ABSTRACT
The visitor today to Weimar, having sped across Germany on an Intercity train and arrived at the large, new railway-station, can walk straight down the Carl-August-Allee – in GDR days called the Lenin-Straße, but things have changed – named after the duke and friend of Goethe who helped fulfil the plan of his mother, Anna Amalia, to turn eighteenth-century Weimar into a major cultural centre. If we join our visitor at the station, we then cross the Rathenau-Platz, and we will come, via the Karl-Liebknecht-Straße, to the Goethe-Platz. There we can see the German National Theatre, built by Max Littmann and Jakob Heilmann on the site of the former Weimar Court Theatre, in which Schiller’s Wallensteins Lager was first performed in 1798. Following a fire in 1824, a new theatre was built, which in turn was replaced in 1908 by the neo-classical building we see today. In this building the constitution of the Weimar republic was signed in 1919; following the Second World War, the destroyed building was reconstructed and reopened with a performance of Goethe’s Faust, Part One, in 1948. It was here that Thomas Mann delivered speeches on the occasion of the two-hundredth anniversary of Goethe’s birth in 1949 and on the one-hundred-and fiftieth anniversary of Schiller’s death in 1955, a fact recorded on a commemorative plaque on an exterior wall, which emphasizes that Thomas Mann and the GDR poet, Johannes R. Becher, met here and joined forces in the fight against fascism and to secure a rebirth of classical literature. From Goethe-Platz, too, one can catch a bus to the former concentration camp of Buchenwald. Weimar today stands as a reminder of the darkness of history, as well as a monument to an epoch of intellectual and artistic brilliance.
