Every year, 3.5 million tourists retrace their steps through this city in the state of Thüringen. There's no other place that offers 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. Even today, the Duchess Anna Amalia Library, where Goethe himself was once a patron and director, reminds us of this legacy.

Friedrich Schiller also helped put Weimar on the cultural map with his many works that testified to his passion for education, equality and liberty. But 140 years after this cultural flowering, Weimar also became associated with the savagery of the Nazi era when Buchenwald, one of the largest concentration camps on German soil, was built nearby. Today, Buchenwald is a memorial to its victims.

Weimar was also the birthplace of the Bauhaus movement, whose spirit has been revived in a district where the experimental Haus am Horn was built in 1923. And in the park on the River Ilm, visitors can enjoy the landscape that inspired Goethe whenever he looked out on it from the window of his garden house.

From Visit Germany
Editor: Sue Cox