Weimar Redux One

My obsession with Weimar was a sheer fluke. It began with a sneer and a party. On the press tour for Stockholm as the Cultural Capital of Europe in January 1998, the architecture critic of Berliner Morgenpost sneered that next year would be a big comedown because "that little Ossie wreck of a town, Weimar, was to be the Cultural Capital".

He sounded so snide (I didn't yet know about the phenomenon of Wessie arrogance) that my underdog sentiments snapped to attention. "Weimar," I asked him, "isn't that where the Bauhaus was founded? And where the ill-fated Weimar Republic started?" "Yes," he conceded,"but that was before twelve years of Nazi and almost fifty years of Communist corruption." What a hip shit, I fumed quietly. I vowed on the spot to take a detour through Weimar on my way back home to San Francisco.

The party was the highlight of that first visit. I walked from the main train station to the center of the city at Theatreplatz in fifteen minutes. I was appalled. The place was a wreck. A few attractive buildings or renovations just made the overall impression worse, like a few gold teeth in a mouth full of decay. So the snotty Berlin critic was right, after all, I concluded. But luckily I decided to visit the headquarters of KulturHaupstadt Europas in a glorious Jugendstil bank, rusticated red sandstone dominating the end of Schillerstrasse.

I buzzed the secure door on the third floor, distracted up all those stairs by the splendid tulip floral decorations on the walls. A twenty something in very American looking gear opened the door, and I stumbled through my well rehearsed opener: "Ich bin Jake McBride von San Francisco." He smiled easily, extended a hand, and replied in idiomatic American. "Hi! I'm Chris...from Weimar." Astonished at his casual style, I asked him where he learned to speak English so fluently. "Simple," he explained, "I spent a year in Dayton, Ohio as a junior in high school. Cultural exchange. You know the number."

He sat me down opposite his desk, as I identified myself. "I write a weekly column for an alternative paper called the San Francisco Eye, and in Stockholm on the press tour for their being the Cultural Capital of Europe in 1998, a smart ass architecture critic from Berliner Morgenpost made some demeaning remarks about Weimar being the next capital and that it was bound to be a mess, given almost six decades of Nazi and Stasi abuse.

I resented his glibness, and remembered some good things about Weimar--the Bauhaus and the Republic--so I decided to check it out for myself. On my way back to San Francisco. I must say, if what I saw just now walking from the Hauptbahnhof is typical, the snotty Berlin critic may be right. It was a mess, from start to finish."

"Heh, don't jump to conclusions. Bonn has ponied up almost a billion Deutschmarks to bring it back from the disaster the GDR left us in. The official reason for our being the Cultural Capital is that 1999 is Goethe's 250th birthday, and Johann Wolfgang is King around here. The cynical among us like to kid that he and his buddy Schiller have pissed in every corner of Weimar. It's for sure without their presence tourism wouldn't amount to much. But that's only the cover story. What Helmut Kohl wanted to do was to give the Ossiesan example of how the spiritual center of Germany could be retrieved from sadness and despair.

When he declared the two Germany's one (Einheit, as he called it), it was assumed that the billions of DM's poured into the obsolescent East would quickly bring the Ossies up to parity with the Wessies. That didn't happen. In fact, twenty percent unemployment is still the norm. And the Ossies feel doubly cheated. Wessies in droves moved in, taking over leadership jobs, and in addition to the injury of displacement was the insult of losing all the security of the socialist welfare system. There are thousands of men in their forties and fifties who feel they've been dealt a deck of jokers. It's very sad to watch my father and his friends, unable to join in the new initiatives and despondent over what they lost."

(To be continued: This is the first of nine parts of a fictional account.)