Part 8: The "Janus-headed city"

Part 8: The "Janus-headed city"

Wednesday 6 August 2003: Bus number 6 goes to Buchenwald.

We took a taxi to the Eisenach Hauptbahnohof from the Hotel Am Bachhaus. I had made all kinds of virtuous plans to find hotels within walking distance of the train stations, but the heat was getting to us, and we had learned that while the distance was *just* manageable carrying only a day-tripper's supplies, the idea of trundling our luggage there was too much.

Europe -- or Germany, at any rate, has a wonderful secret that I will ask all of you not to reveal. The train stations still have luggage lockers! That greatly facilitates last-minute sight-seeing, and here in Eisenach we had by no means seen all there was to see. Fortunately the Romanesque Nikolaitor, the only one of the city gates still standing, is right there near the train station, and Jay commissioned me to go use up the card in my camera. That was easy to do; the gate is attached to the Nikolaikirche and leads to the Karlsplatz, a square in the center of which is a statue of Martin Luther showing scenes from his life -- including those that took place right here in Eisenach.

Then we were off to Weimar, passing once again through Gotha (sorry, my Buckingham Palace friends) and Erfurt. Here I was determined to test the walkability of the distance to our hotel, and the shaded, broad, classic-architecture-lined Karl-August Allee leading downhill from the station looked quite manageable, so Jay grumbled only briefly before giving in.

At midpoint along that trek, Jay pointed out an "interesting building" off to our left. I noted it too -- interesting indeed, but far from beautiful, and somehow sinister. It had columns, like a classic building would, but they were severely unadorned.

By the time we had maneuvered around the cobblestoned plaza by the Neues Museum and gotten entangled in the much smaller and, oddly, less shaded streets of the oldest part of the city, to find at last the tiny Rollgasse leading to the Rollplatz, whereon stood the Hotel Zur Sonne, my feet were beginning to resent my environmental conscience.

The proprietor, when I made our reservation, had tried to steer us to a hotel that had just opened in May because he did not have a room on all the days I was asking for. But I checked its location on the map and informed him that it was much farther from the train station than we needed to be, and besides I had made a mistake on the dates, so could he accommodate us after all? And he could. In retrospect -- knowing that we were taking a taxi back to the station after all -- I'm a bit sorry not to have taken his suggestion, because the Hotel Am Frauenplan is right across the plaza from the Goethe Wohnhaus; a wonderful location.

Zur Sonne, on the Rollplatz, is actually in the oldest part of the city and is opposite the Jacobikirche, which among other things hosts the graves of Lucas Cranach the Elder and of Johann Gottfried Walther, second cousin and friend of Johann Sebastian Bach, and organist and court musician at Weimar from 1707 until his death in 1748. But the square is essentially a municipal parking lot, and the charms that would be played up in another city more starved for attractions than is Weimar are neglected here; the big action in Weimar moved southward beyond the street called Graben -- i.e., across the moat that once encircled the city walls -- to the neighborhoods occupied first by Goethe, then Schiller, and Liszt, and Herder, and all the rest.

After we checked in and rested a bit, we set out to explore. My first goal was to see the Goethe Haus, but we were first startled to see a restaurant called "Texas," and then a horse-drawn wagon full of tourists rolling by it on the cobblestones. We worried about the horses in the heat. Then we saw a bookstore, and unaccustomed as I was to my new backpack, I managed to wreak some damage on one of the book displays. The proprietor was not pleased, but refused to accept any payment as he muttered his way to putting them back in order.

But finally we did get to the square called the Frauenplan, and there we were relieved to see that the horse-drawn wagon had emptied itself of its tourists and the horses were receiving a cooling sponge bath from their caring owner. I wasn't quite sure which of the buildings on the other side of the square counted as Goethe's house -- would it be that large yellow one, or the brownish one to its left? But we photographed the horse with the yellow house in the background, then progressed to find the entrance to the Goethe house. It turns out that both of them were it! The entrance and ticket counter and coat check and souvenir/bookstore were in the brown portion, but the main dwelling was in the large yellow one.

I began to understand the virtues of gaining the favor of a wealthy and powerful patroness -- in this case, Anna Amalia, dowager Duchess of Saxe-Weimar, whose long reign beginning in 1758 is credited with engendering the Golden Age of German culture in tiny Weimar. The rooms in this commodious dwelling that made the biggest impression on me were the study and adjoining library. The library had *rows* of bookshelves, like stacks in a public or university library, and they were only a few steps from the magnificent desk that I fancied would even be able to manage all the stuff that's depressing me right here in my own study because it lacks any space in which to array its spines.

Well. With that kind of facilities (and a charming garden to retire to at need), no wonder the man was able to produce works of genius. Later we went to Schiller's house, a much more modest establishment (although by no means a slum). I was intrigued by a book title that said something like "Unsre arme Schiller" -- our poor Schiller -- and it pointed out that while Goethe was given his spacious accommodations by a munificent aristocrat, Schiller had to pay for his own real-estate needs. Even with the successes he did have, he died sick from overwork and broke, and was initially buried in a pauper's grave until someone rescued his remains and buried them (after first building a crypt in the churchyard at Jacobikirche that was never occupied and remains there empty to this day), finally, in the Grand-ducal crypt wherein Goethe also was laid.

My mind was occupied, as we wandered around this distracting kaleidoscope of a city, with the limited time we had, not only for Weimar but for Leipzig, where we would do a daytrip by train the next day. One of the potential destinations that must be considered by any visitor to Weimar, and especially one who is Jewish, as is Jay, is Buchenwald. I had prepared him for the possibility before we left home, leaving it up to him whether we would go there or not. So when we did get to Weimar I asked him his wishes, and he said, yes, he wanted to go (it's hard to find the appropriate verb in that case -- maybe "needed" would be more like it). But we bustled around from place to place, and when I asked a waitress about streetcars to Buchenwald, she said, Weimar only has buses (which I realized was true), but yes, there were buses to Buchenwald. So I checked the routes on route maps, and I *think* I'm remembering correctly that it was number 6 that went directly to that tragic site, departing from right around the corner from our hotel. Jay sensed, however, that I was feeling a little stressed at trying to fit everything in, and he said, look, if it's going to put a crimp in our day he'd rather we didn't go. And, he said, he doesn't really need to feel depressed.

We went on about our rounds, then, going to the park on the Ilm where Goethe's "Gartenhaus" is located, passing by the Liszt Hochschule für Musik on the way there (and hearing someone practicing the piano and wishing I had the skill to turn on the microphone in my camera). Someone has said of Weimar that it's a park in which someone chanced to build a city, and the greenery leading to Goethe's house (yes, when life in his spacious mansion with its beautiful garden became too stressful he had this quiet refuge to escape to, only a mile or so from home -- do I sound just the least bit envious or anything here? Sorry...) is a large part of that definition.
The existing summerhouse is a reconstruction, and after we visited it I was at a loss to understand why the silly Michelin Green Guide gives it two stars -- "worth a detour." There are no doubt aspects of Goethe's life and work that I have not become familiar with (sorry, dear Frau Professors Bender!) that imbue the place with meaning that does not immediately greet the eye. But from there I had another walk in mind -- northward through the park and then to a residential neighborhood, where the map shows a Jewish cemetery. I thought this might serve as a gesture for the lost visit to Buchenwald. The route seemed unprepossessing, and we were tired, but I told Jay there was method to this madness (he trustingly said he's sure there was).

We got to the cemetery, which, quite unlike the large, wide-open space of the Jewish cemetery in Gelnhausen, was locked up behind fence and gate and hedges -- it was not even possible to see any gravestones. But still we paid homage to the lost Jewish presence in Weimar in a small way.

It was time to go back to the hotel and gather our bodies and souls back together. After dinner I wanted to go looking for those elusive necessities: laundromat, internet cafe, and also a store where I could get more of the 1:200,000 topographical maps I have only a few of. I asked the waitress. No laundromat. No internet cafe -- one had to go to Apolda, not far on the train, but still beyond my capacities at the moment. Maps? Oh, yes (I showed her the kind I meant) -- on the street behind the train station was a place; it sounded to me like she was naming a store that began with "T", and I asked, will it still be open this late? Oh, yes, she assured me.
So I walked to the Bahnhof, and around to the underpass beneath the tracks, to the street in question. I saw a BP gas station and another gas station, and then there was a store whose name began with "T." But it was quite definitely closed. I saw several other stores, but none that looked like they would have maps, and walked the length of the street to the other end and the next underpass beneath the tracks.

Heading back toward the hotel, feet beginning to lose all patience with me, I vaguely noticed that this part of Weimar was not quite as gentrified and assiduously restored as the center looked. Then I came to familiar-sounding street names, and on the Friedenstrasse I saw that I was near that "interesting building." I decided to look at it more closely. It was a massive structure, but completely empty -- looked as if it had not been occupied since the end of the war. And it also, as I walked around it, made its identity clear. This was Nazi architecture at its most unflinchingly brutal. I wondered and wondered -- what is the provenance of the building; what was it meant for; what are the city and the country going to do with it? And I also wondered: knowing that much of Weimar had been destroyed by bombing, and knowing that in a few days we would be in Dresden where some of the world's most ingratiating architecture had been incinerated, how, why, did this memorial to the worst that humanity could do to itself get spared?

I went back to the hotel and ordered yet another ice cream concoction to soothe my fevered body and weary soul, and asked the waitress what that building was. I described its location, and she had to ask another waitress. Oh, she was told. That's the Gauforum. And she began explaining that it was a Nazi building, but from the name I already knew: it was the central gathering place for the Nazi Gau, the district (the term Gauleiter is one most of us have heard of, meaning the administrator of the Nazi district).

It was not until I got back here to Boston and had access to Google that I could find out more about it. It turns out that indeed the very questions I was asking are being grappled with and disagreed over, and the phrase in the subject line, translating "Die Janusköpfige Stadt," is the title of one of several symposiums that have been held to deal with those questions.

In an earlier diary entry I spoke of Weimar as the Janus-headed city, but protesting that it really has many more than two faces; is really more of a multiple-personality place. Since then I have read that in some manifestations Janus was even believed to have four faces, maybe more, so the name is appropriate after all.

As for the Gauforum itself, it is said to be the only Gauforum in Germany that was ever completed, and even at that it was never occupied or used for its intended purpose, which, I suppose, would have been the kind of rally that the recently departed Leni Riefensthal might have filmed. It certainly is large enough. The one use I have found that has ever been made of the building was precisely to house an exhibition of the photographs and related items that supported the symposium on what use to make of the building. I haven't been able to get the proceedings of the discussions, but the abstracts indicate that no agreement has ever been reached, and that much contention surrounds the whole issue. Shall it be razed completely; shall it somehow be redesigned and incorporated into the adjacent Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (successor to the Hochschule, or College, of Architecture)? Nothing seems quite right.

The characterization of Weimar as Janus-headed comes in part from the presence of Buchenwald, in the middle of the Ettersberg woods that Goethe, among many other Weimarites, found to be so inspiring and refreshing. The presence of the Gauforum only a few blocks from all the incredible collection of civilized treasures for which the city is so famous, unmistakeably establishes the shattered-personality syndrome of the place.

As for the map store -- turns out that the waitress had been directing me to a "Tankstelle" -- a gas station! And of course I had passed by two of
them. Now it's been too long since the experience, so my memory is getting jumbled again. Surely we didn't do *all* those things I remember doing there on that one hot day? But the next day I vividly remember we were in Leipzig, so somehow we also managed to squeeze in the delayed discovery of the Theatre-Platz, and finally the famous statue of the paired geniuses Goethe and Schiller in front of the National Theatre (looking determinedly in opposite directions from each other, but there were many indications, in Goethe's house and in my reading and elsewhere, that their friendship was very close indeed). And that was also the home of the sadly ephemeral Weimar Republic.

Since we were there, and it was still open, we popped into the Bauhaus Museum. The famous Bauhaus was founded by Walter Gropius in about 1918, but moved to Dessau some seven years later because Weimar had so many distinguished buildings from classical times, and even earlier, not to mention an embellishment of Jugendstil houses, that it had no room for the spare modernist visions of this new school. Neither Jay nor I are particular fans of Bauhaus minimalism, but we were pleasantly surprised by some of the pre-Bauhaus (art nouveau/Jugendstil) furniture in the museum, especially the work of Henri van de Velde.

Now I look back on all the places we missed! Usually we hit the castles and palaces, for their art museums. We never got to the Stadtschloss, or the Belvedere, or the Wittumspalais, or the Tiefurt; we never paid homage to Wieland or (aside from passing by the Hochschule) Liszt; our swift visit the evening of the next day to the Stadtkirche was for Bach and Cranach, not Herder; we never paid the slightest attention to Nietzsche. We didn't cheer for freedom in the Platz fuer Demokratie. We didn't visit the historic cemetery with the Princely Crypt -- the Fuerstengruft -- holding not only the remains of the ducal family but Goethe and Schiller (finally at rest).

We did, however, get to the main post office, where I mailed back to Eisenach the key to our room at the Hotel Am Bachhaus, which to my dismay I found in my pocket when we checked into Zur Sonne.

Tomorrow, Leipzig. Jay and I have this habit of doing great cities in one day. For example, Rome may not have been built in a day, but it was thoroughly and memorably visited by us in a day, many years ago. Same thing here in Thuringia and Saxony, I'm afraid.


[composed on Tue, 16 Sep 2003 03:47:54 -0400]