It's been a fairly frequent question and we weren't too sure of an answer other than the Weimar Republic and it's near Leipzig. We are here now and discovering how small it is (~65,000) and one young muso was telling us how her mates just want to leave when they can given the life (it happens everywhere). Certainly this is a quiet town on day 1 but it's a public holiday. So what's the history? UNESCO recognise Weimar for its the Republic (Germany's first democracy) and also Bauhaus which was based here, but there's also Goethe and Schiller and Bach (6 Bach children born here; 3 survived past 1 year) and Liszt (the Liszt School of Music is here) and Richard Strauss and the Weimar Republic and Walter Gropius and Hitler and Buchenwald (grimly, there's a bus here that has Buchenwald as its destination but also frequent memorials to local victims victims). The population graph for Weimar is indicative of its history: a steady rise from early 1800s to ~WW2 then pretty much unchanged since. Plus it's on a local track and our journey from Koln had taken eight hours with cascading missed trains (a ticket inspector had had expressed it thus: "Welcome to Germany"). But it's looking up. We've found the local interesting venue and there are museums aplenty and only a few days and we've got a few musical events to attend and it's walkable so looking good. PS. Just some other names associated with Weimar are Marlene Dietrich, Berlioz, Kandinsky, Klee, Martin Luther, Schopenhauer, Rudolf Steiner, Carl Zeiss, Nina Hagen...
Weimar is a small town with a big history in Germany.
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