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Anna Amalia Library

The Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar, Thuringia, Germany houses a major collection of German literature and historical documents. The library contains:
1,000,000 books
2,000 medieval and early modern manuscripts
600 ancestral registers
10,000 maps
4,000 musical scripts

The research library today has approximately 850,000 volumes with collection emphasis on the German literature. Among its special collections is an important Shakespeare collection of approximately 10,000 volumes, as well as a 16th century Bible connected to Martin Luther.
Part of the collection was burned in a fire on September 2, 2004, which destroyed 30,000 irreplaceable volumes, with another 20,000 severely damaged. However, some 6,000 historical works were saved, including a 1534 Lutheran Bible and a collection of Alexander von Humboldt's papers, by being passed hand-over-hand out of the building.

Anna Amalia Duchess of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (October 24, 1739–April 10, 1807) was an influential cultural force in Weimar, Germany in the 18th century.
The daughter of Karl I, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, she was born at Wolfenbüttel and married Ernest, Duke of Saxe-Weimar in 1756. Ernest died in 1758, leaving her regent for their infant son, Carl August.
During Carl August's protracted minority she administered the affairs of the duchy with notable prudence, strengthening its resources and improving its position in spite of the troubles of the Seven Years' War.
As a patron of the arts and literature, she attracted to Weimar many of the most eminent men in Germany, including Johann Gottfried Herder, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. She hired Christoph Martin Wieland, a poet and translator of William Shakespeare, to tutor her son. She also established the Duchess Anna Amalia Library.
Anna Amalia was also a notable composer; among her significant works is a Singspiel called Erwin und Elmire (1776), basing her musical on a text by Goethe.

Address: Platz der Demokratie 1

Directions: Due to the fire the library can be closed, check locally.

The Goethe National Museum

Along with the Goethe and Schiller Archives and the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek, the Goethe National Museum is one of the three main administrative departments of the Stiftung Weimarer Klassik. These departments together are responsible for the Foundation's holdings. The museum administration is in charge of an outstanding ensemble of monuments and museums in and around Weimar: ten houses of key cultural figures from the fields of literature, music and philosophy; the new permanent exhibitions on Weimar Classicism; ten castles and residential palaces and three historic burial grounds. The attraction of these monuments and museums can be explained by their powerful depiction of Classicism, from its early manifestations to its heyday, and also of later epochs right through to the so-called ''New Weimar'' era at the turn of the last century. The scope of the collections, which have been assembled over a period of more than 100 years in these spaces, is correspondingly broad and varied.
The following belong to the Goethe National Museum:
Goethe's House
The permanent exhibition "Multiple Reflections - Weimar Classicism from 1759 to 1832" (from 1.5.1999)
The building housing the collections
Goethe's Garden House in the Park on the Ilm
Schiller's House
The Widow's Palace with the Wieland Museum
The Royal Mausoleum with the Russian Orthodox Chapel in the Historic Cemetery
The "Kassengewölbe" (Funeral Vault) in St John's Cemetery
The Roman House in the Park on the Ilm
The Kirms-Krackow House
Franz Liszt's House
The caves in the Park on the Ilm
The Nietzsche Archives
Tiefurt Palace
Wieland's Oßmannstedt Estate
The Renaissance Castle and Rococo Palace of Dornburg
Kochberg Castle with its Park and Amateur Theatre
The Gabelbach Hunting Lodge near Ilmenau
The Stützerbach Goethe Museum and Bauerbach Schiller Museum near Meiningen
Ettersburg Palace
Belvedere Palace

Address: all over the city

Directions: check the web or any tourist literature

Friedrich Schiller

Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (November 10, 1759 – May 9, 1805),
usually known as Friedrich Schiller, was a German poet, philosopher, historian, and dramatist.
He was born in Marbach (located in Germany's Stuttgart Region), the son of the military doctor, J. C. Schiller. His childhood and youth were spent in relative poverty, although he attended both village and Latin schools, and coming to the attention of Karl Eugen, Duke of Württemberg, entered the Karlsschule Stuttgart (an elite military academy founded by Duke Karl Eugen) in 1773, where he eventually studied medicine.
While at the arduous and oppressive school, he read Rousseau and Goethe and discussed Classical ideals with his classmates. At school, he wrote his first play, The Robbers, about a group of naïve revolutionaries and their tragic failure.
In 1780 he obtained a post as regimental doctor in Stuttgart.
Following the performance of Die Räuber (The Robbers) in Mannheim in 1781 he was arrested and forbidden to publish any further works. He fled Stuttgart in 1783 coming via Leipzig and Dresden to Weimar in 1787. In 1789 he was appointed professor of History and Philosophy in Jena, where he wrote only historical works. He returned to Weimar in 1799, where Goethe convinced him to return to playwriting. He and Goethe founded the Weimar Theater which became the leading theater in Germany, leading to a dramatic renaissance. He remained in Weimar until his death at 45 from tuberculosis.

Part of Schiller's work, his Plays:

Die Räuber or The Robbers (1781)
Kabale und Liebe or Intrigue and Love (1784)
Don Carlos, Infant von Spanien or Don Carlos (1787)
Wallenstein (1800) (translated from a manuscript copy into English as The Piccolomini and Death of Wallenstein by Coleridge in 1800)
Die Jungfrau von Orleans or The Maid of Orleans (1801)
Maria Stuart or Mary Stuart (1801)
Die Braut von Messina (1803),
Wilhelm Tell or William Tell (1804)
Demetrius (unfinished at his death)

Address: all over the city

Directions: Alongside the Goethe National Museum (including Goethes's house), the Weimar Classics Foundation also comprises the Duchess Anna Amalia Library, the Goethe and Schiller Archiv, with its richly varied and, in some cases, unique holdings.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (August 28, 1749 – March 22, 1832)
was a German writer, politician, humanist, scientist, and philosopher. As a writer, Goethe was one of the paramount figures of German literature and European Romanticism during and around the 18th and 19th century. Goethe was the author of Faust and Theory of Colours and inspired Darwin with his independent discovery of the human premaxilla jaw bones.
Goethe was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His father was a man of means and position, and he personally supervised the early education of his son. The young Goethe studied at the universities of Leipzig and Strasbourg, and in 1772 entered upon the practice of law at Wetzlar. At the invitation of Karl August, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, he went in 1775 to live in Weimar, where he held a succession of political offices, becoming the Duke's chief adviser. From 1786 to 1788 he traveled in Italy, and directed the ducal theater at Weimar. He took part in the Napoleonic wars against France, and in the following began a friendship with Friedrich Schiller, which lasted till the latter's death in 1805. In 1806 he married Christiane Vulpius. As of 1820 he was on friendly terms with Kaspar Maria von Sternberg. From about 1794, he devoted himself chiefly to literature, and after a life of extraordinary productiveness, died in Weimar.

Part of Goethe's work:

Götz von Berlichingen
The Sorrows of Young Werther
Sturm und Drang
Wilhelm Meister
Iphigenie
Egmont
Torquato Tasso
Reineke Fuchs.
Hermann and Dorothea
Roman Elegies
Faust
Elective Affinities
Dichtung und Wahrheit

Address: all over the city

Directions: Alongside the Goethe National Museum (including Goethes's house), the Weimar Classics Foundation also comprises the Duchess Anna Amalia Library, the Goethe and Schiller Archiv, with its richly varied and, in some cases, unique holdings.

Ginkgo museum

The Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba), sometimes also known as the Maidenhair tree, is a unique tree with no living relatives.

In the 18th century we find that there was a desire by princes and royal houses to create and cultivate models of the English landscape into their own parks. Because of this new interest we find the Ginkgotree being introduced and spreading into Europe around 1730.
Goethe and the Weimar Duke Carl August, both had a common interest in botany and the creation of exotic parks and gardens.
Goethe of course is very well known for his studies in the 'metamorphosis of plants.'
Duke Carl August had sent his court gardener to the gardens of Kew (England) to study and learn about gardening and it was here that he learned about the Ginkgo.
The gardener returned to Weimar and made the first attempt to introduce the Ginkgotree in the Weimar Orangery Belvedere. During the time of Goethe, the Ginkgo was only about 3-4 m. in height. There was some success in introducing the Ginkgotree to the area, and in 1800, one could buy a Ginkgotree on Belvedere for 1 Taler in Weimar.
The oldest Ginkgo in Weimar, planted about 1820 by the royal court gardener Sckell, who exchanged botanic information with Goethe, can be found just southwest of the House of the Dukes and Princes.
Goethe was very intrigued and inspired by the Ginkgoleaf and this led him to write his poem ,, Ginkgo biloba".
This poem can be found in the book Sulekia, included in the poem-collection ,,West-Eastern Divan".

Address: Windischenstr. 1

Directions: directly on the Marktplatz (Market squere)

Phone: 03643 - 805452

Bauhausmuseum

Bauhaus is the common term for the Staatliches Bauhaus, an art and architecture school in Germany that operated from 1919 to 1933, and for the approach to design that it developed and taught. The most natural meaning for its name (related to the German verb for "build") is Architecture House. Bauhaus style became one of the most influential currents in Modernist architecture.
The school was founded by Walter Gropius at Weimar in 1919, as a merger of the Grand Ducal School of the Plastic Arts with the Kunstgewerbeschule. Most of the contents of the workshops had been sold off during the war. The early intention was for the Bauhaus to be a combined architecture school, crafts school, and academy of the arts. Much internal and external conflict followed.

Walter Adolph Gropius (May 18, 1883 – July 5, 1969) was a German architect and founder of Bauhaus.
Born in Berlin, Walter Gropius was the third son of a building advisor to the government with the same name, and Manon Auguste Pauline Scharnweber (1855–1933) whose family owned a manor near Berlin.
Gropius was an architect, like his father before him, and designed buildings which used modern materials and are often compared to abstract paintings. He founded the Bauhaus, a school of design where students were taught to use modern and innovative materials to create original furniture and buildings.
Gropius married Alma Schindler after the death of her husband Gustav Mahler.
Gropius left Germany in 1934 due to the rising power of the Nazi Party and lived and worked in Britain and then America. He died in 1969 in Boston, Massachusetts. He was known to have a snappy sense of style and was often seen wearing a bowtie.

Address: Theaterplatz