The last three months

I haven't updated my blog in a long time, so this post will hopefully sum up what I've done over the past three months!

After the Christmas break, I got down to the proper work of preparing for giving guided tours of the memorial site. This involved reading through the exhibition catalogue (the main introductory source to most aspects of the history of the concentration camp) and then coming up with my own concept for a tour.

Being honest, this prospect was quite a nerve-wracking one, knowing how complicated the history of Buchenwald is and how emotive and controversial it can be for each visitor or group of visitors in different ways. I have no personal connection with the Holocaust, so no matter how much I study or engage with it as an issue, it will only ever be that: something I have studied from a certain distance or remove. Many of the visitors to the site have grand-parents or great-grand-parents who were persecuted by the Nazi regime, or come from places where the effects of Nazism can still be felt, so there are naturally many sensitivities about how the history of the site is interpreted and presented.

Add to this the size of the site (almost 200 hectares), and the sheer amount of information there is to get through, and suddenly the 90 minutes allocated for the tour doesn't seem so long.

After numerous corrections, revisions and complete re-starts, I finally finished writing my tour by the end of February. I will initially only be giving tours in English and if this goes well, I'll try it in German too in the future. There's not as much of a demand for tours in English as I had thought, but I have an arrangement with the information office whereby I can give tours to individual English-speaking visitors as they turn up and if I'm free. I gave my first tour to an American couple last week and really enjoyed it. Doing it on a smaller scale means I can talk to the visitors a lot more and we can tailor the tour to suit their particular interests.

To return to January, we spent the last week of the month in Berlin at the annual Youth Meeting of the German Parliament, the Bundestag. It was attended by 80 young people from Germany and abroad, many of whom, like ourselves, also work in memorial sites. We spent a week examining many of the different issues in relation to Nazism and how it continues to play a role in the world today.

Speed-dating at the start of the Youth Meeting to help us get to know the eighty new faces!

We were based for the week in the Reichstag building itself and the complex of buildings surrounding it. There really couldn't be a more perfect place to be to engage with twentieth-century German history. The Reichstag had been the seat of the German parliament in the years before the coming to power of the Nazis and they exploited a fire started in the building by a communist in the weeks after Hitler's appointment as Chancellor in January 1933 as a way to consolidate their power and stamp out opposition to the new regime. The Berlin Wall used to run directly behind the Reichstag and since Reunification the building has been completely renovated and once again hosts the parliament of a unified Germany. One of the features maintained in the renovation is graffiti left by some of the Soviet soldiers who captured the Reichstag during the battle of Berlin in May 1945.

For the week we were divided into themed work groups and I chose the one focused on the memorial culture surrounding National Socialism in Germany today. Our group visited many of the larger memorials in Berlin, including the well-known and controversial Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, the Memorial to the Homosexuals Persecuted under the National Socialist Regime and the memorial for the Sinti and Roma victims of National Socialism, which, despite twenty years of debate, is still a building site. However, we also visited smaller, more local memorials throughout the city, many of which were erected much earlier than the 'official' ones.

With the whole group, we visited the Sachsenhausen memorial site and the Jewish Museum, where I took part in a workshop examining original documents dealing with how life for Jewish people changed in the immediate aftermath of the Nazis' coming to power. We also visited a synagogue and held a discussion with a Holocaust survivor.

The programme was very packed and we were all wrecked at the end of each day, but we always had a bit of free time in the evenings so we were able to catch up with the other ASF volunteers based in Berlin.

The event ended with us attending the 'Gedenkstunde', or 'memorial hour', that takes place each year in the Bundestag chamber on 27 January, the Day of Remembrance for the Victims of National Socialism. The ceremony itself was very simple, with some music and addresses by the president of the Bundestag and a survivor of the Holocaust.

Beyond this, I have continued to work in the archives and the visitors' information office, as well as doing translations and helping out here and there around the site. In the middle of April there will be a five-day programme of events to mark the 67th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp. I'll be working to take care of the group of English-speaking former prisoners and their families for the duration. I think it will be a fascinating experience to accompany them as they return here and spend some time getting to know them on a more personal level.

I have also just returned from a preparation seminar for this year's ASF summer camp at Buchenwald. All loyal reader(s) of this blog will know I was a participant in this summer camp last year before I started working here, and this year I will be working in the camp as a 'teamer' (as they call it!). The seminar itself was a great way to meet about 40 other ASF volunteers from Germany who are currently on placements across Europe, Israel and the USA and who will be 'teaming' the dozens of other summer camps this year.

I think that pretty much summarises my work since Christmas. The weather here has really picked up over the past few weeks - I was beginning to wonder in February if I would ever see the end of the snow - but spring has thankfully finally arrived.

Since Christmas, I have visited Leipzig and Munich (to visit the volunteers living there) and am looking forward to spending Easter in Hamburg. I am now beyond the half-way point in my volunteer service, but there is thankfully still plenty more to come!

Our second ASF seminar in Berlin

It turns out that the trains in Germany don't always run on time. As Lena and I set off at the end of November for our second ASF seminar in Berlin, we had no fewer than three delays and did at one stage end up going back through Weimar, having left it over an hour beforehand.

After this (and spending another while wandering through the streets of Berlin looking for our hostel...our own fault this time), though, we did arrive just as everyone was sitting down for dinner so we weren't too bad off.

Above all, the seminar was a great opportunity to catch up with all of the others. As I mentioned before, we are a group of 18 international volunteers living and working throughout Germany, and while we of course keep in touch on Facebook, it was good to have the whole group together again - and for the first time since our introductory seminar in September.

We started the seminar that evening by each presenting one or two photos that symbolised how our initial impressions of Germany had changed over our first three months of living there. I chose a map of Germany to show how the naive idea I had in September that I would spend my weekends travelling around the country visiting all the different cities had gone completely out the window once I got here and realised how big it actually is (and how expensive it is to travel around).

It felt a bit odd saying that in a room with several people from Russia (earlier that day, while we sat waiting for one of our many trains, Lena had said 'Germany is so small!') and the United States, but I suppose I can't help the fact that I come from a small island!

The following morning, we broke into small groups and each had the opportunity to present our work to the other volunteers. I really enjoyed hearing what the others do, because, while some of them also work in memorial sites, many are doing things that are completely different. For example, there are people working in the ASF office, others who work with elderly people and there is one volunteer in a youth club. Despite the variety of work however, we're all experiencing the same issues in terms of settling in and finding our feet in a completely new environment.

We spent one day visiting the House of the Wannsee Conference, exploring many of the issues relating to anti-Semitism and the Final Solution. The exhibition at the site is excellent, charting the history of anti-Semitism in Europe and helping to explain what led to the ultimate decision to exterminate the entire Jewish population of the continent.

That day ended with a visit to a synagogue for a Friday-evening service, which, as many in the group remarked afterwards, was quite refreshing after spending so long speaking of Judaism in the past tense. The exterior seemed a bit unwelcoming, with two police standing at the door and another keeping an eye on the security cameras (something which I have often seen outside the synagogue near my house in Dublin on a Saturday morning too) - a sad reminder maybe that some things haven't changed - but once we got inside, the atmosphere could not have been more different.

It was my first time ever inside a synagogue; I have to admit that the one I just mentioned near my house is somewhere I have passed thousands of times, but have never actually considered going in to. I immediately felt very welcome, with many people asking us where we were from and what we were doing in Germany and there was a group of old men sitting nearby who kept showing us where we were in the prayers and hymns, even though it was all in Hebrew anyway!

There was also a great sense of community: everyone was catching up with friends after the week's work and finding out all the news and gossip, just like many people do in Ireland after mass on a Sunday. As someone who is quite critical of religion in general, this gave me a different perspective on the role it can play in people's lives in terms of bringing them together with their neighbours and creating a sense of belonging.

And religion is a theme that came up again and again throughout the seminar, in particular when we talked about the meanings behind some rituals and festivals (mainly Christmas and Hanukkah, given the time of year) and the ways they are celebrated throughout the world.

Unlike our first seminar, this time we did everything through German. It was difficult at times, and I found myself getting quite tongue-tied when speaking in front of the whole group, but there was definitely a determination among those of us who had mostly spoken English in September to stick to German this time.

In comparison to the first seminar, which was geared primarily towards providing us with an introduction to the whole programme and our work, this seminar involved dealing with a much broader range of topics. As well as everything I've mentioned above, we also talked about many other things, including the concept of 'identity' and how we label ourselves and other people, the issues around how our perspectives of our own lives can change over time and even the most feared topic of all: what we're going to do once our volunteer service is over.

It was strange to be thinking of what comes next already when it seems like we've only started, but as I thought about it on the train home (perfectly punctual this time, thankfully) I realised I've been here for almost four months now and I'm well beyond the stage of 'just starting'!

Nothing in particular

It's a long time since I've posted here, and I suppose it's partly because, since my orientation phase finished up at the end of October, I've just settled into my weekly routine, with each day not being as exciting or new as during the first few weeks. That's not to say that things have got boring though - it's more so that we now have the time to devote to the specific things that we want to work on.

In fact, one of the things I am finding the most challenging is learning how to manage my time properly as I have nobody peering over my shoulder and virtually no deadlines to meet. We work here as volunteers and, apart from a few things like working in the information office, there is very little that we HAVE to do, so it is up to us to make what we want out of the year.

And with so many different projects that I want to work on, I initially found myself like a bit of a headless chicken sometimes, running between all of them and getting nothing done, though I think I'm getting better now at disciplining myself to focus on one thing at a time!

I have spent much of the past few weeks transcribing a set of interviews in English with former prisoners of Buchenwald who were children or teenagers when they were in the camp. While it took a long time, and while transcribing can be a very monotonous process, it was both fascinating and sad to hear the stories directly from the mouths of the people who experienced them.

In general the interviewers would let the men just speak freely about their experiences, but it was sometimes frustrating when they would butt in with a question and interrupt the flow of thoughts - I cannot imagine how difficult it must have been for the men to talk about these events which, as well as being horrific, happened over sixty years ago.

In terms of gaining an understanding of the brutality of what happened, I had the same feelings when I was doing this work as I do when I'm in the archives: the sheer scale of the Holocaust makes it impossible to contemplate the human aspect of the suffering, but by hearing individual stories, I think we can begin to get a better sense of just how awful it really was.

One man spoke of a time when he was living with his family in a Ghetto and they were told that they had to choose one member of the family to be sent for deportation. Not knowing what would happen to the person chosen, they agreed that his older brother would go as he was the most likely to be put to work and not murdered (by this time there were rumours of gas chambers beginning to reach the Ghetto, he said) and thus had the best chance of survival.

Another spoke of how he and many others he knew got sick in the weeks after liberation because they ate more food than their systems could handle at the time. They had become so used to having almost no food, and they couldn't believe how much they now had, that they ate as much as possible in case it would be taken from them.

On the 9th of November, the anniversary of Reichspogromnacht (or Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass), we participated in a ceremony to commemorate the German Jews who, on this and the following days in 1938, had their property and synagogues destroyed and who were rounded up en masse and sent to concentration camps as a means of intimidating them into leaving Germany.

Our role was to read out quotes from some of the men who were sent to Buchenwald at this time; I read out two quotes, one in English and one in German. Needless to say I was quite nervous about having to read something like this out loud at a commemoration ceremony, and we spent most of the preceding two days rehearsing our German pronunciation.


Thankfully it all went well, and the ceremony itself was quite simple and informal. As well as the quotes we read out, the head of the memorial site and the site's chief historian spoke about the events of November 1938 and the mayor of Weimar laid a wreath at the location where temporary barracks were erected to house the men brought to Buchenwald as a result of the pogrom. Ceremonies like this took place all over Germany on the same day and I saw wreaths and flowers in many different towns and train stations over the following weeks.

Towards the end of November, I spent a full day working with a group of school students from England who were visiting Buchenwald as part of a trip through Germany. I accompanied them on a tour around the site and spent the afternoon running a workshop with some of them about the use of photos as sources on the history of the camp.

I found that the students were very engaged in the issues and were far more willing to contribute their opinions than I ever was when I was fifteen. While this was of course only one group, I was happy with my first experience of working with the students and this has encouraged me to work a bit quicker at putting together my own tour, so that hopefully I can start doing it more often myself in the new year.

Other than this, my life outside of Buchenwald has been greatly enriched by the arrival of glühwein and waffles at the Christmas market a few weeks ago and I am happy to report that the freezing German winter that I have been dreading since September hasn't arrived...yet.

The realities of what happened here

I previously mentioned the positive work atmosphere that I have noticed in the memorial site. However, this isn't to say that working here is always easy, or that there aren't things that I find difficult about being here every day.

What has struck me is that I have not found myself being too affected by seeing places like the crematorium or the disinfection facility. I think these are places we all expect to see in concentration camps, so I suppose I was prepared for them to a certain extent.

There are, however, three places within Buchenwald that I find particularly difficult to reconcile and when I visit them I really begin wondering about how the people who worked here could actually do what they did to fellow human beings.

The first is in the building which now houses the administration for the site as well as the library and archives and it is where I have my lunch most days. As far as I am aware it was originally used as an SS accommodation block, but there is something about the main corridor along what are now offices that makes me think about how, in one way, the Holocaust was a very bureaucratic and clinical process.

I can imagine faceless civil servants sitting in offices poring over train timetables and planning transports across the concentration camp network, like they were moving cargo, and I think of how many of these people claimed innocence after the War; they were only paper-pushers carrying out orders, they didn't do anything wrong.

The second place is the collection of enclosures that made up the Buchenwald zoo. It was built using money stolen from prisoners (which was officially recorded as a 'donation') for the entertainment of the SS and their families. It was built directly outside the prisoners' camp, with a clear view of what was going on on the other side of the barbed wire fence.

When I visited this part of the site with a group of students, one of them asked the guide if this was meant as a way of taunting the prisoners. She said that she didn't think so. Rather, based on what former SS men said after the war about how they enjoyed their time at Buchenwald, her interpretation was that the SS just thought so little of the people who were in the camp that they had no problem enjoying themselves with their families on a day out to the zoo, regardless of how close it was to the concentration camp.

The third is a collection of houses in the forest that made up the SS-Führersiedlung, where the camp's commander and other top SS men lived with their families. The houses are beautiful, built in an idyllic forest location, and yet not far away at all was the quarry, where prisoners were made to do back-breaking work for twelve hours a day with no breaks. Like with the zoo, I don't know how people could carry on an outwardly 'normal' family life in a place like this.

I spend quite a lot of my time working in the archives, which I find really interesting. They get hundreds of requests each year from relatives of former prisoners looking for information about their experiences here. We, the volunteers, help by doing the preliminary searching through the microfilm and printed records of transport lists, daily roll-call figures, prisoner information cards, etc.

Up to 250,000 people were imprisoned here at one time or another between 1937 and 1945, a number so high that I think it is difficult, if not impossible, to relate to the human element of the suffering they endured. But when I look at one person's individual experience of Buchenwald, or of the Nazi persecution regime in general (many prisoners were brought here from, or were later sent to, other camps), I find that I can relate much more to it.

I find myself getting quite involved with each individual case that I research in the archives, and I really want to find as much information as possible for the family as I think that even seeing the name of their loved-one on a form or piece of paper can bring some sort of comfort.

There were 250,000 prisoners here, but no two have the same story - each single person had their own families, their own jobs and their own lives that were taken away from them, and each person had a different experience of Buchenwald. I think that is by focusing on personal stories that we can better understand just how terrible the events of the Holocaust really were.

Settling in and meeting my new best friend: Google Translate

Before I started working here, I naively thought that one year was a long time and that I'd really have an opportunity to get to know the place very well. But after working here for six weeks now, I can't believe I ONLY have a year to try and learn as much as possible and make some contribution to the work of the memorial site.

The history of the site is very complicated. It opened as a concentration camp in 1937 and operated as such until its liberation by the US army on 11 April 1945. This is, of course, the most significant part of its history, and the one which on which I will be focusing the most.

But after the War, Buchenwald was used by the Soviet Union as 'Special Camp Number II' to intern thousands of people who had been involved in the Nazi regime or who had been members of the NSDAP, as well as thousands of innocent people who were wrongly suspected of being Nazis.

In 1950, the East German authorities decided that the process of De-Nazification should be ended and the camp was closed, re-opening soon afterwards as a memorial site. However, the official historiography of the DDR claimed that the camp had been 'self-liberated' by the secret communist resistance that had operated within Buchenwald throughout the camp's existence, so instead of commemorating the suffering of the hundreds of thousands of victims of the Nazi regime, the site celebrated the glory of these 'anti-fascist' resistance fighters.

Needless to say, the story of the site as Special Camp Number II was completely ignored during this time, and it was only after German Reunification that proper research could be carried out about it and the rest of the history of the camp in general. Throughout the 1990s all the exhibitions were completely re-designed, and the memorial site has since attempted to present an accurate and balanced interpretation of the history.

So not only does the camp itself have a complex history, its time as a memorial does too.

We have spent the past six weeks in our so-called orientation phase, to allow us to get to know this history and the actual site itself which, as I mentioned in a previous post, has an area of 190 hectares.

I have visited all of the exhibitions, gone on tours and taken part in workshops with school students, visited the library and archives and spent countless hours just wandering around the site, trying to build up a mental map of where exactly everything is (or was).

I have also been given the catalogues which accompany the exhibitions on both the concentration camp and the Special Camp, which detail their histories in full. I don't think I have ever read anything more slowly in my life. I sit and read them at my desk, with my dictionary open on one side and Google Translate on the other, and poor Marlene is driven demented with my constant requests for her to clarify the meaning of a word or sentence.

We have also had to write weekly reports of what we have done and learnt and what we thought of the different exhibitions, tours, etc. I begin by writing them in English and can get one done in about an hour or two, but then have to spend about twice as long translating them into German, with my old friend Google.

But it works both ways; being a native English speaker means I am often in demand for translating work too. I have translated letters and invitations sent to former prisoners living in the USA, England and New Zealand for the ceremonies to mark the anniversary of liberation in April, and I will be working to take care of them when they come.

I am also transcribing a series of interviews with English-speaking former prisoners that will form part of a research project and I am translating some new information signs that will be put up in Ohrdruf, a former sub-camp of Buchenwald in a nearby town.

I found the first two weeks or so very tiring as I had to shake off the cobwebs from my summer holidays. Things also get going in Germany much earlier than at home - we were expected to be in work for 8am on many mornings, and myself and Lena are also doing a German course two evenings a week in Jena, a city near Weimar.

But by the end of the first six weeks, things have settled down a lot and I'm feeling quite at home at work and in Weimar in general. We have got to know the other volunteers and interns quite well and this has made settling in much easier.

By now German is coming much more naturally to me too. As you've probably gathered from the amount of times I mention it, language was the thing that was most worrying me before I came here. However, after only a few weeks it has become completely normal to speak German. Of course I make thousands of mistakes every day and I can still only speak very basic German, but nine out of ten times I can get the jist of what someone is saying and I think they eventually understand me most of the time!

Now the only thing worrying me is the snow, which we are promised could arrive any day now. I've been told that once it comes it's here to stay until about February, so I've already invested in a big new coat and I'm thankful that the heating in my apartment is quite good.

Starting work - the first week

The Buchenwald memorial site is located on the Ettersberg mountain that overlooks Weimar, about 8km from the city centre. The concentration camp was opened in 1937, in what had been a beautiful forest ('Buchenwald' means 'beech forest') with spectacular views over the city and the surrounding countryside. The road up to the site was once a narrow path through the forest which was widened in the early years of the camp's existence by prisoners working in horrific conditions - so many of them died in its construction that it immediately became known as 'Blutstraße' or 'Blood Road', a name by which it is still known today.

My first-day nerves were made worse when I found out that I would be thrown straight in at the deep-end: running the visitor information office with the three other volunteers.

Thankfully Marlene and Fabian had started a week before us, so had done it once before, but it was a little bit strange answering visitors' questions (in my terrible German) about a place I had only started working in that morning.

We work here every Monday, as most of the staff of the educational department have Mondays off because they work at weekends. Unfortunately all of the exhibitions are also closed and there are no guided tours, meaning that all the visitors can do is walk around the site themselves with a map and an audioguide. This works well in certain places, but Buchenwald is a 190-hectare site with very few original buildings still standing, so I do wonder how much the Monday visitors can really learn about it.

This also means that on Mondays my job involves apologising to a lot of disappointed (and sometimes angry) people and then asking them to give me their driver's licence as a deposit for the audioguide.

On the plus side, working here is great for my German. I have memorised a few important phrases for giving directions, explaining how the audioguides work, etc, but other than that I am left to answer all of the other questions in German as well as I can. The phrase 'necessity is the mother of invention' comes to mind fairly often as I attempt to answer the more complicated questions - I can always eventually find a way to explain what I have to, which has given me more confidence in speaking the language. The information office is also one of the rare occasions I get to speak English, as we get quite a lot of American visitors and other international visitors who can speak English but not German.

If Tuesday was a reminder of how some things really are the same everywhere, it also showed how different they can be. First, myself and Lena had to register as residents of Weimar. We were told that for me as an EU citizen it would be straight-forward. But then we entered the maze of bureaucracy and queuing that is the Weimar city administration building. Each person we met told us we needed to go to a different place with different forms and wait outside different offices in a building that can't have been built by anyone other than the Stasi. It was eventually sorted, of course, and I'm now a fully-registered resident, but it was interesting to see that some problems aren't confined to Ireland.

Second, we went to open new bank accounts. The first bank we went to wasn't interested in opening accounts for us because we'd only be here for a year - I tried to imagine a bank in Ireland turning away new business, but I wasn't able to. We then went across the road to Deutsche Bank who told us that they'd give us both free accounts for the year, but that there was nobody there at the time to open them, so we had to make an appointment to come back that evening.

On Tuesday afternoon we got to see our new office - three of us will share one office and one will share another with an intern. They are in a building that used to house some of the SS men, but which is now used to host workshops and events with groups of school students and young people. I wasn't expecting to have an office at all, as in general our work will involve us being in many different areas and working with different people all over the site, but it was a nice introduction to the very impressive set-up they have here, and in Germany in general, for volunteers and interns.

I have met at least ten other volunteers and interns working here in various capacities and for varying lengths of time. While the compulsory year of national service was recently scrapped in Germany, it is still very common for people to complete several internships or periods of volunteer services as part of their studies or just for the experience.

And they're not just here to do the photocopying either; many of them are involved in putting together exhibitions or working on the events for the anniversary of the camp's liberation. This also means that there are a lot of other young people working here, which has made settling in and getting to know everyone that bit easier.

Later that week, we began going around all the weekly departmental staff meetings to introduce ourselves and meet the other people who work here. For me this was quite intimidating at first, sitting around a table with ten to fifteen others (some of whom have worked here for up to thirty years) introducing myself in German, and then trying to remember all of their names and what they do here, before doing the exact same thing again twenty minutes later at another meeting down the hall.

There are a lot of people working here, in a variety of areas, from historians, librarians and archivists to those working in the educational department. One thing that I can say about all of them, though, is that they've gone out of their way to make us feel welcome and help us settle in.

The rest of the first week was mainly spent organising keys and e-mail addresses and the like, but I was absolutely wrecked by Friday evening, having met so many new people and after spending my first full week speaking nothing but German.

One of last year's volunteers told me that, despite the place you work in and the topic you have to deal with on a daily basis, you can really enjoy working here. This sounds a bit strange at first, but I can now understand what she meant.

Of course the place itself is a constant reminder of how low humanity can descend, but the people who work here now are so passionate about their work - learning as much as possible about the camp's history, teaching as many people as possible about it, and doing as much as possible to ensure that what happened here is never forgotten - that the atmosphere is in fact a very positive one.

By the end of the first week, all of my concerns about working in a place like this were gone and I was looking forward to starting again on Monday morning.

Ich bin ein Weimarer

Right after the seminar in Wünsdorf, I took the train down to Weimar with Elena, a volunteer from Russia who will be living and working with me for the year. There we met our two German flatmates, Marlene and Fabian, who had prepared a picnic to welcome us.

We're living in an apartment right in the middle of the city, not that location is a big issue in Weimar - nothing is more than a fifteen-minute walk away. What is important, though, is that the bus to the memorial site goes right by the front door.

Despite being home to only 65,000 people, Weimar is a hugely important city in German history and culture. Two of Germany's most celebrated writers, Goethe and Schiller, lived here and they're remembered by a large statue in the centre and countless plaques around the city claiming that one or the other had once breathed in a particular place. They also both have the honour of having shopping centres named after them.

The city was home to Luther, Liszt and Bach at different times and it's here that the constitution of what would become known as the 'Weimar Republic' was ratified in 1919. The original Bauhaus school was also opened here in that same year.

However, Weimar also has a darker side to its history. It was chosen to be the location for one of the 'Gauforen', large complexes that merged the ordinary civilian bureaucracy with that of the Nazi party, making the city an important administrative capital of the Third Reich. The Ettersburg mountain overlooking the city became the location for the Buchenwald Concentration Camp, which would become one of the largest within Germany.

Controversially, the old 'Gauforum' complex has recently been lovingly restored and is now used as offices by the Thuringian state government and the (never completed) conference hall at its centre has been converted into a shopping centre.

In comparison to the other towns I've visited so far, it's clear that a lot of money has been put into Weimar since Reunification. If anything, it's almost too perfect - as if it was designed by the same people who built Main Street USA in Disneyworld - but it's proving to be a great place to live and I have no worries about being here for a year.