Historical Figures of Weimar

Friedrich Schiller is the other half of Weimar Classicism: the dramatist of Die Räuber, Don Karlos, Wallenstein and Wilhelm Tell, the poet of An die Freude, a professor of history at Jena, and for six years Goethe's partner on the Weimar stage. He moved to Weimar in December 1799, took the house on the Esplanade in 1802 and died in its attic study on 9 May 1805, at forty-five. The house is a museum, he stands in bronze beside Goethe in front of the theatre they ran together, and his tomb in the Fürstengruft is beside Goethe's.

Johann Gottfried Herder, philosopher, theologian and poet, is the third name of Weimar Classicism beside Goethe and Wieland — the man who turned the young Goethe towards Shakespeare and folk song in Strasbourg in 1770, and whom Goethe then brought to Weimar in 1776 as the head of the duchy's church. For twenty-seven years he was chief court preacher, general superintendent and pastor of the town church, and in the time left over he wrote the Volkslieder, the Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit and the Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität. He died in Weimar on 18 December 1803 and lies in the church that has carried his name ever since: the Herderkirche, on the Herderplatz, under his statue.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is the reason Weimar is Weimar. He came in 1775, at twenty-six and already famous as the author of Werther, on the invitation of the young Duke Carl August, and stayed until his death in 1832 — fifty-seven years in which he was the duchy's minister, the director of its theatre, a naturalist of real standing, and the poet who wrote Iphigenie, Tasso, Wilhelm Meister, the Wahlverwandtschaften, the Divan and both parts of Faust in this town. His house on the Frauenplan, his home for almost fifty years, is the Goethe-Nationalmuseum; his garden house stands in the park he helped lay out; his coffin lies in the Fürstengruft beside Schiller's.