Luitpoldhain Park

About this place

A park in the south-east of Nuremberg, laid out for the Bavarian Jubilee Exhibition of nineteen hundred and six, which marked a century since the city became Bavarian, and named after Prince Regent Luitpold. Before nineteen thirty-three it was the city's most important open space: ponds, restaurants, walks and a fringe of Wilhelmine villas. In July nineteen thirty-three Hitler ordered the park cleared and its ground turned into a rigidly laid-out parade square of eighty-four thousand square metres, where party formations of up to a hundred and fifty thousand men were mustered. In the process the Hall of Honour, which the city had built in nineteen twenty-nine to designs by Fritz Mayer for its dead of the First World War, was taken over as a backdrop for ceremonies that had nothing to do with its purpose. After nineteen forty-five the city lifted the paving, turned the ground back into parkland and demolished the adjoining Luitpold Hall. What you find now is grass, trees and paths, with the Hall of Honour still standing at the eastern edge and the modern concert hall on the northern one. In July and August the free open-air classical concerts held here draw around a hundred thousand people and count as the largest of their kind in Europe. The documentation centre and the better-known rally grounds are a short walk away, and it is worth doing them together, because the park on its own does not explain itself.