In 1919, in a small and rather provincial city best known as the home of Goethe and Schiller, an architect called Walter Gropius opened a school that changed the look of the modern world. The Bauhaus aimed to unite art and craft, to bring painters, sculptors and designers into the workshop and to design for ordinary people, and in Weimar it attracted teachers such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and Oskar Schlemmer. The school moved to Dessau in 1925 after local political pressure, and then to Berlin, until the Nazis closed it in 1933, but in those fourteen years it set the course for modern architecture, furniture and graphic design.
The UNESCO listing covers several sites in Weimar and Dessau. Among them is the Haus am Horn, a small experimental house built for the Bauhaus exhibition of 1923, a compact cube with a central living room lit from above and a kitchen designed for efficiency. It stands in a park on the edge of town, plain and bright, and shows what the young designers thought a modern home should look like. The main school building, a larger structure designed by the Belgian architect Henry van de Velde, now belongs to the university, and the city also has the Bauhaus Museum, opened in 2019.
Weimar itself is a city of paradoxes. It was the centre of German classical literature, with the homes of Goethe and Schiller, the park along the Ilm river and the Anna Amalia Library, and it gave its name to the republic of 1919. About eight kilometres north, on the Ettersberg hill, lies the site of the Buchenwald concentration camp, a sobering memorial that shows how close the highest culture can lie to the darkest barbarism. Many visitors combine both visits in a single day, and they should leave time.
The roads around the city run through gentle Thuringian countryside, rolling fields, small woods and villages with brick-red roofs, and the surface is generally good. Weimar has about sixty-five thousand people, with fuel on the main roads and a wealth of cafés. Try a Thuringian bratwurst from a stall on the market square, grilled over charcoal and served in a bun with mustard. Spring and autumn are the best seasons, and the onion market in October fills the streets with braided onions and music.