Weimar: From Enlightenment to the Present

Weimar: From Enlightenment to the Present

Michael H. Kater

Language: English

Pages: 480

ISBN: 0300170564

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Historian Michael H. Kater chronicles the rise and fall of one of Germany’s most iconic cities in this fascinating and surprisingly provocative history of Weimar. Weimar was a center of the arts during the Enlightenment and hence the cradle of German culture in modern times. Goethe and Schiller made their reputations here, as did Franz Liszt and the young Richard Strauss. In the early twentieth century, the Bauhaus school was founded in Weimar. But from the 1880s on, the city also nurtured a powerful right-wing reactionary movement, and fifty years later, a repressive National Socialist regime dimmed Weimar’s creative lights, transforming the onetime artists’ utopia into the capital of its first Nazified province and constructing the Buchenwald death camp on its doorstep.
 
Kater’s richly detailed volume offers the first complete history of Weimar in any language, from its meteoric eighteenth-century rise up from obscurity through its glory days of unbridled creative expression to its dark descent back into artistic insignificance under Nazi rule and, later, Soviet occupation and beyond.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stalin-Allee in that hideous neoclassicist style. His close friend Brecht enthused over the plan to create thousands of dwellings in Berlin, for the proletariat. Post-Weimar, Henselmann rose in stature to become the GDR's most famous architect. His move away from Weimar prompted an exodus of architects and painters Henselmann had attracted. Trökes left, as did Zimmermann and Hoffmann-Lederer, by 1950–51 – all for West Germany. The most infamous case involved Kirchberger, whose “Formalist” mural

nicht vollendete Autobiographie (Dornach, 1990) Steiner, Walter, et al., Weimar 1945: Ein historisches Protokoll (Weimar, 1997) Steiner, Walter/Uta Kühn-Stillmark, Friedrich Justin Bertuch: Ein Leben im klassischen Weimar zwischen Kultur und Kommerz (Cologne, 2001) Steinfeld, Thomas, Weimar (Stuttgart, 1998) Steinweis, Alan E., “Weimar Culture and the Rise of National Socialism: The Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur,” Central European History 24 (1991): 402–23 Stenzel, Burkhard, “‘… Die deusche

remove, even in his cramped dwelling. Eckermann was surrounded by younger contemporaries of Goethe, who had been hangers-on rather than original minds, such as the philologist Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer, the painter Friedrich Preller, or the art critic Ludwig Schorn.3 They assisted the rulers at the Weimar court, Grand Duke Carl Friedrich and his wife Maria Pavlovna, in establishing the commemorative aura which would manifest itself later in the century in the erection of a Schiller museum in 1846

(ii), (iii) Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) (i), (ii), (iii) author of Pucelle (i) Vopo (i), (ii), (iii) Voss, Richard (i), (ii), (iii) Vuillard, Édouard (i) Vulpius, Christian August (i), (ii) Vulpius (von Goethe), Christiane (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) W. Staupendahl firm (i) Wachler, Ernst (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix) author of Mittsommer (i); Widukind (i); Walpurgis (i) Wachler, Ingolf (i) Wagenfeld, Wilhelm (i) Wagner Association Weimar (i)

The young Brahms himself briefly showed up at the Altenburg but, not impressed by anything he saw or heard, departed forthwith.83 Since Liszt was paid less than 2,000 taler annually by the Weimar court and irregularly at that, it was probably his mistress who financed sumptuous evenings of revelry and entertainment, which she always attended, unless as a woman prone to illnesses she had to visit a spa.84 Poems were recited and music was played, sometimes with Weimar artists or notables as

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