A town of 65,000 gave Germany Goethe, the Bauhaus and a republic's name
Weimar never industrialised and sat far from the big trade routes, yet this small Thuringian city hosted Goethe and Schiller, Liszt and Strauss, the founding of the Bauhaus and the signing of Germany's first democratic constitution. Its prestige made it a prize the Nazis courted early and hard.
Records of Weimar go back to 899, and its name probably joins Old High German words for holy and for standing water. The counts of Weimar founded the town in the 13th century, but it stayed marginal until the Wettin dynasty took over in 1346 and granted privileges, including a 1438 right to trade woad, the plant behind blue dye. From 1552 it served as a ducal residence until the monarchy fell in 1918, and Johann Sebastian Bach was court organist there from 1708 to 1717.
Its so-called golden age ran from the regency of Anna Amalia, beginning in 1758, to Goethe's death in 1832. Goethe arrived in 1775 and served the duke as a privy councillor, and Schiller, Herder and Wieland also lived there; the dukes' rule was comparatively liberal and tolerant. A silver age followed. Liszt became court conductor in 1842 and staged the premiere of Wagner's Lohengrin in 1850, Richard Strauss conducted from 1889 to 1894, and Nietzsche spent his last three years in the city.
The art school founded in 1860 and Henry van de Velde's applied arts school of 1902 merged in 1919 under Walter Gropius as the Bauhaus. That same year the National Assembly met in the theatre to draft a constitution, because Berlin was unsafe during the Spartacist uprising and Friedrich Ebert hoped the city's classical associations would impress the Allies. The Bauhaus left for Dessau in 1925 after a right-wing state government cut its funding; only one original building, the Haus am Horn, went up.
Hitler visited more than forty times before 1933, drawn by both the republic's birthplace and the aura of high culture. In 1930 Wilhelm Frick became the first Nazi minister anywhere in Germany, and in 1933 early camps opened nearby at Nohra and Bad Sulza. Today the Classical Weimar and Bauhaus sites are UNESCO-listed, and in 1999 the city was European Capital of Culture.
Source: Weimar
