There are several ways to tell a story. The usual way is to start at the end, at the present time. For example: the exposition Bauhaus and National Socialism Until September 15, it presents how the school of architecture, crafts, design and art, which completely renewed everyday life, folded, died or went into exile with the dictator.
He does this in three museums in Weimar, where he first focuses on the struggle between politics and art, then he looks at confiscated art and, now in the heart of the city, he follows the lives of those who were trained at the Bauhaus when National Socialism came to power. of those who participated in the regime, of those who died, of those who fled; of those who chose to survive in the most obvious way and who adapted. All under the aegis of a craft and artistic school born in 1919 to, in the words of Walter Gropius, its creator: “Return to manual work (…) free from that arrogance which divides the social classes and seeks to erect an insurmountable barrier between craftsmen and artists.”
The other way of telling a story goes to the origin, to the roots, analyzing why in a silent town of barely 65,000 inhabitants, located in the state of Thuringia (Thuringia), in East Germany, a school was born that revolutionizes life. crafts, furniture, textiles. And why the place where the school is born is the symbolic object that the dictator desires as much if not more than the school itself; because the place is the origin and also a symbol to be appropriated.
“Goethe is the cause of everything that happens here,” says Héctor Canal Pardo (Valladolid, 43), a researcher at the Saxon Academy of Sciences at the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv. “In this era, known today as the Time of Goethe (Goethezeit), Germany overcomes its inferiority complex in relation to England and especially France. Authors such as Goethe, who, together with Schiller, made Weimar the centre of German classicism, the Romantic circle and the great philosophers are responsible for the enormous cultural boom of the German language. Goethe’s decision to remain in the province is paradigmatic of this attempt to create a cultural power that, like the cop The Greeks, is not linked to the military power of Rome,” explains Canal Pardo who, with about forty people, is in charge of investigating the correspondence of the German writer.
We are at the top of the city of Weimar, in one of the few places from where you can have an idyllic and general view, here as in few places in Weimar, you can plan with your eyes the pointed roofs, the towers, the bridges, the gardens and the ponds that give a narrative aspect to the place as full of chiaroscuro as history itself.
But now we find ourselves inside a sumptuous and at the same time impregnable building, designed as a vault to protect everyone from fire, light and changes in temperature, from blows, floods or attempts to steal the documents written or dictated by Goethe; acting as a ship capable of transporting his words and those of Schiller into the future.
We are faced with a multitude of gems in paper form that have changed the universal mind, and, judging by Goethe’s correspondence, they were largely written for this purpose. The files pile up before us like a sheet of paper with an original draft of the Splendor written in pencil and crossed out by Goethe to mark each paragraph that was transcribed exactly as he had arranged it. “He added text that he cut out and superimposed on the first draft,” Canal Pardo says.
We are now next to the folder containing the manuscript that attempted to prove the existence of the intermaxillary bone in humans, next to the drawings of skulls of various animals with which Goethe proved that human fetuses are similar to those of certain animals, even though this was unknown to the renowned scientists to whom he sent the richly decorated manuscript. Before us is the document.
While Canal Pardo comments on the importance of one of the last letters acquired by the archives that speaks of the concept of Universal Literature. The letter in question is also a rosette of Goethe’s thought. Canal Pardo interprets: “It is not about competition but about sharing. There is no literature above another; “Each work contributes to collective knowledge.” He adds: “In the letter he says: I am convinced that a universal literature is being formed, and that all nations tend towards it and in this sense they advance amicably. The German can and must put all his efforts into it.”
The Valladolid researcher speaks in the ivory-walled reading room of the archives, where, upon accessing the force, I exchanged the pen for a pencil so that nothing could damage the treasures that show why the city is a metaphor. Below us, in the closely guarded underground archive rooms, are evidence of how words in the form of letters helped the author of Splendor, also a lawyer and minister, developed the strategy to create the cultural relevance of Weimar.
History is like a river that follows itself.
The Gate of Barbarism
Outside, already on the street, but very close to Goethe’s house, a drawn image of the poet points in one direction. On the street there are shops with his name, chocolate shops, shopping centers. On the theater square there is a huge statue with an imposing sculpture of Goethe and Schiller, also the basis of German literature and classicism, who lived in the city and were a close friend of the author of The metamorphosis of plants.
Nearby is the house dedicated to the Weimar Republic, which at the beginning of the 20th century recognised equality, laid the foundations of the welfare state and social constitutionalism; around which opposing ideologies clash like opposing centrifugal currents and which, according to political scientist Giovanni Sartori, winner of the Prince of Asturias Award, was one of the most polarised moments in history.
“Look,” says Canal Pardo, pointing to a metal door in the middle of a square next to the Schiller Museum. A sentence is read above the door: “Jedem of the Seine”, which translates to: “To each his own taste.” The expression served as the motto of Justice, and today it has a huge negative charge precisely because of the use of this mysterious door. The door is made of metal; The door opens to the other world thanks to who was its designer, where and why it was made. The door, a copy of the original from 1938, seems imperfect, but if you open it with your imagination, you will not be able to go back.
This is the gate of Buchenwald, the concentration camp located half an hour by bus from Goethe’s city, where, among others, Jorge Semprún was imprisoned. Its designer, Fritz Ertl, belonged to the Bauhaus movement, was imprisoned for his political activism and, after his release, he worked for the SS. At the end of the war, the artist and craftsman achieved success and made a name for himself in the GDR. In the concentration camp where the gate was located, there was also a tree, an oak, which Goethe, it is said, planted, where he went to sleep and on which he carved his name. This is where he must have found the inspiration for a large part of his works because it was his oak. When someone realized who this tree belonged to, they would put up a fence to separate it from the barbarity; but it was too late. In the space where the tree stood there is now a gigantic monument of memory.
