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Weimar - Classical heritage and moving history

04:22

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Michael BärApril 17, 2011

Weimar is the former residential seat of the dukes of Saxe-Weimar, and owes its international reputation as home to poets and philosophers primarily to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. Every year, 3.5 million tourists retrace their steps through this city in the state of Thüringen.

There's no other place where you can get such an authentic impression of how Goethe and Schiller once lived. Thanks to Goethe's friendship with Grand Duke Charles Augustus, Weimar blossomed into a center of the arts and literature. The Duchess Anna Amalia Library bears witness to that. Goethe himself was a patron and director of the library. Schiller was also passionate about scholarship and education, liberty and equality. In such plays as William Tell, he declared war on tyranny. 140 years later, Weimar could not avoid being connected with the savagery of the Nazi era. Buchenwald, one of the largest concentration camps on German soil, is now a memorial to the victims. The spirit of the Bauhaus movement has been revived in a new city district located where the Haus am Horn, an experimental residential house, was built as part of the first Bauhaus exhibition in 1923. In the park on the River Ilm you can enjoy the landscape that inspired Goethe whenever he looked out on it from the window of his garden house.