I was just wandering around the “land of poets and thinkers,” as some observers used to call it circa 1800, before the outer world's primary impression of Germany became one of bristling moustaches and weaponry, not to mention extermination camps. This mythical land of feeling and imagination, readily evoked by a string of names-- Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Jean Paul, Fichte, Schelling-- had its physical centers in Weimar and Jena: capitals of the good, the lovable, the intellectual and utopian Germany. By comparison, Berlin appears as the capital of force, where bureaucrats write memos threatening to take away Professor Kant's freedom of speech and where Hegel is lured into rewriting his philosophical system as a hymn to power.

My intellectual mate and I walked around the small cobbled town with heavy flakes of snow falling slowly all day. The houses where Schiller and Goethe had lived and worked were nicely preserved and open for visiting, as they have been for a hundred and fifty years. With so much ugliness in the background-- militarism, fascism, genocide, total mobilization, occupation, commercialization, consumer culture and the present sour state of Europe, where politicians are deeply interested in only one thing, restricting immigration-- you might understand the appeal of Weimar, a little town tucked away from it all, where the bronze statues in the streets commemorate poets and historians and the local commerce deals heavily in culture-kitsch. (Goethe's charming poem about the gingko leaf is currently the most merchantable literary artifact in town, giving rise to jewelry, postcards, keychains, tea, tablecloths, lamps, and so on.) But of course you can't really get away from German history any more than you can get away from bratwurst and pilsner-- excellent, by the way, if you are going there-- so after a couple of days the dream of a poetic Germany began to take on more familiar lineaments, not entirely cynical but salted with the usual human pettiness: the gingerbread house of culture, to lift an image from the Brothers Grimm.

Goethe's house on the Frauenplan: a big place arranged for a big guy, with rooms for receiving guests and displaying collections; also a little work room and a tiny bedroom, tucked away from the public part of the house. Goethe's carriage, like Elvis's Cadillacs, was on display.

Schiller's house was on a street that had once been planted with trees and has now become a sort of outdoor shopping mall. (Both Goethe and Schiller have had their names eternalized by their hugely reproduced signatures being the trademarks of two glitzy minimalls: the Goethe-Kaufhaus and the Schiller-Kaufhaus. I guess every age brings as tribute the best it has, and this is the most we have to offer.) Smaller than Goethe's, as you would expect, because Schiller was just a paid dramatist whereas Goethe was the private counselor to the duke, with thirty years of public service behind him by the time Schiller died. The tiny rooms were almost but not quite in the “artist-garret” style.

We learned from a special exhibit in the Schiller-Haus that when Schiller died, his wife ran to her sister's house and did not come back for a few days, by which time the poet's friends and disciples had taken casts of his death mask, subjected him to an autopsy, and buried him in a hasty midnight service. This treatment prefigured the hunt for relics that twenty years later would lead the mayor of Weimar to dig the poet up from his communal grave, proclaim a particular skeleton Schiller's, and present its skull to Goethe as a souvenir. Eventually the Schillerian remains would be installed next to Goethe's in the crypt of the ducal family of Saxe-Weimar, a powerful tribute, it might seem, to talent on the part of wealth and power. Except that because of his poverty and the irregular handling of the bones, the “Schiller” in the coffin wasn't really Schiller at all, but a patchwork of other people's body parts presided over by a skull of uncertain provenance whose DNA, as recent research relates, bears no similarity to that of Schiller's descendants. What was for generations the shrine of genius turns out to have been the Tomb of the Unknown Somebody, a fitting commentary, I would say, on the industry of cultural kitsch. You won't catch Schiller and bind him to your necromantic purposes, Mr. Bürgermeister. What you can catch is just Somebody, the Skull in general. Which is fine and all you need anyway.

The combination of morbidity and commercialism, seasoned with a bit of crass academic positivism, marks off the mental world of German romanticism from all that followed.

As far as I can tell, Goethe's body was treated more delicately. (His name, on the other hand, underwent every contortion and appropriation that collective memory affords-- see this witty and detailed study of the 1932 Goethe celebrations by Hiltrud Häntzschel.)

Alas, cynicism is all around us. It's not just souvenir spoons and beer ads. Nietzsche's objectionable sister Elisabeth schlepped her brother and his manuscripts to Weimar, hoping that the newly constructed Nietzsche-Archiv would get in on the Goethe-Schiller action; the Bauhaus lasted no more than five years in Weimar before being evicted by a right-wing local government; the statues representative of Weimar classicism were picked up as the basis of official Nazi sculptural style (with some extra pumping-up of the muscles and poses, of course); no expression of “Anmut und Würde” but can be put to a baser use.

So let me respond with a calculation in the spirit of our times. Nowadays we hear that everything but the making of money costs too much, is, indeed, irresponsible. Think of the investment horizon, though (if the word “investment” excites you more than the words “culture” or “thought”). The dukes of Weimar had an old name; they had some territory, agriculturally rich but landlocked; their political elbow room was not large, with Austria and Prussia squeezing them alternately; their towns were not big but had a few old universities and libraries. Culture was their means of raising themselves in the world. And they did it in the networked way that human culture tends to do: when Knebel introduced the young Goethe to the future duke he was doing the house of Weimar a favor, because once Goethe had been invited over to take a position as ducal private counselor, he brought in Herder, then Schiller, and the little town was for a while the literary capital of Germany. A genealogy of the house of Saxe-Weimar hanging in the Schloss supplies the experimental verification for the thesis that yes, culture is good for you and your dynasty. Prior to the early nineteenth century, the grand-duchesses who married into the house came from other regional nobility: “good matches,” I'm sure the old ladies of the time must have said, because the families knew each other and were of roughly equal status. But Duke Carl August, Goethe's patron, and thus the underwriter of literary Weimar, was able to marry his son to a grand-princess of Russia, and his grandchildren had upwardly-tending international marriages too, one granddaughter becoming empress of Germany. The sudden rise in the fortunes of this little dynasty was fueled by the prestige of the brainy people recruited to the court between 1775 and 1805-- to whose efforts the clumsy manipulation of poor Schiller's skull stands as a perverse kind of homage.