Kasseturm
About This Site
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.
What is left of the town wall, 15th century
The tower went up in the fifteenth century as part of Weimar's fortifications, and it is a remnant rather than a monument — the wall it belonged to is gone, absorbed into later building, and the tower stands on what is now the Goetheplatz with the traffic going round it. Its present shape is not medieval: a local history dates the form a visitor sees to more than 350 years after the original tower.
Why it is called the cash tower, 1779
In 1779 the tower became the property of the ducal chamber and the seat of the regional treasury, and the name stuck: Kasseturm, the tower of the cash office. It is a very Weimar kind of survival — the fortification outlived its purpose and was kept because a small state needed somewhere to put its accounts.
The twentieth century, floor by floor
The uses tell the century plainly enough. Offices, including a surveying office and a tax authority. The lowest level a fruit and vegetable store from 1936, then an air-raid shelter from 1941 to 1945. One upper floor a depot for second-hand furniture. A building nobody thought worth a plaque was quietly doing whatever the decade required of it.
A student club since 1962
In May 1961 the university leadership decided to turn the tower into a student club. Work began that October, took fifteen months, and was done largely by students themselves, in voluntary labour and with their own money. The club opened on 18 December 1962 and has been running ever since; after 1989 other groups in the town began using the rooms as well.
Questions visitors ask
- What is the Kasseturm?
- A round medieval tower on the Goetheplatz, the last significant remnant of Weimar's town wall. It has been run as a student club since 1962.
- How old is it?
- The original tower went up in the fifteenth century as part of the town's fortifications; its present form dates from more than 350 years later, following rebuilding.
- Why is it called the Kasseturm?
- In 1779 it became the property of the ducal chamber and the seat of the regional treasury (Landeskasse) — the name, meaning "cash tower", comes from that use.
- Can I visit?
- Admission and opening times follow the student club's programme of events rather than fixed museum hours.
Visit Information
Admission depends on the event; the club publishes its own programme and prices.
Opening times follow the club's programme rather than museum hours.
Goetheplatz, Weimar
On stage
On stage
In Weimar's history
Historical periods
The tower belongs to the fifteenth-century fortifications — nearly the only part of the medieval defences still standing.
For six centuries Weimar is a small Thuringian town with a castle, a market and a church, overshadowed by its bigger neighbours. What the Middle Ages leave here is not a monument but a ground plan — and, after the town burns in 1424, the two buildings everything later happens around.
Students converted it into a club in 1961/62 with their own labour and money; it opened on 18 December 1962 and outlasted the state it was built under.
For forty-five years Weimar was a provincial town that the state could not afford to neglect, because the classics it kept were the pedigree East Germany wanted for itself.
Stages and venues
Goetheplatz 10, 99423 Weimar