Weimar has always appealed to people who were in search of meaning – of thought, of intellectuality. I mean, it’s mostly associated with Goethe and Schiller, those two sort of national poets of Germany who worked and lived there, especially Goethe, who I would say perhaps has this sort of status of almost Shakespeare in the English-speaking world to most Germans. And then later on you get composers like Liszt and Bach and philosophers like Nietzsche. It’s sort of a who’s who of European thought. They all have touch points in Weimar because it’s got this reputation as being the cultural heart of the country. So that’s not a coincidence when they go there in 1919 to found the new German Republic in Weimar and not Berlin. It’s partially because it’s safer and they don’t really feel safe in Berlin to meet and to draft the constitution. But also because of this intellectual history to rebrand the entire republic. So when Hitler later on comes in, it’s exactly the same thing that draws him to Weimar. It’s this idea of whoever controls Weimar controls German thought and intellectuality; and rebranding the space with his own thought was a very, very conscious decision.

In our latest podcast episode, a German historian discusses her new book on Weimar.