Weimar Walking Tour

The Goethe-Schiller Monument has stood on Theaterplatz, the Theatre Square, since 1857, in front of the German National Theatre. Grand Duke Carl Alexander commissioned it, and the Dresden sculptor Ernst Rietschel designed it. The larger-than-life bronze group was unveiled on September 4, 1857, the hundredth birthday of Duke Carl August. The two poets stand side by side on a tall stone pedestal. Seen from where you are, Goethe is on the right and Schiller on the left. Look at their hands. Goethe holds the laurel wreath firmly, while Schiller only touches it. Rietschel meant to show that the two were equals, but that Goethe was older and had been famous for longer. Goethe came to Weimar in 1775. He first served at the court of Duke Carl August, and from 1791 he also ran the court theatre. Schiller settled in Weimar for good in 1799. The two became close friends and worked together, through letters, conversations and shared thinking about art. Schiller's journal Die Horen and the Xenien, the short satirical poems they wrote together, came out of this exchange. The monument stands here for a reason. The present theatre building only dates from 1908, but the court theatre stood on this spot before it, and Goethe and Schiller staged their plays there. Court, townspeople and theatre came together here. The monument became the best-known landmark in the city. From here it is about a five-minute walk southeast to the Frauenplan, where Goethe lived for almost fifty years.

This baroque townhouse on the Frauenplan was built from 1707 to 1709. In 1782 Goethe moved into its western half as a tenant. After a few years in another house on Marienstrasse he came back. In 1792 Duke Carl August bought the house for him, gave it to him in 1794, and formally handed over ownership in 1807. Goethe had it remodelled to his own ideas, and he lived here until his death in 1832. Here he received visitors, held conversations, arranged his collections, and worked on literature, science and the theory of art. The best-known room is his study with his private library, which has kept its furnishings almost unchanged. Other rooms hold Goethe's collections of art, minerals and natural history. In the garden behind the house he grew apricots and grapes and carried out botanical experiments. Friedrich Schiller came here too. After the two men grew close in 1794, they talked intensively about literature, theatre and aesthetics, often in these rooms. They appeared in public at court and in the theatre, and here in the house they worked together. Today Goethe's house belongs to the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, and eighteen rooms are open as a museum. From the Frauenplan, walk north to the market square, about three minutes away.

On the market square stands Weimar's town hall. After the court and the poets, this stop shows the town and its citizens. The present building went up after a fire in 1837 and was finished in 1841. It was designed in the Neo-Gothic style by the state building officer Heinrich Hess. Of the building that burned, a Renaissance town hall from 1583 that Goethe and Schiller knew, only the town's coat of arms and two stone doorways survived. Both were built into the new town hall. Since the Middle Ages the market square has been a place for trade, public announcements and town festivals. Goethe and Schiller are linked mainly with the court and the theatre, but this is where the town council and its officials met. With its Gothic forms, Hess deliberately drew on older town halls, as was popular in the nineteenth century. If you are here on the hour, you may hear the carillon. Since 1987, thirty-five bells made of Meissen porcelain have hung in the tower. They play at ten in the morning, at noon, and at three and five in the afternoon, and from mid-June to November also at six in the evening. In winter they are silent, because frost could crack the porcelain. The town administration and the registry office still work in the town hall today. From here it is about a three-minute walk east to the Platz der Demokratie, the Square of Democracy, with its equestrian statue.

On the Platz der Demokratie, formerly called the Fürstenplatz, an equestrian statue commemorates Carl August of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, who lived from 1757 to 1828. The sculptor Adolf Donndorf made the bronze figure, and it was unveiled on September 3, 1875. Carl August wears the uniform of a Prussian general. The statue shows him returning to Weimar from the wars against Napoleon. Carl August became duke in 1758, when he was still a small child. At first his mother, Duchess Anna Amalia, ruled for him. In 1775, at the age of eighteen, he took over the government himself, and the monument was unveiled exactly one hundred years later. In that same year, 1775, he brought Johann Wolfgang Goethe to Weimar, and later he also supported Friedrich Schiller. From 1776 Goethe sat on the Privy Council, the government of the duchy. In Weimar, poetry and government were in the same hands. The monument honours a prince rather than a poet: the prince who brought Goethe to Weimar and supported him. Behind the rider you can see the Fürstenhaus, the former princes' palace, which is now the University of Music. The last stop is only a few steps away, on the south side of the square: the Duchess Anna Amalia Library.

The Duchess Anna Amalia Library is the last stop on this tour. Here the court, scholars, and poets such as Goethe worked with the same books. The ducal book collection goes back to the sixteenth century, and from 1691 Duke Wilhelm Ernst expanded it step by step. In 1766 Duchess Anna Amalia had the books moved to the so-called Green Palace, a Renaissance building from the 1560s. For the books, the state architect August Friedrich Strassburger fitted out the three-storey Rococo Hall, with light colours, galleries and richly decorated ceilings. The library was a workplace and a store of knowledge for the Weimar court, and it was also open to readers from the town. In 1797 Duke Carl August put Goethe and the minister Christian Gottlob Voigt in charge of the library. Under them it got new rules for borrowing and grew to about eighty thousand volumes by 1832. Goethe deliberately bought books on the Faust legend, and they became the basis of today's Faust Collection. On September 2, 2004, the building caught fire. About fifty thousand books burned, including Duchess Anna Amalia's music collection, and another one hundred and eighteen thousand were damaged. On October 24, 2007, Anna Amalia's birthday, the restored building reopened. Since 1998 it has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage Site "Classical Weimar". The tour ends here. It is only a two-minute walk back to the market square.