Weimar, German History in a Small Thuringian Town

When my son was in Frankfort on a business trip in May and was stranded there for a long and lost weekend, he possibly had in mind my blog about Weimar when he spontaneously decided to visit the town. He came back full of fascinating experiences, telling us stories and impressing Elisabeth, so she wanted to see Weimar, too. 

We went there for a long weekend, staying in (where else?) the Elephant Hotel three weeks ago.

I felt happy showing my wife the Weimar that I know so well. Before we went, it happened that a week earlier, in a small bookshop at Kirchzarten near Freiburg, Annette Seemann, who had previously published a Weimar travel guide, gave a presentation of her latest book: Weimar, eine Kulturgeschichte. Her reading was overbooked, and I was lucky to find a seat. 

In a panel discussion, the editor of the cultural part of the Badische Zeitung tried to have the author cover the content of the whole book. That was a problem because the amount of information in the already thick book, resulting from laborious work, presented many detailed facts. 

Still, the text occasionally lacks a deeper analysis. Nevertheless, I learned quite a lot, e.g., about the Reformation and that Luther was in Weimar several times. Anette Seemann's tome will complete my collection of books on Weimar, which I shall present in a future blog.

Red Baron, then a young scientific hopeful in Munich, still remembers his first visit to Weimar in 1959. In November 1958, Nikita Khrushchev issued the Berlin ultimatum that caused Hamburg's press baron Axel Springer in January 1959 to start a campaign in the Federal Republic with the slogan Macht das Tor auf (Open the Gate) selling* pins with the Brandenburg Gate. Later, in 1987, President Reagan visited the Berlin wall and, looking at the Gate, modulated Springer's slogan, imploring the right person: Mr. Gorbachev, open this Gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Wall!
* for 20 Pfennig a piece

In the fall of 1959, a left-wing Gesellschaft für fortschrittliche Politik (Society for progressive politics) in Munich posted an answer to Axel Springer: Wir machen das Tor auf (We open the Gate) offering a bus trip at a moderate price to Gera, a small industrial town in Thuringia, and as a lure a detour to Weimar. Together with a friend and a couple of other students, we took this unique opportunity to visit Weimar, the working place of Germany's quadruple stars Goethe, Herder, Schiller, and Wieland. However, before that, our delegation had to suffer heated political discussions in Gera.

The political slogan in Gera's theater:
Germany's fate will be decided between the forces of peace and the military adventurers in the West.
This and the following scanned slides are more than 50 years old.
Despite image processing, the quality is terrible.

With my friend, we fought virtually back-to-back against devoted followers of the communist regime. Initially, we felt somewhat lost against their arguments supported by "hard facts" until we noticed that the achievements forwarded were not as "hard" as they seemed. So, I started to invent "supporting numbers" myself. I became so successful in defending "Western values" that my East German counterpart, a trade union official, sought help. He frequently asked a journalist of the Neues Deutschland, the official government newspaper, Antworte du dem doch mal (You should instead answer him).

The following day, we were shipped to Weimar. It was in November. A pale sun illuminated the square in front of the Goethe-Haus, which was closed on Sunday morning. When we walked to the Goethe-Schiller monument, the sun disappeared. The two geniuses of German literature stood gray against the gray front of the Nationaltheater, which had been a symbol of hope in 1919 with the adoption of the democratic Weimar Constitution.

We soon had to leave the magical places to visit Weimar's other heritage, the concentration camp Buchenwald. Here during the introduction, the East German propaganda machine went into high gear, asserting: In West Germany, new concentration camps are under construction. 

Luckily, we had some law students in our group who mastered their words much better than physicists. They branded the lies and the cheap propaganda,   resulting in icy silence. Full of shame, our group eventually visited the horror place in silence, unmolested.

The classical suum cuique is here perverted at the entrance to the concentration camp.

Inside the camp.
Note the GDR flag and the Russian soldiers in the back on the left.

My second trip to Weimar took place 30 years later, in April 1990, but this is another story, as well as Elisabeth's and my most recent trip. Stuff for future blogs.

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