The National Assembly convenes in Weimar
On 6 February 1919 the assembly elected to write Germany a constitution met for the first time, in a court theatre eleven years old. Weimar was chosen because Berlin was too dangerous.
Germany's constituent assembly met in a provincial theatre because the capital was too dangerous to meet in, and the republic it produced took the theatre's town as its name.
A quarter past three
The constituent session opened at 15.15 on Thursday 6 February 1919, and the man who opened it was Friedrich Ebert, chairman of the Council of People's Deputies.[1] He held no office in the state being founded — the Council was the provisional authority that had taken over when the monarchy fell — and five days later the same assembly elected him its president.
A room built for something else
The room was an auditorium, and the theatre's own history records that it had to be rebuilt into a plenary chamber before the delegates could sit in it.[2] The result was a parliament in a space designed for an audience facing a stage, which is not the worst description of a constituent assembly ever devised.
Why not Berlin
The Bundestag's own account is blunt: Berlin was still too unsettled by the revolutionary situation.[1] A body writing a constitution could not be seen to deliberate under street fighting, and Weimar offered the opposite of a barricade — a small residence town whose name meant Goethe, Schiller and a humanist ancestry the new state was glad to claim. It kept the name, through everything the name later had to answer for.
Sources
- Weimarer Nationalversammlung — Deutscher Bundestag, retrieved 29 August 2026
- Geschichte — Deutsches Nationaltheater und Staatskapelle Weimar, retrieved 29 August 2026
Historical figures
Historical figures
1871–1925 • politician • statesman
As chairman of the Council of People's Deputies, Ebert opened the constituent session at 3.15 p.m. on 6 February 1919.
Historic sites
Historic sites
It commemorates the assembly that convened in 1919 in the building across the square.
Weimar city centre, 50 metres from the Goetheplatz
The museum's centrepiece exhibition tells the story of the assembly from the town's side.
Theaterplatz 2, 99423 Weimar
The assembly sat in the theatre's auditorium, converted into a plenary chamber for the purpose.
Stages and venues
Theaterplatz 2, 99423 Weimar
The theatre's own history records that its auditorium was rebuilt into a plenary chamber so the assembly could sit in it.
Period
1918–1933
The republic drew its name from this assembly and the town that hosted it.
In Weimar's history
In Weimar's history
On 9 November 1918 a workers' and soldiers' council formed in a Weimar pub, a newspaper editor drafted the abdication, and by that evening the monarchy in Weimar was over.
The assembly met because the monarchy had fallen three months earlier — in Weimar, on the evening of 9 November 1918.
Walter Gropius took over a grand-ducal art school in a defeated country and renamed it the Staatliches Bauhaus.
The same town, the same spring: the National Assembly was sitting in Weimar while the school was being founded.
On 31 July 1919 the delegates voted Germany's first democratic constitution through in its final form, in the Nationaltheater. It was signed somewhere else entirely.
The vote closed the work the assembly had convened in the same hall to do, five months earlier.
On 3 and 4 July 1926 the party held its first congress after being refounded, with Hitler present, in the hall where the Republic had voted its constitution seven years earlier.
Same hall, seven years apart: the assembly that founded the Republic and the congress of the party that would end it.