When: 1953

The GDR takes charge of the classics

In 1953 East Germany gathered Goethe's and Schiller's houses, the parks, the Nietzsche archive and the state library into a single organisation. Its successor is the foundation that runs Weimar today.

One roof over everything

The GDR founded the Nationale Forschungs- und Gedenkstätten der klassischen deutschen Literatur — the NFG — in 1953. It was the first umbrella organisation of its kind here, and it brought together the grand-ducal collections nationalised back in 1921, the private property of the Carl August line expropriated in 1948, the summer residences and their parks, the Nietzsche archive and the Thuringian state library.^[1]

Care and control were the same act

It is tempting to file this as cultural policy and move on. It is better understood as both things at once: a state that wanted the classical German inheritance as its own pedigree had every reason to conserve it properly, and every reason to decide what it meant. Conservation and interpretation arrived in the same institution, and only one of them was open to argument.

What became of it

After reunification the NFG's institutions and collections were incorporated in October 1991 into the newly created Stiftung Weimarer Klassik, at first as a dependent body and independent from 1994.^[1] That line of descent leads directly to today's Klassik Stiftung Weimar, which runs most of what there is to see.