The Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany

Chapter 1
CULTURAL CAPITAL
Hamburg, Hannover, G�ttingen, and Kassel. There were other trains: the tracks to the dull marshy west toward Bremen and Osnabr�ck (change for Amsterdam), or the maddeningly slow and infrequent service to Berlin, whose cars were always crowded with students. There was the boat-train north to Denmark and the local to L�beck. But this was the one we took most often from our temporary home, the white and bullet-nosed InterCity Express that dropped south at a speed America could only dream of--Hamburg to Frankfurt in three hours and a half, Munich in just over six. Though today I wasn't going quite so far. "Gr�ssen Sie Th�ringen von mir," the happy pink-faced conductor had said when he punched my ticket. Say hello to Thuringia for me. He was young and plump, with a ginger mustache; I had trouble with his accent and wondered when he'd left.
In the caf� car, I spread the Herald-Tribune under coffee and rolls and looked up from "Doonesbury" as, south of Hannover, the north German lowlands began to ripple into hills. I finished my breakfast and the ripples turned into folds, the hills began to offer something like a prospect. A landscape has to be uneven before you can see it--the bands of fields and forests, the villages settled in valleys, confined and bordered, framed, and yet because of that open and legible, in a way that the flat countryside around Hamburg almost never is. Then the train was at G�ttingen, the university town of the Brothers Grimm, unvisited. And then Kassel, where six months before Brigitte had led me around the Documenta, building after building of oddly undemanding contemporary art. Kassel: change for Weimar. It was a slow train now, along rivers and through tight-packed hills, a postcard landscape with every town tucked neatly in a bend of the stream, unbombed and old-fashioned and no longer quite so gray as they would have been when this was still the East.
And then Weimar. I wheeled my bag downhill from the station, past the set of brooding administrative buildings that the Nazis had built, along the tree-lined Schillerstrasse, through the crowded Marktplatz with its vendors of fruit and Fleisch and blue Bohemian pottery, and into the lobby of the Hotel Elephant. And so began my jog around this small and architecturally modest city that has nevertheless figured on the traveller's shopping list for two centuries and more. Every reader of German literature knows the story: how the Dowager Duchess Anna Amalia of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, widowed young and ambitious in a way that her son's small realm couldn't satisfy, started inviting poets and thinkers to make their home in his capital. Wieland came, to serve as tutor to Anna Amalia's son Karl August, and Herder took over the city's largest church. The most important invitation, however, was that extended by the young duke himself, who in 1775 picked out the day's hottest talent and asked him to visit, a writer who though only in his twenties was already a bestseller, a notorious maker of taste and of fashion. Goethe came, he saw, he stayed. He picked up a title, supervised Weimar's finances, established the theater, chaired the War Commission, oversaw the duchy's mines, and always, always kept his pen moving. Schiller joined him 1787, and long after Goethe's death the place remained attractive enough to become Liszt's base of operations.
Now you can buy their faces on plates and mugs, and in Goethe's case on much more besides. He has, for example, given his name to a popular mark of brandy, whose labels carry a detail from the portrait that his friend Tischbein did in Rome: the poet in a wide-brimmed gray hat that turns him into something like a German gaucho. In fact Tischbein's Goethe is as much an icon in Germany as Gilbert Stuart's Washington is in America. I've seen it on the sign of an Italian restaurant in Berlin and on a mirror advertising a brand of beer, while Andy Warhol once modeled a poster on it, whose hot pink and yellow make the poet look as though he were his own acid trip. It is in truth a very bad picture--not in the handling of the face, where Tischbein has perfectly caught Goethe's long straight typically Teutonic nose, but in the body, whose legs are comically out of proportion. Much better is the simpler portrait that Angelica Kauffman did on that same Italian journey, in which Goethe looks both less grand and more interesting, full-faced and with his brown hair pulled back, hatless and dark-eyed and shrewdly sensual.
The Weimar of today isn't the city in which Goethe lived, but it is an elaboration of it, a town decked out with memorials to the one he lived in. I've never been in a place so small that had so many statues and monuments.