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Introduction
to Weimar
Weimar was a Duchy - What was that? In many ways the town of Weimar in the middle of the 18th century was not unlike the villages that clustered near the great houses of wealthy landed families in England in the same period. What made the difference, was that Weimar was a duchy. Within the makeup of the Holy Roman Empire, Weimar was the capital of a sovereign state, the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach. The great curve of wooded hills that, in the form of the Fichtelgebirge, the Thuringian forest, and the Harz Mountains, once made up the southwestern border of East Germany, was surrounded in the 18th century by a mosaic of nearly thirty principalities. It was a buffer zone between Saxony in the east and Hesse-Kassel (Hessen-Kassel) in the west, Brandenburg-Prussia in the north and Bavaria in the south. Of the Saxon duchies, fragmented by inheritance and recombined by intermarriage and the extinction of ruling houses, the House of Saxe-Weimar was the oldest, though not the largest. Since 1741 it had been united with the extinct duchies of Jena, some twelve miles to the east, and of Eisenach, about fifty miles to the west, while thirty miles to the south, and deep in the Thuringian forest, lay Weimar's other major possession, the small territory of Ilmenau. Each of these domains had its own distinct character: Jena had its university, Ilmenau up in the hills had its copper and silver mines, though these had been abandoned in 1739. Eisenach (the birthplace of J. S. Bach) was of more obvious commercial and historic significance than Weimar - its medieval castle, the Wartburg, dramatically situated on the wooded eminence outside the town, had been the scene of the famous contest of the German troubadours, the Minnesänger , in 1207, and had sheltered Martin Luther after the Diet of Worms, while he translated the New Testament. Despite the political Union with Weimar in 1741, Eisenach retained almost intact its own administrative system. The union of these different territories was by family, of course, not by geography. The road from Weimar to Eisenach, for example led through two other distinct and sovereign territories. First there was Erfurt, one of the extra territorial possessions of the Archbishop of Mainz, which was governed by one of Germany's most cultured men, the "Vicar" or Statthalter Carl Theodor von Dalberg, great-great-uncle of the historian Lord Acton. Erfurt possessed an ancient university, where Martin Luther once studied, however by the mid-18th century, it was dwindling into insignificance. Fifteen miles west of Erfurt lay Gotha, the capital of the Duchy of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, which in 1775 was ruled by Duke Ernst II and was larger, wealthier, then it administered, and to an extent more cultivated than Weimar. The Duke's younger brother, Prince August, a dilettante and a sickly man who was constantly and morbidly concerned with his health, spend much time in Weimar and was to become a particular friend of Goethe's, but the Duke himself with the Syrians, learned, and the rather domestic man who dreamed of living is a private gentleman in a republic such as Switzerland or America. He is male succession was to die out in 1825, and in the consequent reorganization of the Saxon principalities altogether became independent, the miniature Duchy of Saxe-Meiningen expanded (jointly ruled by two brothers), while Gotha was combined with the most southerly of the Saxon duchies, Saxe-Coburg. Some of the qualities of Duke Ernst II reemerged in his great-grandson, Prince Albert of Saxe- Coburg-Gotha, the Prince consort of Queen Victoria. It can easily be understood then, why a political conglomeration such as Saxe- Weimar-Eisenach could not act with the independence of a nation state. Not only did it depend upon its neighbors for communication between its constituent parts, but the neighbors also had certain rights, notably over the roads and the waterways, even within the territory's own boundaries. The University of Jena was a joint foundation of all four Saxon duchies, and although Weimar, as the principal source of finance for the university, had the principal say in its affairs, all four had to be consulted about serious matters, including the appointment of professors. Nonetheless, internally, at any rate, she was a nation, and Carl August, who ruled at the height of Weimar's fame from the age of eighteen, was the father of that country, the absolute ruler of the 106,000 inhabitants of the Weimar territories. In Weimar the threads of power ran up through the offices of the central administration, were gathered together by the Privy Council and placed in the hands of the Duke, who was responsible for educating, judging, punishing, patronizing, preaching at, defending -- there was an army of around 500 infantry, 20 who saws, and half a dozen artillery men -- and, especially, taxing a body of people more numerous than the population of any Imperial free city in the Holy Roman Empire, except Hamburg, and nearly three times the size of Frankfurt. Economically and socially, it is true, the Duchy reflected the weaknesses of its capital: there was next to no industry, only stocking-weaving as a cottage industry northeast of Weimar, and little significant commerce, since the roads in this wet and hilly terrain made transport so difficult. Without a navigable river, the considerable resources of timber could not be exploited. There were no operating mines. The economy was therefore almost exclusively agrarian and even had it been possible to generate agricultural surpluses, there was no convenient urban markets in which to dispose of them. The absence of a middle class was thus even more marked in the Duchy as a whole than in Weimar itself, and it is evident that the perhaps 2,000 courtiers, officials, soldiers, and pensioners who had to be supported from taxation, and a further body of landlords who had to be supported by rents and feudal dues, represented a much heavier burden for the population then for example, did Frankfurt's 500 officials for its 36,000 inhabitants. Especially since many in Weimar's upper class enjoyed much better incomes than they did in Frankfurt. Goethe memorably expressed the problem in a letter of 1782 after a long journey which had taken him both as a diplomatic emissary to all the Thuringian courts and as a superintendent land agent and state geologist through all the fields, forests and hills of the region, so they felt he knew them as well as his multiplication tables: So I have been mounting up through all the classes, seeing the farming man extorting from the earth the barest essentials, which would be a decent living if he was sweating only for himself. But you know how it is, when the agent is sitting and sucking on the roses and it got themselves a nice and fat and green, and the ants come along and sucked to refine juice out of their bodies. And so it goes on and we have now got so far that in one day the top is always consuming more than the bottom can furnish or produce in the same time. Home |
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