Shakespeare Monument
About This Site
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.
The third German classic
The phrase is the city's own and it is not a joke.[1] Shakespeare was absorbed into German literature so thoroughly during exactly the decades this town is famous for that a nineteenth-century reader could place him beside Goethe and Schiller without blinking. Putting him in the park, among the buildings of Weimar Classicism rather than in front of a theatre, is a claim about ancestry: not a foreign author admired, but a predecessor adopted.
The only one in the country
According to the city, this is the sole Shakespeare monument in Germany[1] — which makes its location worth thinking about. Of all the places a country might have put its one statue of him, it chose a landscape garden in a Thuringian town of sixty thousand, laid out by a duke and a privy councillor: as plain a claim as this town ever made about where it thought German literature came from.
Questions visitors ask
- Why is there a Shakespeare monument in a German park?
- The city calls him "the third German classic":[1] Shakespeare was absorbed into German literature so thoroughly during the decades this town is famous for that a nineteenth-century reader could place him beside Goethe and Schiller. Putting him in the park, among the buildings of Weimar Classicism, is a claim about ancestry — a predecessor adopted, not a foreign author admired.
- When was it put up, and by whom?
- In 1904, by the Berlin sculptor Otto Lessing.[1]
- Is it really the only Shakespeare monument in Germany?
- According to the city, yes — the sole one in the country.[1]
- Is there an admission fee?
- No — it's free, in the park, accessible all year.
Sources
- Bauten, Denkmale, Brunnen – Denkmale — Stadt Weimar, retrieved 29 August 2026
Visit Information
Free
In the park, accessible all year
Park an der Ilm, 99423 Weimar
In Weimar's history
Historical periods
The period claiming an English predecessor as its own — the city calls him the third German classic.
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.