Читать книгу World Literature, World Culture - Группа авторов - Страница 10

Without Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Weimar would have been an unknown place, even a non-place, somewhere on the Eastern outskirts of Central Europe. With Goethe Weimar became, for more than a generation, a cultural center for both the German-speaking part of Europe and for Europe as a whole. The city maintained this central cultural status after Goethe passed away in 1832. Weimar was the capital, Hauptstadt, of one the many small German principalities, Sachsen-Weimar. Actually, it was more Haupt than Stadt. The head was Goethe’s, which reflected within it most of the rest of the world, while the city in Goethe’s lifetime harbored a mere 8,000 inhabitants.

In face-to-face encounters and in his correspondence, Goethe gathered important thinkers, artists and diplomats from all over Europe, crossing the national boundaries of his day. You did not wash your hands for a couple of days, it was said, after having shaken hands with the famous Goethe. He was a diplomat, a civil servant and a polyhistor in the cosmopolitan spirit of the eighteenth century, and he was engaged in modern sciences such as geology and biology as well as in philosophy, arts and letters. But, first and foremost, he was instrumental in forming a conception of human life. Under the name Bildung, it came to constitute a cornerstone of general education and formation that still dominates today, particularly in Central and Northern Europe.

After Goethe’s death, Weimar continued to be a symbol of German and European culture that for better or worse had a global impact. The city seemed to need a break after Goethe’s lifelong activities, and its cultural profile narrowed down to the arts. European composers such as Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner walked the streets and visited the salons and concert halls. Then, shortly after 1900, Weimar became the home of an arts and crafts school that would exert as great an influence on art, science and politics as Goethe’s work. Known as the Bauhaus school, it became a driving force in twentieth-century architecture, urban planning, design and visual culture across the globe. This was mainly due to Bauhaus’s combination of innovative creativity, traditional craftsmanship and modern industrial production. Its designs, materials and forms of production also opened up new vistas in the social and political sphere. The activities of Bauhaus had global consequences in forging a modern conception of the urban environment of streets, workplaces and homes. Modern design, in all its different forms, would not have existed without Weimar and Bauhaus.

But post-Goethean Weimar gave birth to other striking phenomena as well. One of the first constitutions on the European continent was born there in 1816, offering a tentative first step towards the democratic constitutions that took shape later in the century. In 1919, in the aftermath of the First World War, Germany made the attempt to become properly democratic with the Weimar Republic. The republic came to a bitter end when Hitler and the Nazis rose to power in 1933 and shortly thereafter initiated another World War. Of course, the Nazi regime was well aware that Weimar conjured up both old Germanic greatness and the political breakdown after the First World War, and they cultivated the positive symbolism of greatness with a perverted zeal that led to terrible effects. Already by 1937, the concentration camp Buchenwald had been built almost in Goethe’s back yard. The Spanish prisoner and member of the French resistance, Jorge Semprún, describes in L’écriture ou la vie (1994) how he walked around the site, wondering how, precisely in this place, world culture could have been transformed into world torture.

The former East-German communist regime also tried, in 1968, to launch a new constitution in Weimar with more allusions to the myth of Goethe than real contributions from his work. Finally, in 1998 the Goethe archives, the old part of Weimar and the Bauhaus site were declared a part of the world’s cultural heritage by UNESCO, and Weimar and its now 65,000 inhabitants became the European cultural capital of 1999.

If a small city such as Weimar can repeatedly constitute a veritable global center, under changing historical conditions, then this role is open to any other place on earth. It is not the place as such, but the quality of its visions that determines its cultural importance.