Weimar, Germany

Weimar is the city where German cultural history concentrates most densely. In the late 18th century, Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar assembled the greatest writers of German Enlightenment at his court — Goethe arrived in 1775 and stayed until his death in 1832; Schiller lived here from 1799 to his death in 1805; Herder and Wieland joined them. The four together constitute the Weimarer Klassik — the German literary classical period that defined the national intellectual canon. A century later, in 1919, two events converged in Weimar: the founding of the Bauhaus school (Walter Gropius's synthesis of fine art, craft, and industrial design, which became the most influential design school of the 20th century) and the drafting of the Weimar Republic constitution in the National Theatre on the Theaterplatz. Both the Goethe era and the Bauhaus era left their UNESCO-listed physical mark on the city. The practical scale of Weimar makes it a two-day destination at minimum — but a very concentrated one. The Klassik Stiftung Weimar manages all the major sites: the Goethehaus at Frauenplan, the Schillerhaus at Schillerstraße, the Duchess Anna Amalia Library (its rococo book-hall severely damaged by fire in 2004 and restored by 2007), the Weimarer Schloss museum, and the landscape Park an der Ilm with Goethe's garden house. The Bauhaus cluster on the opposite end of town includes the original Gropius-designed school building on Geschwister-Scholl-Straße and the Haus am Horn. A separate ticket covers the Bauhaus-Universität and related spaces. The Buchenwald Memorial (Gedenkstätte Buchenwald) on the Ettersberg hill 8 km north-west of Weimar is not optional for a Weimar visit — the proximity of one of the largest Nazi concentration camps (1937–1945, approximately 43,000 deaths) to the city of Goethe and Schiller is the central unresolved question of German cultural memory, addressed directly in the memorial's permanent exhibition. The bus from Weimar Hauptbahnhof takes 15 minutes.