FRANZ STERNBALD, THE FICTIONAL HERO of Ludwig Tieck's eponymous novel, leaves Nuremberg and sets off on his journey to Holland and Italy only in order to come back to Nuremberg. Franz's journey away from the city is in reality a journey toward the city. Godfather Drosselmeier's namesake in Hoffmann's story-within-the-story in “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” also leaves Nuremberg only in order to come back to that wonderful city whose houses have windows. My trajectory in this book has been a different one. I have traveled from a foreign land to diverse “Nurembergs” at divergent times only in order, now, to leave them behind. Franz Sternbald journeyed abroad in order to arrive in, and discover, Nuremberg. I have traveled to Nuremberg in order to discover the land around it. My path is more like that of Per Daniel Atterbom or Claude Ollier than that of Sternbald or Drosselmeier. Franz Sternbald's journey was to end at Nuremberg's major cemetery. My journey ends, in a sense, with the discovery of Nuremberg as a cemetery — Feliks Topolski, writing in the ruined city of 1946, called it “the graveyard of Nuremberg” — a monument to itself and to the dreams of its inventors.

Like Franz Sternbald, who interrupts his journey to look back at the city from a distance and admire its outline before he continues on to other places, I too will pause and reflect on the city and its contours before I say farewell. Unlike Franz, who left the city on foot, I am leaving Nuremberg on a high-speed Inter-City Express train whose expert crew have a schedule to keep and will not stop the train's forward progress for me to get out and look back at the city I am leaving. Therefore my survey will have to be imaginary, not real. But since the city I have been visiting, Nuremberg2, was also imaginary, that is not a problem.

Franz Sternbald can only appreciate Nuremberg from a distance. It is from there, and not inside the city's narrow streets, that its many towers can be grasped as a whole. From this perspective various drawings of the city were made in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The same perspectival limitation applies to other cities, even the city of New York, where I was born. Only from New Jersey or Brooklyn can I see Manhattan.