Weimar is a surprising splash of color and verve in the still too-often gray, bleak world of the former East Germany.
Sidewalk cafes brim once again with artists, students and travelers. Flower stalls spill out their reds, purples and yellows from under their tents on the Marktplatz.
Statues of the city’s favorite of its many favorite sons, writers Goethe and Schiller, hold hands in front of the National Theater, just across the Theaterplatz from the beautifully restored Wittumspalais castle.
Weimar has built its reputation as home to highbrow culture, and for those who want to jump from museum to opera house to literary haunt, it’s a mecca.
But even those who flee at the thought of wading through Schiller’s “Aesthetic Education of Mankind” should stop in Weimar to see the rebirth of a once-great city.
New restaurants have rescued the city from its bratwurst-and-beer stupor and returned Weimar to the culinary map of Europe. Fresh plaster and brilliant coats of paint — some say too brilliant — give the city a light, airy look in contrast to the once-brooding baroque exteriors.
The freshly scrubbed lanes of the city embrace the homes of the great thinkers of two centuries. The cathedral houses some of the finest examples of church wood carvings in the world. The city celebrates itself as the birthplace of the Bauhaus movement, the revolutionary modernist architecture that sought to throw off the past and create a clean, sleek style for a new age.
All these pleasures have made Weimar, along with Potsdam and Dresden, a must-see destination of the former East Germany.
Weimar is back on the traveler’s trail because it supplies sustenance for the traveler’s mind, soul, ears, eyes — and stomach.
This is the Germany of the mind, the liberal Germany of the Enlightenment, when Weimar was a cradle of ideals of reformation, humanity and pursuit of beauty and truth.
But it’s an incomplete picture. For in and around Weimar are reminders of other eras. Democracy stillborn in Weimar, the rise of Adolf Hitler, the savagery of the Buchenwald concentration camp, and more than 50 years of totalitarian rule under the Nazis and communists.
It’s possible in a day or so to visit reminders of the darkness and light in Weimar, remnants of the brilliance and depravity that are Germany’s twin legacies of the past millennium.
This year is perhaps the best time to visit the reinvigorated city on the River Ilm. Weimar is finally able to relax a bit, taking a breather after a wildly successful 1999 as the official European Cultural Capital. For 12 months, the arts, music and museum scene focused on Weimar, recalling the city’s magical heyday in the 18th and 19th Centuries.
Weimar has attracted artists, writers and scholars since soon after it was founded in 1410. Martin Luther preached the Reformation here. Bach and Liszt served as court players. The philosopher Nietzsche lived and worked in the city.
Later, painters Paul Klee and Wassili Kandinsky lived here, along with Walter Gropius, the father of the Bauhaus movement.
Above all others, the city celebrates Goethe and Schiller, the twin giants of German intellectual life, who wrote many of their great works in Weimar. Their houses are now museums.
All around the city are four-legged reminders of one of the city’s non-human contributions to society. Dog fanciers know Weimar as the original breeding ground of the feisty Weimaraner. The beloved gray-coated dogs with amber eyes were bred in the 19th Century for hunting, but their obedience and intelligence have made them a popular 20th Century house pet.
Weimar is centered on the bustling Marktplatz, flanked by the Rathaus (city hall) and near the famous Hotel Elephant, where just about every prominent visitor to Weimar has stayed since it opened its doors in 1696. Next door to the hotel is Zum Schwartzen Baeren (The Black Bear), an inn and tavern dating to the 16th Century.
Visitors asking someone on the street for directions to the St. Peter and St. Paul Kirche may get nothing but shrugs. The late-Gothic church is popularly known as the Herderkirche, after Johann Gottfried Herder, the former court minister brought to Weimar by Goethe. Look for Herder’s burial vault, with its famous inscription, “licht, liebe, leben” — “light, life, love.”
From the church, it is a short walk to the homes-turned-museums of Weimar’s luminaries.
Schiller lived in a green-shuttered home on what is now, not surprisingly, called Schillerstrasse. It was here that he wrote “William Tell,” the story of Switzerland’s fight for freedom.Schiller’s themes of liberty and human freedom in the mid-18th Century made him popular in the mid-19th with the revolutionaries of Europe who sought to overthrow the continent’s monarchies.
Schiller is eclipsed in Weimar only by Goethe, Germany’s most esteemed writer. The writer had two homes that are now museums. Goethehaus, in the town center at Frauenplan 1, is where the scribe lived for 47 years. Next door to Goethehaus is the Goethe National Museum, featuring exhibits of his writings.
In Weimar, Goethe wrote his early popular work “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” which caught the fancy of youth around the continent. In his later years, he polished his most famous piece, “Faust,” about a mortal gambling his soul with the devil.
The story is one of the most popular in the world, told and retold in many guises, one of the latest being the movie “Devil’s Advocate” with Keanu Reeves as the Faust-like character and Al Pacino chewing scenery as a latter-day take on Satan.
When Goethe wanted to get away from the city’s stresses, he would head to “Gartenhaus,” a cottage in the countryside near the River Ilm. As expected, it, too, is a museum. The final home of Goethe and Schiller is The Historischer Friedhof, the graveyard where both are buried.
The park is lovely for strolling, with statues to Schiller. A statue of Shakespeare, from 1904, was the first erected to the English bard in continental Europe.Farther south is the pretty Schloss Belvedere, a onetime hunting lodge for the local dukes known for its wildly ornamental rococo interiors.
To help visitors recall the golden age of Goethe, Schiller, Bach and Liszt, the federal government in Bonn (and later Berlin) pumped the equivalent of $700 million into refurbishing Weimar’s quaint Old World buildings and putting together an amazing repertoire of annual arts performances and exhibits.
But hanging over the city are three eras less beloved in the memories of the people of Weimar.
After World War I, the city was where Germany’s first attempt at democracy was born after the fall of Kaiser Wilhelm. The German Republic was proclaimed in 1919 by an assembly meeting in the German National Theater, which stands on the Theaterplatz.
Though Germany’s capital remained in Berlin, the experiment would forever be known as “the Weimar Republic,” a name that conjures images of political instability, Depression-era hyperinflation and the madcap “anything goes” social attitudes embodied in the writings of Christopher Isherwood and immortalized in the movie “Cabaret.”
Knowing its reputation as a touchstone of the traditional German culture he adored — and as the fragile birthplace of the democracy he loathed — Adolf Hitler chose Weimar as the site of the first national congress of his Nazi Party.
When the Nazis won a plurality of the national vote in the 1932 election, Hitler ended democracy in Germany. Weimar soon became the site of one of the Nazi era’s most infamous sites, Buchenwald.
More than 60,000 people were killed at Buchenwald during World War II, equal to the entire population of Weimar today. The camp buildings were mostly bulldozed after the war, but a few remain as a museum and memorial to those who died.
Weimar ended the war in the Soviet sector and soon found itself part of the German Democratic Republic, the puppet regime set up in Berlin but run from Moscow.
The communists made sure that the city received a larger than normal share of money for restoration. The government saw the city’s link with Germany’s pre-fascist literary and musical past as useful for propaganda purposes. When the National Theater reopened in 1948 after extensive work to repair wartime bomb damage, the first production was Goethe’s “Faust,” with the devil seen as a symbol of the materialistic West.
Buchenwald was maintained as a museum largely because it was where many German communists were imprisoned or executed by the Nazis.
When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 and East Germany was absorbed into West Germany a year later, Weimar and the rest of the east went through a cultural and economic shock.
But Weimar’s past glories again came to the rescue, as politicians in the former West approved generous plans for the city’s refurbishment as a tourist and cultural center, culminating with its naming as the 1999 European Cultural Capital.
With its new museums, revitalized historical monuments and programs to attract artists and scholars from around the world, Weimar is hoping to build on its reputation of its first 500 years of existence and push the past 100 into the ever more distant past.
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For more information on Weimar, contact the German National Tourist Office at 212-661-7200.
