Weimar, Germany: the small city where German classical culture flowered

For a town of its size, Weimar carries an extraordinary cultural weight. In the late eighteenth century the enlightened patronage of Duchess Anna Amalia and Duke Carl August drew Goethe, Schiller, Herder and Wieland to this Thuringian residence on the river Ilm, and the literary movement they created - Weimar Classicism - made the town a capital of the European mind. A city of around 66,000 people, Weimar lies in the heart of Thuringia about 20 kilometres east of the state capital Erfurt and some 80 kilometres south-west of Leipzig.

The houses of Goethe and Schiller, the Baroque-and-Rococo Duchess Anna Amalia Library, the residence castle and the landscaped Park an der Ilm together form the UNESCO World Heritage ensemble known as Classical Weimar, inscribed in 1998. Goethe lived in the town for more than fifty years, and he and Schiller lie side by side in the princes' tomb of the historic cemetery.

From classicism to the Bauhaus

Weimar's creativity did not end with the poets. Franz Liszt made it a centre of music in the nineteenth century, and in 1919 Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus here, the design school that reshaped modern architecture and whose early sites earned the town a second UNESCO listing. That same year the new German republic drafted its constitution in Weimar, lending its name to the Weimar Republic.

Remembering the whole story

Weimar's history also holds a darker chapter: on the Ettersberg hill just outside the town lies the memorial at the former Buchenwald concentration camp, a sober counterweight to the city of poets. Together they make Weimar a place to reflect as much as to admire, its compact centre of theatres, museums and parks well suited to exploring on foot.