Weimar: From Enlightenment to the Present
Michael H Kater
Abstract
This book chronicles the rise and fall of one of Germany's most iconic cities in this history of Weimar. Weimar was a centre of the arts during the Enlightenment and hence the cradle of German culture in modern times. Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich von 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 li ... More
This book chronicles the rise and fall of one of Germany's most iconic cities in this history of Weimar. Weimar was a centre of the arts during the Enlightenment and hence the cradle of German culture in modern times. Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich von 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 one-time artists' utopia into the capital of its first Nazified province and constructing the Buchenwald death camp on its doorstep. This book offers a complete history of Weimar, 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.
Keywords:
history,
Weimar,
Germany,
Enlightenment,
German culture,
Bauhaus school,
Nazi rule,
Soviet occupation
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2014 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780300170566 |
| Published to Yale Scholarship Online: January 2015 |
DOI:10.12987/yale/9780300170566.001.0001 |
