Thüringen

14/8/2020 – Weimar – Before setting off to Jena, we visit the ‘Nietzsche-Archiv‘. Not that I have a particular interest in philosophy but because the former Villa Silberblick was renovated by Henry Van de Velde. Nietzsche was weak and almost blind at the end of his life and his sister took care of him here. We walk up Humboldtstraße while thick clouds hover over us, they shield off the burning sun. The avenue is steep and the air heavy, we arrive at the villa with sweaty faces. Inside it is not cooler. The guards wear suit and tie and are happy to receive the few visitors there are and give a brief introduction. ‘Das ist ja alles Van de Velde.’ About Elisabeth, Nietzsche’s sister, and how she asked Van de Velde to style the archives of her brother. We are drawn to an object in the middle of the room: Nietzsche’s Schreibkugel. When the philosopher was almost blind he had difficulty writing and was sometimes unable to decipher his own handwriting. He thought this ball, invented by a Dane...

  14/8/2020 – Weimar – Around every Weimar corner there is a surprise. The elegance breathes through every brick, every window, every tree in the parks. Goethe and Schiller blessed the town with a poetic touch. The ginkgo planted by Goethe in 1813 close to the Anna Amalia library is one of the highlights for a relic hunter like me. Touch the tree and pick up some leaves to take home and find them back after years, between the pages of a book… We go to the Neues Museum to see ‘Van de Velde, Nietzsche und die Moderne um 1900’. Never have I enjoyed a museum so much, the face mask doesn’t matter. It is quiet, the collections are amazing and in every corner of the museum there is a brief video about how Weimar developed into a centre of modern art and what the contribution was of the main protagonists. Graf Harry Kessler, Van de Velde… All of a sudden we are in a room where two works from fellow Ghent-citizens are on display. A wonderful impressionist painting of bathing women by Théo v...

13/8/2020 – Weimar – We cross the park opposite Haus Hohe Pappeln and follow the Ilm to go and see Haus am Horn. All of a sudden the path is blocked by barriers. We try to find our way through and stumble into a group of young people who cool down by wading through the Ilm. I ask how to get to the other side and a helpful migrant tries to explain but his German is too basic. Next to him, a tall, rebellious looking girl with a half shaved head says: ‘Ach, einfach die Schranke ignorieren und weiterlaufen!’. She is topless and rubs herself dry. We follow her advice and soon see Goethe’s Gartenhaus in front of us. Not far from there we see the white model house built for the Bauhaus Exhibition of 1923. After almost 100 years it still hasn’t lost its modern flair. It is cubic and has a flat roof. A wave of new ideas swept through the area, catalysed by Van de Velde and later by Walter Gropius. A cooperation between architects, engineers, craftsmen and artists led to a creative bubble. It bu...

12/8/2020, Weimar – We sleep in Amalienhof, close to the Frauenplan, where Goethe had his majestic house. We are early and the hotel gives us one room for the four of us to shower away our cycling sweat. Then we walk to Haus Hohe Pappeln. As proud citizens of Gent in Belgium we want to see where Henry Van de Velde built his house when he was the director of the Kunstgewerbeschule. The sun bombards us through the foliage of the trees on the Belvederer Allee, the avenue lining Park an der Ilm. The two and a half kilometres are exhausting and the heavy air will soon change into thunder and lightning. Van de Velde bought the land for Hohe Pappeln in 1906, when the area was still undeveloped. At the time his halo was bigger in Germany than in Belgium, and he was commissioned for some important works. Van de Velde had many creative pursuits in life. In Weimar, he already had a career as a painter behind him and was primarily an architect. We put on our face masks and disinfect our hands befo...