New Light on Weimar - Weimar, Germany

Art in America, July, 1999 by David Galloway

This year's European Cultural Capital; Weimar is not only playing up its celebrated historic attractions but giving a prominent place to modern 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 1,200 pages. Weimar does not appear among the cities listed there, though throughout 1999 half-price tickets are being offered to rail travelers bound for this year's European Cultural Capital, not to mention reduced admission to 20 local museums. The apparent marketing lapse is a harmless instance of the recurrent anomalies of a small city that symbolizes, better than any other, both 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 posing the rhetorical question, "Where else can you find so much good in so small a space?" But it was in the same small space that Adolf Hitler enjoyed his most enthusiastic support, that the National Socialists won their first electoral victories and that neighboring Buchenwald--the largest concentration camp on German soil--became a chilling synonym for man's inhumanity to man.

The foundation for Weimar's cultural eminence was laid in the 16th century, when it became the capital of the duchy of Saxe-Weimar. Lucas Cranach the Elder established his studio here in calculated proximity to the court, and his friend Martin Luther made frequent visits to the town. But it was in the 1750s that the golden age was truly ushered in by Duchess Anna Amalia, one of the most 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 own reign, the duke persuaded Goethe to take up residence in Weimar. A decade later, Friedrich Schiller joined him, and in the generations to come 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 countered with his own unique conception of musical theater. Friedrich Nietzsche spent 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 home 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 cobbled streets of this picturesque town, its charms may well seem irresistible. Freshly restored NeoClassical, Baroque and Jugendstil facades gleam in pastel shades of green, rose and yellow, like so 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 sculpture has been freed of corrosion and pigeon droppings. Every second house seems to be a museum, memorial, library, archive or former residence of a celebrated native son. In the splendid landscape park that follows 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 once charmed and disarmed his female visitors. Nearby, a precise replica of this modest sylvan retreat, built at a cost of DM 3.5 million (about $1.9 million), reduces touristic wear and tear on the original and puts to the test Walter Benjamin's theory of "aura."

Such cultural cloning is not the only indication that Weimar may be on its way to becoming Disneyland East. Inspection reveals that the intricately modulated cobblestone patterns that unify the inner city are executed with an incongruously modern-day precision, while the surrounding architectural facades have the stiff artificiality of an overlifted diva. Even the coloration of the stucco seems somehow synthetic, derived as it is from acrylic substitutes rather than natural pigments. The ensemble will not age gracefully, for the simple reason that in this embalmed state it will never 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 offers a disproportionate share of pleasure for the flaneur.

A Tangled Cultural Heritage

The town's extensive urban makeover, realized at a cost of DM 380 million (around $209 million) for public projects, included the ingenious transformation of the Goethe Museum into a spellbinding cultural promenade and the rebuilding of the 19th-century New Museum, which now houses the Paul Maenz collection of contemporary art. There is no official calculation of the millions invested by private enterprise in recent years, including banks, hotels and restaurants sprucing up for the pilgrimage year of 1999. Including DM 50 million (roughly $27.5 million) in public funding for more than 300 cultural events, the annus mirabilis is likely to run up a tab of DM 500 million (approximately $275 million)--hardly an inconsequential sum for a city with 60,000 inhabitants and an unemployment rate that hovers between 14 and 17 percent. Weimar is the smallest city ever 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 by the European Union, the German federal government and the state of Thuringia, not to mention generous subventions from such corporate sponsors as Volkswagen.