Honor, Space, and Class in the City of Weimar, 1770–1830

Recently historians, such as Tanya Kevorkian, Denis Cosgrove, and Karen Till have explored the intersections of spatial configurations and human behavior. In this paper, I probe the ways spatial arrangements shaped and were shaped by honor in the city of Weimar during its classical era. More specifically, I am interested in how individuals from different social classes articulated their sense of honor in these rearranged spaces. How, for instance, the creation of large parks, sidewalks, gardens, and plazas accessible to all city-dwellers and foreign visitors did change the culture of social distinction typical for such small princely capitals as Weimar?

Weimar provides and interesting case. In the 1770s, it was a residence of a minor German duke, dominated by the court and especially the Duchess Anna Amalia. She transformed the city by inviting such leading cultural figures, as Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Martin Wieland, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Friedrich Schiller as administrators of the government and initiating extensive beautification and landscaping of the city. What was unique in Weimar was the palpable presence of dense intellectual reflection and promotion of these changes by Goethe and others. By the first decade of the nineteenth century, ducal promotion and intellectual visions had produced a new cultural canon recognized and emulated by the German elite and middle class.

By using the official journals of the Weimar court, records of parks design and maintenance, memoirs, and correspondences I suggest that rather than enforcing a more democratic and hence egalitarian civic culture, the changes in the city-scape of Weimar created a cultural canon that rested on asymmetric notions of honor, the honor between unequals.