Weimar – a Personal Tribute

Weimar is a relatively small town in the centre of Germany. Around 1552 it became the capital of the small Herzogtum Sachsen-Weimar (Principality Saxony-Weimar), from 1741 until 1918 the capital of the (still relatively small) Principality – since 1815 Grand Principality – (Groß-) Herzogtum Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach (Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach). After World War I all monarchic structures in Germany were abandoned, the democratic Free State of Thuringia was founded in 1920, and Weimar became its capital until 1950.
Despite its moderate size, Weimar managed to gain a cultural profile that extended and still extends far beyond the borders of the (Grand-) Principality, even beyond Germany. The foundations were laid in the 18th and early 19th century, connected to writers and pilosophers like Christoph Martin Wieland, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johann Gottfried von Herder, and Friedrich von Schiller who all lived and worked in Weimar. In the late 19th and early 20th century more writers, musicians and artists contributed to Weimar’s reputation, e.g. Franz Liszt, Richard Strauss, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Harry Graf Kessler, Henry van de Velde, Edvard Munch, Walter Gropius, Paul Klee, Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky, Lyonel Feininger.
In politics, Weimar played ambiguous roles between a comparatively liberal (Grand) Principality, the birth place of the first democratic state in Germany (Weimar Republic), turning “brown” (National-Socialist) from the late 1920s, Communist after World War II, democratic again after the German re-unification in 1990.
Weimar is a very special, even intriguing place. This book tries to convey its aura by telling its story from the early beginnings in the 16th century until today, with a main focus on the last three centuries – embedded into pan-German, even pan-European developments.