Unfinished Business in Weimar: a Tourist's Guilt

The University of Heidelberg international exchange program that sponsored the first Tour Bus Ride of my life has since sponsored my second—this past weekend we went to Weimar and it occurred to me to lie about how it went. Something like, “Weimar?! Are you kidding?? It’s was so amazing, I mean there’s so much art and history there, how could I have gone and *not* have had the most enriching experience of my life??”

But to be honest, the day began badly the night before we left. We were out with a friend who was also going on the trip, and we came to the belated realization that the buses leaving the Studentenwohnheim (where we live) for downtown (where the tour bus would depart) didn’t start running early enough on a Saturday to get us there on time. Another round of drinks became a subject for debate—it was only a little after midnight, but the bus was leaving at 6a.m. after all—and we laughed and laughed at the hilarity of making willfully bad decisions; said oh why not!!

…A few hours later, with still-in-the-making, vague-like headaches, we got up and walked to downtown from our place, setting out at 5:15 a.m. into the unanticipated steady rain of October; of incredibly poor planning, of increasing regret.

It’s useful to look at a map to know exactly how ridiculous this “day trip” was, but it might suffice to say that the bus ride took 4 hours, each way. We arrived a bit after 10am and went to the Stadt Kirche first. It is the site of Johann Herder's grave and a pretty cool church in baroque style. Then we traipsed around a little bit after a tour guide rendered inaudible by the rain; we broke away from the group for a coffee here (in the rain), a sandwich there (rain, headache), and finally decided to leave behind the embarrassment of traveling with a pack of 40-something students and go our own way.

Opting to see the Goethe house first, we got lost twice trying to get there. When we finally arrived to purchase tickets, they were time-stamped, would not admit us until an hour later. So during that hour we bought impractically big and non-collapsible umbrellas with hooked handles and, again, coffee (rain/headache).

Once we made it inside, the Goethe house was quite cool. Several weeks ago when I was in California visiting my parents, I read an article about an old European tradition, which was to place a used shoe under the floorboards of a house (preferably near the doorway or under a window) as it was being built. It was believed that as the likeness of the person’s foot was retained by the shoe, so was their spirit, which could ward off any evil spirits that might try to enter the house. This occurred to me at Goethe’s house, seeing all the things he used each day—in particular, of course, his books. There is something really awesome and hard to explain about seeing the stuff of someone’s life, which is, well, not quite so basely ordinary as my own (headache, coffee, hooked umbrella), but some approximation of what a person is, rather than a larger-than-life, literary-plus-everything-else figure. It just seems so funny that he slept in such a little bed. A twin size! Cute. (I wish I had pictures here but cameras weren’t allowed in the museum. The above is a picture of the map pamphlet they gave me at the door.)

After finishing at the Goethe house we were extremely pressed for time. The tour bus was leaving at 5 p.m.! This should definitely have instilled some kind of urgency—and it did! But we were hungry. So we stopped for a quick pizza, which was really tasty, and we wondered what to do with our estimated remaining 1.25 hours, pizza time subtracted. What to do with our wet clothes on the bus, what time would we get back? What would we do the next day? Owning a German Sheppard—nationalism, or not? How much of this town is real, how much reproduction? How inconvenient are cobble stones when you’re in a hurry? Do we even like this? Etc.

Our original plan had been to go to the Bauhaus for most of the day, but with so little time remaining it seemed less than worthwhile to try. So after pizza, we went to the Stadt museum instead—it turned out, of course, to have already closed. Then, frustrated, we photographed anything we could see of interest on our walk back to the bus—relatively a lot, but it wasn’t really how we had imagined our site-seeing.

So Weimar was, in short, a bust. Or at length, a confluence of things, like a bus full of tourists trying to take a day trip to a far-off city, incredibly bad weather, my quotidian and constant need for food and caffeine, an utter lack of navigational skills, my insane failure to exercise a little carpe diem. We had a total of 6 and a half hours to spend in a city that not only contains Goethe’s house but Schiller’s, too, as well as the Bauhaus, Rathaus, a Schloss, the Schloss museum, the State museum, a museum of ancient and early history, the Neuer art museum, the Nietzsche archives, etc. etc.

The reason I’m choosing to write this post is mainly because Tourist Guilt is something I often feel—that I should be seeing and doing more, that I’m wasting the opportunity to experience something important, that I haven’t properly prepared for the trip or fortified myself with historical fact, etc. Anyway I’m sharing this really for no other purpose than to admit it: I have traveled as idiot and I apologize to history.

But also I think the magnitude and preciousness of History and Art is way too much. It’s impossibly serious and while I, too, enjoy and consider important History and Art, I’ll go ahead and say that, under frantic constraints of time, the pair becomes a compulsory drag. Weirdly it’s the same way I feel sometimes about Nature. Overwhelmed by having to express constant awe and fixation, trying to rush to a summit—! But anyway, this brings me to extolling and coveting, on behalf of all Americans, the German Urlaub, an annual, mandatory-for-all, 6 weeks paid vacation. That would fix some of this problem, no?? And I’m also reminded that I’m not just passing through, which is lucky and great! I’m staying through at least February, and (much better) plans for our return trip to Weimar are in the making.