I’m a Yankee!

I got called a Yankee at school last week in one of the classes I was observing- but it wasn’t because I’m from America.

Nuremberg has very distinct areas in the main part of the city. (I’m currently living in Nuremberg by the way, I don’t think I’ve officially announced that on the blog yet. Oops.) As you can see below, the innen Stadt or ‘downtown’ is right about where the word Nürnberg is. Slightly north of the is the Burgberg (where the castle is), and slightly south are the train lines and main station. Most of the city is surrounded by a ‘ring’, the big red road that is roughly a circle on the map.

I live in the northern part of Nürnberg, north of the innenstadt and castle. The schools I work at are in the Southern part, below the train station. Apparently, there is (or used to be) some conflict and rivalry between northern and southern Nuremberg, with the Northerners being considered hochnäsig (snobby or, literally, ‘to have one’s nose up’) and the southerners being considered poorer and less sophisticated. I think this is probably because the northern part of the city is older and part of the original town, within the castle walls, while the southern areas were built later.

Anyway, people who live in the South part of town will apparently call people from the North ‘Yankees’, with the same kind of pejorative (if teasing) tone used throughout American history by the British to the Americans or Southerners (Americans) to Northerners (Americans), without actually having anything to do with being American at all. Instead, it was reduced to the idea of a North versus South rivalry.

The best part, however, is that the ‘north’ part of town and the ‘south’ part of Nuremberg are only about 3 miles apart, which back home would be no distance at all.

UPDATE: My roommate corrected me; it’s not that the South was built later, but that it was built first. After WWII most of Nuremberg had to be rebuilt. The Southern area was built quicker and cheaper to give people a place to live. By the time they started working on the northern part of town, people had more time and money to devote to reconstruction.