The Weimar Triangle is founded
Two years after the wall came down, the foreign ministers of Germany, France and Poland met here and signed a declaration on the future of Europe. The format still carries the town's name.
28 and 29 August 1991
Hans-Dietrich Genscher for Germany, Roland Dumas for France and Krzysztof Skubiszewski for Poland came to Weimar over two days at the end of August 1991 and founded what has been called the Weimar Triangle ever since.[1] The timing is the substance: Germany had just been reunified, Poland had just come out of communist rule, and nobody yet knew what the eastern half of the continent was going to be.
What they signed
The document is a joint declaration of the three foreign ministers on the future of Europe, and the Federal Foreign Office still publishes it. It opens: "Europa steht an einem historischen Wendepunkt seiner Geschichte. Seine Völker und Staaten haben den Weg zu neuen Formen des Zusammenlebens beschritten."[2] That is the register of 1991 exactly — a sentence written by people who could see that the arrangement was changing and could not yet see into what.
Why here
A meeting between Germany, France and Poland about the shape of Europe could have been held in any of three capitals. It was held in a small Thuringian town whose name already stood for a German attempt at a republic and, at the same time, for what lay eight years further on. Choosing Weimar in 1991 meant the same thing as choosing it in 1919: taking the name and everything attached to it.
Sources
- Weimarer-Dreieck-Preis — Stadt Weimar, retrieved 29 August 2026
- Gemeinsame Erklärung der Außenminister von Deutschland, Frankreich und Polen zur Zukunft Europas — Auswärtiges Amt, retrieved 29 August 2026
Period
1990–present
The clearest instance of reunified Weimar being handed a role in European politics on the strength of its name.