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Rathaus, Weimar, Germany 2009
Ilmpark
Old castle
Punishment AreaEssential Germany
So moving about Weimar is that it is essentially Germany in a nutshell. If you had only two days for Germany, they should be spent here.
Weimar was the city of the German Klassik. Literature (Goethe, Schiller) and free thought thrived here. Not many people realise just how important the Weimar court was in the 18th century in shaping Germany's then-future of a unified sovereign nation state with a parliament and a constitution. This destiny became true in the "Weimar Republic", the Republic founded in 1918 after WW I and the predecessor of today's Germany. It is called "Weimar Republic" because it was declared in Weimar and Weimar hosted the national assembly.
Today Weimar is a charming little town with gardens and old buildings with Goethe's home among them, the German National Theatre and some great museums far larger and more important nationally than the town's size would suggest - and next to one of Germany's WW II horrors, the Concentration Camp Buchenwald.
During the Cold War Weimar had been long closed off to visitors from the Western World, so the site is not as well known as Auschwitz or Dachau. It was also a camp designed with political prisoners in mind, not extermination. Yet one cannot escape the dreary feeling and physical illness that hits when you are walking around the site. It is especially noteably compared to the idyll that presents itself in Weimar. It is this contrast that defines Germany to this day and seeing it is the first step to understand the true horror of the Nazi regime and the German Concentration Camps. Now my tip: If you go to Weimar, get your hands on "Naked among Wolves", a book written by Bruno Apitz and translated into English by Edith Anderson. It is also available as a movie in German with English subtitles on DVD. The story is a fictional account of the last days of Buchenwald based upon a true story. A 3-year-old Jewish boy arrives in a siutcase in Buchenwald. He is supposed to go on a transport to Auschwitz, but some inmates make the decision to rescue him. They hide him inside the camp, always in danger of discovery, while the Nazi's search for him. Reading the book is chilling to the bone and will help you understand what you see at the camp.
