THE REDISCOVERY OF NUREMBERG COINCIDED with the beginning of German Romanticism. In fact the rediscovery of Nuremberg was the foundational act of German Romanticism. Hence one could say that Nuremberg, or concepts of Nuremberg, had a profound impact on European intellectual history. The rediscovery — or invention — of Nuremberg created an intellectual movement that was to affect Germany and Europe for many decades.

Paradoxically, Nuremberg's rediscovery coincided with the final agony of the once powerful city. It occurred during the Napoleonic wars, when the city was virtually bankrupt and under threat of military occupation by French troops, which were in the process of invading many of the principalities of which Germany then consisted. On 23 July 1796, in the year that Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder and his friend Ludwig Tieck anonymously published their book Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders (Confessions from the Heart of an Art-Loving Friar), the foundational text of German Romanticism, the crown and scepter of the Holy Roman Empire — the state form in which highest constitutional authority in German lands had existed for many centuries — along with the other imperial insignia that had, by Emperor Sigismund's decree, been kept in the city since 1424, were spirited out of Nuremberg at the behest of the city's leaders in order to keep them out of the hands of the invading French. Two weeks later, on 8 August, Nuremberg was occupied by French troops. Although Nuremberg and its promoters tried for more than a century to reclaim the crown and the other insignia of empire, they failed. The insignia were taken to Vienna, where they remained until Germany's annexation of Austria in 1938, when, at the behest of Adolf Hitler, they were returned to Nuremberg. There they stayed until 1945, when the American military returned them to Vienna. Tourists can see them to this day in the treasure chamber at the Hofburg.

Ten years after the insignia of the empire left Nuremberg in 1796, the Holy Roman Empire that they symbolized itself ceased to exist, also as a result of the Napoleonic Wars. On 6 August 1806, Emperor Francis II abdicated, bringing an end to the nine hundred years of the empire. In the absence of the empire that had helped to guarantee its imperial freedoms, the city of Nuremberg, which had gone bankrupt in 1797, could no longer sustain its independence.