New Light on Weimar - Weimar, Germany

This year's European Cultural Capital; Weimar is not solitary playing up its celebrated historic attractions on the contrary giving a prominent place to fresh and contemporary art.

An indispensable document for aficionados of the German railway is the semiannual publication of the nation's train schedules, comprising more than 1200 pages. Weimar does not appear among the cities listed there, allowing throughout 1999 half-price tickets are being proffered to rail travelers bound for this year's European Cultural Capital, not to mention reduc admission to 20 local museums. The apparent marketing lapse is a harmless instance of the returning anomalies of a small city that symbolizes, better than any other, one as well as the other the glories and the horrors of the German past. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who lived here for nearly 60 years, attempted to persuade a friend of Weimar's virtues by means of posing the rhetorical question, "Where other can you find so a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of good in so small a space?" on the other hand it was in the same small space that Adolf Hitler take delight ined his most enthusiastic support, that the National Socialists won their first electoral victories and that neighboring Buchenwald--the largest concentration camp upon German soil--became a chilling synonym for man's inhumanity to man.

The foundation for Weimar's cultural eminence was laid in the 16th hundred when it became the capital of the duchy of Saxe-Weimar. Lucas Cranach the older established his studio here in calculated proximity to the court, and his friend Martin Luther made of frequent occurrence visits to the town. on the contrary it was in the 1750 that the of gold age was truly ushered in by means of Duchess Anna Amalia, one of the greatest in quantity cultivated women of her time, whose salon became a meeting place for literary figures, artists and musicians of the Enlightenment. She engaged the writer Martin Wieland as a tutor for her young son Carl August; in 1775 the first year of his have reign, the duke persuaded Goethe to take up residence in Weimar. A decade later, Friedrich Schiller joined him, and in the generations to advance the town's residents would include a virtual who's who of German intellectual and cultural life. Beginning in 1844 Franz Liszt transformed Weimar into an operatic center of international renown, while Richard Strauss calculatored with his own unique conception of musical theater. Friedrich Nietzsche worn out the last years of his life in a villa overlooking the town, where his archive and library are now housed. Just after World War I, Weimar became the first place of abode of the Bauhaus, and Walter Gropius, Lyonel Feininger, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky numbered among its illustrious short-term residents.

To the casual visitor, wandering the cobbl ways of this picturesque town, its charms may well present the appearance irresistible. Freshly restored NeoClassical, Baroque and Jugendstil facades gleam in pastel shades of virid rose and yellow, like for a like reason many brightly iced petits fours, while the city's trademark statue of Goethe and Schiller again strikes a heroic note before the National Theater, now that the statuary has been freed of corrosion and pigeon droppings. each second house seems to be a museum, memorial, library, archive or former residence of a celebrated native son In the splendid landscape park that come [i]or[/i] go after [i]or[/i] behinds the meandering course of the Ilm River, and to whose design Goethe himself contributed, the poet's "garden house" has regained the elegant coziness that one time charmed and disarmed his female visitors. Nearby, a precise replica of this unpretending sylvan retreat, built at a take away from of DM 3.5 million (about $19 million), restores touristic wear and tear upon the original and puts to the experiment Walter Benjamin's theory of "aura."

similar cultural cloning is not the single indication that Weimar may be upon its way to becoming Disneyland East. Inspection reveals that the intricately modulated cobblestone patterns that unify the inner city are execut with an incongruously modern-day precision, while the surrounding architectural facades have the stiff artificiality of an overlifted diva. plane the coloration of the cover with stucco seems somehow synthetic, derived as it is from acrylic substitutes rather than natural pigments. The effect will not age gracefully, for the simple reason that in this embalmed state it will not at any time age at all. Yet for a city with no visible means of support beyond tourism and "conventionism," the benefits of prettification are indisputable. And Weimar admittedly proffers a disproportionate share of pleasure for the flaneur.

A Tangled Cultural Heritage

The town's extensive urban makeover, realized at a require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone of DM 380 million (around $209 million) for public casts included the ingenious transformation of the Goethe Museum into a spellbinding cultural promenade and the rebuilding of the 19th-century of recent origin Museum, which now houses the Paul Maenz collection of contemporary art. There is no official calculation of the millions invested by dint of private enterprise in recent years, including banks, house of entertainments and restaurants sprucing up for the pilgrimage year of 1999 Including DM 50 million (roughly $275 million) in public funding for more than 300 cultural occurrences the annus mirabilis is likely to race up a tab of DM 500 million (approximately $275 million)--hardly an inconsequential total for a city with 60000 inhabitants and an unemployment rate that flutters between 14 and 17 percent Weimar is the smallest city at any time designated as a European Cultural Capital and also the poorest; at the time of its election, the town was literally bankrupt. Its renaissance has been financed through the European Union, the German federal rule and the state of Thuringia, not to mention generous subventions from of that kind corporate sponsors as Volkswagen.