Weimar's Elephant Hotel

The Elephant Hotel on April 1, 2012.
The rose building in the back is the famous Anna-Amalia-Bibliothek

While attending the opening concerts of Thuringia's Bachwochen 2012, my group stayed in Weimar in the Hotel Elephant, a truly historic place.

Duke Wilhelm Ernst of Saxony issued a concession to Christian Andreas Barrtig.

In 1696, the duke's cupbearer, Christian Andreas Barrtig, got a concession for an inn bordering Weimar's market square that he named The Elephant. Later, it became a stagecoach station and was enlarged to house all the merchants and visitors. When somebody asked at the city gate for Wieland, Herder, or Goethe in those days, he was directed to the Elephant because people were sure they would be found there. 

In 1938, Thomas Mann made the hotel famous when it played a central role in his novel, "Lotte in Weimar." Charlotte Buff had been one of young Goethe's sweethearts. Still, she had married another guy. Deceived, and in a dark mood, Goethe wrote his bestseller, The Sorrows of Young Werther -- a (still) famous/infamous book, which brought early renown to Goethe. Mann takes Lotte's visit to Weimar and her stay in the Elephant in 1816, where she met the aging Goethe as the starting point for his novel.

An early photo of the Elephant around 1860.
On the right Weimar's oldest inn: Zum schwarzen Bären from 1540.

In the 1920s, the Elephant became the headquarter of the local Nazi party that, as early as 1926, had two ministers in Thuringia's state government. The same year, the NSDAP held its first national party convention in Weimar when Hitler spoke from a window to the crowd in front of the hotel.

Peeping through a window of the Haus Elephant,
the NSDAP boss is greeting the crowd in the marketplace

During the coming years, the hotel looked rundown. With the pressure of the Nazis, who had governed the state of Thuringia since 1932 and had taken power in the Reich in 1933, the old, unattractive building was torn down and replaced by the present construction in 1938.

The newly built Haus Elephant as a national-socialist shrine

The most important addition to the new building was a balcony meant for der Führer to address the people in the marketplace. In the following years, self-proclaimed Nazi dignitaries used to use it more than he did.

New Year's Eve dinner 1943 at the Elephant.
Note: The courses have low-rounded prices but require precious food ration card coupons.

Today's interior still breathes the Nazi architecture, a strange mixture of neo-realism and cold splendor like door frames made from marble and metallic luminous elements.

Entrance to a set of rooms

Following the Wende (the end of the German division), new splendor
 with illustrious guests and their interpreter

Nowadays, the balcony is crowned by Goethe's dictum: Here I am Man, here I may live up to it, the final line of the poem Osterspaziergang (Easter Walk) taken from his drama Faust. The Führer's balcony now serves as a place for cultural displays. During my last visit, Thomas Mann stood up there; star architect Walter Gropius and femme fatale Alma Mahler-Gropius-Werfel decorate the balcony this year.

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