Discovering Weimar: The Bauhaus Museum

Workshop trips for students: study and travel at the same time

At the beginning of my exchange semester in the city of Saarbrucken at the Hochschule der Bildenden Kunste Saar I had to pick up my courses, seminars and workshops that I wanted to follow during my study there. I was looking through the course catalog of the faculty and I found out that the school organizes workshop trips to various places, inside Germany and also outside of it in foreign countries.

Most of this kind of trips had ECTS points too which was literally mind blowing for me. I saw such a great opportunity to do both things at once – especially for being an Erasmus student – namely to study and complete those necessary credits for my Learning  Agreement and travel.

What a perfect combination that suited my goals and desires so well. Plus, when I discovered that 50% of the trips expenses were going to be covered by the school when I will get back from Leipzig, I was even more happier and excited about my good decision of taking this workshop trip.

In regards to the above facts, I appreciated the effort of HBK for providing the students with such opportunities and I recommend the school and the city for an exchange mobility to the persons who want to travel while learning and the other way around.

I have wrote an article about my fellows and I experience in Leipzig which you can find in my profile: Leipzig, a rough city , but I thought it will be helpful and interesting to share the journey to Weimar as well because in my opinion the city is totally worth visiting.

Having local guides

In Leipzig I met with the two girls who were going to held the workshop trip. Both of them were actually post graduate students from HBK and now they were living and working here.

The workshop they proposed to us was about creating posters with the subject of protest, but because we were too few, the girls gave us the chance of choosing if we want to be part of it or not. So, we ended up just getting around as many places as we could alongside with our two helpful and good german guides.

Arriving to Weimar

Earlier in the morning, in the second day of our stay in Leipzig, we gathered in the main train station of Leipzig and popped up on a train to Weimar. There was a distance of more than 100 kilometers from those two cities, so the journey with the train took a bit more than one hour. The cost of the both way tickets was about 11 euros.

Strolling the streets

Our main destination to visit in Weimar was the Bauhaus Museum, but before we went inside of it, we spend some time on the streets of the city, walking and looking around at the buildings, the monuments, the public squares. While we were strolling the streets, the two girls were telling us about the history of this region in connection with the entire country, focusing on what happened to the art field during the 20thcentury and the importance of Bauhaus.

From the outside, Weimar looked like a very clean and organized city. The buildings and the cultural or historical constructions were very well maintained giving a nice looking aspect to the city. 

The only problem that we encountered was the high heat of the sun. It was a hot summer day outside and we were trying to find the shadow everywhere we would get.

In the city center, to cool ourselves down, we got ice cream from a place called “Eiscafe Venezia” where they had vegan ice cream as well. What a good news for me! If people go to Leipzig in a hot summer day, they should definitely try out this place. And before we got the ice cream, because everybody was hungry, we also eat something at a place called Halal Food City Kebap. The food was pretty good and cheap, they were serving vegan options too, so I had a falafel wrap with fries. 

After we ate that delicious ice cream, we went in front of the Deutsch National Theater and took a photo – which I cannot find right now to insert in this article – with the statue representing two of the most known german writers, namely Goethe and Schiller.

And that was not all, walking on the streets, our guides showed us the memorial houses of these important literature personalities, both of them living and working during their life in Weimar. People can also visit the writer’s houses because the buildings had been transformed into museums:

• Schiller Museum

• Goethe-Nationalmuseum

Somehow, Weimar remained me of Brasov, a Romanian city, due to the aspect of the houses, the configuration of the streets, the green area surrounding it.

What had Weimar to do with Bauhaus?

Weimar was the birth place of the artistic movement called Bauhaus which appeared 100 years ago, in 1919, but Bauhaus was not only a new an artistic tendency, it was an academic school of arts, design, architecture, theater founded in the city by Walter Gropius.

Unfortunately, because of the Nazi politics and pressure, the school had to move in Dessau in 1925, where there is today another museum dedicated to this influential movement of the 20thcentury.

Where is the museum located?

When it got extremely hot outside, we decided that the time had come to go inside the museum and be protected by its shadow and cooler rooms. Since The Bauhaus Museum was located in the modern area of Weimar, more precisely in Stephane Hessel Platz, we had to walk for about 15 minutes from Goethes Wohnhaus to there.

The outside strange appear of the museum

When we got in front of the museum’s building I felt a bit shocked because I didn’t expected the construction to be looking like that. I was seeing this large cube with sharp edges, designed in an extremely minimalistic and neutral style with grey walls. Plus, I used to imagine that the museum would be much bigger and now from the outside it looked quite small. I guessed, I thought I knew something about Bauhaus, but actually I didn’t and it was the time to find out more. I got excited and curious about what was in that gigantic grey cube without any feelings and decorations.

When is the museum open and how much a ticket costs?

As I am writing this article, I don’t remember in which day of the week we visited the museum, but that aspect wasn’t a problem regarding the time table of the institution because, apparently, The Bauhaus Museum is open every day from 10.00 AM to 18.00 PM. We paid for one ticket 7 euros and got access to all of the rooms and displayed collections that the museum has to offer.

What is to see and experience in The Bauhaus Museum?

On the walls of the museum were exhibited lots of different kind of works from black and white drawings to abstract and geometrical paintings, textiles, objects and crafts, sculptures, photographs, video and sound artworks, furniture designed in the Bauhaus style, all showing the movement’s programme which was defined by innovation, the main purpose of the school being the awakening of free creativity before focusing on art and design.

The influence of Wassily Kandinsky

One of the teachers at Bauhaus Weimar was Kandinsky who seemed to had, due to its teaching, a major impact on the new artistic movement. What Kandinsky did was to focus on colors in terms of their essence and effect, so everything got simplified in form and color, that’s why the language of the Bauhaus was reduced to very simple, elementary forms and colors. And that’s how I got the answer about why was the building of the museum so simply obscure.

My impressions about the museum

Well, I thought that I would get more from this museum, but actually the artworks were not a lot on my taste. What I liked the most were Kandinsky’s works and a sound installation which was making sounds depending on the position of the viewer in accordance to it. At the entrance of the building there was also a hanging installation with a very interesting structure made out of strings and mirrors.

The rooms and the overall aspect of the museum was very clean, organized and well curated, but I felt like there was a lack of something that would had pleased me more.

We probably spend more than 2 hours in the Bauhaus Museum until each of us had seen every corner of it. I finished admiring the exhibitions first and I had to wait for the others, but that wasn’t a problem because the museum had a very nice café and terrace where I waited and rested for a bit after standing up and walking a lot that day.

My recommandation to the people who are thinking about visiting Weimar

When our group reunited again, we got out of the Bauhaus and because we still had sometime until we had our train, we continued to discover the city by strolling its streets. We arrived into a park named Park an der Ilm where there were many buildings such as The Remisches Haus, Goethes Gartenhaus, Tempelherrenhaus, Grunes Schloss, which we admired from the outside becaue we didn't had enough time left to visit something else. 

That was when I realized that there were so many buildings like that in Weimar and that I should had informed myself more about what was to be seen in the city before coming. Thus, I recommend the people who are planning on travelling to Weimar to first search on the Internet what is to be seen in the city because after I was there, I came to the conclusion that Weimar has plenty of attractions that are waiting to be discovered.