When: 24 August 1617

The Fruitbearing Society is founded in the Weimar castle, 1617

The first great society for the German language was founded here — a year before the castle it met in burned down.

On 24 August 1617, in the Weimar castle, a group of princes and noblemen founded the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft — the Fruitbearing Society, also called the Palm Order — to promote and cultivate the German language and its literature. It is the earliest of the German language societies, and it was founded in this town.

What they were actually proposing

In 1617 the language of learning was Latin, the language of courts was increasingly French, and German was what you spoke to servants. A society devoted to promoting and tending German as a written language was therefore a programme, not a hobby: it argued that the vernacular could carry poetry, scholarship and government. Two centuries later, in the same town, that argument would look self-evident because Goethe and Schiller had won it.

Members took a new name

Each member entered under a society name rather than a title, which is the detail that gives the enterprise away as serious play. Duke Wilhelm IV of Saxe-Weimar belonged from the founding day, as "der Schmackhafte" — the palatable one. On 7 May 1651 the leadership of the society was offered to him,^[1] and for the last eleven years of his life the first great institution of the German language was directed from Weimar.

A year before the fire

The castle the society was founded in did not last.^[2] In 1618 fire destroyed it, and the rebuilding produced the Baroque Wilhelmsburg that stood until 1774. The founding is therefore the last well-known thing to happen in the Renaissance castle that Johann Friedrich had chosen as his residence in 1552 — the closing scene of one Weimar and the year before the next one starts building.

Sources

Wilhelm IV., Herzog von Sachsen-Weimar — Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, retrieved 29 August 2026
Weimar-Chronik kompakt — Stadt Weimar, retrieved 29 August 2026