We have all heard of Weimar. Mainly the name. Wasn’t there once a Republic there? Hasn’t it something to do with hideous paintings of disfigured soldiers and angry women wearing monocles, with jerky, angry music, Bertolt Brecht, that film Cabaret, and the Bauhaus? Is it perhaps mentioned, disguised as Pumpernickel, in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair? Yes it is, along with its famous Elephant Hotel. And then of course it is actually in the title of Thomas Mann’s Lotte in Weimar. But it is also a place.

Approach it with me, on a dingy winter’s day of low cloud and sharp wind, on a scruffy Communist express train from Berlin in which I, my wife Eve, and a couple of very obvious secret police spies (who are pretending very badly that they cannot understand English) are traveling. For, in my travels in the old East Germany, Weimar was not just a name from the past. It was one of the very few places in that sad little state which had escaped the deliberate uglification inflicted on everywhere else, and I very much wanted to see this rare combination of Communism and beauty. I had my visa (in those days you had to tell the authorities in advance exactly where you were going, so that they could deploy the spies). We were quickly enveloped in a nostalgic twilight of empty countryside with cobbled roads, and industrial cities which looked like the North of England in the 1950s, long rows of terraced houses with perhaps one car in each street, lots of factory chimneys, huge slabs of crude Plattenbau housing blocks. Who would have thought Handel could have come from here?

We had to change trains, quite lengthily, at the wondrous and amazingly unknown city of Naumburg, in those times full of Soviet army vehicles painted the color of pickled cucumbers. In between sonic booms from Warsaw Pact planes hurtling above, we gasped at the glorious eleventh-century statues in the cathedral, which has two choirs and no fewer than four magnificent towers. I had no idea such loveliness existed in East Germany, and they had tried hard to hide it, presumably because it was a very Christian beauty. Do not let anyone ever tell you that medieval sculpture is stiff and lifeless. I seem to remember the enormous cathedral was in those days entered through a tiny, uninviting door, better fitted to a storeroom, its other, grander entrances having been blocked in some interminable socialist rebuilding project.

Later, in search of coffee and perhaps cake (there was a brown, rasping fluid, made from who knows what, and there were beige slabs of something gritty and extraordinarily dry, but not coffee or cake as I had previously known them), we came across another church building. And there, in the middle of a Communist state, we found, in a dusty corner, a First World War memorial, bearing the crowned eagle of the Hohenzollern Empire. Its crown, scepter, and orb are each surmounted, unmistakably, by a cross. The dates “1914–1918” and a large representation of an Imperial Iron Cross war medal were visible. Even more perplexing was a second slab, this time dated “1939” but with no end date. This had no National Socialist symbolism, but it did bear an image of Christ crucified and two quotations from scripture. These were “Greater love hath no man than this than that a man lay down his life for his friends,” from the Gospel of John, very common in British war commemorations, and “Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life,” from the Apocalypse.

Were they, I wondered, entitled to say this on a monument to those who died in Hitler’s armies? It is possible that the monument had once borne Nazi emblems (I could see no trace) and they had been removed. Such things happened. But for this Englishman these remnants were quite shocking enough as they were. I had always somehow imagined that Germans would want to forget the terrible disasters which war had brought upon them, especially given the homicidal madness and the revival of slavery with which they ended. I was reminded of Abraham Lincoln’s great rebuke in his second inaugural address: “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces, but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered.”

The continued existence of these worrying slabs of stone came as a surprise. I had assumed that the storms of history would have wiped any such thing out of existence. War memorials in my own country were everywhere, sometimes triumphal, mostly just sad, but all based on the belief that we had not started it and that we were the forces of good. But nobody was ashamed of them or embarrassed by them, as surely Germans must be. They formed the temples of a religion of patriotism and victory that has largely replaced conventional Christianity, though it occupies much the same space.

Germany, I mused as I gaped at this black and grey Denkmal, had been beaten in 1918 in a war of aggression it had started. Then it had chosen a mass murderer to lead it into another such war, and been beaten again. How had this relic possibly survived under Communist rule? I still do not know, though perhaps it was because hardly anyone in that atheist nation ever went there, and it was easier to leave it be.

Full of thought, we took the ancient tram (fare twenty Eastern pfennig) down the curving cobbled hill to the station, which had not been painted since Stalingrad, and finally made our way to Weimar, which did not disappoint although evening was coming on. Much of it was in darkness as by then, in the early 1980s, East Germany was suffering from a major energy crisis thanks to cuts in supplies of Soviet oil and gas. And the air was grittier because this forced the greater use of brown coal, the only locally produced fuel. The smell of this substance, mingled with the perfume of two-stroke car exhausts, was the aroma of the German Democratic Republic. If you bottled it as L’Heure Rouge or Eau de Trabant, quite a few people would buy it to bring back the atmosphere of that lost, equivocal age. Even pretty Weimar, with its tasteful street lamps and paved pedestrian precincts, could not escape it.

We stayed in the famous Elephant Hotel on the marketplace, from whose windows I did not then know that Adolf Hitler had addressed infatuated crowds. Though his own preferred quarters were at the back, overlooking a garden, he might well (I also did not then know) have used our room to make those harangues. The entire establishment had been remodeled in the 1930s to suit the Führer by a Nazi architect who had also designed boarding schools for the S.S. There was a certain rectangular austerity to it, and an aggressive bigness. I recall the room had a bathtub eight feet long, deep and wide in proportion, in which you might have concealed a miniature submarine. But it also boasted an ancient, softly glowing wireless set from which we were able to conjure the B.B.C. World Service, a special act of defiance in that country of lies.

So now let us walk out into the Weimar portrayed by the historian Katja Hoyer. Hoyer, a young woman with a successful and interesting book about the G.D.R. under her belt, is rapidly establishing herself as a notable voice in German history. Coming as she does from the East (though the Communist regime collapsed when she was still a small child), she has an original perspective on her country. In Weimar: Life on the Edge of Catastrophe, she takes several individuals and follows their lives in that city from just before the First World War to the gory collapse of the Hitler state thirty-one years later. Some of these individuals are more interesting than others. And, as we all know how this saga will end, their tribulations and joys in the years before 1933 can be a little ordinary.

Things speed up a great deal after Hitler sizes control of the story. In this small space, the doomed post-1918 Republic which nobody believes in is founded. Hitler, who likes the town, comes and goes often, as do his bigoted bruisers and swivel-eyed “intellectuals.” Hermann Goering falls in love with an actress. Goebbels and Marlene Dietrich almost cross paths. Goebbels and Himmler go riding together through the town on a motorbike. People may think that Weimar is “safe, pretty and far away—an oasis of deceptive calm.” But evil is incubating in the bankrupt, defeated state, and it will come to Weimar as well. The Hitler salute is tried out in public there for the first time. Weimar’s tram system (the nearest that public transport gets to virtue) is destroyed to make way for a grandiose Nazi remodeling of the city. And Friedrich Nietzsche’s rather unappealing but also rather pathetic sister strives to make an industry out of her complicated brother’s memory. Hitler really prefers Wagner, rightly suspecting that Nietzsche, left to his own devices, is not really a brownshirt type.

Interestingly, the old question “How did the people who gave us Goethe and Schiller fall into the hands of Nazi barbarians?” is (sort of ) answered. The Nazis didn’t particularly dislike Goethe and Schiller, safely in the past as they were, and were quite happy to celebrate them. Both had made anti-Jewish references during their lives. Hitler himself, in reply to the last gasp of opposition in the Reichstag from Otto Wels in 1933, quoted with a sneer from Schiller’s Wallenstein in response: “Late you come; but still, you come” (Spät kommt ihr, doch ihr kommt!). The house museums which are nowadays devoted to Goethe and to Schiller in Weimar are absolutely beautiful, filled with light and grace, and an evocation of Germany when it was a happy and weak jigsaw of small statelets, yet to be soaked in blood and bound in iron. They are in tune with the small rivers, woods, and parks; the churches with their Cranach paintings; the sylvan, poetic nature of the place. But alas, the high arts and the delights of nature offer little in the way of defense for freedom against tyranny. Despots like to co-opt them.

In Hoyer’s account of inter-war Weimar, we also meet Baldur von Schirach, the worryingly intelligent evil genius of the Hitler Youth. Alongside him, and counterbalancing his evil with their courage, we find a group of hopelessly brave Social Democrats, who keep going because someone needs to defy the torture state. They are caught. Among these, Kurt Nehrling especially deserves to have his name remembered. How did they bear the fear? We meet Jews who wisely try (and eventually fail) to hide their ancestry. At what point could they have been sure that it was time to flee? Where could they realistically have gone? Imagine being a Jew and finding one morning that, thanks to Nazification, you now live on Adolf Hitler Street. You might rightly conclude that you did not have long to live in freedom. And we meet the usual disgusting, murderous oafs whose evil was obvious to the world long before they got the power to destroy and kill. Yet they won power, and kept it, and used it.

To me, there is no great conundrum here. The original folly of Germany was to make war in 1914 when it did not have to, to slaughter its young men, to spend all its wealth, to poison what had until then been a reasonably free civil society with sulky, childish propaganda, and into the bargain to spread the bacillus of Bolshevism into Russia, to gain a cheap and temporary victory.

Without this original act of hubris, we might now live in a far more civilized world. And at this moment of choice, the peoples of the nations involved waved and cheered. Weimar was no different from Stuttgart or Cologne. They all fell for it. As the Communist Brunet remarks in Sartre’s Roads to Freedom about France’s unwillingness to fight in 1940, women in 1914 garlanded the soldiers on their way to muddy death when they should have lain down on the railway tracks. The women of 1940 opposed the war when they should have been urging their men to fight. Hoyer describes very well the mobilization of Germany for war in 1914, and its popularity: “A place that took pride in its civility and high culture suddenly became a garrison town. . . . The trains were decorated with flowers and crowds gathered at the station to see them off with cheers and good wishes.” Look now at photographs of German squares and streets before 1914 and you see a profound peace, probably unmatched since.

And then the devil of war storms over the horizon, ripping up the trees and tearing homes apart, and the crowds cheer the troops, and the good men go away and do not come back, and the poverty begins to bite like a wild dog, and then there is the blockade (a stain on my country) and actual starvation, and revolution in the streets. And after revolution and counter-revolution comes the debauchery of the currency. This was not some weird, inexplicable natural catastrophe. It was another direct consequence of what another German historian, Fritz Fischer, denounced in 1961 as “Germany’s grab for world power” (“Griff nach der Weltmacht” was Fischer’s phrase) in a book which infuriated his country’s patriots. They accepted that Hitler had been a disaster. They had to. But they still thought that Germany was the victim in 1914. Well, it wasn’t. There may have been several other countries only too ready to join a war once it had started. But Germany took the first step along that dark road, the road that led to the Nazis and to Stalin.

And here we come to the horror about Weimar that we must save for last because it is worst. Up in the beechwoods where Goethe used to walk, about five miles northwest of the town, was the wooded hill known as the Ettersberg. There in 1937, the National Socialists began to hack down the trees to make way for the Buchenwald concentration camp, of which the whole world has now heard. But how many realize that it lies so close to the literary and artistic city of Weimar? And how many know that the oak tree under which Goethe used to sit on hazy afternoons, which now lay within the camp grounds, was spared by the S.S. because its members prided themselves on their cultural sensitivity? It is as if a homicidal dictatorship, seizing power in Britain, had built a savage prison for its opponents in Stratford upon Avon in some gentle woodland where Shakespeare once mused—and then put a statue of the Bard of Avon inside the camp.

I have been twice to Buchenwald. The first time, in the Communist era, all its inmates had been called indiscriminately “anti-fascists” (I bet they were after the first ten minutes). On my second visit, after reunification, its use to terrorize Jews after Kristallnacht was mentioned, as was its repurposing by the Communists to lock up their opponents when they took over in 1945. Under any regime, it is one of those places where it is actually rather shaming to be human. Nowadays I very much wish that everyone who cheers for war could be compelled to visit it, only for two hours, and see where such follies lead. Its strangely elegant entrance gate bears the sneering inscription, paradoxically designed by a Communist Bauhaus graduate, Jedem das Seine (to each his own). It could be seen only from within. No nonsense about work making you free. It didn’t. And this is the most lasting and memorable thing you will see in that pretty little town.