With its 2024 Theme Year motto “Auf/Bruch”, the Klassik Stiftung Weimar offers visitors the opportunity to explore the past while looking ahead to the future. The exhibitions, projects and experiments presented as part of the Theme Year symbolise “Breaking/Ground” in more ways than one.

In the 20th century, civilisation saw cultural upheaval and catastrophe, collapse and renewal come in close and drastic succession. We examine the connection between culture and politics in Weimar in an age of extremes and shed light not only on the historic turning points of 1924 and 1949, but also on the struggle surrounding the Bauhaus. With its Theme Year 2024, the Klassik Stiftung Weimar honours two groundbreaking figures of their time whose contributions to Weimar’s cultural political and artistic development cannot be emphasised enough: Grand Duchess Sophie of Saxony-Weimar-Eisenach, the founder of the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv who embodied the rise of Germany as a cultural nation, and the artist Caspar David Friedrich, whose works of the Romantic period are closely intertwined with Goethe.

2024 also marks the 20th anniversary of the devastating fire that swept through the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek, damaging and destroying a majority of its collection. It offers us a moment to reflect and focus on what has been lost and devote ourselves anew to reconstruction and the discovery of new frontiers in museum collection. Together we want to celebrate a place which continues to stand for democracy, free access to information and, above all, a new beginning.

The Theme Year 2024 offers us the opportunity to reflect on the past, shape the present and look ahead to the future. In 2024 – Dare to break ground!