Weimar: Goethe, Bratwurst, and the Road to Buchenwald
Weimar is a city of contradictions, and it knows it. This is where Goethe wrote Faust and where Schiller finished his great historical dramas. Where the Bauhaus school was founded in 1919 by Walter Gropius, just weeks before the Weimar Republic was established in the same city. Where Germany’s democratic experiment between the wars took its name. And eight kilometers up the Ettersberg hill, in the beech forest above the town: Buchenwald. The city that produced Germany’s highest culture sits in the immediate shadow of one of its worst crimes, and the distance between the two—geographically, morally—is the central fact of Weimar.
The Town
The center of Weimar is compact and genuinely elegant. Neoclassical buildings line cobblestone streets. Goethe’s house is on a quiet lane off the main square, preserved as it was when he lived there. Schiller’s house is a short walk away. The Bauhaus Museum sits near the Platz der Demokratie, which is named for the republic that was born here and died at the hands of the movement that would build Buchenwald. Students on bicycles weave between tour groups. It felt like a university town that also happened to be a monument to itself—which, in a sense, it was.
In the market square, I found the most Thuringian thing possible: a bratwurst stand with a giant fiberglass bratwurst sculpture mounted on the roof and a sign declaring itself “die wahrscheinlich köstlichste Bratwurst der Welt”—probably the most delicious bratwurst in the world. I ordered one. The Thüringer Rostbratwurst is a regional specialty, made with pork and marjoram, grilled over charcoal in a split roll. It was, in fact, excellent. It felt important to note that: a beautiful afternoon, good food, people sitting in the sun in Weimar’s market square, Goethe’s house around the corner. The bratwurst stand was not in spite of the history. It was part of the same city.
The Buchenwald Soviet Memorial
After lunch, the mood shifted. The road climbed out of Weimar and into the beech forest toward Buchenwald. Before reaching the camp itself, the group stopped at the Soviet Memorial—a massive monumental complex built by the East German government in 1958. The GDR was not subtle about memorialization: the approach to the memorial is a long processional avenue flanked by stone figures, leading up terraced steps to a bell tower at the summit. The scale is deliberately overwhelming.
The memorial incorporates mass graves—long depressions in the hillside where prisoners who died at Buchenwald are buried. Stone bowls mark the grave sites. Stone relief panels depict prisoner suffering, resistance, and liberation. The figures are idealized in the socialist realist tradition: muscular, determined, looking toward the future. The memorial reflects a specific political interpretation of what Buchenwald meant. The East German government emphasized communist, labor movement, and Soviet prisoners—figures who fit the GDR’s self-narrative as the inheritors of anti-fascist resistance. The Jewish victims who made up a significant portion of Buchenwald’s dead were largely absent from this framing.
This is not a minor historiographical point. It shapes what visitors are taught to see and remember. A memorial is an argument about the past, not a transparent window onto it. The Soviet Memorial at Buchenwald is a powerful and moving place; it is also a Cold War document. Both things are true simultaneously, and holding that complexity was one of the first lessons the trip gave me about how memory works.
Standing at the top of the memorial, looking out over the Thuringian countryside, I could see Weimar in the distance. The market square was down there. Goethe’s house was down there. The bratwurst stand was down there. And up here, the mass graves of people who died in a camp that the city of Weimar could smell when the wind was right. The proximity was not incidental. It was the whole question. Tomorrow: the camp itself.
