Goethe and Schiller Archive
About This Site
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.
What is actually kept here
The manuscripts went here — Goethe's own handwritten estate among them, which carries UNESCO Memory of the World status[1] — along with the papers of a great many other writers, scholars, composers and artists, and the records of publishers and literary societies.[1] That is the unglamorous half of a literary city: not the desk somebody wrote at, but the sheets they wrote on, catalogued and climate-controlled by people whose names no visitor learns.
A working archive, not a museum, 1896
The heart of the building is its reading rooms, and they are for readers: this is somewhere scholarship happens rather than somewhere exhibits are shown.[1] The staircase and foyer impressed Herman Grimm enough in 1896 that he wrote to the Grand Duchess about them,[1] which is a fair measure of what the building was meant to say about the seriousness of its contents. Visitors who want rooms and objects should go to the houses in town; visitors who want to see the machinery of preservation should come up here.
Questions visitors ask
- What is kept in the Goethe and Schiller Archive?
- Germany's oldest literary archive by its own description — roughly five million pages of German-language literature and culture from the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries, including Goethe's own handwritten estate, papers of many other writers, scholars, composers and artists, and the records of publishers and literary societies.[1]
- Can I visit as a tourist, not a researcher?
- Yes. It is a working archive, not a museum — the reading rooms are for scholarship rather than exhibits — but the building itself is worth the visit: a staircase and foyer that impressed Herman Grimm enough in 1896 that he wrote to the Grand Duchess about them.[1]
- Is entry free?
- Yes, free.[1]
- What are the opening hours?
- Monday to Friday 09:00–18:00; Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays 11:00–16:00.[1]
Sources
- Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv — Klassik Stiftung Weimar, retrieved 29 August 2026
Connected Historical Figures
writer • statesman • naturalist
His handwritten literary estate is held here and is inscribed in UNESCO's Memory of the World.
writer • poet • historian
The archive carries his name alongside Goethe's and holds material of his.
Visit Information
Free
Mon–Fri 09:00–18:00; Sat, Sun and public holidays 11:00–16:00
Jenaer Straße 1, 99425 Weimar
50.9831, 11.3338
Events held here
Events
Running through most of the year, in the archive
The exhibition is in the archive, and about what the archive holds — the papers Goethe ordered for posterity.
In Weimar's history
Historical periods
Where the period's paper ended up, and the reason so much of it can still be read.
For roughly sixty years a duchy of a few thousand people held the centre of German literature, because its ruler kept inviting writers to live there and then gave them jobs. That is the whole mechanism, and it ran from Goethe's arrival in 1775 to his death in 1832.