Weimar-Berlin or Berlin-Weimar?

When we talk about the Weimar era or the Weimar culture, we immediately think of Berlin. I have never heard of Weimar Hamburg or Weimar Munich. But, why Weimar and what is Weimar ?

The city of Weimar, 300 km from Berlin, with a central position in the map of Germany, was very small in population, but it had a great importance in the history of literature. It had been the center of so-called Weimar Classicism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, marked by the activity of several great writers living in the city, including Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich von Schiller.

Without giving the matter much thought, I have always believed that the German republic founded in 1919 had its capital, not in Berlin but in Weimar.

False: Weimar has never been capital, even if Bonn, another city of proud cultural traditions (Beethoven was born there) became it in 1949. But here is why the new German state took the name of Weimar:

On November 9, 1918, after the German defeat in the Great War, Kaiser Wilhelm was forced to abdicate and the Republic was proclaimed at the Reichstag Palace in Berlin.

Goethe and Schiller

 

Elections to a National Constituent Assembly take place on January 19, 1919. At that time, the left-wing parties are not really organized, and the Communist Party KPD refused to stand for election, leading to a solid majority of seats for moderate movements. The Social Democrats of the SPD alone get 45% of the votes cast, which allows Friedrich Ebert to become the first president of the young republic. To avoid the bloody riots underway in Berlin, the National Constituent Assembly decided to meet, not in the capital of the Reich but in the National Theater of the city of Weimar, thus giving its name to the new republic.

This was due to the still turbulent situation of Berlin; but Ebert, the Social Democrat leader, also advocated this place on the grounds that it would probably be perceived positively in the world to combine "the spirit of Weimar" with the construction of the new German state.

Weimar was not the only alternative: the names of Bayreuth, Nuremberg and Jena were also mentioned. Had one of them been chosen we would speak of the Republic of Bayreuth, and the name of this blog would probably be Berlin-Bayreuth, which would make one think more of Wagner's music than of Kurt Weill's.

Weimar became also the seat of the Bauhaus, the famous art school, also founded in 1919.

It must be said that contemporaries spoke of "German Republic". It was only after the Second World War that the name "Weimar Republic" prevailed.