Weimar is foremost the city of the German classicists. At the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, Weimar was the center of intellectual thought in Germany. Art, especially literature of extraordinary quality, was created here in a small insignificant town of around 5,000 inhabitants. Foremost amongst these artists were Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friederich von Schiller.

The Goethe-Schiller Statue, on Theaterplatz, is one of the most photographed statues in Germany. It was created in 1857 by Ernst Rietschel and shows the two German literary giants in period costume. Goethe and Schiller were friends, or according to some, competitors with Goethe jealous of the popularity and success of Schiller. In the statue, they do not face each other, enhancing the perception amongst many that they were indeed rivals. While Schiller took in consideration the technical restraints of the theater, as well as the limitation of actors’ abilities, Goethe famously ignored both and wrote masterpieces that were beyond the capacity of any theatre or actor. (Maybe he already envisioned film and television?)

During their lifetime, Schiller was performed more often. Many of his plays debuted in the German National Theater, then under the direction of Goethe. Ironically, in the English-speaking world Schiller, the greatest German dramatist is not best known for great plays, such as Wilhelm Tell or Maria Stuart, but rather for the poem Ode to Joy, famously set to music by Ludwig von Beethoven in his monumental Ninth Symphony.

The neo-Classical Deutsches Nationaltheater (German National Theater), behind the Goethe-Schiller Statue, is the third theater building on this spot. The current building was erected in 1948, following the plans of the 1908 theater, destroyed during the Second World War. It was here that the National Assembly convened after the First World War to write Germany’s first democratic constitution. It was a masterpiece on liberal democracy, which was also its undoing. A multitude of minor parties and independents made government impossible. Parliament could not cope with the realities of the 1920s and especially the crisis of the Great Depression. In 1932, it allowed Hitler and the Nazis to use illegal means to grab power legally. A direct consequence of this constitution is the article in the current German constitution that requires a party to have a minimum of five percent of the popular vote in order to be represented in parliament.

Also on the square is the Bauhaus Museum, ironically in a classical building, commemorating the famous design school’s (then very much unappreciated) roots in post-First World War Weimar.