Sophie, Grand Duchess of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach
Also known as: Princess Sophie of the Netherlands
Biography
A Dutch princess came to Weimar in 1842 to marry the heir to the grand duchy, and forty-three years later she was handed the single most valuable literary estate in Germany. What she did with it is the reason scholars still come to this town.
"I have inherited, and Germany and the world shall inherit with me"
On 15 April 1885 the manuscript estate of Goethe passed to Sophie, sole heir under the will of Walther, the poet's last surviving grandson. She was sixty-one. The sentence the archive still quotes from her is the whole decision in one line: „Ich habe geerbt, und Deutschland und die Welt soll mit mir erben.“ A private inheritance became a public institution because the person who received it said so, immediately.
An edition and a second estate
She set the archive its founding task at once: a complete edition of Goethe. The Sophien- or Weimarer Ausgabe, which she initiated, appeared in four sections and 143 volumes between 1887 and 1919 — one of the largest editorial undertakings ever attempted for a German writer. In 1889 Schiller's descendants of the von Gleichen-Rußwurm family gave the poet's literary estate to the same institution, and the archive had both names it still carries.
A building of its own, 1896
The collection outgrew its rooms within a decade, so between 1893 and 1896 Sophie had a building put up for it. She inaugurated it on 28 June 1896, and with that opening Germany's first research-based literary archive came into use. It holds something like five million sheets today and calls itself the oldest literary archive in the country; Goethe's handwritten estate is UNESCO documentary heritage.
Notable Works & Achievements
The Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv (building inaugurated 1896)
The Sophien- or Weimarer Ausgabe of Goethe's works (1887–1919)
Historical Context
The period's third great institution-founding, after the art school of 1860 and the orchestra school of 1872 — and the one that made Weimar a place scholars must travel to.
Goethe died in 1832, and Weimar had to work out what a town does after its golden age. It decided to keep going, and the answer took eighty-six years — the era the Klassik Stiftung Weimar calls the Silver Age. Music replaced literature as the thing Weimar was for, two royal patrons paid for it, and the schools they founded outlived the monarchy that funded them.
Read more about this period →Quick Facts
1824
1897
Dutch
In Weimar's history
In Weimar's history
The most valuable literary estate in Germany became one woman's private property, and she gave it away the same day.
She was the sole heir, and the decision to make the estate public was hers alone, taken at once.