Wilhelm Ernst, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach
Biography
The last Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, who spent a decade paying for the modernism Weimar is now famous for and then signed his throne away in an evening.
A throne inherited from the Silver Age
He succeeded his grandfather Carl Alexander on 5 January 1901 and reigned for seventeen years. What he inherited was a court built around the memory of Goethe's Weimar and a town that had been living on that memory for two generations — a comfortable position, and a static one.
Modernism as court policy
In 1902 Henry van de Velde was brought in to advance the applied arts, and from 1908 to 1915 he directed the Grand Ducal School of Arts and Crafts — the institution out of which the Bauhaus was assembled in 1919. In 1905 Harry Graf Kessler took over the Grand Ducal Museum and mounted more than forty exhibitions before the Rodin scandal forced him out in 1906. For about a decade, the avant-garde in Weimar was not an opposition. It was the court's own programme, and it collided with the court that funded it.
Nine November 1918
He signed the abdication drawn up that afternoon by a newspaper editor and was the first of the Thuringian monarchs to go. The family left for Silesia, and he died at Heinrichau on 24 April 1923, aged 46 — five years after the throne went, and ten before the republic that had replaced it went too.
Notable Works & Achievements
Reign 1901–1918
Engagement of Henry van de Velde (1902)
Appointment of Harry Graf Kessler to the Grand Ducal Museum (1905)
Historical Context
His reign, 1901–1918, falls inside the Silver Age, and the van de Velde and Kessler appointments are its last chapter.
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 →His abdication on 9 November 1918 is the act the Republic in Weimar begins from.
Germany's first democracy is named after this town for an almost accidental reason: in 1919 the capital was too dangerous to write a constitution in, and Weimar was quiet.
Read more about this period →Quick Facts
1876
1923
German
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.
He signed the deed around eight in the evening, having been handed it at half past four.