowded, particularly during the summer festivals. Yet the complaint is also unfair: the "real life" of any place is, and has always been, the life at which it finds it can make a living. Were the heights
of old Franconian villages suitable for building tennis-shoe factories or steel mills, someone would have long since torn off Rothenburg’s mask to do so—and while today the town might have a very different life, we’d be unlikely to give it a second glance.
The mask at least is authentic and genuinely old. Unlike the carefully rebuilt "old towns" of nearby Nuremberg and Regensberg, the medieval face of Rothenburg is the real thing; luck rather than restoration. The town has twice avoided destruction—once in the Thirty Years’ War (see below), and again in World War II, when the frantic efforts of an American history buff averted a scheduled bombing expedition at the last moment.
Stay in Rothenburg overnight, so that you can rise at dawn and prowl the narrow lanes, stroll the high walls, with only the mists of time as your company. At the right moment, and with the right set of mind, you will find that instead of a mask you are face to face with another age.
