An uncanny feeling set in as I was flying into Munich and looking down on idyllic Bavarian villages. Having visited German cities like Dresden, Hamburg, and Cologne, I couldn’t help but think of the Allied pilots who descended on the country eighty years ago to bomb it into submission. Few cities escaped destruction; among the more fortunate ones was Bamberg, my final destination.
Bamberg cathedral viewed from its grounds (Wikimedia Commons).
Bamberg is relatively small, possessing 78,000 inhabitants in comparison with nearby Nuremberg’s population of over 500,000, but as any local antiquarian will point out, it played an important role in the history of the Holy Roman Empire. In the eleventh century, Emperor Henry II and his wife Kunigunde made Bamberg a diocese and administrative center and arranged for the construction of its cathedral and abbey. When Henry visited his other territories, Kunigunde often remained in Bamberg. According to legend, the empress, who was later made a saint along with her husband, loved the city and prayed that God would protect it from harm. One thousand years later, says the legend, Kunigunde cast her veil over Bamberg in the form of a cloud, saving it from bombardment.1
A statue of St. Kunigunde on the Obere Brücke next to the Old City Hall, with Baroque and medieval buildings behind her. Photo provided by the author.
Thus preserved, Bamberg’s mix of medieval and Baroque architecture draws sightseers from around the world. The entire city center is designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site, which always struck me as an implicit acknowledgement of the loss that the world suffered from destruction on all sides in World War II.2 Countless tourists come to Bamberg each year to find what disappeared forever from so many other places – and enjoy some really good beer.3
Bamberg’s Old City Hall (Altes Rathaus). Photo provided by the author.
As a medievalist, I’m drawn to really old things. But when I first came to Bamberg ten years ago with friends, I was just looking to have a good time. We were undergrads studying abroad in Munich and barely had any real responsibilities. We day tripped to beautiful places all over southern Germany, and to me, Bamberg was the most beautiful of them all, with its painted Old Town Hall suspended over the river Regnitz and its cobblestone streets leading up to that magnificent cathedral. The Baroque gardens were verdant and the beer, of course, was flowing. I was in a dream world.
The author on the grounds of the New Residence, the Baroque complex that was once the residence of the prince-bishops and now houses the Bamberg State Library. Photo provided by the author.
But now I’m a grad student in my thirties, juggling side hustles to pay my bills and chasing opportunities that will help future job prospects. When I returned to Bamberg this January, having fun wasn’t my top priority. I was there to spend six weeks as a Praktikantin – an apprentice of sorts – at the Bamberg State Library. Located across from the cathedral, its holdings include collections from the area’s old monastic institutions, and it continues to obtain any material, old or new, that pertains to the surrounding region of Franconia. Though it can boast of its share of “celebrity manuscripts,” including the resplendent Bamberg Apocalypse, it is equally renowned for the breadth and cohesion of its collection as a whole, enabling scholars to understand larger networks of information exchange in pre-modern southern Germany. For over a decade, the library has been engaged in the creation of a multi-volume catalog of its illuminated manuscripts and early printed books.4 Art historians Dr. Susanne Rischpler and Frau Ulrike Carvajal are currently putting together the volume covering the fifteenth and sixteenth century, and I was to assist them. I didn’t know exactly what my assignment would be going in. I ended up spending most of my time working on the index of the catalog-in-progress, but as always, I was anxious to prove myself.
Bamberg State Library MS 370, fol. 14r: Miniature of Henry II and Kunigunde, imperial couple and saints, holding a model of Bamberg Cathedral. Staatsbibliothek Bamberg, Msc.Add.370. Photo: Gerald Raab. Licensed under Creative-Commons-License CC BY-SA 4.0.
At first, the staff at the library treated me with a combination of kindness and formality, as is normal in Germany. They were helpful when I asked questions and patient when I ran up against the limits of my knowledge of the German language. Nonetheless, I was intimidated by the whole situation. I’d never done anything like this before; I’d only experienced the country as a student and tourist, and I had a lot to learn when it came to manuscript illumination. My background was in literary studies, not art history; I had found out relatively recently that manuscript historians cannot separate the two. This was going to be an incredible learning experience, but it was also outside my comfort zone, so I was determined to keep my head down and come off as competent and professional.
Baroque allegorical figures and a coat of arms preside over an entrance to the New Residence, the former home of the prince-bishops which now houses the Bamberg State Library. Photo provided by the author.
All of this, however, flew out the window at the end of my first week. I had a lovely lunch with Dr. Rischpler at a nearby bakery. She told me about her memories of doing research in Providence, Rhode Island; I told her about my German-American grandfather. I got so caught up in the conversation that my anxious mind relaxed and I didn’t think about anything else. And whenever I stop being so uptight, disaster strikes. That evening, as I was getting ready to leave the library, I realized I was missing my purse. At first, I was determined not to tell anyone; I was too embarrassed. But when a preliminary search failed, the situation was too serious to keep under wraps. Reluctantly, I admitted my predicament to colleagues who noticed my distress. Before I knew it, everyone left on the floor was checking its various Baroque rooms in search of my purse.
Seel Bakery, a favorite lunch spot within walking distance to the Bamberg State Library. Photo provided by the author.
When these efforts came up short, I finally realized that I must have left it in the since-closed bakery. That meant spending the night without my wallet, bus pass, keys, and phone charger – but no one would let me exit the building without making sure I had everything I needed and could get into my apartment. As I left with Frau Carvajal, who had called her husband to pick us up in their car, the deputy director of the library reassured me that he had left belongings in the same bakery and they were always there the next day: “The people of Bamberg are good and honorable.” Sure enough, when I arrived at the bakery the next morning and asked about my purse, it was immediately fetched from a safe location and handed over unscathed. I walked up the last few steps to the cathedral, and for a minute I stood listening to the 9 a.m. bells, breathing deep sighs of relief.
A Baroque sculpture of the Holy Trinity is attached to a street corner near the cathedral. Photo provided by the author.
Any embarrassment I felt was erased by how kind everyone had been to me, and for the rest of my time at the library, I felt fully comfortable. By the time the six weeks were up, Susanne and Ulrike had become my friends. The incident with my purse had become a running joke; every time we left a place, they asked, “Do you have everything?” I did good work, and on my last day, the library director, renowned book historian Dr. Bettina Wagner, gave me a hardcover with reproductions of pages from the library’s most famous manuscript, the Bamberg Apocalypse. Leaving was bittersweet; the goodbyes hit hard, but that’s how you know you experienced something amazing. I expected to learn about manuscripts – to get my hands on the past that Bamberg uniquely preserves. But just as importantly, I learned how good and honorable the people of Bamberg are.
- I had heard the legend of Kunigunde’s veil from the gentleman giving a tour of the cathedral. More information about the tours offered by the cathedral (in German) can be found at https://bamberger-dom.de/besuch/einzelgaeste/Oeffentliche-Domfuehrungen/.
- Additional information about Bamberg’s UNESCO designation can be found on the organization’s official website at https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/624/.
- Little Bamberg, with around 10 breweries in its limits (depending on your definition of a brewery, as an article in infranken.de recently pointed out), rivals behemoth Munich as the beer capital of Germany. Some tips for anyone interested: Rauchbier (smoke beer), made famous by the 600-year old brewery Schlenkerla, is a unique style associated with the city, but if its intense flavor is too much for you, don’t feel bad: not everyone in Bamberg drinks it. Instead, try Schlenkerla’s lager, a world-class helles with just a hint of smoke. For classic German styles like pilsners and wheat beers, my favorite Bamberg brewery was Fässla (though you can’t really go wrong with any). Fans of the experimental beer culture will love Hopfengarten, which uses hops grown right in the city to fuse the tried-and-true with the unique. Their downtown Hopfenhaus, where I tried a eucalyptus lager, made me feel like I was back home in a Massachusetts microbrewery.
- The cataloging project is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and aims to make the library’s collection accessible for the purposes of art historical research. More information can be found on the Staatsbibliothek Bamberg’s website at https://www.staatsbibliothek-bamberg.de/ueber-uns/projekte/.
