Weimar : from enlightenment to the present /
Kater, Michael H.,1937-author.
"Historian Michael H. Kater chronicles the rise and fall of one of Germany's most iconic cities in this fascinating and surprisingly provocative history of Weimar. Weimar was a center of the arts during the Enlightenment and hence the cradle of German culture in modern times. Goethe and Schiller made their reputations here, as did Franz Liszt and the young Richard Strauss. In the early twentieth century, the Bauhaus school was founded in Weimar. But from the 1880s on, the city also nurtured a powerful right-wing reactionary movement, and fifty years later, a repressive National Socialist regime dimmed Weimar's creative lights, transforming the onetime artists' utopia into the capital of its first Nazified province and constructing the Buchenwald death camp on its doorstep. Kater's richly detailed volume offers the first complete history of Weimar in any language, from its meteoric eighteenth-century rise up from obscurity through its glory days of unbridled creative expression to its dark descent back into artistic insignificance under Nazi rule and, later, Soviet occupation and beyond"--
Includes bibliographical references (pages [416]-443) and index.
A Weimar Golden Age, 1770 to 1832 -- Promising the Silver Age, 1832 to 1861 -- Failing the Silver Age, 1861 to 1901 -- The Quest for a "New Weimar," 1901 to 1918 -- The Weimar Bauhaus Experiment, 1919 to 1925 -- Weimar in the Weimar Republic, 1918 to 1933 -- Weimar in the Third Reich, 1933 to 1945 -- Buchenwald, 1937-1945 -- Weimar in East and West Germany, 1945 to 1990 -- Weimar after the Fall of the Berlin Wall, 1990 to 2010 -- Epilogue.
"Historian Michael H. Kater chronicles the rise and fall of one of Germany's most iconic cities in this fascinating and surprisingly provocative history of Weimar. Weimar was a center of the arts during the Enlightenment and hence the cradle of German culture in modern times. Goethe and Schiller made their reputations here, as did Franz Liszt and the young Richard Strauss. In the early twentieth century, the Bauhaus school was founded in Weimar. But from the 1880s on, the city also nurtured a powerful right-wing reactionary movement, and fifty years later, a repressive National Socialist regime dimmed Weimar's creative lights, transforming the onetime artists' utopia into the capital of its first Nazified province and constructing the Buchenwald death camp on its doorstep. Kater's richly detailed volume offers the first complete history of Weimar in any language, from its meteoric eighteenth-century rise up from obscurity through its glory days of unbridled creative expression to its dark descent back into artistic insignificance under Nazi rule and, later, Soviet occupation and beyond"--
Social change