The journey from Dresden to Weimar was undoubtebly the worst inter-city trip so far, and for a simple reason: I missed my bus. It wasn't my fault--the S-Bahn happened to not be running at all that day, so I couldn't ride out to the main station (where my bust station was) nearly as quick as I'd planned. If not for this, I'd have made the bus and easily would have gotten to Weimar. Every S-Bahn line was down (still don't know why), so I had to quickly find an alternate way there. I asked some people nearby how I could bus there, and they told me to take the 10 bus. However, it was a fifteen minute wait for that bus, and by then, my main bus to Weimar was gone. There was no way I made it, but I checked the place where the FlixBuses were parked, going to Berlin or Prague or elsewhere. After confirming I missed the bus (and dragging all my luggage), I went into the main train station to buy a much more expensive train ticket. After dropping 20 euro, I looked for the train to Weimar to board. I couldn't find it. In fact, I had to go to an information desk twice. The first time I simply asked where the train was. I was given a program with the platform info, but found a train going to Leipzig in its place. Not understanding why (and already getting slightly panicked) I went back to the information desk where I was very rudely barked at. Apparently there was no direct train to Weimar. I had to go back to Leipzig, catch a train to Jena, and then, once in Jena (a town I'd never been in before), I had twenty minutes to get off and find another station in Jena on foot. From there I'd get a train to Weimar.
So, frazzled and angry and nervous, I got onto the train back to Leipzig. Didn't think I'd be going back through there again! The train was full of hipsters, cosplayers and goths around my age--apparently there was a big annual book festival happening in Leipzig at the time. Hence hipsters. Anyway, part of the reason I was so anxious was because of arriving in Weimar so late due to the mix-up. I'd be nearly two hours later than I would've been had I made the bus on time. I was going to be meeting my new host immediately when I arrived based on the bus' schedule. She only had a half-hour window where she could meet me before going to work, and then (I assumed) I'd have to simply sit on her doorstep until she came back from work. Long story short, her room mates let me in and everything was fine. Her house was literally like two minutes away from the Weimar station, an extra bonus when my arms already felt like they were gonna tear out from the weight. That was mostly from running along in Jena. Fortunately I found the other station no problem, but it was an uphill walk on cobblestone, at least fifteen minutes of it with a huge heavy suitcase rolling behind me. I was so relieved to be in Weimar. I relaxed the rest of the afternoon, and then went looking around on the next day. Weimar is by far the smallest place I've been to, and I was able to walk the whole of the main town area in a day, seeing all of the landmarks.
So, frazzled and angry and nervous, I got onto the train back to Leipzig. Didn't think I'd be going back through there again! The train was full of hipsters, cosplayers and goths around my age--apparently there was a big annual book festival happening in Leipzig at the time. Hence hipsters. Anyway, part of the reason I was so anxious was because of arriving in Weimar so late due to the mix-up. I'd be nearly two hours later than I would've been had I made the bus on time. I was going to be meeting my new host immediately when I arrived based on the bus' schedule. She only had a half-hour window where she could meet me before going to work, and then (I assumed) I'd have to simply sit on her doorstep until she came back from work. Long story short, her room mates let me in and everything was fine. Her house was literally like two minutes away from the Weimar station, an extra bonus when my arms already felt like they were gonna tear out from the weight. That was mostly from running along in Jena. Fortunately I found the other station no problem, but it was an uphill walk on cobblestone, at least fifteen minutes of it with a huge heavy suitcase rolling behind me. I was so relieved to be in Weimar. I relaxed the rest of the afternoon, and then went looking around on the next day. Weimar is by far the smallest place I've been to, and I was able to walk the whole of the main town area in a day, seeing all of the landmarks.
Most of Weimar is a collection of narrow, stone-paved residential streets. Those residential streets seem to all converge on the large churches in the town. There are a couple of town squares and a park area that runs outside of the Weimar area and beyond. Oh, and any sign pointing out tourist sights have something to do with either Goethe or Schiller, famous German writers. Unlike the other GErman places I've been, Weimar's also hilly. You can get a higher view of the town by going into the surrounding suburbs.
Unfortunately, while in Weimar, the sun came out only briefly on my second day there. It was either heavily cloudy or rainy the rest of the time. I'm sure the place is much more lively in summer though, as basically every turn has a sight that looks like it's straight out of a Victorian scenery painting. It was certainly a much different town than anywhere else I've been--nowhere else could I feel like I properly explored the area in just one day. But the main reason I came to Weimar was not to see the actual town centre--it was for the nearby Buchenwald concentration camp.
The Blood Road and Buchenwald Concentration Camp
The Blood Road (or Blutstrasse) runs out of Weimar. It was built by the slave labour of mostly Jewish concentration camp inmates in the late 30s. I think it's like 6 km long or something, and it runs through the woods towards the Buchenwald concentration camp. Camp inmates would come into Weimar at the station and be marched or carted through the road to the camp. They were also deployed for slave labour details via this road. Rather than take the bus straight to the camp, I decided to walk the whole thing. Aside from the odd car, the road was very quiet, and lined with huge piles of cut down trees.
There were occasional signs about the history of the road, but eventually, right near the camp, the road dipped to the left and I came to the clock tower, part of a large memorial to Buchenwald built by the communist East German government in the 50s (after their Russian allies had used the same camp for similar cruelties as the Nazis).
The memorial is basically a huge clock tower with the Roman numerals for 1945 (the year of the camp's discovery and liberation by the Soviets) carved along the top. There's another monument in front of it depicting the inmate uprising of the camp in classic communist propaganda style. The monument might as well be depicting the 'triumph of will of the working class against the bourgeoisie' or some other standard Soviet theme. The whole area is surrounded by huge torches representing each country affected by the rampage of the Nazis. There are also big blocks featuring carvings of imagery of the camps, from their creation to their liberation. The Soviets here managed to squeeze in a lot of themes of heroism and nationalism and all those other things alongside the mourning of the victims. You can definitely see that they took the opportunity to display their might and power with the oversized monument.
The memorial sits on a hill where the trees have all been cleared, and since it rises above a bunch of other towns including central Weimar, it can be seen for miles. Driving out of Weimar and on the highway, I could still see the memorial clock tower poking out of the trees. I wondered if the clock still rang, and on my way back from the camp I found out. It was really loud, and really startling on the otherwise totally quiet road. The Blood Road comes to an end at the foot of the camp.
Unlike most other concentration/death camps that have the infamous inscription "Arbeit Macht Frei" (work makes you free), this camp says "Jedem das seine" (To each what they are due). The font is what interests me the most here, as it's in a Bauhaus letter font, characteristically un-Nazi, since they were fundamentally against modern art and design. The sign was actually put together by Franz Ehrlich, a communist prisoner at the camp.A lot of people say the use of font for the sign was a quiet act of resistance, and others feel the significance of the font choice is overblown.
Out of the several concentration/death camps I've been to, Buchenwald is the most ruined. The interior part of the camp (as opposed to the old administrative buildings which are largely still standing), there are only three or four buildings still standing. All the barracks, the morgues, the execution chambers, and everything else are all gone except for the foundations. As a result, the former concentration camp looks like a wasteland in the middle of the forest, totally flat except for the odd sections where piles of brick and stone show where buildings used to be. It was demolished in 1950 after the Soviets were done using it to imprison/torture/kill political subversives. The ruins of the old place make it really distinctive. There are signs near some of the rubble piles describing what the former buildings were used for. Unlike Sachsenhausen, there weren't interior exhibitions full of information all over the place, because there was hardly any 'interior' to speak of. This gave me a lot more room for free-thinking reflection-type stuff, filling in the gaps for myself after getting basic info from signposts. There were temporary exhibitions in the few remaining buildings on-site, but they oddly closed two hours before the actual memorial itself did, and since I didn't know that until it was too late, I only saw one of the exhibitions, which was on photographs taken of the camp during its operation and liberation.
The destroyed state of the place gets even stranger when you come to the bottom of the hill that the camp is situated on. A forest has grown up where some of the other buildings used to be (there even used to be a brothel in which female inmates were forced to be prostitutes to the male prisoners, but that's totally gone now). You can basically exit the whole camp through the forest, as long as you're careful not to fall into the brick holes that are still around (not sure what the holes would be for--maybe ventilation?).
After skirting along the edge of the forest for some time, I found some odd sights--steel poles sticking up out of the ground between trees. They're markers of the mass-grave underneath the forest. I had no idea I was walking through an area where hundreds upon hundreds of people had been anonymously buried. And this particular mass grave wasn't a result of Nazi genocide--it was the result of the Soviet's five-year administration of the camp. For 40 years it had been unmarked and unmentioned, but after the communistic East German government fell, people could again look into the post-war violence in such camps and make memorials for loved ones that died there. These steel poles were the result, each one numbered and (as far as I could see), marked with the phrase "unbekannt" (unknown). This stretch of forest just kept going and going and going, with numbers reaching from 1 to 500. I'm sure it went well past 500, but that's the largest number I saw on any of the posts. Another little memorial cropped up in the middle of this, made up of a lot of little crosses with names of victims including date of birth and death. I still find it really freaky to think that some of these Nazi concentration camps were not simply put out of commission as I'd believed for so long--camps like Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald were used for a further five years in which, again, high numbers of prisoners died by various gruesome means (mostly due to exposure, disease and starvation, rather than blatant mass-execution methods).
The last thing that really interested me just before leaving was the strange ruins just outside of the camp's barbed-wire fence. A sign told me that this was a mini zoo enclosure, for the leisure of the guards. Like, I'm talking a literal place where the guards could absent-mindedly watch bears hang out in an enclosure, like a bunch of tourists. The 'zoo' had wires and a fence as well to keep the animals in, and the parallel with the concentration camp (which, let me emphasize, was literally immediately behind the zoo) was really disturbing. The prisoners could have conceivably seen over to the enclosure with the bears and vice-versa. The idea of having a zoo so close to something like a concentration camp is so demented I don't even know what to say about it to make it any more nightmarish. The irony that occurred to me was that the bears of the zoo were probably treated better than the human prisoners across the road.
One last thing--I'd read in an article online that the Buchenwald camp memorial sells postcards along with the usual informative books and such. It turned out to be true. Out of morbid curiosity I bought two, but I have to wonder, who would actually send these out to friends or family? I can't exactly picture someone getting this in the mail with the message "wish you were here" written on it.
One last thing--I'd read in an article online that the Buchenwald camp memorial sells postcards along with the usual informative books and such. It turned out to be true. Out of morbid curiosity I bought two, but I have to wonder, who would actually send these out to friends or family? I can't exactly picture someone getting this in the mail with the message "wish you were here" written on it.