Weimar

“ But personally I find a Weimar "Full Session" about as entertaining and enlightening as was Weimar Grand Opera. A stout elderly gentleman advances to the centre of the stage and reads steadily and stolidly through a pile of typewritten recitative. The Independents, who go in for bravura and even gag a little, are now nearly always away on tour in the provinces. So the Assembly can continue daily from three [30] to six digesting a pleasantly conservative Constitution and a pleasingly liberal lunch. For Weimar is an oasis of peace and plenty in a land swept by famine and fighting. ”

“ Self-seeking “representatives of the people,” frock-tailed bureaucrats, scurrying correspondents from the four comers of the earth and the flocks of hangers-on which these unavoidable appendages of modern society inevitably bring in their train, had all fled Berlinward. Weimar had been restored to her own simple people, except that one of her squares swarmed with the Jews of Leipzig, who had set up here their booths for an annual fair and awakened all the surrounding echoes with their strident bargainings. ”

“ Poetry had had no stronghold in Germany for many a long year, but now Weimar became one. Thither Goethe summoned Herder; Wieland had been there since 1772. Schiller received an appointment in the adjacent Jena. Weimar was, then, the place where passion, as poetical, compared with the prosaic conventions of society, was worshipped most recklessly and with least prejudice, in practice as well as theory. "Ah! here we have women!" cries Jean Paul when he comes to Weimar. "Everything is revolutionarily daring here; that a woman is married signifies nothing." ”

“ Years ago a swarm of noisy wasps hovered about the gentle paralytic of Weimar, and when a ray of light made their wings gleam they said that they had been turned to gold, that the world had been turned upside down, that man had stolen the keys of the earthly paradise, and that heaven had come down to hell. ”

“ All Weimar adores him. When he goes out, every one greets him as if he were a king."
"All Weimar adores him,"—let us confess, for we can no longer blink the fact, that there is something nauseous about the atmosphere in which Liszt lived, and that we cannot acquit him of a liking for it. Does not every man choose, at least within certain limitations set by fate, his own environment? ”

“ Yes, such is the life of Weimar. The luxury of your great capitals, the gorgeous salons of London and Paris, the voluptuous pleasures which unbounded wealth and all its train of passions beget, are utterly unknown there; but there is a world of pure enjoyment and of intercourse with high and gifted minds which more than repay you for their absence. A few years more, and all this will be but “matter for an old man’s memory.” Increased facilities of travel and greater knowledge of language erase nationality most rapidly. ”

“ This was the impression produced by a first morning's walk in Weimar—an impression which very imperfectly represents what Weimar is, but which is worth recording, because it is true as a sort of back view. Our ideas were considerably modified when, in the evening, we found our way to the Belvedere chaussée, a splendid avenue of chestnut-trees, two miles in length, reaching from the town to the summer residence of Belvedere; when we saw the Schloss, and discovered the labyrinthine beauties of the park; indeed every day opened to us fresh charms in this quiet little valley and its environs. ”

“ As they followed the custodian through the grand-ducal Residenz at Weimar, March felt everywhere the strong wish of the prince who was Goethe's friend to ally himself with literature, and to be human at least in the humanities. He came honestly by his passion for poets; his mother had known it in her time, and Weimar was the home of Wieland and of Herder before the young Grand-Duke came back from his travels bringing Goethe with him, and afterwards attracting Schiller. The story of that great epoch is all there in the Residenz, told as articulately as a palace can. ”

“ The modern spirit, the spirit of scoffing and fast travelling, has been so much diffused, even over Germany, though accepted only in a limited sense as regards speed on railways and still resisted by eilwagen, that few towns retain that idyllic aspect we are accustomed to call German. No town, to me, retains it so completely as Weimar; and it is fit that simplicity, which lingers last with great men, should plant its extrema vestigia on their long abode and resting-place. ”

“ In the shock from this he was sensible that he had not seen any woman-and-dog teams for some time, and he wondered by what civic or ethnic influences their distribution was so controlled that they should have abounded in Hamburg, Leipsic, and Carlsbad, and wholly ceased in Nuremberg, Ansbach, and Wurzburg, to reappear again in Weimar, though they seemed as characteristic of all Germany as the ugly denkmals to her victories over France. ”

“ Behold me then again afloat on the Rhine—I meet Guhr, still swearing—I leave him—meet our friend Hiller, who tells me his Fall of Jerusalem is ready—I leave, in company with a magnificent sore throat—sleep on the way—dream frightful things that I will not repeat—reach Weimar, thoroughly ill—Lobe and Chélard try in vain to prop me up—preparations for concert—first rehearsal—I rejoice and am cured.
“There is something broad, cultivated, liberal about the very air of Weimar. Calm, luminous, peaceful, dreamy—how my heart beat as I paced the streets! ”

“ Weimar, in gratitude, erected this column as a memorial of the baker's feat and its own deliverance. A little farther on is the Borkenhaus, where Carl August used to play the hermit for days together, and from which he used to telegraph to Goethe in his Gartenhaus. Sometimes we took our shady walk in the Stern, the oldest part of the park plantations, on the opposite side of the river, lingering on our way to watch the crystal brook which hurries on, like a foolish young maiden, to wed itself with the muddy Ilm. ”

“ Has the Constitution of Weimar resistance enough to withstand all the inevitable assaults which will be aimed at it, and can it guarantee to the German people a well-ordered public life and a stable government? ”

“ However, after relating a scene which took place at Weimar, he adds, 'Whatever we may say or think of her, her visit was certainly followed by very important results. Her work upon Germany, which owed its rise to social conversations, is to be regarded as a mighty engine which at once made a wide breach in that Chinese wall of antiquated prejudices, which divided us from France; so that the people across the Rhine, and afterwards those across the channel, at length came to a nearer knowledge of us; whence we may look to obtain a living influence over the distant west. ”

“ Weimar owes its importance not to any industrial development, which the grand-dukes discourage within the limits of their Residenz, but to its intimate association with the classical period of German literature, which earned for it the title of the “poets’ city” and “the German Athens.” The golden age of Weimar, covered by the reign of Charles Augustus (q.v.) ”

“ The little town of Weimar, with all its distinguished men, lay hidden in mist and equally bored at the foot of the long slope of the Ettersberg, looking like any other little country town in the rain--comfortless and desolate'. In the midst of the loneliness and the spring rain, sounded now and then the note of a thrush, crying for the sun.
The Kirsten girls and their comrades had slipped up in spite of rain and mud, because they hoped that on such a day the amorous youths, the donkeys, as they called them, would stay at home. ”

“ There is a new Weimar—not so wonderful as the two old Weimars—the Weimar of Anna Amalia and Karl August, of Goethe, Wieland, Herder, and Schiller, Johanna Schopenhauer and her sullen son Arthur, the pessimistic philosopher—and [329] not the old Weimar of Franz Liszt and his brilliant cohort of disciples; nevertheless, a new Weimar, its intellectual rallying-point the home of Elisabeth Foerster-Nietzsche, the tiny and lovable sister of the great dead poet-philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. ”

“ We were quite contented, however, that it was not yet the Weimar "season," fashionably speaking, since it was the very best time for enjoying something far better than Weimar gayeties—the lovely park and environs. It was pleasant, too, to see the good bovine citizens enjoying life in their quiet fashion. Unlike our English people, they take pleasure into their calculations, and seem regularly to set aside part of their time for recreation. ”

“ A young and gallant chief of the house of Weimar stands in the rosy light of early dawn, on the highest turret of his castle, with his newly wedded bride, taking a long farewell of her and of their fair domain, for at sunrise he leads his knights and men-at-arms to the crusade, and the return is years distant and uncertain. Their mood is full of sadness and yet of a 202 strong, religious exultation and trust. ”

“ Whether it lies in the race, in the soil, in the free political constitution, or in the healthy tone of education,—certainly, the English in general appear to have certain advantages over many others. Here in Weimar, we see only a few of them, and, probably, by no means the best; but what fine, handsome people they are. And however young they come here, they feel themselves by no means strange or embarrassed in this foreign atmosphere; on the contrary, their deportment in society is as full of confidence, and as easy as if they were lords everywhere, and the whole world belonged to them. ”

“ Later, towards the end of the Weimar Republic, the wandering role was taken over by thousands of unemployed, who were to be met with everywhere on their aimless journey. By 1933 they wandered no longer, but marched in their hundreds of thousands. The Hitler movement literally brought the whole of Germany to its feet, from five-years-old to veterans, and produced a spectacle of a nation migrating from one place to another. ”

“ It requires imagination to put Goethe and Schiller and Wieland in the bow window at White’s, and to place Lords Glengall and Yarmouth in Frau von Stein’s drawing-room in Weimar; but the discerning eye which can see this picture, knows at a glance why England misunderstands Germany and Germany misunderstands England. For White’s is White’s and Weimar is Weimar, and one is British and one is German as much now as then! In the one the winner of the Derby is of more importance than any philosopher ”

“ The Weimar Parliament is so dead that only civil war can galvanise it to action. If reinforced by a Council system, the Weimar Party Government and the Preuss Federal [197] Constitution would perhaps have steam enough to work.
The Councils are as essential to Germany to-day as the Commons were to us a century ago. Indeed, our insistence on the supremacy of the Weimar Assembly as a guarantee for the maintenance of peace, can be paralleled by our insistence a century ago on the maintenance of Upper Houses in the constitutions of the States revolutionised from France. ”

“ Singularly ill-adapted to such a purpose it seems to beings not ducal. On the other side of the Ilm the park is bordered by the road leading to the little village of Ober Weimar,—another sunny walk which has the special attraction of taking one by Goethe's Gartenhaus, his first residence at Weimar. ”

“ No one who has followed attentively the work of the constitution-makers in Weimar can have overlooked their readiness to adopt and assimilate the positive elements of a movement which was essentially destructive. In this respect they displayed a remarkable degree of open-mindedness and receptivity. They showed themselves avid of every contribution which they could glean from any source to the work of national reorganization, and even in Teutonized Bolshevism they apparently found helpful hints of timely innovations. ”

“ Indeed, I felt it, too; but, then, I argued, it was their nature, their way, and may have been born with their fine pride and their penuriousness, for Weimar is a city of the proud and poor. Leave out its memories, its significance, and you are among a people that has not yielded, that will not budge. No one dares jostle them, or trouble them with the irreverent word; the wit and the parvenu are alike excluded from this tremulous hospitality. But what was Davidson, an Englishman, doing with them? ”

“ Leaving the nation and its statesmen to fight out their freedom, he hurried away to Weimar, and thence to the quiet Thuringian town of Rudolstadt, where in the inn "Zum Ritter," out of sight of soldier and sound of drum, he wrote, helped by books from the Weimar library, his essay for the degree of doctor in philosophy. ”

“ Without a Duke Charles Augustus of Weimar, there would probably have been no Wieland, no Herder, no Goethe, and no Schiller. It is not only plants that want sunshine, genius also requires light and warmth to bring it out, and the refining influence of a small court was nowhere so necessary as during the period of storm and stress in Germany. ”

“ There was a regular airplane mail service between Weimar and Berlin, three times a day in each direction, with room for a passenger or two on each trip. The German may not forgive his enemies, but he is quite ready to do business with them, to clothe them or to fly them, to meet any demand of a possible customer, whatever his origin. He still tempers his manners to outward appearances, however, for the great leaden god of caste sits heavily upon him, in spite of his sudden conversion to democracy. ”

“ So from Paris--to her the "hub of the universe"--Madame de Staël, "with wandering steps and slow, took her solitary way." Expelled from the Eden she loved, she sought to find some place where she could enjoy society,--which was the passion of her life. Weimar, in Germany, then contained a constellation of illustrious men, over whom Goethe reigned, as Dr. Johnson once did in London. Thither she resolved to go, after a brief stay at Coppet, her place in Switzerland; and her ten years' exile began with a sojourn among the brightest intellects of Germany. ”