Weimar's Historical Journey
From medieval origins to modern times, explore eight pivotal periods that shaped Weimar into the cultural capital we know today. Each era brought remarkable figures and transformative events that continue to influence the world.
Historical Timeline
Jump to any period in Weimar's history
The Baroque Court
The century and a half between two castle fires is the Weimar nobody puts on a poster, and it is the one that made the town musical. It opens with a burnt-out castle in 1618 and closes with another one in 1774 — and in between, in a chapel that no longer exists, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote most of his organ music.
Notable Figures
Ernst August I, Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach
duke • builder • huntsman
The second half of the Baroque court: hunting, building, and a duchy living beyond its means.
Wilhelm Ernst, Duke of Saxe-Weimar
duke • patron
Forty-five years of the Baroque residence: the church rebuilt, the orphanage, the seminary, and Bach in the castle chapel.
Wilhelm IV, Duke of Saxe-Weimar
duke • builder • president of the Fruitbearing Society
He is the period's builder: the residence rebuilt after the fire of 1618, and the Fruitbearing Society in his hands from 1651.
Johann Sebastian Bach
composer • musician • organist
Court organist here from 1708, Konzertmeister from 1714, imprisoned in the castle's Bastille and released on 2 December 1717.
Bauhaus in Weimar (1919–1925)
The Bauhaus was founded in Weimar in 1919 and voted out by 1925 — time enough to change what a design school is, and not enough for the town that made it to keep it.
Notable Figures
Adolf Meyer
architect • master of architecture at the Bauhaus • teacher
At the school from its founding year to the day the Weimar chapter closed.
Alma Siedhoff-Buscher
designer • cabinetmaker • toy designer
At the school from 1922 to 1927, in the years when the workshops had to show what they could make.
Franz Ehrlich
designer • typographer • architect • prisoner in Buchenwald
He studied at the Bauhaus in Dessau from 1927 to 1930, and it is Bauhaus typography that ended up on the Buchenwald gate.
Georg Muche
painter • Bauhaus master • head of the weaving workshop
Youngest master of the Weimar school, from 1920 to the move to Dessau.
Gerhard Marcks
sculptor • Bauhaus master • head of the ceramic workshop
One of the first masters of 1919 and form master of the ceramic workshop until 1924.
Gunta Stölzl
weaver • Bauhaus student, then head of the weaving workshop
One of the school's first students in 1919, and from 1926 the head of the workshop she had learned her trade in.
Henry van de Velde
architect • designer • founder of the Weimar arts and crafts school
The buildings, the school and the recommendation the Bauhaus inherited in 1919.
Herbert Bayer
typographer • graphic designer • photographer • architect
A student of the Weimar years who became a Jungmeister at Dessau in 1925.
Johannes Itten
painter • art teacher • Bauhaus master
One of the first masters, from October 1919, and the author of the course every student began with.
Joost Schmidt
sculptor • typographer • Bauhaus master
A student of the whole Weimar period, in the sculpture workshop from 1919 to 1924/25.
Josef Albers
painter • designer • teacher
A Weimar student of 1920 who joined the teaching body in 1923 — the school teaching its own.
Karl Peter Röhl
painter • graphic artist • Bauhaus student
A student of the school's first years and the author of its first emblem.
Karla Grosch
dancer • gymnastics and sports teacher at the Bauhaus
Born in Weimar in 1904; taught sport and gymnastics at the school from 1928, after it had moved to Dessau.
László Moholy-Nagy
artist • photographer • Bauhaus master
Master from March 1923, and the man who turned the school's teaching towards the machine.
Lothar Schreyer
playwright • painter • head of the Bauhaus stage workshop
Master and head of the stage workshop in the Weimar years, 1921–1923.
Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack
painter • printmaker • art teacher
At the school from October 1919 to March 1925 — the full span of the Weimar years.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
architect • furniture designer • last director of the Bauhaus
Called to the school in 1930 as its last director, five years after it left Weimar; his furniture is in the collection here.
Lyonel Feininger
painter • printmaker • Bauhaus master
The first master called, in May 1919; his woodcut is on the manifesto that founded the school.
Marcel Breuer
furniture designer • architect • Bauhaus student, then master
Arrived in 1920 as a student and left in 1928 as the head of the furniture workshop.
Marianne Brandt
designer • metalworker • photographer
At the school from 1923 — first as a student in Weimar, later as head of its metal workshop in Dessau.
Oskar Schlemmer
painter • sculptor • choreographer • Bauhaus master
One of the first masters of the Weimar school, from January 1921.
Otto Dorfner
bookbinder • binding artist • teacher at the Staatliches Bauhaus
Workshop master of the school's bookbindery in its first Weimar phase.[^ksw-blog-dorfner]
Paul Klee
painter • Bauhaus master • teacher
A master of the Weimar school from 1921 to 1925, whose form theory became part of the preliminary course.
Theo van Doesburg
painter • architect • De Stijl propagandist
The school's own history calls him a catalyst of its development, from outside it.
Walter Gropius
architect • founder and director of the Bauhaus • teacher
He founded the school in Weimar in April 1919 and directed it through the whole Weimar period, until the move to Dessau in 1925.
Wassily Kandinsky
painter • Bauhaus master • teacher
A master from June 1922 to the school's last day in 1933, and its deputy director from 1923.
Wilhelm Wagenfeld
designer • silversmith • industrial designer
A student of the Weimar years, and the designer of the lamp the period is recognised by.
Weimar under GDR Rule
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.
Notable Figures
Bruno Apitz
writer • communist • prisoner
SED member from 1946, Academy member from 1961, and the GDR's most widely read author on Buchenwald.
Erich Kranz
pastor
His sermons of 4 and 5 October 1989 fall in the last weeks in which the GDR was still governing Weimar.
Fritz Cremer
sculptor
A GDR sculptor whose most famous work was revised three times under political criticism before it was accepted.
Walter Bartel
communist • resistance organiser • historian
Professor of contemporary history in the GDR, and a leading figure of the International Buchenwald Committee.
Medieval Origins of Weimar
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.
Reformation and the Ernestine Residence
For a hundred years Weimar is a Reformation town before it is anything else — and it becomes a capital by accident, because a prince who had lost everything else still had this place. The century leaves the town its market-square gables, an altarpiece the stewards rank among the main works of Reformation painting, and a court that never moved away again.
Notable Figures
Johann Friedrich I
duke • elector
His choice of Weimar in 1552 turned a small town into the residence of the Ernestine line, and the century takes its shape from that.
Lucas Cranach the Younger
painter • printmaker
Painter of the Reformation in his father's succession; the Weimar altarpiece of 1555 is the movement's picture of itself.
Martin Luther
reformer • theologian • preacher
The movement he set going with the theses of 1517, in the town whose princes protected it.
Lucas Cranach the Elder
painter • printmaker
He came to Weimar in 1552 with the deposed elector and spent his last year on the market square, dying here in October 1553.
Reunification and Modern Weimar
Since 1990 Weimar has been a small city with an outsized inheritance, working out what to do with it — and occasionally being handed a role in European politics on the strength of its name.
The Silver Age
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.
Notable Figures
Carl Alexander, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach
grand duke • patron
The period's presiding figure: its patron, its institution-builder, and the man the Klassik Stiftung names it around.
Carl Friedrich
hereditary prince • grand duke
Grand duke from 1828 to 1853: the reign that brought Liszt to Weimar and the railway to the town.
Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein
princess • writer
The Altenburg household is where the period's musical circle actually met, through Liszt's years as Hofkapellmeister.
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche
archivist • editor • publisher
Her arrival, the archive's move to Weimar and her brother's last years all fall in the decades between Goethe's death and the end of the monarchy.
Franz Liszt
composer • pianist • conductor
The central figure of the decades after Goethe: called to the court by Maria Pawlowna, Hofkapellmeister from 1848, and brought back by Carl Alexander in 1869.
Friedrich Nietzsche
philosopher • philologist
His three Weimar years, 1897 to 1900, are the closing act of the decades between Goethe's death and the end of the monarchy.
Friedrich Preller the Elder
painter • engraver
The painter who carried Weimar's classicism through the decades after Goethe — the visual counterpart to what Liszt was doing in music.
Harry Graf Kessler
art patron • museum director • publisher • diplomat
His Weimar years, 1903 to 1906, are the period's last attempt to make the town modern before the monarchy ended.
Johann Nepomuk Hummel
composer • pianist • Kapellmeister
The concert life the period ran on began with his standing concerts of 1822; his last five years fall inside it.
Joost Schmidt
sculptor • typographer • Bauhaus master
His first Weimar years belong to the ducal art academy of 1910, before the war and before the Bauhaus.
Maria Pawlowna, Grand Duchess of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach
grand duchess • patron
The Klassik Stiftung names her the founder of the period; she is where its account of these decades begins.
Max Littmann
architect
The last large public building of the period, and the only one in this theme designed by an outsider brought in for the job.
Peter Cornelius
composer • poet
He is the period's clearest casualty: a composer the town's boldest decade brought in, and its factions drove out.
Richard Strauss
composer • conductor
Second Kapellmeister at the grand-ducal court theatre from 1889 to 1894, where he premiered "Don Juan", "Hänsel und Gretel" and "Guntram".
Richard Wagner
composer • conductor
The Lohengrin premiere of 1850 is the musical high point of the decades after Goethe — his work, staged in his absence.
Sophie, Grand Duchess of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach
grand duchess • collector • archive founder
The period's third great institution-founding, after the art school of 1860 and the orchestra school of 1872 — and the one that made Weimar a place scholars must travel to.
Wilhelm Ernst, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach
grand duke • patron
His reign, 1901–1918, falls inside the Silver Age, and the van de Velde and Kessler appointments are its last chapter.
Henry van de Velde
architect • designer • founder of the Weimar arts and crafts school
Called to Weimar in 1902, at the end of this period, to rebuild the Nietzsche-Archiv's interior and to found the school of applied arts the Bauhaus grew out of.
Weimar Classicism
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.
Notable Figures
Adele Schopenhauer
writer
The period seen by someone who grew up inside its most famous drawing room and wrote about what it cost women.
Duchess Anna Amalia
duchess • regent • patron • composer
Regent until 1775 and then the host of the court's circle: she called Wieland in 1772 and gathered Goethe, Herder and Wieland at the Wittumspalais and Tiefurt.
August von Goethe
chamberlain • chamber councillor • jurist
The period's second generation, and the evidence of what it was like to be born into it.
Carl Friedrich
hereditary prince • grand duke
Hereditary prince of the classical court from his birth in 1783, educated with Herder's help.
Caroline Jagemann
actress • singer
The period's stage seen from the other side of the footlights — where influence, not authorship, decided things.
Charlotte von Stein
lady-in-waiting • author
The private half of the classical decade: the correspondence that runs alongside the published work.
Christian August Vulpius
novelist • dramaturg • librarian
The period's popular literature, written by the man in the household nobody quotes.
Christiane von Goethe
companion • wife of Goethe
The household behind the classical decades, and the scandal the town attached to it.
Christoph Martin Wieland
writer • poet • translator
The first of the four to arrive: called in 1772, three years before Goethe, and in Weimar until his death in 1813.
Clemens Wenzeslaus Coudray
architect • Oberbaudirektor
As Oberbaudirektor from 1816 he gave the Weimar of Goethe's last years its classical architecture.
Corona Schröter
singer • actress • composer
The one professional in an amateur court theatre — the period's stage as it actually worked.
Friedrich Justin Bertuch
publisher • entrepreneur • court official
The commercial engine beneath the literary court — publishing, trade and the park.
Friedrich Schiller
writer • poet • historian
His six Weimar years, 1799 to 1805, are the period at its most concentrated.
Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer
philologist • librarian • editor
The trained philologist inside the house — the part of the period that does not fit the story of solitary genius.
Georg Melchior Kraus
painter • drawing master
The period's eye — the man who drew the town while it was becoming famous.
Johann Gottfried Herder
philosopher • theologian • poet
He held Weimar's senior church offices from 1776 to 1803, across the period's middle decades.
Johann Nepomuk Hummel
composer • pianist • Kapellmeister
He took up the Weimar post in 1819 and served through the final thirteen years of Classicism, dying five years after Goethe.
Johann Peter Eckermann
writer • editor • librarian
The period's stenographer — and the reason so much of it is quotable at all.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
writer • statesman • naturalist
He arrived in 1775 on Carl August's invitation and stayed until his death in 1832 — the period is bounded by his lifespan.
Johanna Schopenhauer
writer • salonnière
By 1806 the circle's centre of gravity was a rented room belonging to a widow who had just arrived.
Johannes Daniel Falk
writer • educator • philanthropist
The period's other face: the same decades, the same town, and the children the literature does not mention.
Carl August
duke • grand duke • patron
The period ran under his rule and began with his invitation to Goethe in 1775.
Karl Ludwig von Knebel
poet • translator • tutor at court
The man who made the introduction, and the last of the circle to die.
Louise of Hesse-Darmstadt
duchess • grand duchess
The duchess of the classical court from 1775 to 1828, and after Anna Amalia's death in 1807 the centre of its literary circle.
Ottilie von Goethe
editor • salonnière
The generation that had to live in the period after it ended, inside its most famous building.
Weimar Republic Era
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.
Notable Figures
Adolf Hitler
dictator • leader of the NSDAP • Reich chancellor
In Weimar's 1932 presidential elections he took 34.5 and then 42.8 per cent; in August 1932 his party took over the Thuringian government, five months before he became chancellor.[^wikipedia-de-weimar]
Friedrich Ebert
politician • statesman
Opened the assembly that gave the republic its constitution and was elected its first president in this town.
Hermann Brill
Social Democrat • lawyer • resistance organiser • politician
A Thuringian state deputy and Reichstag member under the Republic, until 1933 ended his career.
Hugo Preuss
constitutional lawyer • liberal politician
He wrote the draft the republic's constitution was built on, commissioned six days after the monarchy fell.[^dhm-lemo-preuss]
Wilhelm Ernst, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach
grand duke • patron
His abdication on 9 November 1918 is the act the Republic in Weimar begins from.
Nazi Era and Buchenwald (World War II)
The regime wanted Weimar for what its name meant, and it built a concentration camp on the hill above the town. Both facts belong to the same twelve years.
Notable Figures
Adolf Hitler
dictator • leader of the NSDAP • Reich chancellor
More than forty visits, the Gauforum, the Elephant, the theatre box and the camp on the Ettersberg: the period's Weimar is the town he shaped.[^wikipedia-de-weimar]
Bruno Apitz
writer • communist • prisoner
He came to Buchenwald as a political prisoner in November 1937, months after the camp was built.
Elie Wiesel
writer • witness • Nobel laureate
Brought to Buchenwald at the end of January 1945 on an evacuation transport from Auschwitz.
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche
archivist • editor • publisher
She received Hitler at the archive several times between 1932 and 1934 and died in 1935 — the archive's part in the Nietzsche cult of National Socialism begins with her.
Franz Leitner
communist • block elder • Righteous Among the Nations
Committed to the camp in 1939 as a member of the communist youth league, and there until the liberation.
Fritz Löhner-Beda
librettist • lyricist • prisoner
Arrested within weeks of the Anschluss and moved to Buchenwald in September 1938.
Fritz Sauckel
Gauleiter • Reichsstatthalter • war criminal
The party's chief in Thuringia through the whole period, and from 1942 the organiser of forced labour across the Reich.
Hermann Brill
Social Democrat • lawyer • resistance organiser • politician
Convicted of preparing high treason in 1938 and moved from prison to Buchenwald in 1943.
Hermann Leopoldi
pianist • composer • cabaret artist
Arrested in Vienna in April 1938 as a Jew, and in Buchenwald from that August until February 1939.
Jorge Semprún
writer • resistance member • screenwriter
Deported here at the end of January 1944 as a "political Spaniard" and held until the liberation.
Maurice Halbwachs
sociologist • scholar
Deported from a French prison in the last transports of August 1944.
Raphaël Élizé
veterinary surgeon • mayor • resistance member
A French mayor removed from office for his colour in 1940 and murdered near Weimar in 1945 — the period seen from the other end.
Walter Bartel
communist • resistance organiser • historian
Arrested in Prague in 1939 and held at Buchenwald until the liberation.
What happened, when
The events of Weimar's history, each on its own page, in the order they happened.
- 1424The town fire of 1424
One fire took much of the houses, the castle, the town church and the town hall — and Weimar's oldest surviving buildings are what replaced them.
- 1552Weimar becomes a residence, 1552
A defeated elector picked the town that was left to him, and Weimar stopped being provincial.
- 1617-08-24The Fruitbearing Society is founded in the Weimar castle, 1617
The first great society for the German language was founded here — a year before the castle it met in burned down.
- 1618The castle fire of 1618
Fire took the Renaissance castle, and what replaced it gave Weimar a Baroque residence and, eventually, Bach's chapel.
- 1717 – 1717-12-02Bach in the Bastille, 1717
The court organist asked to leave, and the duke had him locked up for four weeks before letting him go in disgrace.
- 1758 – 1775-09-03Anna Amalia's regency, 1758–1775
A widow of eighteen took over a bankrupt duchy and ran it for seventeen years — and handed her son a court worth coming to.
- 1774Knebel introduces Goethe to Karl August
In December 1774, on a journey to Frankfurt, a tutor at the Weimar court brought the hereditary prince together with a young lawyer who had written a scandalous novel.
- 1774-05-06The castle fire, 6 May 1774
The Baroque residence burned down to its tower and gatehouse, and the room Bach had played in was gone for good.
- 1775-11-07Goethe arrives in Weimar, 7 November 1775
On 7 November 1775 a carriage from Frankfurt brought the twenty-six-year-old author of Werther into a town of six thousand people. He had come for a short visit; he stayed for the rest of his life.
- 1779-04-06The first Iphigenie, 6 April 1779
Goethe's Iphigenie was first performed in its prose version on Easter Tuesday 1779, with Corona Schröter in the title role and Goethe himself playing Orest.
- 1791Goethe is given the court theatre, 1791
The duke handed Weimar's most famous writer a theatre to run, and he opened it with a box-office hit by somebody else.
- 1805-05-09The death of Schiller, 9 May 1805
He died in the study on the top floor of his own house, three years after buying it, and was buried in the night of 11–12 May in a vault the court kept for people of rank who had no grave of their own.
- 1808-09-27 – 1808-10-14The Congress of Erfurt, 1808
From 27 September to 14 October 1808 Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I met in Erfurt with the princes of the Rhine Confederation — and on 6 October the congress came to Weimar.
- 1816-05-05The grand duchy and the constitution of 5 May 1816
The Congress of Vienna made Carl August a grand duke with a larger land in 1815; on 5 May 1816 he gave it the first constitution in Germany after the wars against Napoleon, with an elected Landtag and full freedom of the press.
- 1832-03-22 – 1832-03-26The death of Goethe, 22 March 1832
He died in the house on the Frauenplan he had rented since 1782, and on 26 March was carried into the ducal vault to lie beside Schiller.
- 1850-08-28The world premiere of Wagner's "Lohengrin", 1850
A small ducal theatre gave the first performance of an opera whose composer could not attend, because the police were looking for him.
- 1858-12-15The premiere of "Der Barbier von Bagdad", 15 December 1858
An organised hissing campaign wrecked a premiere, and Weimar lost Liszt as a result.
- 1860-10-01The Grand Ducal Art School is founded, 1 October 1860
A grand duke started an art school out of his own pocket; fifty-nine years later it was half of the Bauhaus.
- 1872Germany's first orchestra school opens, 1872
Liszt wanted a conservatory in Weimar and never got one; the school opened nineteen years after his attempt collapsed.
- 1885-04-15Goethe's manuscript estate passes to Grand Duchess Sophie, 15 April 1885
The most valuable literary estate in Germany became one woman's private property, and she gave it away the same day.
- 1893The world premiere of "Hänsel und Gretel", 1893
One of the most performed operas in the German repertoire was heard for the first time in Weimar, conducted by a 29-year-old assistant Kapellmeister.
- 1902-10-15 – 1915-10-01Van de Velde's arts and crafts school, 1902–1915
The school the Bauhaus was built out of: begun as a private seminar in borrowed rooms, closed by ministerial order thirteen years later.
- 1908-01-11The new court theatre is inaugurated, 11 January 1908
The theatre everyone photographs in Weimar is younger than the Wagner premieres it is famous for.
- 1918-11-09The Grand Duke abdicates
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.
- 1919The Bauhaus manifesto, April 1919
Six folded pages with a cathedral on the front — the document that told Weimar what the new school was for.
- 1919-01-19The theatre is renamed, 19 January 1919
On the day Germans voted for the assembly that would write them a constitution, the theatre that assembly was about to sit in took the name»Deutsches Nationaltheater«.
- 1919-02-06The National Assembly convenes in Weimar
On 6 February 1919 the assembly elected to write Germany a constitution met for the first time, in a court theatre eleven years old. Weimar was chosen because Berlin was too dangerous.
- 1919-04-01The founding of the Bauhaus, April 1919
Walter Gropius took over a grand-ducal art school in a defeated country and renamed it the Staatliches Bauhaus.
- 1919-07-31The Weimar Constitution is carried
On 31 July 1919 the delegates voted Germany's first democratic constitution through in its final form, in the Nationaltheater. It was signed somewhere else entirely.
- 1922The De Stijl course, 1922
A rival course, taught in a studio directly opposite the Bauhaus, by a man the school never employed.
- 1923-08-15 – 1923-09-30The Bauhaus Exhibition of 1923
The weeks in which the Bauhaus put itself in front of the public for the first time, in three buildings and one house it had to build first.
- 1925-03-31The end of the Weimar Bauhaus, 1924/25
An election, a halved budget, and contracts cancelled to 31 March 1925: the school left for Dessau after six years.
- 1926-07-03 – 1926-07-04The NSDAP holds its party congress in the Nationaltheater
On 3 and 4 July 1926 the party held its first congress after being refounded, with Hitler present, in the hall where the Republic had voted its constitution seven years earlier.
- 1930The purge of the Weimar art schools, 1930
Five years after the Bauhaus left, what it had painted on the walls of its workshop building was destroyed — by the school that took its place.
- 1930-01-23 – 1931-04-01Wilhelm Frick takes office in Thuringia
On 23 January 1930 Wilhelm Frick became Thuringia's minister of the interior and of public education — the first National Socialist anywhere in Germany to hold a government office. He lasted fourteen months.
- 1937-05-01The Gauforum is begun
The party built itself an administrative quarter in the middle of Weimar, with a hall for twenty thousand — and used concentration camp prisoners to do it. Most of it is still standing.
- 1937-07-15 – 1945-04-11Buchenwald concentration camp is built
From July 1937 the SS had prisoners build a camp on the Ettersberg, the wooded hill above the town. 277,800 people from more than fifty countries were held there; 56,000 did not survive.
- 1941-05-24 – 1943-01-02The satellite camp at Kranichfeld
On 24 May 1941 the SS put fifty Buchenwald prisoners into a carriage shed at Kranichfeld to rebuild a castle it had bought — and the point of the work was an insurance claim.
- 1944-08-18Ernst Thälmann is murdered in the crematorium
On 18 August 1944 the leader of Germany's communists was killed inside the Buchenwald crematorium. Nine years later the first memorial plaque in the prisoners' camp marked the spot, and the GDR arranged its visits around it.
- 1945The children's block in Barrack 66
In January 1945 prisoners set up a second children's block at the far end of the Small Camp and kept the boys in it alive. 904 children and young people were in Buchenwald when it was liberated.
- 1945-02-09The air raid of 9 February 1945
A US Air Force raid aimed at the Gustloff armaments works north of Weimar. Eight of ten bombs fell in one tight cluster, killing concentration camp prisoners at their machines, and the Nationaltheater was destroyed the same day.
- 1945-04-11The liberation of Buchenwald
On 11 April 1945, with armoured divisions of the US Third Army approaching, the SS were ordered out and armed prisoners took the camp gate.
- 1945-08-21 – 1950Soviet Special Camp No. 2
Four months after the liberation, the Soviet occupation began interning people on the same ground. 28,494 were held there until 1950 and 7,113 of them died.
- 1948The theatre reopens with Faust, 1948
A house bombed down to its façade and its foyer was the first German theatre rebuilt after the war — and it opened again with Goethe.
- 1953The GDR takes charge of the classics
In 1953 East Germany gathered Goethe's and Schiller's houses, the parks, the Nietzsche archive and the state library into a single organisation. Its successor is the foundation that runs Weimar today.
- 1958»Nackt unter Wölfen« and the making of a legend
Bruno Apitz's novel appeared in 1958 and a DEFA film followed in 1963. For a decade afterwards it was easier to tell Buchenwald's story through a novel than to research it.
- 1958-09-14The GDR builds its national memorial
By 1958 a monumental complex stood on the southern slope of the Ettersberg as the national monument of the GDR — a memorial to the dead that was also a platform for the state that built it.
- 1989-05-07 – 1989-12-05The peaceful revolution in Weimar
Weimar's 1989 does not run to the familiar national calendar. It began at an election count in May, gathered in the churches in October, and reached the street late — on Tuesdays.
- 1991-08-28 – 1991-08-29The Weimar Triangle is founded
Two years after the wall came down, the foreign ministers of Germany, France and Poland met here and signed a declaration on the future of Europe. The format still carries the town's name.
- 1996-12-07 – 1998-12-02Weimar on the World Heritage List, 1996 and 1998
Twice in three years the World Heritage Committee put Weimar on its list: the Bauhaus buildings on 7 December 1996, and the eleven monuments of Classical Weimar on 2 December 1998.
- 1999Weimar is European Capital of Culture
The EU named Weimar European Capital of Culture in 1993 and the town held the title in 1999, with around a thousand events.
- 899Weimar first appears in writing, 899
A charter of Emperor Arnulf of Carinthia names the place Vvigmara — the earliest evidence that Weimar exists.
Explore Weimar's Legacy
Discover the people who shaped these periods and visit the places where history unfolded.