What to See in Weimar

The Altes Rathaus went up in 1567–77 as a merchants' warehouse on a wooden predecessor's site, briefly housed Duke Ernst I before Friedenstein was ready, and has stood as Gotha's town hall since the great fire of 1665 — a gilded head on its façade still drops its jaw on the hour.

The Anger is Erfurt's main shopping street, and in the Middle Ages it was the city's chief trading place for woad, wine, wool and wheat. About 600 metres long and as broad as a square, it runs through the south-eastern old town, 500 metres from the main station along Bahnhofstraße and 300 metres east of the Krämerbrücke — a pedestrian zone where all six of the city's tram lines meet, lined with grand commercial houses of the Gründerzeit in historicist and Jugendstil dress, and with cafés and restaurants where the people of Erfurt themselves sit. A walk from end to end passes the church where Luther preached and Bach's parents married, the Renaissance house where Goethe and Schiller were guests, the baroque weigh house that holds the city's art museum, a medieval tower with a carillon of sixty bells, the neo-Gothic main post office and a monumental fountain to the flower city.

The Evangelisches Augustinerkloster in Erfurt is a rare surviving example of medieval monastic architecture, complete with its church, three enclosed courtyards and its conventual and working buildings. The Augustinian Hermits began building it in 1277, and Martin Luther lived here as a monk from 1505 to 1511. Today it is a Protestant place of worship, conference centre and guest house, carrying the European Heritage Label as a Luther memorial and a site of the history of democracy.

The Neue Bachgesellschaft opened the Bachhaus on 27 May 1907, the first museum ever built for Johann Sebastian Bach — a half-timbered house of 1456 that nineteenth-century tradition named as his birthplace. Over 300 original exhibits fill 600 square metres, and five baroque keyboard instruments are played live, on the hour, in the Instrumentensaal.

The Bachkirche gave Johann Sebastian Bach his first professional post: at eighteen, in the summer of 1703, the town brought him in to inspect its brand-new organ, then kept him on as organist for four years. First documented as the Bonifatiuskirche in 1333, the church has carried Bach's name ever since.

The world's oldest museum collection of Bauhaus workshop work, in a building that is younger than most of its visitors.

Two buildings by Henry van de Velde stand side by side on the Geschwister-Scholl-Straße, and the Bauhaus was founded in one of them.

The Bauhaus-Werkstatt-Museum Dornburg occupies the former stable building where the Bauhaus ran its only ceramics workshop outside Weimar from 1920, and is the last Bauhaus workshop anywhere still standing on its original working site.

A glass-domed painter's studio of 1886 in the university courtyard, which fed the Bauhaus for six years and sells its souvenirs now.

A baroque summer residence on a wooded rise south of the city, built between 1724 and 1748 for Duke Ernst August of Saxe-Weimar and Eisenach. It began as a hunting lodge with a menagerie and turned into something far more elaborate — and the court kept using it as its summer place until 1904.

The Botanischer Garten Jena is Germany's second-oldest botanical garden, growing out of a 1586 physic garden and shaped in the 1790s by Goethe, who commissioned its greenhouses and inspector's house as the Weimar minister responsible for it.

The Buchenwald Memorial stands on the Ettersberg, the wooded hill above Weimar, on the ground of the concentration camp the SS ran here from July 1937 until its liberation on 11 April 1945: 277,800 people from more than fifty countries were held in it and its 141 satellite camps, and 56,000 of them died. The former prisoners' camp, the SS area, the GDR's monument of 1958 and the graves of the Soviet special camp are open every day until dusk; admission is free.

The bath and assembly house the Weimar court built for its spa in the Ilm valley, finished on 24 June 1825 under the grand-ducal chief architect Coudray. It has been closed since October 2025 for renovation.

Two identical gabled houses stand on the east side of the market square, and the left one is where Lucas Cranach the Elder died. The city calls it a document of the early Renaissance; it is also not a museum, and the only room a visitor can enter is the theatre under its vaults.

The building on the Theaterplatz is younger than the company inside it: Max Littmann's house was inaugurated in January 1908, while the ensemble goes back to the court theatre Goethe was given to run in 1791. In February 1919 the constituent assembly sat in this hall, which is why the republic it was elected to give a constitution is called Weimar.

The Divi-Blasii-Kirche, a three-aisled, cross-shaped Gothic hall church begun by the Teutonic Order around 1276, was where a young Johann Sebastian Bach served as organist for one year, 1707 to 1708 — and where the organ he designed still stands, rebuilt to his own specification.

The Dom St. Marien is the most important and oldest church in Erfurt: 81.26 metres high, it holds in the Gloriosa the largest freely swinging medieval bell in the world. A flight of 70 steps leads up from the Domplatz to the hill it shares with St. Severus; with its high Gothic choir, Romanesque towers and late Gothic hall it succeeds the church Rome called for in 724 and was the principal church of the bishopric Boniface founded in 742. A collegiate church through the Middle Ages, it has been the cathedral of the re-founded diocese of Erfurt since 1994.

The Domplatz is Erfurt's cathedral square and its great open room: more than 14,000 square metres of paving, the largest square in the city. On its western side a flight of 70 steps climbs to the Domberg, where the cathedral of St. Mary and the church of St. Severus stand side by side; around the rest of it run half-timbered burghers' houses, the Renaissance inn Zur Hohen Lilie and a neo-Gothic court building, with the Erthal obelisk and the Minerva fountain out on the stones. It is still the city's main market six mornings a week, the ground of Thuringia's largest Christmas market and, every summer, the setting of open-air opera and musicals on the cathedral steps. With its coach parking and the underground garage below the Petersberg, it is where most visitors meet Erfurt first.

The Dornburger Schlösser are three castles on one limestone bluff over the Saale — a medieval keep, a Renaissance residence and a Rococo pleasure palace — linked by terraced garden paths with views into the valley below.

Two coffins stand side by side in the vault under this hill, and one of them is not what it says. Built between 1823 and 1828 as the burial place of the house of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, the Fürstengruft ended up as something else entirely: the room where a duchy put Goethe and Schiller among its own dead rather than beneath them.

The Duchess Anna Amalia Library holds about a million volumes on European literary and cultural history, with its focus on the years 1750 to 1850. Its collection goes back to 1547, the ducal library was founded in 1691, the Rococo Hall opened in 1766 and Goethe oversaw the house for thirty-five years; the fire of 2 September 2004 destroyed 50,000 volumes, and the restored hall reopened on 24 October 2007.

The Ekhof-Theater, fitted into the former ballroom of Schloss Friedenstein's west tower between 1681 and 1683, still runs one of the oldest baroque stage machineries anywhere to survive in working order — hand-operated then and hand-operated now.

A hunting lodge and summer seat on the north side of the Ettersberg, begun in the early eighteenth century by Duke Wilhelm Ernst and finished by his nephew Ernst August. The ducal family used it as exactly that — somewhere to hunt and spend the summer — until they abdicated in 1918.

A village church a Bauhaus master drew and painted over and over, until the village started calling it by his name.

The Fischmarkt is the heart of Erfurt's old town, a square between the Domplatz and the Anger where so many markets were held in the Middle Ages that it became the centre of the city's social life. The neo-Gothic Rathaus presides over it, and inside, its murals tell legends, scenes from Luther's life and the history of Erfurt. Around the square stand Renaissance patrician houses that speak of the city's wealth in the early modern age — the Haus zum Roten Ochsen of 1562, home to the Kunsthalle Erfurt, and the Haus zum Breiten Herd of 1584 — and facing the town hall an armoured warrior, the Römer, stands on a column first raised in 1591. It is the place to begin a day in Erfurt: a painted town hall open to visitors, Renaissance façades, contemporary art, and the Krämerbrücke just beyond the Benediktsplatz to the east.

The Friedrich-Ludwig-Jahn-Museum tells the life of the man who opened Germany's first gymnastics ground in Berlin in 1811 and gave the movement its name, in the house he built for himself in Freyburg and in whose grounds he is buried.

An art gallery on the first floor of Schillerstraße 18, run by the siblings Susanne and Klaus Hebecker — twentieth-century German art, with a particular eye for artists defamed as degenerate under National Socialism and for expressive realism.

A National Socialist administrative quarter in the middle of Weimar, built partly by concentration camp prisoners, never finished as planned, and in ordinary daily use ever since.

A museum about bells — the ones cast in this town and sent around the world — and about the wool and textile trade that shared the same streets. It is currently housed as a "Museum auf Zeit", a museum on borrowed time, in temporary premises on the Auenstraße.

Germany's oldest literary archive, by its own description, standing above the Ilm on the edge of town: roughly five million pages of German-language literature and culture from the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. If you want to understand how any of Weimar survived, the answer is that somebody built a solid building on a hill and put the paper in it.

The Goethe-Laboratorium is the University of Jena's permanent exhibition on Goethe as a natural scientist, set in the inspector's house of the Botanical Garden, where Goethe spent more than 350 days between 1817 and 1830. He had the house rebuilt for Grand Duke Carl August's fiftieth jubilee in 1825 to plans by the architect Clemens Wenzeslaus Coudray: a three-winged group of yellow-plastered half-timbered buildings around a small, almost square courtyard, which Goethe inspected on its completion in 1827. Memorial rooms opened here in 1921, and since 2024 the exhibition Bewegliche Ordnung presents Goethe's geology, anatomy and botany, with glimpses of his meteorology, palaeontology and theory of colour.

Goethe and Schiller have stood on the Theaterplatz since 1857, made by Ernst Rietschel. The city's own description is the best thing anyone has written about them: almost at the same eye level, and yet without eye contact.

The duke gave Goethe this house in the park in 1776, and it was where he lived for his first six Weimar years, until he moved into town in 1782. It is a small old building in a meadow — which is exactly what he liked about it.

Goethe moved into the house on the Frauenplan as a tenant in 1782 and lived and worked there for almost fifty years, until his death in it on 22 March 1832. Eighteen of its rooms are open with his own furniture and collections, the study and private library kept as he left them; the Goethe-Nationalmuseum, founded in 1885, runs the house together with the exhibition next door.

The Goethehäuschen is the small shelter on the summit of the Kickelhahn, Ilmenau's 861-metre home mountain, where on 6 September 1780 Goethe wrote the eight lines that became "Wandrers Nachtlied II" — "Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh." The building burned down in 1870 and was rebuilt to the original design four years later; it stands open to anyone who climbs the mountain, the verses now shown in sixteen languages.

The GoetheStadtMuseum occupies the Amtshaus on Ilmenau's market square, in the rooms Goethe used as his official residence across the 26 visits he made here between 1776 and 1831. Its permanent exhibition covers the administrator who reopened the town's mines and reformed its taxes — not the poet.

The only building the Bauhaus ever realised in Weimar, put up in four months for a single exhibition and furnished by every workshop in the school.

The central place of remembrance for Germany's first democracy, standing directly opposite the theatre in which that democracy was founded.

Henry van de Velde spent a decade teaching Weimar how to make modern things; out on the Belvederer Allee he tried the argument on himself and his own family.

The Heidecksburg is the Baroque palace the Princes of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt rebuilt on the hill above the town after a fire took the earlier Renaissance castle in 1735 — their residence until the line ended in 1918, and today home to the Thuringian State Museum's Rococo festival hall, painting collection and armoury.

The Stadtkirche St. Peter und Paul on the Herderplatz, which Weimar calls the Herderkirche, is a late Gothic hall church of 1498–1500. Luther preached here between 1518 and 1540; the Cranach altarpiece of 1555, which the parish counts among the main works of sixteenth-century art in Saxony and Thuringia, stands behind the altar; and Johann Gottfried Herder, its pastor from 1776 to 1803, is buried in the nave. Wrecked in 1945 and re-consecrated in 1953, the church is part of the World Heritage ensemble Classical Weimar.

Weimar's Catholic parish church of 1891 wears two styles at once: Gothic within, Italian Renaissance without — and its dome and bell tower were modelled on the cathedral of Florence.

Consecrated in 1818 as the successor to the Jakobsfriedhof, and laid out on a strict frame of intersecting avenues that divide it into four burial quarters. UNESCO added it, with the ducal vault, to the Classical Weimar ensemble in 1998.

A bookshop trading since 1710 — founded by Heinrich Siegmund Hoffmann, the privileged court bookseller, and once the shop where Goethe, Schiller, Herder and Duchess Anna Amalia bought their books.

Charlotte von Stein lived here for fifty years, until her death in 1827 — the city calls her Goethe's friend and close confidante, which is the whole of what the plaque-writers have ever agreed on. It is a private building and not a museum.

The Imaginata in Jena calls itself an experimentarium for the senses: a place of learning, training lab, monument, science centre, concert hall and gallery in one, housed since 1999 in the former Jena-Nord electricity substation. On 1,700 square metres indoors and more than 3,000 outdoors, over 100 interactive stations from mathematics, physics, technology and biology wait to be tried out, meant not only to pass on facts but above all to set the imagination working. It began in 1995 as a summer week of experiments around the university's main building and is one of the first centres of its kind in Germany.

A plain Baroque box on a low hill north of the centre, and one of the densest few hundred square metres in Weimar: Goethe was married in the sacristy, and Cranach the Elder lies in the churchyard outside.

The JenTower is a 160-metre round tower built for the Zeiss combine in 1972, its outline drawn as a telescope, still the tallest office building in the former East Germany and open to the public on its viewing platform.

This is where Schiller was actually buried, and almost nobody comes. It is a small vault on the Jakobskirchhof that opens two days a year, and it has a better claim on the fact of his burial than the famous mausoleum that gets the visitors.

A round tower on the Goetheplatz, left over from the town wall, that has spent the last sixty years as a student club. Weimar keeps almost nothing of its fortifications; this is the piece that survived by being useful in every century since.

The country seat of the von Stein family, some thirty-five kilometres south of Weimar, and the house Goethe kept riding out to. He was a regular guest between 1775 and 1788 — the years of his closest attachment to Charlotte von Stein — and the visit is still the reason to come.

The Krämerbrücke is the oldest secular building in Erfurt and one of its best-known landmarks: a pedestrian bridge over the Breitstrom, closed in on both sides by half-timbered houses, joining the Benediktsplatz to the Wenigemarkt. First mentioned in 1117 and rebuilt in stone in 1325, it is the only bridge north of the Alps built up with houses and lived in, once with 62 of them and today with 32. Potters, woodcarvers and glassblowers still show and sell their work here, beside speciality shops and galleries.

A former brick factory on the Goetheplatz that became Weimar's museum of modern art in 1903, and now carries the name of Harry Graf Kessler, the director who showed the French Impressionists here and was forced out in 1906.

The Liebfrauenkirche stands where historians place Arnstadt's first church, on ground named in a donation charter of 704. Building began around 1200 and ran, in two long phases, into the fourteenth century, leaving one of central Germany's most important Romanesque-to-Gothic church buildings, alongside Naumburg Cathedral.

A gardener's house at the edge of the park, where Franz Liszt spent the summers of his last years teaching. It is the modest, late chapter of his Weimar — and the one that survives to be walked into.

The Lutherhaus is a half-timbered house of 1356, one of the oldest half-timbered houses in Thuringia, where the teenage Martin Luther boarded with the Cotta and Schalbe families while he attended the Latin school. It has been a museum since 1956, rebuilt inside between 2013 and 2015 around a single exhibition: Luther and the Bible.

The Lutherhaus is the half-timbered house of around 1520 where Martin Luther stayed in February 1537, in Schmalkalden for the Schmalkaldic League's most significant assembly, and where he wrote the Schmalkaldic Articles — a statement of Lutheran doctrine later folded into the evangelical church's Book of Concord.

The Marienkirche, a five-aisled Gothic hall church begun in 1317 and topped by the tallest church tower in Thuringia outside Erfurt, was where Thomas Müntzer preached and briefly governed the city in 1525; deconsecrated in 1975, it now holds the Museum St. Marien and the city's memorial to him.

The market square is where Weimar does its ordinary business, and always has: a working market place with a Renaissance front on one side, a Neo-Gothic town hall on the other, and the two houses in which Cranach and Bach lived standing a few doors apart.

Jena's market square is a closed square of 5,000 square metres at the heart of the old town, and its outline has never changed. On its south-west side stands one of the oldest surviving town halls in Germany, first recorded in the 1360s, with a baroque half-timbered tower and steep hipped roofs; on the hour its fifteenth-century clock sets the Schnapphans snapping at a golden ball, one of the Seven Wonders of Jena. In the middle stands the Hanfried, the monument to Johann Friedrich I, who founded the Hohe Schule from which Jena's university grew, and who spent his last years in Weimar. On the north side the late-Gothic Göhre holds the Stadtmuseum, with the city's story from the first mention to the Zeiss era, and four days a week the weekly market fills the square with regional food.

A bolt of concrete driven up out of the ground, over the graves of workers killed in their own town.

The house that answers the question this town usually skips: what was happening in Weimar between Goethe and the Bauhaus. The answer is on the walls, and most of the painters on them are names you will not know.

A museum about forced labour under National Socialism, opened in May 2024 inside the Gauforum — the party complex whose own construction used concentration camp prisoners.

The Naumburg Cathedral of Sts Peter and Paul has carried UNESCO World Heritage status since 2018, for architecture, stained glass and above all the west-choir founder statues the anonymous Naumburg Master carved around 1250 — Uta of Naumburg among them, long called Germany's "most beautiful woman of the Middle Ages".

The lower of Kranichfeld's two castles, first documented in 1147 as a small medieval keep and now best known for the open-air stage in its grounds. The town is candid about what a visitor will find: an interesting and popular destination, but one that is not staffed continuously.

Friedrich Nietzsche was brought to this villa in 1897, silent and past writing, and died in it in 1900. What a visit is about came afterwards: the rooms Henry van de Velde made for the archive in 1902, among the finest early-modern interiors anywhere, and the house's own history, including its part in the Nietzsche cult of the National Socialists.

The Nietzsche-Haus is the flat on the Weingarten that Nietzsche's mother took in the summer of 1858, where he grew up and went to school, and where he returned, ill, after his 1889 collapse.

A castle of around nine hundred years above the upper Ilm valley: hall, chapel and keep from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a Renaissance rebuilding from 1530, a fire in 1934 that took it down to the foundation walls — and, under the Nazi regime, a Buchenwald satellite camp on the site, whose prisoners were made to raise part of the ruin again.

The Old Synagogue in Erfurt has parts reaching back to the 11th century, and it is the oldest synagogue in Central Europe still standing up to its roof. Since 2009 it has been a museum of the city's medieval Jewish community, which held a prominent place in Europe in its day: the building tells its own long story, the Erfurt Treasure, most likely buried at the time of the pogrom of 1349, lies in the cellar, and gravestones from the lost medieval cemetery stand in the courtyard. Together with the mikveh by the river Gera and the Stone House on Benediktsplatz, the synagogue has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 17 September 2023, as the Jewish-Medieval Heritage of Erfurt: a rare chance to see, in one old town, how a Jewish community lived, prayed and did business beside its Christian neighbours in the Middle Ages.

The Park an der Ilm is a landscape garden of 48 hectares along the river at the edge of Weimar's old town, laid out from 1776 under Goethe's guiding hand and from 1778 on the western slope by Duke Carl August, with Goethe's garden house, the Roman House, the Tempelherrenhaus and the Liszt-Haus standing in it. Part of the UNESCO World Heritage ensemble Classical Weimar since 1998, it is open all year and free.

Twelve metres under the Park an der Ilm there is a tunnel system, dug in the 1790s to store beer for a brewery that was never built. It has been a quarry, a court promenade and an air-raid shelter since, and it is now open as a walk through 200,000 years of earth and human history.

A riding house in the ducal park where, for two years, the Bauhaus taught the course every one of its students had to pass.

A temple on a slope above the Ilm meadows, built for a duke who wanted somewhere to be left alone. The foundation's description of what it was for is unusually direct: this was Carl August's favourite residence and his retreat — a private house disguised as a public monument, standing in a park anyone could walk through.

The Rotkäppchen Sektkellerei began as a wine business three friends opened here in 1856 and is today, by market share, Germany's best-selling sparkling wine — still made in Freyburg, with tours through the historic cellars.

The plain concrete-and-glass building beside Schiller's house is, in the foundation's own words, the only new-built literature museum the GDR produced — and it came late, between 1984 and 1988, four years before the state that commissioned it ceased to exist.

Schiller bought this house on the Esplanade, today's Schillerstraße, in 1802 and had three years left in it: he wrote Die Braut von Messina and Wilhelm Tell here and died in his study under the roof on 9 May 1805. His widow Charlotte lived on in the house until 1826; in 1847 the town of Weimar bought it and opened it, the same year, as the first memorial to a poet in Germany.

The Schillerhaus is the former home of the von Lengefeld family, where Friedrich Schiller spent the summer of 1788 courting Charlotte von Lengefeld and, on 7 September that year, met Johann Wolfgang von Goethe for the first time. The restored rooms now hold a museum built entirely around that Rudolstadt summer.

Schillers Gartenhaus is the house on the Leutra that Friedrich Schiller bought as a summer retreat in 1797 and where he wrote parts of Wallenstein and Maria Stuart, now a museum of the Friedrich Schiller University.

A closed, irregular oval of buildings on a plateau above the town, standing on ground fortified since a Frankish round fort of the seventh century. The town's own description explains its plainness disarmingly: it was never a princely residence, so nobody ever gave it splendid architecture — which is why the defensive plan survives at all.

Schloss Elisabethenburg is the Baroque palace Duke Bernhard I built between 1682 and 1692 as the residence of Saxony-Meiningen, and today it holds 52 rooms across 3,400 square metres of collections, from Rococo and Historicist period interiors to centuries of paintings and the region's music and theatre history.

Schloss Friedenstein is one of Germany's most significant seventeenth-century palace complexes, raised between 1643 and 1654 by Duke Ernst I over the ruins of the old Grimmenstein castle — still in the middle of the Thirty Years' War — and given a name that stated its purpose: the stone of peace.

Schloss Neuenburg is the castle Ludwig der Springer built around 1090 to secure the eastern edge of his lands, the sister castle of his Wartburg in the west, standing high over Freyburg with a Romanesque double chapel on the Straße der Romanik.

Schloss Wilhelmsburg is the Renaissance palace Landgrave Wilhelm IV of Hesse-Kassel built from 1585 and consecrated in 1590, its original room layout, wall paintings and stucco still intact. It now holds the permanent exhibition on Martin Luther's era and the Schmalkaldic League, the alliance whose eight meetings in this town gave it its name.

The Schlossmuseum fills the Neues Palais, a baroque city palace Prince Günther I of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen built between 1729 and 1734, with the former princely collections of the House of Schwarzburg. Its best-known holding is Mon plaisir, a miniature baroque residence in eighty-two scenes that Princess Auguste Dorothea spent thirty-five years of widowhood building — currently under restoration, with an interim exhibition showing selected pieces on a rotating theme.

The Severikirche stands on the Domberg directly beside Erfurt Cathedral, and together the two churches form the landmark of the city; it is one of the few five-aisled Gothic hall churches in Germany. Built from the 1270s on a Romanesque ground plan, it counts among the first hall churches of central Germany, and the bones of its patron, Severus of Ravenna, rest in a sarcophagus of great artistic importance. Inside also stand a stone Madonna of 1345 and a baptismal font of 1467, fifteen metres high.

An Englishman standing in a German park, put there in 1904 by the Berlin sculptor Otto Lessing. The city calls him the third German classic, and notes that this is the only monument to Shakespeare in Germany.

A cemetery of honour for the Red Army, laid out in June 1945, where 640 Soviet service personnel were buried in the first ten months of the peace.

St. Lorenz, the Lorenzkirche, is the Catholic parish church on the Anger, Erfurt's central square, and one of the city's oldest parish churches, the first after the cathedral to hold parish rights of its own: its earliest surviving charter dates from 1140, its square tower from around 1300, and its south front, with tall Gothic windows raised through the eaves under gables of their own, from the rebuilding after the fire of 1413. It is also the place where the peace prayer has been held every Thursday since 1978, a prayer that gained a special meaning in the Peaceful Revolution of 1989. Inside wait a Gothic winged altar, medieval figures of saints and a late Gothic font, and on the wall towards Schlösserstraße a plaque, unveiled in 2019, recalls that the first ecumenical peace prayers of the GDR began in this church.

The Staatstheater Meiningen is where the Meininger troupe, sent touring across Europe by Duke Georg II from the 1870s, rehearsed historically accurate productions as complete works of art and pioneered a naturalistic style built on the actor's full immersion in a role — credited by the theatre's own history as a foundation of the Hollywood studio system. Its Grand Theatre seats 725 and was fully restored in 2011 to its appearance in Georg's own time.

The green and white Renaissance house on the east side of the market square, which the city calls a splendid building in the early Renaissance style. It has been a burgher's house, a council house, a market hall, a ballroom and a ruin, and it holds the tourist information today.

The Stadtkirche St. Michael is Jena's main church, a late Gothic hall church begun in 1380 and completed in the sixteenth century, one of the largest of its kind in Thuringia, with a long show front and a tower visible far along the Saale valley. Inside stand the stone pulpit from which Martin Luther preached in 1524 and 1529, and Luther's bronze grave plate, cast for his tomb in Wittenberg and given to the University of Jena in 1571 by a Weimar duke. Two of the Seven Wonders of Jena belong to the church: the Angelus jenensis, a carved archangel of around 1240, and the vaulted passage that runs beneath the altar, once the only way to the convent behind the church.

Mühlhausen's medieval town wall once ran 2.8 kilometres around the old town in travertine quarried from the ground it stood on; 2.2 kilometres survive, and a 370-metre stretch from the Inner Frauentor is open to walk, past a defensive-history exhibition and up the Rabenturm's viewing platform.

The Stadtmuseum Weimar is the town's own museum, about the town: how it earned its living, what it made, and how it came to give its name to a republic. It shows all this in the Bertuchhaus, the house of the publisher Friedrich Justin Bertuch, the biggest employer in the Weimar of Goethe's day, fifty metres from the Goetheplatz.

The Stadtschloss on the Burgplatz was the residence of the dukes of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach: a four-wing palace whose classical face dates from the rebuilding after the fire of 1774, carried out from 1789 under Goethe's direction on the walls of the baroque Wilhelmsburg, with the 53-metre tower as its oldest part. Almost the whole palace has been a museum since 1923, with the Cranach collection and the Dichterzimmer inside; closed for a complete restoration since July 2018, it reopens on 2 October 2026.

A court folly in the park that became a Bauhaus master's studio and then a bombed shell — the three centuries of Weimar in one small building.

The house where Liszt actually lived while he was running Weimar's musical life — not the small summer place the tour buses stop at, but the one where the circle met.

Weimar's streets are one continuous architecture lesson: a pilgrim church first consecrated in 1168, Renaissance gables, the court's baroque and classicism, Gründerzeit quarters, van de Velde's Jugendstil, the Bauhaus — and, at the story's other end, the museum cube opened in 2019. And all of it lies within one walk.

The republic's own memorial tablet, at the theatre where its constitution was passed, designed by the director of the Bauhaus.

More than forty historic buildings, most of them taken down elsewhere in Thuringia and rebuilt here, furnished as they were lived in. It calls itself Thuringia's largest open-air museum and invites you to travel through five hundred years — which, unusually for a slogan, is roughly what the buildings cover.

Anna Amalia took this small house on the Ilm as her summer residence from 1781, and used it for exactly what a court is bad at: sociable, artistic, musical time away from court ceremony. Goethe, Herder, Wieland and Schiller were among the guests. Entry is free.

A brine spa in the Ilm valley whose one genuinely original idea is acoustic: under the Liquid Sound concept the music plays not only above the water but beneath it, so that you hear it through your own skull while floating in salt water.

The main building of the Friedrich Schiller University on Fürstengraben was built between 1905 and 1908 to plans by the architect Theodor Fischer on the site of Jena's former palace, and it counts among the most important German university buildings of the early twentieth century. Raised for the university's 350th anniversary in 1908, it gathers its wings around two courtyards, takes up the scale of the old town and carries sculpture by artists from Stuttgart and Weimar. Ferdinand Hodler's mural of German students setting out for the War of Liberation of 1813 hangs in its Aula, and in its front garden stands the oldest Burschenschaft monument in Germany, made by the Weimar sculptor Adolf Donndorf in 1883.

The Wartburg has stood on its hill above Eisenach for close to a thousand years, and it has been the only castle in Germany on the UNESCO World Heritage list since 1999. Martin Luther translated the New Testament into German inside it; centuries of poets, painters and one composer have made it a setting of their own.

A privately run experience museum on the Schillerstraße that stages five thousand years of the town's history as a walk through built sets with lifelike figures, light and sound. Its own list of scenes runs from prehistory and the Thuringian kingdom through the Middle Ages to Weimar Classicism, the duchess's round table, Napoleon and Goethe's Faust. The figures, the city adds, come from the workshops of Madame Tussauds.

About ten kilometres north-east of Weimar, the estate where Christoph Martin Wieland lived and wrote from 1797 to 1803, calling himself a poetic country squire and the place his Osmantium. He is buried in its park, which makes this the only one of Weimar's great writers' houses that is also the grave.

A bronze of the first of them, on the square that carries his name. Anna Amalia called Christoph Martin Wieland to Weimar in 1772 as tutor to the princes, and the monument by Hanns Gasser was unveiled during the celebrations of Carl August's hundredth birthday.

A baroque town palace in the middle of Weimar, built in 1767–69 and bought by Anna Amalia from her own minister after the castle burned in 1774. She lived here until her death in 1807.

The Zeiss-Planetarium Jena opened on 18 July 1926 above the Zeiss works, and is the world's oldest planetarium still projecting the night sky it was built to show.

The Zitadelle Petersberg rises above Erfurt's old town, one of the largest baroque town fortresses of central Europe and the only one largely preserved; laid out as a star, it was held to be the most modern fortress of its day and impregnable. The Elector of Mainz had it built from 1665 as a stronghold against the city; Prussia and France later held it, and today its core of about twelve hectares, with eight bastions and some two kilometres of walls, houses state offices, homes, the Federal Labour Court and places to visit.