I know, I know… I was supposed to spend time in Italy *not* thinking about Weimar. To be fair, Goethe didn’t manage either. He may have escaped on his Italian Journey almost exactly 240 years ago, in September 1786. But he knew he’d always return to Weimar and kept sending letters back.
So I reckon one small letter of sorts to you ZEITGEISTERS won’t do any harm to my recuperation efforts in northern Italy. Besides, there’s a very stark Italian connection I meant to tell you about: the “Florence-Weimar Axis”.
I came across the peculiar relationship between Weimar and Florence under fascism while researching for my book at the Weimar Town Archive. There’s an entire file with documents on how the two cities sought to create a small-town version of the “Rome–Berlin Axis”, as the collaboration between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy was termed since Benito Mussolini officially used the phrase in 1936. Local Nazis – ever keen to cement Weimar’s role as a “Nazi Model Town” – wanted to translate this new Axis down to the municipal level. So they pushed the idea of a “Florence-Weimar Axis.”
Weimar’s town archivist, Dr. Jens Riederer, told me about this Nazi town twinning on one of my frequent visits to his marvellous treasure trove of historical sources. He’s also written — as far as I know — the only substantial essay on this project himself. It’s called “The ‘Town Axis’ Weimar-Florence” and covers the events of 1937-1942. The following is based on his findings and the sources I studied at the archive.
It’s a story that unfortunately didn’t make it into my book because Weimar ends in 1939 with the onset of war. But I agree with Jens Riederer that the “Weimar-Florence Axis” deserves attention — not least because it was so disturbingly ambitious, going way beyond culture and involving sinister ideas on race, eugenics and ethnic superiority.