Wandering the Streets: Weimar, Germany
I left my great niece, Debbie, at the Erfurt train station for her return to Ilmenau and I headed east toward Weimar where I spent the night. The next day I explored this small German city rich in history.
Goethe House
From Wikipedia: Weimar is a city in the federal state of Thuringia, Germany. It is located between Erfurt in the west and Jena in the east, approximately 170 kilometers (106 miles) north of Nuremberg. Together with the neighbour-cities Erfurt and Jena. The city counts a population of 65,000. Weimar is well known because of its large cultural heritage and its importance in German history.
The city was a focal point of the German Enlightenment and home of the leading characters of the literary genre of Weimar Classicism, the writers Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller. In the 19th century, famous composers like Franz Liszt made a music centre of Weimar and later, artists and architects like Henry van de Velde, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Lyonel Feininger and Walter Gropius came to the city and founded the Bauhaus movement, the most important German design school of the interwar period. However, the political history of 20th-century Weimar was inconsistent: it was the place where Germany's first democratic constitution was signed after the First World War, giving its name to the Weimar Republic period in German politics (1918–33), as well as one of the cities mythologized by the National Socialist propaganda.
After a comfortable night's sleep in my rather spartan "pension" room, I packed up, had breakfast, and drove closer to central Weimar. I did no traditional sightseeing, just a walk-about around the city for a few hours.
As I walked up from where I had parked, I came onto a large plaza that was just coming awake with activity. Vendors were setting out their wares, people were hustling to work, and several were just having a coffee. I went in search of the house where Goethe had lived and thought I would visit it before learning how long a tour was and realizing time was almost up on my parking place. I passed and went back to the streets.
(Note: You will notice that the image of the market plaza - 15th in the gallery grid - is a bit shaky. I took this shot with TrueHDR, and app on my iPhone 7 Plus, handheld and didn't do a great job of holding it steady. However, it is the only shot I have that takes in most of the large, open plaza. Two lessons: [1] use something to steady your hand when taking a multiple image HDR shot and [2] take more than one shot of scenes you may want to use later!)
