Weimar: Much More than Goethe

Weimar: It's a sheer fluke that I'm spending this year (1999) in Weimar when it's the Cultural Capital of Europe. At the press opening of Stockholm's tenure as the EuroCapital, a snooty art critic from Berlin sneered that he didn't see how a run-down East German "village" (60,000 at last count) could follow the Swedish capital.

My siding with Underdogs, as well as a longtime interest as an architecture buff interested in the Bauhaus, prompted me to make a detour back to Philadelphia via Weimar. I figured I'd at least get a tasty visit to Berlin (now competing neck and neck with Barcelona as my favorite city in the world) out of it.

The twenty minute walk from the main train station to the city "center" made the Berlin critic's putdown look like an understatement. What a mess. What wasn't being renovated looked about to collapse. Still the glorious Jugendstil Deutsche Bank where the press center was piqued my interest further.

Luckily I fell into the capital hands of Andreas Schneider, a thirtyish former radio broadcaster who immediately understood my curiosity. He took me for an introductory walk (reversing the itinerary of my arrival). He showed me the Cranach House in the marketplace, the National Theatre where the so-called Weimar Republic's constitution had been written in 1919, the Goethe Cafe, and a whole neighborhood of buildings on nearby Goetheplatz undergoing rehab, and across from which is the new Congress Center opening in May.

We dropped in the Bauhaus Museum with a small but choice selection of artifacts from the entire history of that institution--plus an introduction to the great local works of Henrik van der Velde, the Belgian Jugendstil genius who ran the applied art school that preceded the Bauhaus.Then down Karl Liebknect Strasse where he showed me the local high school with a legendary Big Band. Then the old Landesmuseum in the process of becoming a Contemporary Art Museum. He pointed out behind it at Rathenau Platz the Thuringer Design Center where the social idealism plus techno savvy of the Bauhaus tradition is alive and kicking.

There, Karl Liebknecht gives way to Carl August Allee (Leninallee until the fall of the DDR!) Carl August was the Duke who presided over the Golden Age of Goethe and Schiller at the turn of the 19th century, after his mother, the regent Ana Amalia got the salon fever started.

We dropped into the C1 club, the freshest pop music venue in Weimar, where one noisy July night I lost my hatred of rock music. (I had already been softened up by the marvelous jazz groups performing there.) We ended up at the bar of the InterCity Hotel across from the train station. He asked me if I'd like to meet some architecture students from Bauhaus UNI (the efflorescence of Denglish has created the linguistic tic of clipping words in what is mistakenly assumed to be verrrry American--crime series on TV are Krimi's, prominent celebs are Promi's, respected professionals Profi's).

Six of them, all female, had rented the top floor of an apartment to spend the wee hours finishing their diploma projects. One, for example, was a new hotel capitalizing but not negating the Neuschwanstein folly of Mad Ludwig. I swear every other person in Weimar seems to me to be studying architecture. I swear, their enthusiasm and openness won me over on the spot.

Weimar might be a virtual mess at the moment, but the almost billion Deutschmarks already ponied up would surely save the day. The excuse for picking Weimar allegedly was to celebrate Goethe's 250th birthday (August 28), but its secret agenda was to show the East Germans that their areas could be retrieved from twelve years of Nazi abuse and almost a half century of socialist neglect.

I vowed to come back in May, and stayed at the InterCity for four months as I got acquainted with the city and its Kreis (Weimar is encircled by fascinating villages, towns, and cities--Bad Berka, Apolda, Erfurt, and you should plan to use the fine mass trans network to relish them.