Worlds Elsewhere by Andrew Dickson

1820, nearly half a century after Herder and Goethe. It was the Germans who first made Shakespeare Romantic, not the British. When Samuel Taylor Coleridge gave his revolutionary lectures on literature at the Royal Institution in 1808, outlining what he described as Shakespeare’s ‘organic form’ (‘it shapes, as it develops, itself from within, and the fulness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form’), they were taken as a clarion call of Romanticism. Yet remarkably similar arguments had already been made twelve years earlier by August Wilhelm Schlegel, perhaps the foremost Romantic critic in Germany.
    Even if Coleridge hadn’t actually been cribbing – he claimed not – it would set the tone for what happened next. When it came to the study of Shakespeare in the nineteenth century, Germany led the world.

    WEIMAR LEFT ONE IN LITTLE DOUBT of its self-image. As the train sighed gently to a halt, I noticed the signs on the platform:
‘KulturBahnhof’.
It was the first time I had seen a station advertise its cultural credentials. The station itself, an elegant neoclassical edifice with a sweeping red-tiled roof, looked more like the seat of a minor princeling than the mere terminus of the Thuringian railway. At least two people who disembarked with me were carrying cello cases. Presumably they had been forewarned.
    Outside, shaking out the knots in my legs, I joined a gaggle of tourists milling near a large-scale town map on a noticeboard. German cities weren’t reticent about showing off their illustrious connections, but when it came to shameless name-dropping Weimar was surely in another league. Immediately in front of the station was Schopenhauerstrasse, with Rembrandtweg a few streets to the east. Further south were Schubertstrasse, Hegelstrasse, Kantstrasse, Beethovenplatz, Mozartstrasse.
    Goethe and Schiller – who had, unlike nearly all the others, actually lived here – had been granted a
platz
and a
strasse
respectively, not to mention the famous double monument to them outside the Deutsches Nationaltheater. In fact the monument was everywhere: an image of it graced the front of every map of the town at the Weimar station bookshop.
    Gutenbergstrasse, Luthergasse, Cranachstrasse, Bachgasse, Hummelstrasse, Lisztstrasse, Wagnergasse, Gropiusstrasse: one could plot a cultural history of Weimar – more, of Germany at large – through its street plan. Nearly everyone who was anyone in German cultural history had passed through the town, from the Reformation to the Bauhaus in 1919, the same year that the terms of the Weimar Republic were signed in the Nationaltheater.
    Much of this rich history was down to the generous Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, whose patronage ensured that the arts flourished during Weimar’s ‘golden age’ and long afterwards. Duchess Anna Amalia (1739–1807) founded one of Germany’s first public libraries – still open, a marvel of royal-icing Rococo – and coaxed the renowned actor Abel Seyler to play for her, as well as exhibiting talents of her own as a composer. Her son Karl August (1757–1828) continued the family business, inviting Goethe to join him as a privy councillor in 1776 and seeking Herder’s advice on redesigning the educational system.
    As I rattled my luggage noisily down the hill, Weimar seemed pleasant in a faintly aseptic way: cobbled streets and low-built, red-roofed buildings, their spotless facades coloured handsomely in caramel and mint-white. To the left, I could glimpse the broad green swath of the park that ran through the centre of town. Early on a Monday morning, bar the odd ambling tourist, hardly anyone was around. When the chimes of the town-hall clock in the main square sounded, the sound echoed weirdly. It wasn’t just the street plan that put me in mind of a mausoleum.
    The town did have a William-Shakespeare-Strasse, but – more