Weimar train station, 1990 and 2015
House at 37 Albrecht Durer Street
The Hotel International … is now the Hotel Kaiserin Augusta
(all photos: Barry D. Wood)
WEIMAR, GERMANY:
While there was still a German Democratic Republic in March 1990, I
traveled to Weimar, the town of Goethe and Schiller and of the Buchenwald
concentration camp where 56,000 Jews and others perished.
The article I wrote for The Financial Times was entitled Weimar’s Grey Welcome. Arriving in the
evening at the Weimar train station the nearby International Hotel (photo) was
full as were two or three other places. In desperation I called at a newly
created office where arrangements could be made to stay in the homes of local
residents. It was an early version of Air B & B.
Soon a grey Trabant arrived and I was off for #37 Albrecht
Durer Strasse for what proved to a fascinating evening of conversation and
hospitality. My host was Beate Hoffmann,
a youngish mother who in the months since the wall came down had turned hopeful. As we drank tea, she rushed to the next
room and returned with Mikhail Gorbachev’s book on Perestroika, the restructuring
the Soviet Union and the world.
Twenty-five years later Mrs. Hoffmann still lives in Weimar
where she owns two properties although she no longer lives in the renovated
home on Albrecht Durer Strasse.
Today’s visitors to this city of 65,000 not far from Leipzig
find a bright, modern Weimar eager to welcome visitors. They come in great
numbers to see the homes of Goethe and Schiller as well as the Bauhaus where
the great designers of the 1920s pursued art and architecture.
Many visitors also make their way up the hill above the city
to Buchenwald, whose American liberators in 1945 required locals to file
through to see the horrors done in their name.
Theo Waigel, West German finance minister in 1990, told an
audience at Georgetown University on October 1 that in the months following
unification 140,000 state enterprises in the east were privatized. Arrangements were made for the
withdrawal of half a million Soviet soldiers.
Today’s Weimar and other East German cities are
beneficiaries of $2 trillion of fiscal transfers over 25 years from West German
taxpayers. Everywhere there is new
infrastructure—highways, rail lines, hospitals, schools, telecommunications.
Waigel said the investment was worth it. Millions of East
Germans and visitors to Weimar would agree.
