He brought to his court the poet and translator of Shakespeare’s works Christoph Martin Wieland (1733-1813), the poet and philologist Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), and above all Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832). Thus at that time, around 1 800, Weimar became a center of German and European intellectual life. In this city Goethe wrote some of his most famous works, including the final version of “Faust”. Weimar was also home to Friedrich von Schiller from 1787 to 1789 and from 1799 to 1805. Here he wrote, among other works, his “William Tell”. In the second half of the 19th century, Franz Liszt (1811-1886) composed and gave concerts in this city distinctive for its keen appreciation of the fine arts.

Here, in 1919, Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus, a school of architecture which sought to overcome the divisions between art, handicraft and technology. In 1925 the Bauhaus moved to Dessau, and a few years later to Berlin. There, in 1933, it fell victim to the barbarity that followed Hitler’s seizure of power and sealed the fate of the first German republic, the Weimar Republic, whose constitution had been drafted and adopted in Weimar in 191 9. Weimar has been selected as the cultural capital of Europe for the year 1999, the 250th anniversary of Goethe’s birth. Johann Sebastian Bach, the scion of a renowned family of musicians, was born in Eisenach in 1685. Ensconced in the nearby Wartburg in 1522, Martin Luther translated the New Testament into German - a key step in the development of the modern German literary language. Thuringia marked the 450th anniversary of the reformer’s death with a “Luther Year 1996″. Meeting at the Wartburg in 1817, representatives of patriotic student groups known as “Burschen-schaften” called for a united Germany.