Weimar

Weimar is recorded in 899 and was the seat of a powerful county in the early Middle Ages, but it stayed a small town of under 5,000 people for centuries, rebuilt again and again after fires. Its fortunes turned in 1547, when the Ernestine branch of the Saxon dukes lost the Schmalkaldic War and their capital, Wittenberg, and needed a new residence; from 1572 Weimar was the capital of Saxe-Weimar.

The regency of Duchess Anna Amalia from 1758 and the reign of her son Carl August began the classical or "golden" age, which lasted until Goethe's death in 1832. Goethe arrived in 1775 and took on civic duties at court, followed by Herder, Wieland and Schiller, and a town of about 7,000 people became the centre of German literature. A "silver age" followed: Liszt came as court conductor in 1842 and staged the premiere of Wagner's Lohengrin in 1850, an art school was founded in 1860, Nietzsche spent his last years here from 1897, and Henry van de Velde set up a school of applied arts in 1902.

In 1919 the National Assembly met in the theatre to draft the constitution of the Weimar Republic, away from street fighting in Berlin, and Walter Gropius merged the two art schools into the Bauhaus, which moved to Dessau in 1925 under pressure from a right-wing state government. The Nazis built a government district by the station and in 1937 opened Buchenwald concentration camp on the Ettersberg, 8 kilometres away, where an estimated 56,545 people died; after liberation the Soviets used it as a special camp until 1950. Weimar was Thuringia's capital until 1948. The Bauhaus sites were listed by UNESCO in 1996 and Classical Weimar in 1998, and in 2004 a fire badly damaged the Duchess Anna Amalia Library.

Weimar has been a place of pilgrimage for German readers since Goethe moved here, and its identity rests on that inheritance. Goethe and Schiller lie in the ducal crypt of the Historic Cemetery, Rietschel's statue of the two poets stands before the National Theatre, and their papers are kept in the Goethe and Schiller Archive, part of UNESCO's Memory of the World. The Klassik Stiftung Weimar, one of the largest cultural institutions in Germany, looks after more than twenty museums, palaces, houses and parks, covering not only the classical age but also Liszt, Nietzsche, van de Velde and the Bauhaus.

Music runs through the city's life. The Liszt School of Music, founded in 1872, trains some 850 students, a boarding school for young musicians occupies Schloss Belvedere, and the National Theatre and the Staatskapelle play on six stages across the city. The Bauhaus University, with more than 4,000 students in architecture, design and media, keeps an experimental, student edge in a city otherwise devoted to its past, and celebrated the Bauhaus centenary with partners worldwide in 2019.

The city also lives with the darker side of its history. Weimar's residents were ordered to walk through Buchenwald after liberation, and the memorial on the Ettersberg is part of how the town understands itself. The great popular festival is the Onion Market each October, held since 1653, when the old town fills with onion plaits and onion food.

About 66,000 people lived in Weimar in 2024, much the same as the 65,000 of 1940; together with Erfurt and Jena it forms the central metropolitan area of Thuringia, with around 500,000 people. As elsewhere in eastern Germany, the foreign-born population is small and most residents are non-religious.

Heritage tourism is one of the leading parts of the economy, alongside the universities, the cultural foundation, the theatre and public institutions, including Thuringia's supreme administrative court and constitutional court and the main state archive. Students give the old town much of its life during term.

The most desirable homes are on either side of the Park an der Ilm in the south-east, while the western and northern districts are more modest and mixed with industry at their edges. Trams ran in the city from 1899 to 1937; today buses meeting at Goetheplatz carry residents around a town small enough to cross on foot or by bicycle, and regional trains link it with Erfurt and Jena.

Weimar shares the cooking of Thuringia. The Thüringer Rostbratwurst, a thin, spiced sausage of 15 to 20 centimetres, is sold from grills on the Marktplatz, and potatoes from the farmland north of the city go into Thuringian dumplings, made from a mixture of raw and boiled potatoes. In 2016 a kosher version of the Thuringian bratwurst, of veal and chicken, was first sold at the Onion Market.

Onions are the city's own emblem. At the Onion Market in October the stalls sell braided onion plaits and onion cakes, onion soups and onion breads, using onions grown in farming villages to the north. Saale-Unstrut wine from Bad Sulza, about 25 kilometres to the north-east, is the local wine.

Eating out centres on the old town, where restaurants and cafés in historic houses around the Marktplatz, the Herderplatz and Theaterplatz serve Thuringian home cooking and international food to visitors and students alike.