Die Weimarer Klassikerstätten: Vom Kriegsende bis zur Gründung der Nationalen Forschungs- und Gedenkstätten der klassischen deutschen Literatur in Weimar; Ereignisse und Gestalten: Eine Chronik, 1945–1949 ed. by Wilfried Lehrke (review)

Hardly ever has there been such a spectacularly schizophrenic book, good and bad in equal measure. The title is not only convoluted but wrong. The NFG was founded in 1953, so it makes no appearance in the book. Only when one notices, on the back of the title page, that this is the first volume of two does it dawn that there will be a second volume covering 1950–53: the book contains no introduction or explanatory notes. Tiny font, typos, and many stray hard hyphens do not help either. The indices are a disaster: for example, in the “Sachregister,” under the letter G, almost none of the twenty-six entries are in the correct alphabetical order (it begins with “Goethehaus” and ends with “Gesellschaft zum Studium der Kultur der Sowjetunion”). Apparently, the odd document was taken out or added after the index was already completed, because the numbering is faulty. The book appeared only a few days before the controversial November 2014 conference “Hans Wahl im Kontext: Weimarer Kultureliten im Nationalsozialismus” (the proceedings were published in the October 2015 issue of Publications of the English Goethe Society), and one has the feeling that it was rushed into print for that occasion; the Freundeskreis that published it has been one of the leading defenders of Hans Wahl, director of the Goethe-Nationalmuseum from 1920 and the Goethe- und Schiller-Archive from 1928 until his death on February 18, 1949.

But for the reader interested in the immediate postwar period in Weimar—and indeed in Germany—Lehrke provides 1,141 of the most fascinating documents. A large number are previously unpublished and come mainly from the Goethe and Schiller Archive or the Thuringian State Archives in Weimar and from hard-to-obtain newspaper articles.

The events documented in the book begin with the American bombing raid on Weimar—which harbored armaments works—on February 9, 1945, and end not long after the politically contested celebrations of Goethe’s two-hundredth birthday in August 1949. It was a turbulent time. The American troops made a relatively good impression in Weimar, but soon the rumors were confirmed that they would be withdrawing so that Thüringen could be in the Soviet zone, according to the secret agreement made at the Conference of Yalta. Within days of Weimar’s surrender on April 10, Hans Wahl breaks the Goethe Society rules in order to bestow lifetime membership on the American commander Major William M. Brown, who in civilian life was a German professor at Columbia University. And Wahl uses this connection to go hunting for Goethe’s and Schiller’s coffins in Jena, where Gauleiter Fritz Sauckel sent them to keep them from falling into profane American hands (the order to destroy them to prevent that from happening was not carried out). The authorities and cultural institutions in Weimar faced a daily struggle against shortages of food, building materials (particularly roofing), and labor, all of which were strictly rationed.

After the Soviet troops occupy Weimar on July 3, it initially looks as if the transition will be reasonably smooth. Above all, the Soviets are keen to capitalize on the classical heritage, and they give permission for Goethe’s house—which had been hit by a bomb in February—to be reopened after the building is repaired and its contents are recovered from storage. The accompanying rhetoric, with its one-sided focus on the protosocialist humanism of German classicism, is ratcheted up, and soon the ideological strictures tighten. Hans Wahl manages to rationalize his NSDAP membership to the Soviets, with the help of allies who claim, among other astonishing things, that Wahl was “mit seinem ganzen Denken...