Germanisches National Museum / German National Museum

Visiting the German National Museum was one of our main purposes for going to Nuremberg. It is the largest collection of German art in the world with more than 1.2 million objects, of which 20,000 are on display.

The museum is housed in a collection of buildings ranging from the ultramodern to a former monastery. The entrance is located in the modern building in a side street lined with pillars, each inscribed with a clause from the UN Declaration of Human Rights (it forms part of the adjacent museum of Human Rights). The layout of the museum is slightly confusing and the free maps are not particularly clear but staff members were helpful to point us to the articles we wanted to see most.

The oldest articles on display are from pre-history and a large medieval collection, naturally religious in nature, is appropriately displayed in the former monastery. The former church serves as a display area for church statues with an interesting angel literally leaping from a wall.

Nuremberg was the hometown of Albrecht Dürer (1471 - 1528), the man who introduced the Renaissance to Germany. This section of the museum is titled Dürer and his times and contains arguably the most impressive artworks in the museum. Several of Dürer’s own works are on display here, including a very famous painting of Charlemagne, for many the first German emperor, next to one of Kaiser Sigismund. Also on display is the oldest globe in existence (1491-3), dating more or less from the same era as Dürer. Ironically, Nuremberg played a major role in creating the maps and technology that led to the discoveries of the sea routes to the East and thereby helped hastened the decline of this once powerful and important city.

The descriptions of many works are in German only. A more serious gripe is the small size of the lettering making it hard to read them, even close up. We met up with only one guided tour during our two-hour visit so the amount of eavesdropping that we could do was limited.

The virtually deserted coffee shop in the basement served very good coffee and superb chocolate cake. The large museum shop was closed leaving only a smaller one on the ground floor with a very limited range of items. Even taking into account that it was the off-season and the start of carnival, the museum was very quiet and at times almost deserted - a great time to enjoy art at leisure.

Open: Tuesday - Sunday: 10 - 17 (20 on Wednesday)

One really unique area of this museum is constructed around a Carthusian Monastery. It's hard to believe as you open the door from the very modern gallery and suddenly you are in a medieval church. We only found it because we were looking for the portrait of Barbara Durer which was not in the expected gallery. They gave us directions to find it--go through the kirche. And go through it we did. You will also pass through the cloister and the Stations of the Cross.

This is so much more than just an art museum, it is the largest German Museum of art and culture. You can find early exaples of tools and weapons from pre histroy through the middle ages. Also on display is the oldest known globe in the world which was made in Nuremburg in the late 15th century.

There are galleries dedicated to the lives of not only the upper classes but the working classes as well. See the toys, clothes and household impliments , enjoy the displays of regional costumes and folk items. There are cases of religous items and articles of furniture. Plan to spend several hours just waundering through the many displays and find out why this is one of Germany's most popular museums. This museum has an excellent store. We did a lot of shopping here.

Parking is a problem in this area of town. We ended up parking in a no parking zone and got a ticket. This caused us a lot of inconvience because we had to go to a Deutsche Bank to pay the ticket and it was a Saturday and none were open. We payed it finally in Munich. However if we hadn't parked where we did we would not have been able to stop and the musuem.