Weimar

Hard to believe that five miles away from Buchenwald sits Weimar, the birthplaces of the German Enlightenment and the Bauhaus movement in architecture.   Bach, Liszt, Goethe and Schiller (standing side by side in front of the concert hall) all called it home at one time or another.

Goethe wrote here:

And Schiller here:

I wish I'd had more daylight to photograph the glorious statues, the Rathaus and some of the candy-colored architectural details.

After an excellent, inexpensive antipasto and pizza, we did some window-shopping and ran into Friedrich Schiller.  A playwright and an essayist, he once wrote "the voice of the majority is no proof of justice."

We also spotted a well-maintained Wartburg 313 Sports Coupe.  The East Germans stopped manufacturing them in 1960, seven years before Florian's birth.  Its three-stroke engine (one more than the Trabbi's) certainly couldn't go as fast as the one in our VW Polo.  With the pedal to the metal on the Autobahn back to Berlin, I drove faster than I ever have, hitting speeds in excess of 100 mph.  In comparison to some of the other cars, it seemed as if we were crawling, but we arrived 15 minutes earlier than our GPS predicted.