Today was a full day in Nuremberg. We visited MAN truck and bus a precision engine plant in the morning, an underground wartime bunker in the afternoon, and then free time to just walk the city. By the end of it I felt like I had seen three completely different versions of the same place.
We started at the MAN Truck & Bus engine plant, where the company manufactures the combustion engines that go into commercial trucks, city buses, vans, and even marine vessels. That range alone set it apart from anything we had visited before. The automotive companies earlier in the trip were building passenger vehicles, products that an individual person buys and drives. MAN is doing something different. They are making a core component that then gets built into machines that move goods, transport entire cities full of people, and power boats on open water.
The other thing that surprised me was where MAN sits on the road to electrification. I came in assuming that a German manufacturer in 2026 would be heavily focused on electric components. MAN’s primary focus remains on combustion engines, with hybrid adapters being developed to make those engines more efficient rather than replacing them outright. For the kinds of machines, supplying a full electric transition is a much more complicated problem than it is for a passenger car, such as the weight, the range requirements, and the infrastructure needed. Watching MAN navigate that reality made the energy transition feel less like a clean switch and more like a hard engineering and logistics problem being worked on.
From there, we went underground. The Historischer Kunstbunker is a tunnel system beneath Nuremberg’s old city that was used during World War II to shelter the city’s most valuable artworks from Allied bombing. Sculptures, altarpieces, and civic treasures were carried down into these tunnels and kept there for the duration of the war. The city above was heavily bombed and much of it was destroyed. The art survived. What stayed with me was the decision someone made, in the middle of a catastrophic war, to move these things underground rather than leave them to chance. That act says something real about what a community values even under pressure.
After the bunker visit, we had free time. I ended up wandering through the Hauptmarkt. It is Nuremberg’s central square, and the site of the famous Christkindlesmarkt every winter. It was interesting to stand there in May and try to picture it filled with market stalls and lights. I did a little shopping and then just walked, following the rivers that run through the city, which I loved.
The thing that hit me hardest, though, was reading the city itself as I walked. Nuremberg was one of the most heavily bombed cities in Germany by the end of the war. Around ninety percent of the old city center had been destroyed. What I saw today was a combination of carefully restored historic buildings and newer construction built to fill the gaps left behind. It’s a city that chose to remember what it lost and rebuild anyway, and walking through it with that knowledge gave the whole day a different feeling. The art in the bunker survived. The engines at MAN represent something being built for the future. And the city itself is evidence of what it looks like to reconstruct after devastation.