Weimar and the Future of Germany

Reflections from Mitteldeutschland

View from my window at Ettersburg Castle

Picture me writing this in a baroque castle in central Germany. I’m sitting in a large room under the eves on the top floor of Schloss Ettersburg, just outside of Weimar, almost exactly in the centre of Germany.

Looking out of my window, I see the elaborate, snow-covered facade of the ‘New Palace’ opposite and the bucolic Thuringian landscape beyond. It’s a beautiful place and one where a mind-churning amount of German history converges.

Germany’s national poets Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller spent time here. The latter withdrew to this splendid solitude to finish his play Maria Stuart (about the last days of Mary, Queen of Scots). The Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen (author of The Emperor's New Clothes and The Little Mermaid) was a guest, as were composer Liszt and Bach. I could drop the names of more famous guests: Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I., for instance, who met here in 1808. You get the idea: it’s a place associated with high culture, politics and intellectual exchange.

One and a half miles from my window lies Buchenwald, one of the largest concentration camps the Nazis built on German soil. Around 56,000 people died there between 1937 and 1945. Another 7,000 perished after the war when the Soviets used the camp to imprison anyone who seemed vaguely suspicious to them. It’s a place associated with barbarity and moral bankruptcy.

Today, this place tries to live with the fractured legacy of its memories and physical traces of history.

I’m here at nearby Ettersburg Castle for an intellectual exchange in the best tradition of its past. Since 2011, the Ettersburger Gespräche or Ettersburg Conservations series of talks has invited authors, thinkers and politicians to revive this legacy. I met with a group of young(ish) people from the fields of politics and journalism to discuss the future of German politics. When we planned the talks, we had no idea just how topical and heated the debate would be with the German election just days away (this coming Sunday).