Readers will probably be aware that as well as writing this blog I also hold, on a more or less regular basis, semi-popular, public lectures on the history of science. These lectures are as diverse as this blog and have been held in a wide variety of places. However I have, over the years, held more lectures in the Nürnberg Planetarium than anywhere else and last Thursday I was once again under the dome, this time not to hold a lecture but to help celebrate the ninetieth birthday of this august institution.
Before the twentieth century the term planetarium was a synonym for orrery, a mechanical model, which demonstrates the movements of the planets in the solar system. The beginnings of the planetarium in the modern sense was as Walther Bauersfeld, an engineer of the German optics company Zeiss, produced the plans for the construction of a planetarium projector based on earlier concepts. In 1923 the world’s first planetarium projector, the Zeiss Mark I, was demonstrated in the Zeiss factory in Jena and two months later on 21 October in the Deutschen Museum in Munich. Following further developments the first planetarium was opened in the Deutschen Museum on 7 May 1925.
Zeiss Mark I Planetarium Projector
Various German town and cities followed suit and the city council of Nürnberg signed a contract with Zeiss for a planetarium projector on 12 February 1925. The contract called for the city council to pay Zeiss 150, 000 Reichsmark ( a small fortune) in three instalments and 10% of the takings from the public shows. In a building on Rathenauplatz designed by Otto Ernst Schweizer the Nürnberg planetarium opened ninety years ago on 10 April 1927.
Original Nürnberg Planetarium
Fitted out with a new Zeiss Mark II projector the first of the so-called dumbbell design projectors with a sphere at each end for the north and south hemispheres. It was the world’s ninth planetarium.
Zeiss Mark II Planetarium Projector
From the very beginning the planetarium was born under a bad sign as the NSDAP (Nazi) city councillor, Julius Streicher, (notorious as the editor of the anti-Semitic weekly newspaper Der Stürmer) vehemently opposed the plans of the SPD council to build the planetarium. On 30 January 1933 the NSDAP seized power in Germany and the days of the planetarium were numbered. In November the planetarium director was ‘persuaded’ to recommend closing the planetarium and at the beginning of December it was closed. There were discussions about using the building for another purpose but Streicher, now Gauleiter (district commissioner) of Franconia was out for revenge. In March 1934 the planetarium was demolished on Streicher’s orders, with the argument that it looked too much like a synagogue! However the projector, and all the technical equipment, was rescued and put into storage.
Historischer Kunstbunker Entrance: There are guided tours
During the Second World War the projector was stored together with the art treasures of the city in the Historischer Kunstbunker (historical art bunker), a tunnel under the Castle of Nürnberg.
Following the war, in the 1950s, as Nürnberg was being rebuilt the city council decided to rebuild the planetarium and on 11 December 1961 it was reopened on the new site on the Plärrer, with an updated Zeiss Mark III. During the celebrations for the five hundredth anniversary of the death of Nicolaus Copernicus in 1973, whose De revolutionibus was printed and published in Nürnberg, the planetarium became the Nicolaus-Copernicus-Planetarium. In 1977 the Mark III projector was replaced with a Mark V, which is still in service and in 2010 the planetarium entered the twenty-first century with a digital Full-Dome projector.
Nicolaus-Copernicus-Planetarium am Plärrer in Nürnberg (2013)
The Zeiss Mark V Planetarium Projector in Nürnberg
Since the 1990’s the planetarium has been part of the City of Nürnberg’s adult education complex and alongside the planetarium programme it is used extensively for STEM lectures. I shall be holding my next lecture there on 28 November this year about Vannevar Bush, Claude Shannon, Robert H Goddard and William Shockley- Four Americans Who Shaped the Future (in German!) and if you’re in the area you’re welcome to come and throw peanuts.
The Renaissance Mathematicus 
Dear German-British historian:
Was the Nazi-aversion against the planetarium just a personal aversion of the “Gauleiter” or a typical Nazi attitude? Nazi’s (Hitler) loved the strange “Welteislehre” (that all cosmos consists of ice, e.g. the brilliantly white moon):
Don’t laugh about the Welteislehre, the companion pseudoscience of homeopathy (a favorite of high-ranking Nazi’s, too) is still a successful German export article also to anglo-saxon countries incl. royal families….Alas.
The Nazi Party was fundamentally opposed to the planetarium in Nürnberg because it was part of a SPD programme of adult education for workers, the Nürnberg Volkshochschule (adult education centre) opened just a couple of years earlier than the planetarium, to which the Nazi’s were opposed on principle. As soon as they came into power they cut the funding for all aspects of the programme.
I can remember the old London Planetarium with its Zeiss ‘dumbell’ projector, but I cannot be sure what Mark it was. It opened in 1958 and I went there on a school trip in the early 1960s. Sadly, it closed in 2006.
I went to a show at the London Planetarium sometime in the late 1960s. I can’t remember mush detail but I was very impressed at the time.
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