Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach

The Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach is a constituent state of the German Empire in Thuringia, the largest of the four Ernestine states and the one that the rest of Germany regards as partly its own. Its capital, Weimar, a town of 75,000, is where Goethe lived for fifty-seven years and Schiller for his last six, where Bach played the organ and Liszt conducted, and where the idea that Germany is a nation of poets before it is a nation of anything else was given an address. Every German schoolchild comes to Weimar once. About four million visitors come every year.

The grand duchy is small and scattered and holds three of Germany’s great inheritances. Weimar has the poets. Jena, twenty kilometres east and now the largest town, has the university that the Ernestine states have kept together since 1558, and the optical works of Carl Zeiss, one of the two poles of German precision optics. Eisenach, in the west under the Thuringian Forest, has the Wartburg, the castle where Luther translated the New Testament into German, and the town where Bach was born, and a car works. About 650,000 people live in the grand duchy’s 3,600 square kilometres, which come in three main pieces and several exclaves, separated by the lands of Prussia, Gotha and the Schwarzburgs.

The Grand Duke is Carl Bernhard, born in 1962, a librarian by training, who succeeded his father in 2004 and three months later stood in the ashes of the Duchess Anna Amalia Library, where he had worked for twelve years. He is a widower, and his heir is his son, Carl Alexander, a physics student at Jena. The government is led by a Staatsminister, the grand duchy’s historic title and Goethe’s own office, since 2020 Klaus-Dieter Ruhland of the SPD, a former press-shop foreman at the Eisenach car works, who leads a grand coalition with the National Liberals and has made the future of the car works his whole term.

The grand duchy’s difficulty is that Goethe belongs to everyone. Weimar’s classical inheritance is kept by a foundation that the Empire pays for almost entirely, and every German state, every German school and most German newspapers regard Goethe as theirs. The grand duchy is left to be his caretaker: to clear the streets after the school parties, to police the summer crowds, to be told by every visitor what Weimar means, and to live in a small Thuringian town that the rest of the country has decided is a shrine. It does so with patience, a certain amount of irony and, since 1925, one great regret, which is that the Bauhaus was born in Weimar and Weimar threw it out.

Name

The state is Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach, Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach in English, and the name records two duchies, Weimar and Eisenach, joined in 1741 when the Eisenach line died out, under the Saxon name of the Ernestine house. “Saxe” is the old French and English form of Sachsen. The grand duchy is the senior of the four surviving Ernestine states, with Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Saxe-Meiningen and Saxe-Altenburg, and the only one of them that is a grand duchy, a rank it was given at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

Nobody in the grand duchy uses the full name. Weimar is Weimar, Jena is Jena and Eisenach is Eisenach, and the state is the grand duchy in its own newspapers and Weimar everywhere else, which Jena and Eisenach mind. The rest of Germany uses “Weimar” to mean not the state or the town but an idea, the classical Weimar of Goethe and Schiller around 1800, and the grand duchy has long since given up correcting it.

Germany’s cultural capital

Everybody’s Goethe

Weimar is the place where Germany keeps its idea of itself. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe came to Weimar in 1775 at the invitation of the young Duke Carl August and stayed until his death in 1832, as the duke’s minister, his friend, the director of his theatre and the most famous man in Europe. Friedrich Schiller came in 1799 and died there in 1805. Herder preached in its town church and Wieland taught its princes. Between them they made the small residence of a minor Thuringian duke into the capital of a literature, and the German states, which were then many and quarrelsome and had nothing else in common, found in Weimar the one place they all agreed was German.

That agreement has never ended, and it is the grand duchy’s fortune and its burden. The Empire treats the inheritance of Goethe and Schiller as a national possession and not a Thuringian one, and the grand duchy’s connection to it is a source of pride out of all proportion to its size. It is also a source of irritation. Every German state claims Goethe. Frankfurt, where he was born, claims him first, and Leipzig, where he studied, and Straßburg, where he finished his studies and wrote his first great poems, and Rome, where he went to escape Weimar, all have their Goethe houses and their Goethe festivals. Weimar is the place he chose to live and die, and it is treated as the place that looks after him for everybody else.

The Classical Foundation

The inheritance is kept by the Weimar Classical Foundation, set up in 1949 by the Empire and the grand duchy together, on Grand Duke Carl August’s initiative, for the bicentenary of Goethe’s birth. It holds the Goethe House on the Frauenplan, Goethe’s garden house in the park on the Ilm, Schiller’s house, the Wittumspalais, the city palace and its collections, the Duchess Anna Amalia Library, the Goethe and Schiller Archive, Liszt’s house, the Nietzsche Archive, the Belvedere’s park and the princely vault, and it runs the Court Theatre.

The Empire pays nine-tenths of the Foundation’s budget, and the grand duchy pays for the roofs. That is the grand duchy’s own description of the arrangement, and it is meant fondly about half the time. The Foundation’s board is drawn from the Empire and the grand duchy together, and it proposes the director, whom the Grand Duke appoints; Berlin pays and Weimar chooses, which both sides regard as the right way round for different reasons. What the grand duchy pays for, and what the Foundation’s budget does not, is everything around the shrine: the roads, the police, the buses, the rubbish, the toilets, the first aid on the market square in August, and the patience of a town of 75,000 that receives four million visitors a year.

The fourteens

Every German school class comes to Weimar once, usually at fourteen. The custom is older than the Foundation and younger than Goethe, and nobody ordered it; it became, in the course of the twentieth century, simply what German schools did. From April to October the town is full of fourteen-year-olds, a hundred classes on a busy day, being walked from the Goethe House to Schiller’s house to the vault and back to the market square, where they eat ice cream on the steps of the town hall. The grand duchy calls them the fourteens. There is no ritual and no certificate. The fourteens come, look at the desk Goethe wrote Faust at, and leave, and most of the adults in Germany can remember the ice cream better than the desk.

The reading

Each 28 August, Goethe’s birthday, the Emperor or a member of the imperial family reads a poem at the Goethe House. The custom was begun by Emperor Albrecht I on 28 August 1949, the bicentenary, when he read Wanderers Nachtlied, the eight lines that Goethe wrote on the wall of a hut in the Thuringian Forest in 1780, in the room where Goethe died. It has been broadcast across the Empire every year since, and the choice of poem is the reader’s own and is kept secret until the reader begins.

The reading of 2028 did not take place. The reading of 28 August was cancelled for the first time since 1949, for the mourning for Heinrich I. The poem, Wanderers Nachtlied again, was printed on the front of every German newspaper that morning with a black border and no reader’s name, and the Goethe House stayed shut for the day.

The regret

The Bauhaus was born in Weimar, and Weimar sent it away. In 1919 the architect Walter Gropius merged the grand duchy’s old art school and its school of arts and crafts into a new school, the Bauhaus, which set out to join art and industry and became, within a few years, the most influential school of design in the world. Weimar’s court, its old families and its newspapers disliked it from the first day. In 1924, after the school held a costume party in the palace grounds, the Regent, Grand Duchess Feodora, closed it by decree, and in 1925 Gropius took it to Dessau, in Anhalt, whose government gave it a building and kept it. The Bauhaus tradition is Anhalt’s, and Anhalt’s has been the most exported piece of German design thinking ever since.

Weimar has known for a century that it made a mistake. It has had no art school since 1925. Grand Duke Carl August, who was twelve when his mother signed the decree, kept the Bauhaus’s name out of every speech he made for sixty years. His grandson said it at last, at the centenary in 2019, when he opened a Bauhaus museum in Weimar in the presence of Duke Leopold of Anhalt, in one sentence: “In 1925 this town sent the future to Dessau, and Dessau was kind enough to keep it.” The Duke of Anhalt laughed, and so, after a moment, did Weimar.

The towns

Weimar

Weimar is a small residence town on the Ilm that became a monument without ceasing to be a small residence town. Its centre is a market square with a Renaissance town hall and the house where Lucas Cranach lived and died, a few streets of eighteenth-century houses, the city palace on the river, and the park on the Ilm, which Goethe laid out with Carl August as an English landscape garden along the river’s meadows. Goethe’s house is on the Frauenplan, a small square south of the market. Schiller’s is a street away. The Court Theatre stands on the theatre square with the double statue of the two poets in front of it, unveiled in 1857 and copied in bronze in half the cities of Germany and three of the Realm.

The town lives on the visitors and minds them. About four million people come to Weimar each year, and Goethe’s house alone receives about a million. In summer the old town is a museum with a population, and the population, which is about 75,000 and includes the civil service of the grand duchy, the Thuringian broadcaster, the Liszt Academy and the Foundation’s staff, has learned to do its shopping before ten in the morning. Weimar’s people are proud, courteous to visitors and ruthless about the parking.

Jena

Jena is the grand duchy’s largest town and its richest, and Weimar’s other half. It lies twenty kilometres east of Weimar in the valley of the Saale, a university town of about 110,000 whose university, founded in 1558, has been the shared university of the Ernestine states since its foundation, and whose optical works, founded by Carl Zeiss in 1846 and made a science by Ernst Abbe, have made it one of the two capitals of German precision optics. Schiller taught history there; Hegel, Fichte and Schelling made it the centre of German philosophy around 1800; and the battle of 1806, in which Napoleon destroyed the Prussian army on the plateau above the town, is still the word Prussians use for a disaster.

Jena and Weimar are friendly. They are two halves of one city in all but name, joined by a road, a railway and a tram-train that runs every quarter of an hour and is always full, Jena’s scientists living in Weimar’s old houses and Weimar’s students studying in Jena. Goethe and Schiller worked in both, and both claim them, without much heat. Jena has the money, the university and the future; Weimar has the court, the government and the past; and each knows that it would be a lesser place without the other.

Eisenach

Eisenach is a works town, and the Wartburg is its view. It lies in the west of the grand duchy, in its own piece of territory under the Thuringian Forest, about seventy kilometres from Weimar, and its people regard themselves as the grand duchy’s working town before anything else. The car works, founded in 1896, has built cars in Eisenach for more than 130 years and is the largest employer in the western grand duchy. The town knows perfectly well that it has the Wartburg on the hill above it, the castle where Luther hid and translated the New Testament into German, and the house where Johann Sebastian Bach was born in 1685. It considers them excellent for visitors and is more interested in what BMW is going to decide in the spring.

Eisenach thinks Weimar’s Goethe is Weimar’s problem. The town keeps its own inheritance, Luther and Bach, without fuss, and it keeps Reformation Day, 31 October, as the grand duchy’s public holiday, which it won from Weimar in 1919 and has never let Weimar forget.

Apolda and Ilmenau

Apolda, north-east of Weimar, makes bells and knitwear. Its bell foundry, founded in 1722, has cast bells for half the churches of Germany, the Wartburg’s among them, and the town has a bell museum and an affection for the dogs bred there in the 1880s by a local tax collector named Dobermann. Ilmenau, in one of the grand duchy’s exclaves in the Thuringian Forest, has a technical university founded in 1894, close to the Jena works, and on the hill above it, the Kickelhahn, the wooden hut on whose wall Goethe wrote Wanderers Nachtlied on 6 September 1780. The hut has been rebuilt since, and the lines are on its wall in a copy.

History

The Ernestine duchy

The house of Saxe-Weimar is the senior surviving branch of the Ernestine Wettins, the elder of the two lines into which the house of Wettin divided in 1485. The Ernestines lost the Saxon electorate to their Albertine cousins in 1547, after the Elector John Frederick was defeated and captured at Mühlberg fighting for the Lutheran cause, and kept only their Thuringian lands, which they spent the next two centuries dividing among their sons. A duchy of Saxe-Weimar emerged from the divisions in 1572, and in 1741, when the Eisenach line died out, Weimar inherited Eisenach and the duchy took the name it has kept.

Luther made the Ernestines’ fortune before he made their misfortune. It was an Ernestine elector, Frederick the Wise, who had Luther seized on the road home from the Diet of Worms in May 1521 and hidden in the Wartburg, his castle above Eisenach, where for ten months, as a knight called Junker Jörg, Luther translated the New Testament from Greek into German. The translation made a German language out of a dozen dialects, and the Wartburg became, and is still, the place where the German language is said to have been born. It was the Ernestines’ loyalty to the Reformation that cost them the electorate twenty-six years later.

Anna Amalia and Carl August

The duchy’s classical age was made by a widow and her son. Duchess Anna Amalia, a Brunswick princess widowed at eighteen in 1758, governed the duchy as regent for her infant son for seventeen years, brought Wieland to Weimar to teach him, and collected the library that bears her name, with its rococo hall of 1766. Her son, Carl August, came of age in 1775 and in the same year invited a twenty-six-year-old lawyer and poet from Frankfurt, the author of a famous novel, to visit. Goethe came for a few weeks in November 1775 and stayed for fifty-seven years.

Goethe governed as well as wrote. Carl August made him a privy councillor, and over the following decade Goethe ran the duchy’s roads, its war commission, its mines at Ilmenau and, for a time, its finances, and he directed the court theatre from 1791 to 1817. Herder came as the duchy’s senior churchman in 1776, and Schiller, after ten years in Jena, settled in Weimar in 1799, a street from Goethe, and wrote his last plays there for Goethe’s theatre. When he died in 1805 Goethe said he had lost half his existence. The small residence of a few thousand people, with its two poets, its preacher, its library and its theatre, was by then the place that German-speaking Europe looked to for its literature, and its name had become a word for an idea.

Bach had been there first. Johann Sebastian Bach was court organist and concertmaster at Weimar from 1708 to 1717, and wrote much of his organ music for the palace chapel. When he asked to leave for a better post, the duke had him locked up for a month. Weimar tells the story against itself, and the plaque on the lock-up, which is in the old town and is now a café, says so.

1806 to 1815

The duchy was on the wrong side of Napoleon and survived it. On 14 October 1806 Napoleon destroyed the Prussian army at Jena and Auerstedt, and French troops sacked Weimar the same night, breaking into Goethe’s house, where he was saved by the woman he married five days later. Carl August, whose regiment had fought with the Prussians, made his peace, joined Napoleon’s Confederation of the Rhine, and spent the next seven years waiting for Napoleon to fall. At the Congress of Vienna in 1815 the duchy was rewarded for its patience: it was enlarged, given the rank of grand duchy, and Carl August became Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach in the restored Holy Roman Empire.

In 1816 Carl August gave the grand duchy one of the first constitutions in Germany. The Constitution of 1816 created a Landtag of the grand duchy’s estates, guaranteed the freedom of the press, and made the grand duchy, for a few years, the most liberal state in Germany. It is still in force, amended many times and democratised in 1919, and the grand duchy regards it as the second thing, after Goethe, that it gave Germany first.

The Wartburg Festival

On 18 October 1817 about five hundred students met at the Wartburg. They came from the German universities, many of them veterans of the wars against Napoleon, to mark the three-hundredth anniversary of the Reformation and the fourth of the battle of Leipzig, and they carried the black, red and gold of the volunteer corps they had served in. They made speeches for a united and free Germany and burned some reactionary books, and the princes of Germany, alarmed, spent the next thirty years suppressing the student fraternities. Carl August, who had allowed the festival, was rebuked by Vienna and refused to apologise.

Black, red and gold are still the students’ colours. The colours of 1817 became the colours of the liberal and national movement of the nineteenth century, and in this Germany, which was united in 1871 under the black, white and red of the Empire, they never became the national flag. They are the colours of the student fraternities and of the liberal tradition, and every October, on the anniversary, they fly from the Wartburg’s keep for a day.

Charles Frederick and Maria Pavlovna

Carl August’s son married the Tsar’s daughter. Charles Frederick, Grand Duke from 1828 to 1853, a kind and unremarkable man, had married in 1804 Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna of Russia, the daughter of Tsar Paul I, who brought to Weimar a fortune, a seriousness about charity, and an Orthodox faith she kept for the rest of her life. When she died in 1859 she was buried, at her wish, beside the princely vault, and her son built over her tomb a Russian Orthodox chapel, the only one in Thuringia, which is still served by a priest. It was the grand duchy’s tie to the Romanovs while they reigned, and to their exiled heirs after they fell; since the restoration of October 2028 it is a tie to a reigning house again.

Their daughters married well. Augusta, born in 1811, married Prince Wilhelm of Prussia in 1829 and was Queen of Prussia from 1861 and the first German Empress from 1871. Her elder sister Marie, born in 1808, married Wilhelm’s brother, Prince Carl of Prussia. Their youngest sister, born in 1823, was also christened Marie, as princely families of the time did not hesitate to do, and was called Mimi in the family to tell the two apart. In 1845 she married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the widower of Queen Victoria, who had come home to Coburg after the Queen’s murder, and through their son, Duke Albert II, and his granddaughter Princess Sibylla, Queen Christina and so George V descend from Albert and from Weimar. Weimar notices the connection, as Coburg does, quietly.

Carl Alexander and the silver age

Carl Alexander reigned for forty-eight years and gave Weimar a second age. Charles Frederick’s son, Grand Duke from 1853 to 1901, was a cultivated, earnest, slightly comic man who had known Goethe as a boy and spent his life trying to deserve him. He brought Franz Liszt to Weimar as court Kapellmeister, and from 1848 Liszt lived in the Altenburg, a house above the Ilm, and made Weimar the centre of the new music: he conducted the first performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin at the Court Theatre on 28 August 1850, Goethe’s birthday, with Wagner in exile and unable to attend, and he taught a generation of pianists in his music room for nothing. Carl Alexander founded an art school in 1860, restored the Wartburg from near ruin over thirty-seven years, and with his wife, Grand Duchess Sophie of the Netherlands, founded the Goethe Archive in 1885, when Goethe’s last grandson died and left the family’s papers to her. In the 1890s the archive of Friedrich Nietzsche came to Weimar with his sister, and the town added a philosopher to its poets.

In 1866 Carl Alexander tried neutrality and came in on Prussia’s side. He was a grandson of Tsar Paul and the brother-in-law of the King of Prussia, through his sister Augusta, and he spent a month in the war of 1866 trying to stay out of it, then sent the grand duchy’s small contingent to Prussia, as most of the Thuringian states did. The grand duchy entered the German Empire in 1871 as a constituent grand duchy, and its Grand Duke’s sister was the Empress.

Wilhelm Ernst

Wilhelm Ernst, Carl Alexander’s grandson, was stiff and disliked. He succeeded in 1901, at twenty-four, his father having died before his grandfather, and he was everything his grandfather had not been: a hunting, reactionary, quick-tempered prince who quarrelled with his theatre, his artists and his ministers, drove the art critic Count Harry Kessler out of Weimar, and regarded the modern art his own art school was teaching as an insult. He allowed the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde to found a school of arts and crafts in 1907 and spent the rest of his reign wishing he had not. In this Germany, which won the First Great War and had no revolution, he reigned until his death in April 1923 instead of abdicating in 1918, and the grand duchy remembers him as the price it paid for keeping its monarchy.

The grand duchy’s men went to the First Great War with the Thuringian division, and the grand duchy came out of it, like the rest of the Empire, victorious, poorer and democratised. The constitution of 1816 was amended in 1919 to make the Landtag sovereign and its government responsible to it, and to give women the vote, and in the same year Reformation Day, 31 October, became the grand duchy’s public holiday, at the demand of Eisenach’s members, who had threatened to vote against the amendment unless Luther got a day.

The Bauhaus, 1919 to 1925

In April 1919 Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in Weimar. He merged the art school of 1860 and van de Velde’s school of arts and crafts into a single school with a manifesto calling for a new guild of craftsmen and artists, and over the next six years its masters, among them Kandinsky, Klee, Feininger and Itten, made it the most radical school of art and design in Europe. Wilhelm Ernst approved its founding with ill grace, because the Landtag had voted the money. Weimar’s court, its old families, its craftsmen’s guilds and most of its newspapers hated it from the start, for its politics, its students, its sandals and its parties.

Grand Duchess Feodora closed it. Wilhelm Ernst died in April 1923, leaving a ten-year-old son, and his widow, Feodora, born a princess of Saxe-Meiningen, became Regent. She was a conservative and a devout one, and in the autumn of 1924, after the Bauhaus held a costume party in the grounds of the palace that the Regent watched from a window, she closed the school by decree, with effect from the following spring. Her ministers, who had wanted to close it for a year, countersigned. In 1925 Gropius moved the Bauhaus to Dessau, in the duchy of Anhalt, whose government built it a new home; it flourished there, and the Bauhaus tradition has been Anhalt’s ever since.

Weimar has had no art school since. The art school that Carl Alexander founded in 1860 ended with the Bauhaus, the regency made no attempt to replace it, and later governments, by the time they wished to, found that Weimar’s name and the word Bauhaus had become inseparable in a way that made any new school look like an apology. The grand duchy made the apology instead, ninety-four years later.

Carl August

Carl August reigned for sixty-five years, the longest reign of the house. He came of age in 1930, at eighteen, and reigned until his death in 1988, through the depression, the Second Great War and the long postwar peace, and he is remembered as the patron who made Weimar’s inheritance a national institution without letting the nation take it away. He rebuilt the stage and auditorium of the Court Theatre in the 1960s, founded the Weimar Festival of Liszt and Wagner in 1950, and in 1949, for the bicentenary of Goethe’s birth, persuaded the imperial government to found the Classical Foundation with the grand duchy. He never mentioned the Bauhaus in public. He had been twelve when his mother closed it.

In the Second Great War he served at the front. Carl August, twenty-seven in 1939, went with the Thuringian division to the western front and served with it throughout the war, and he was away from Weimar when the town fell. In December 1941 the French deep thrust that reached Berlin threw out a southern arm across Thuringia, and for three weeks Weimar and Eisenach were in French hands.

December 1941

The French found an empty archive. The Goethe and Schiller Archive had moved its manuscripts, Goethe’s and Schiller’s papers, the drafts of Faust and the letters, into the old mine galleries near Jena in 1939, and when the French officers who had been sent to secure them walked into the manuscript room in the archive on the hill above the Ilm, they found the shelves bare. A French war photographer took a picture of them standing in it. The photograph, of four officers in greatcoats looking at empty shelves, is the grand duchy’s image of the war, and every year in December the archive keeps the room empty for a day.

Jena’s works stopped themselves. The engineers of the Zeiss and Schott works, warned a day ahead, disabled the lens-grinding lines and walked out, taking the key parts with them, and the French found a factory they could not run. In Eisenach the car works’ machine tools were loaded on French trains in the last week, and the trains never left the yard. The German counter-attack retook Eisenach and Weimar in the first week of January 1942, and the French went back the way they had come.

The postwar grand duchy

The grand duchy did well out of the long peace. Jena’s optical works grew into the second pole of German precision optics, the Eisenach car works built small cars for BMW in their tens of thousands, and Weimar became, with the Classical Foundation’s money, the best-kept small town in Germany. The Weimar Festival brought Liszt and Wagner back to the Court Theatre each summer from 1950. The grand duchy’s government outgrew the old Fürstenhaus, which had been its Landtag since 1848 and which the Foundation would not give up, and the Landtag moved in the 1970s to a new building outside the old town, which Weimar thinks is the ugliest building in the grand duchy and visitors never see.

Georg reigned from 1988 to 2004, quietly. Carl August’s son, born in 1937, had served twenty-five years in the imperial army and retired a colonel, and as Grand Duke he was a soldier, a quiet one, and a gardener: he restored the park and orangery of the Belvedere, the small baroque summer palace on the hill south of Weimar where the house lives, much of it himself, and was most often photographed in its greenhouses. He died in June 2004.

The fire

On 2 September 2004 the Duchess Anna Amalia Library burned. A fire that started in the roof of the library’s eighteenth-century building spread through the upper floors before it could be controlled, and about 50,000 books were lost and tens of thousands more damaged by fire and water; the rococo hall on the lower floors was saved, and so was the Luther Bible of 1534, which a librarian carried out through the smoke. The new Grand Duke, Carl Bernhard, who had worked in the library for twelve years until his accession three months before, came that night and stood in the courtyard in the ash with the staff he had worked with, and the photograph of him there, in a borrowed fireman’s coat, is the image of the first year of his reign. The restored library reopened in 2007, and replacing the lost books is still the Foundation’s longest work.

2019 and after

In 2019 the grand duchy apologised to the Bauhaus. For the centenary of its founding Carl Bernhard opened a Bauhaus museum in Weimar, the first institution in the town to carry the name since 1925, in the presence of the Duke of Anhalt, and said his one sentence. Dessau sent a delegation, Weimar’s newspapers printed the sentence on their front pages, and the grand duchy has been noticeably more relaxed about the subject since.

The grand duchy’s part in the year of the regencies was small and correct. When Heinrich I died suddenly in February, Carl Bernhard walked at his funeral in Berlin among the German princes. The Goethe reading of 28 August was cancelled for the mourning. When Kittyhawk, the flight carrying King Ernest V, was lost east of Newfoundland in September, the Grand Duke wrote privately to Queen Christina, as head of the house from which she descends through Albert’s second wife; nothing about the letter was made public. In October the grand duchy’s vote in the Bundesrat went with every other state’s for the amendment that abolished the imperial Regency Council. And on 26 October, the day after Russia proclaimed Paul II its Emperor, Carl Bernhard wrote to congratulate him, and the priest of the Russian chapel in Weimar rang its bell.

The Grand Dukes

The house

The house of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach is the senior line of the Ernestine Wettins, and its Grand Dukes are the cousins, at a remove of five centuries, of the Kings of Saxony, the Dukes of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and the other Ernestine sovereigns. It has reigned in Weimar since 1572, and its patronage, of Bach, of Wieland, of Goethe and Schiller, of Liszt, and briefly and unwillingly of the Bauhaus, is the reason the grand duchy is what it is. The succession is by male-preference primogeniture. With one son in the house, the Landtag has never been asked to change it.

Carl Bernhard

Grand Duke Carl Bernhard is called the librarian, with affection. He was born in 1962 at Weimar, named Carl for the house’s great patron and Bernhard for the soldier-prince of the house who fought at Waterloo, and he trained as a librarian and a historian of the book at Jena and Leipzig. For twelve years before his accession he worked at the Duchess Anna Amalia Library, in its department of early printed books, under his own name and on the library’s pay scale, and he was cataloguing a collection of sixteenth-century Bibles when his father died. Three months later the library burned.

He reigns quietly. He signs what the Staatsminister advises, opens the Landtag after each election, receives the Staatsminister on Tuesdays, and represents the grand duchy among the Empire’s sovereigns. He answers the Classical Foundation’s letters himself, and he is in the library’s reading room most Thursdays, at a desk by the window, reading, which the staff and the readers are trained not to notice. As formal governor of the grand duchy’s Lutheran church he confirms what its synod decides. He is the only Ernestine sovereign who goes to a football derby, and he goes to every one.

He is a widower. In 1994, at the Weimar Festival, he met Countess Ingrid Lindenkrone, of an old comital family of Funen in Denmark, a music teacher, and they married in 1996 in the Herder church, under Cranach’s altarpiece, with the court orchestra playing Bach. They had no child for twelve years. In 2008 their son was born, and Grand Duchess Ingrid died at his birth, at forty-one. She is buried in the princely vault. Carl Bernhard raised their son alone at the Belvedere, and has said, in the one interview he has given on the subject, that he will not marry again.

The heir

Hereditary Grand Duke Carl Alexander, born in 2008, is twenty and studies physics at Jena. He is shy, refuses interviews, and cycles the twenty kilometres from the Belvedere to the university most days, in all weathers, which the grand duchy finds admirable and his father’s security officers do not. He was photographed once at an FC Carl Zeiss match, in a scarf, and has not been photographed at one since, though he still goes.

Geography

The grand duchy is scattered across Thuringia in three main pieces and several exclaves, about 3,600 square kilometres in all, as the Congress of Vienna left it. The largest piece, around Weimar, Jena and Apolda, lies in the eastern Thuringian basin and the valleys of the Ilm and the Saale. The western piece, around Eisenach, lies on the north-western edge of the Thuringian Forest, with the Wartburg on its ridge above the town and the Werra valley below. The eastern piece, around Neustadt an der Orla, lies on the uplands towards the Reuss principalities. Between and around them lie the Prussian district of Erfurt, the duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha’s Gotha half, the two Schwarzburg principalities and Saxe-Altenburg, and in the Thuringian Forest the grand duchy holds exclaves, the largest of them around Ilmenau.

The map is the reason for the Thuringian treaties. No state with territory in so many pieces could run its own higher courts, broadcasting and administration economically, and the grand duchy has been the strongest supporter of the treaties by which the Thuringian states share them. The common Thuringian court of appeal sits at Jena, in the grand duchy, and the common Thuringian broadcaster is based at Weimar, which the other states accepted because Weimar was the one place nobody could object to.

The towns. Jena has about 110,000 people, Weimar about 75,000, Eisenach about 45,000; then Apolda, Ilmenau and Neustadt. The rest of the grand duchy’s 650,000 people live in small towns and villages, in farmland on the basin and forest villages in the hills. Erfurt, the largest city in Thuringia, is twenty kilometres west of Weimar and Prussian, and a good part of the grand duchy commutes to it.

Government and politics

The constitution of 1816

The grand duchy is governed under the constitution Carl August granted in 1816, one of the first in Germany, as amended many times since and democratised in 1919. It provides for the Grand Duke, who reigns by inheritance and acts on his ministers’ advice; for the Landtag; for the government under a Staatsminister; and for the Lutheran church, of which the Grand Duke is the formal governor. Its article on the freedom of the press, the article for which Vienna rebuked Carl August in 1819, is still in it in its original words.

The Landtag

The Landtag has sixty members, elected for four years by proportional representation, and sits in Weimar in the building it moved to in the 1970s, outside the old town. Its debates are conducted in standard German until they become heated, when they slip into Thuringian, which most of the grand duchy still speaks and which its stenographers have long since stopped trying to render. The last election was in 2025 and the next is due in 2029.

The SPD is the party of Jena’s works and Eisenach’s, and the larger party in the grand duchy since 1919. The National Liberals are the party of Weimar’s old bourgeoisie, of the Foundation’s staff and of the professions, and have led a good many of the grand duchy’s governments. The FVP is strongest among Jena’s academics, the DKP in the forest villages, the Zentrum in the few Catholic parishes, and the USPD in Jena’s and Apolda’s older works.

The Staatsminister

The head of the government is the Staatsminister, the grand duchy’s historic title for its chief minister and the office Goethe held in Carl August’s council, kept for that reason when most of the other states adopted Minister-President. The Staatsminister is elected by the Landtag and leads a cabinet of six.

Since 2020 the Staatsminister has been Klaus-Dieter Ruhland, of the SPD, who leads a grand coalition of the SPD and the National Liberals with 36 of the 60 seats, as the grand duchy has often been governed. He was born in 1960 at Eisenach and went into the car works’ press shop at sixteen, became its foreman, and came into the Landtag for Eisenach in 2004. In 2020 his predecessor, an SPD Staatsminister from Jena, retired through ill health in the middle of the term, and the Landtag elected Ruhland in his place; he won the elections of 2021 and 2025 in his own right. He is a fixer, a union negotiator who governs by deal and is at his best across a table from BMW, and the grand duchy, which has had a good many literary Staatsminister, rather likes having one who is not.

His deputy is Dr Henrike Vogt, of the National Liberals, the minister for finance and culture, a former director of the Goethe House, who deals with the Classical Foundation and with Berlin, and is the coalition’s Goethe to Ruhland’s press shop.

The car works

The grand duchy’s live argument is where BMW builds its next car. BMW, which has owned the Eisenach car works since 1928, must decide by the spring whether its next small electric car is built at Eisenach or in Bavaria, and about four thousand jobs at the Wartburg works, and a good many more in the supply firms of the western grand duchy, depend on the answer. Ruhland, who worked in the press shop for twenty-eight years, has made the decision his whole term, and has been to Munich more often than to Berlin. He will stand again at the election of 2029, and everyone in the grand duchy agrees that the election will turn on whether the next car comes to Eisenach.

The grand duchy in the Empire

The grand duchy casts one vote in the Bundesrat, the smallest weight there is, and its influence in the Empire comes from elsewhere: from the Classical Foundation, which makes the imperial government a partner in Weimar’s business; from Jena’s science; and from the plain fact that nobody in Germany wishes to be seen arguing with Goethe’s town. It is the strongest supporter of the Thuringian treaties, and its relations with Prussia, whose district of Erfurt lies between its pieces, are close, practical and, at football, adversarial.

Economy

Jena

Jena is the grand duchy’s engine. The optical works of Carl Zeiss and the glassworks of Otto Schott, founded in 1846 and 1884 and owned since 1889 by the Carl Zeiss Foundation that Ernst Abbe set up to own them, never split or moved, employ about 12,000 people in Jena and make microscopes, lenses, medical and scientific instruments and optical glass. They are important to German industry and not indispensable to it, and they are, with the university, the reason Jena has outgrown Weimar. Around them the town’s research institutes, its medical-technology firms and its optical start-ups make it one of the richest towns in Thuringia. The works also built the oldest projection planetarium still running, opened in Jena in 1926.

Eisenach

The Wartburg works at Eisenach build BMW’s small cars. The car works was founded in 1896, built its first car, which it named the Wartburg, in 1898, and was bought in 1928 by BMW, which has kept it ever since. It builds the firm’s small cars and engines, with a Wartburg badge on the sill of every car that leaves the line, a condition of the sale of 1928 that BMW has honoured for a century. The works employ about four thousand people, and the future of the line is the grand duchy’s main political question.

Weimar and the visitors

Weimar lives on its inheritance and on the government. About four million visitors a year come to Weimar’s classical sites, and the town’s hotels, restaurants, shops and guides live on them. The rest of Weimar’s living is the grand duchy’s administration, the Thuringian broadcaster, the Liszt Academy and the Classical Foundation itself, which employs about a thousand people. The onion market each October and the festival each summer fill the town twice more.

Apolda and the rest

Apolda makes bells and knitwear, Ilmenau has its technical university and the instrument firms that grew up around it, and the countryside grows grain and sugar beet on the basin and timber in the forest.

Output

The grand duchy’s output is about A£56.6 billion, about A£87,000 a head, a little above the Empire’s average of A£84,000. Jena is well above it, Eisenach about at it, and Weimar’s visitors and the farming countryside below it. The grand duchy is a small net recipient of the equalisation between states, which it attributes to the cost of looking after Goethe.

Society

Population

About 650,000 people live in the grand duchy, a figure that has grown slowly and steadily for a century with Jena’s science and Eisenach’s industry, and faster since the 1990s as Jena’s institutes and firms drew researchers from across the Empire and beyond. Jena is younger than the rest of the grand duchy by about ten years on average, and Weimar older, and the forest villages older still.

Speech

The grand duchy speaks Thuringian, and means it. Standard German is the language of the schools and the government, and Weimar claims, with no evidence and great confidence, that Goethe invented it. At home, in the market and in the Landtag when the debate is going badly, most of the grand duchy speaks Thuringian, the soft, rounded dialect of the basin, which in Weimar takes a polish from the court and in Eisenach a Hessian edge from the west. It is stronger here than in most of the Thuringian states, and the fourteens, who come from every corner of Germany, go home having understood one word in three of what the woman who sold them their ice cream said.

Religion

The grand duchy is the heartland of the Lutheran Reformation, and is now about half Lutheran. The Evangelical Lutheran Church of the grand duchy, of which the Grand Duke is formal governor, has its seat at Weimar’s town church, the church of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, which everyone calls the Herder church after the preacher who served it for twenty-seven years. About half the grand duchy belongs to it; a small Catholic minority lives in a few parishes, and a large and growing number, about two-fifths, belong to no church. The Wartburg is a pilgrimage for Lutherans from all over the world, and Eisenach on Reformation Day is full of Swedes, Finns and Americans.

Education

The University of Jena is the Ernestine states’ university. Founded in 1558, it has been maintained since its foundation by the Ernestine duchies together, and it still is: the grand duchy, Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Saxe-Meiningen and Saxe-Altenburg pay for it in shares fixed by treaty, the grand duchy as its seat paying the largest, and the four Ernestine sovereigns are its joint rectors, a title that obliges them to attend its matriculation once in each reign and do nothing else. It is one of the Empire’s great universities, strongest in the sciences, in optics and in philosophy, and it is where the grand duchy’s heir studies.

Weimar has music and no art. The Franz Liszt Academy of Music, founded in 1872 on Liszt’s initiative as an orchestral school, is one of the leading conservatories in the Empire and the grand duchy’s second university, and among its students is Prince Ernst of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. The technical university at Ilmenau, founded in 1894, teaches engineering close to the Jena works. Weimar has had no art school since 1925.

Culture

The Court Theatre

The Grand Ducal Court Theatre is the house Goethe ran. He directed it from 1791 to 1817, staged Schiller’s plays in it, and gave German acting its first set of rules in it, and it stands on the theatre square behind the statue of the two poets. It is still the Court Theatre, Hoftheater, and the Classical Foundation runs it. It opens every season with Goethe or Schiller, plays opera and drama in repertory, and is booked out from September to June by school parties from all over the Empire, who are given the cheap seats at the top, where Goethe could not see them.

Music

Music is Weimar’s second inheritance and nearly its first. The court orchestra, the Staatskapelle, was founded in 1491 and is one of the oldest orchestras in the world; Bach played in it, Liszt conducted it, and Richard Strauss was its conductor in the 1890s. The Liszt Academy teaches in term and the Weimar Festival, which Carl August founded in 1950, plays Liszt and Wagner in the Court Theatre each July and August. It was at the festival of 1994 that the present Grand Duke met his wife.

The classical houses

Goethe’s house on the Frauenplan is the most visited private house in Germany. He lived in it from 1782 until his death in 1832, and it is kept as he left it: the yellow front rooms where he received visitors and showed his collections, the plain study at the back with its standing desk, and the small bedroom with the armchair in which he died, asking, the story goes, for more light. About a million people pass through it each year, a few at a time, in felt overshoes. His garden house across the park on the Ilm, where he lived for his first six years in Weimar, is smaller, plainer and preferred by everyone who has seen both.

The rest of classical Weimar is a walk of a mile. Schiller’s house, where he wrote Wilhelm Tell and died in the attic room, is a street from Goethe’s. The Wittumspalais, Anna Amalia’s dower house, kept her Friday evenings, at which the duchy’s poets read and its princes listened. The Duchess Anna Amalia Library, in a sixteenth-century palace by the park, has its rococo hall of 1766, three storeys of white and gold galleries around an oval, with Goethe, who was its director for thirty-five years, in marble at one end. Outside the town lie the summer palaces of Belvedere, where the Grand Duke lives, and Tiefurt, where Anna Amalia held her summer court, and the hunting lodge on the Ettersberg, the wooded hill north of the town where Goethe walked and where an oak he is said to have sat under still stands, propped on iron. The fourteens are walked round all of it in a morning.

Jena’s thinkers

Jena is where German philosophy was made around 1800. In the dozen years either side of 1800 the small university town held, at the same time or in quick succession, Schiller, who lectured on history to five hundred students on his first night; Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, who between them made German idealism; the Schlegel brothers and Novalis, who made German Romanticism in a house in the town; and Goethe, who rode over from Weimar to supervise the university and the botanical garden. Hegel finished the Phenomenology of Spirit in Jena as the armies gathered in October 1806, and saw Napoleon ride through the town the day before the battle. The town is proud of all of them and reads none of them.

The Wartburg

The Wartburg is a Luther shrine and a state castle. It stands on its ridge above Eisenach, a medieval castle of the Landgraves of Thuringia, restored by Carl Alexander in the nineteenth century, and it keeps three stories. In its hall the minstrels of the thirteenth century are said to have held the contest that Wagner made into Tannhäuser. In its chapel and its frescoes it keeps the memory of Saint Elisabeth of Hungary, the landgrave’s wife who gave away her husband’s bread to the poor. And in a small panelled room, with a stove and a writing desk, it keeps Luther’s room, where he translated the New Testament in 1521 and 1522 and, the story goes, threw his inkpot at the devil. The ink stain on the wall has been renewed by visitors’ penknives so often that the castle keeps a pot of ink for the purpose and has done for two centuries.

Cranach’s altarpiece

The town church keeps the grand duchy’s great painting. Lucas Cranach the Elder, the painter of the Reformation, spent the last year of his life in Weimar with his Ernestine patrons and died there in 1553, and his son finished the altarpiece he had begun for the town church in 1555. It shows the crucifixion, and beneath the cross, among the figures of the Gospel, stand Luther, holding his open Bible, and Cranach himself, with a stream of blood from Christ’s side falling on his head. Herder preached under it for twenty-seven years, the present Grand Duke was married under it, and the fourteens are brought to stand in front of it and told to look for the painter, and most of them find him.

The princely vault

Goethe and Schiller lie among the Dukes. The Fürstengruft, the princely vault in Weimar’s historic cemetery, built in the 1820s for the ducal house, holds the coffins of Goethe and Schiller in oak, side by side, among the Grand Dukes and Duchesses, as Carl August wished; every Grand Duke since, down to Georg in 2004, and Grand Duchess Ingrid in 2008, is buried there with them. Beside it stands the Russian chapel over Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna’s tomb, with its gilded domes and its Orthodox priest, where from 2019 the head of the exiled house of Romanov, who became Emperor of Russia in October 2028 as Paul II, came each year on the feast of Saint Mary Magdalene, her patron, to whom the chapel is dedicated.

The onion market

Each October Weimar holds an onion market, the Zwiebelmarkt, three days of stalls hung with plaits of onions and garlic, onion tart and onion beer, which the town has held every year since 1653. It is the one event in Weimar’s calendar that has nothing to do with Goethe, though the posters always show him, because he is said to have bought an onion plait every year, and because in Weimar nothing goes on the posters without him.

Food

The grand duchy eats Thuringian. Its dishes are the Thuringian sausage, grilled over charcoal and served in a roll with mustard; Thuringian dumplings, the round potato dumplings that every grandmother in the grand duchy believes she alone makes correctly; and onion tart, at the onion market. Weimar’s restaurants serve what Goethe is said to have eaten, which is a menu invented in the 1950s.

Football

The grand duchy’s club is FC Carl Zeiss Jena, the works club of the optical works, which plays in the imperial second division. Its derby is with Rot-Weiß Erfurt, twenty minutes away across the Prussian line, and in the grand duchy the derby means one thing: it is the one occasion each season when a small Thuringian state gets to beat Prussia at something. The Grand Duke goes to every one. He is the only Ernestine sovereign who attends a derby, which the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, who has never attended his own, regards as a breach of the Ernestine family’s dignity and has said so in a letter.

Memory

The empty archive

The grand duchy’s image of the Second Great War is an empty room. For three weeks in December 1941 the French held Weimar and Eisenach, and the photograph of four French officers standing in the bare manuscript room of the Goethe and Schiller Archive, whose shelves had been emptied into the mines near Jena two years before, is the picture the grand duchy keeps of the war. Each December the archive empties the room for a day, and visitors are let in to stand where the officers stood.

The Bauhaus

The grand duchy remembers the Bauhaus as its mistake. It has said so since 2019, at its Grand Duke’s insistence and with visible relief, and the Bauhaus museum in Weimar, which opened that year, is the only museum in the town not run by the Classical Foundation. Weimar’s guides now tell the story of the costume party and the Regent’s decree with the brisk candour of a family telling the story of an uncle, and the line from Carl Bernhard’s speech is printed on the museum’s door.

The library

The fire of 2004 is the grand duchy’s own memory. The Duchess Anna Amalia Library burned on 2 September 2004, three months into the present reign, and the grand duchy remembers the night for the Grand Duke in the courtyard, the librarian with the Luther Bible, and the townspeople who formed a chain to pass books out of the burning building by hand. The restored library reopened in 2007. The burned books are still being replaced, one at a time, by gift and purchase, and every replacement is entered in a ledger that the Grand Duke signs.

Symbols

The flag is black, yellow and green, in three horizontal bands, as it has been since the nineteenth century; the state flag adds the grand-ducal arms. The arms are the Saxon arms of the Ernestine house, the bars of black and gold crossed by the green crown of rue that the grand duchy shares with the other Ernestine states and the Kingdom of Saxony, quartered with the striped lion of Thuringia and the black lion of Meissen, under the grand-ducal crown. Black, red and gold, the students’ colours of 1817, fly from the Wartburg’s keep once a year and are not the grand duchy’s.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• German Empire, of which the grand duchy is a constituent state
• Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the Ernestine duchy into which the grand duchy’s Princess Marie married
• Kingdom of Saxony, the Albertine kingdom that shares the Saxon arms
• Christina II of Sweden, who descends from Weimar through Marie
• Paul II, who came to the Russian chapel in Weimar each year as head of his house
• Heinrich I, whose mourning cancelled the Goethe reading of 2028

Categories

Nations of the World · The German Empire · Constituent states · Thuringia · Weimar · Jena · Eisenach