ABSTRACT

This chapter examines how Anna Amalia's Gedenktafel manifests her transformation into an icon of Weimar. Beginning with Anna Amalia's death, there was a conscious effort by the people living and visiting Weimar to ensure that Weimar would be collectively remembered in history as a site of Bildung. The memorial embodied ideas of German nationalism as well as asserting Anna Amalia's accomplishments as part of a tradition in Weimar. It is important to discuss the impact of Anna Amalia's funeral and public mourning in Weimar, and the tradition of memorials in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. Anna Amalia's transformation in the early nineteenth century into an icon or personification of Weimar is also visually evident in a Gedenktafel. In Anna Amalia's memorial, both the political and personal merge, the ultimate realization of her self-cultivation and the city's cultivation come together into an immortal personification.