when in Weimar

A couple of weeks ago I made a trip down to Weimar with the International Office Coordinators and international students. Weimar - the place of Goethe, Schiller, Franz Liszt, Wassily Kandinsky, Walter Gropius, National Socialist propaganda and of course the Bauhaus - the most important art school in Germany at the time, founded with the idea of creating a "total" work of art in which all arts, including architecture, would eventually be brought together. A style that became one of the most influential currents in modern design and Modernist architecture, as well as the art, design and architectural education. First founded in Weimar, it was later relocated to Dessau and we made a stop there to indulge in the overload of great architecture. Not only did we walk around the hallways of the Bauhaus School, eat in the canteen, entered the office of Mr Gropius and hanged out in the students private rooms, we also got introduced to the Masters' Houses - imagine; every teacher got assigned their own house, all in a true Bauhaus style, except for the interior of house Kandinsky where actual golden walls were put up as a backdrop to old style furnitures and big carpets. My kind of house.

After the Dessau stop, we got back on the route to Weimar were we continued in the footsteps of the Bauhaus movement but added a little history of Goethe, Schiller and the Nazis to the to-do-list.

Weimar is a pretty dull place after dark. A beautiful, but dull place. We saw the theatre glowing in sparkling lights buzzing with life and movement, but as the doors opened and people started to spill out on to the little town square, in a second they were all dissolved and on their way home leaving the little town dark and quite behind. Through some inside information we found one local pub that was filled with action, after we had filled our stomachs with crêpes at the local créperie - no sturdy german food for this group of students. 

The last evening in Weimar, I ended up in a true local bar where a jug of beer was handed to me at the measly cost of 1 euro. There the bar lady acted as a shepherd gathering her herd close to her, providing them with beer, good laughs and a lot of gossip. 

Mechanically opened windows.

Luckily we got a guided tour of the newly opened New Masterhouse Gropius, done by BFM Architekten, where the Kurt-Weill-Centre will house from now on. The Masterhouse was destroyed during the WWII and now rebuilt in a most sensible way. Totally in awe of the place. 

On a more tragic note. Buchenwald Concentration Camp is situated just in the outskirts of Weimar. A strategically well-thought-through position - the first concentration camp during the WWII that was actually applied for. So we got on a bus and drove the 7km to the place where 250 000 people were kept prisoners, without the knowing of the inhabitants of Weimar - or so they claimed. It was my first visit to a concentration camp. Enough said. 

A steel slab on the grounds of Buchenwald engraved with the names of fifty-one national groups that were victimized there. The slab is set at a constant 37 degrees Celsius, to suggest the body heat of those whose memory it would enshrine. In winter, with snow covering the rest of the ground, the slab is always clear, an all-season marker for the site of the original attempt to commemorate the crimes of Buchenwald.