The story
On 2 October 2026, after eight years behind construction fences, the east wing of Weimar's city palace opened to visitors again. Work on the rest of the building, including much of the museum, is expected to run into the early 2030s.
The palace has been rebuilt before. A fire on 6 May 1774 gutted the ducal residence, and when reconstruction began in 1789, Duke Carl August put Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the poet and a senior official at his court, in charge of the building commission. The work went on until 1803. In the 1830s Maria Pavlovna, a Russian grand duchess who had married into the ducal family, commissioned memorial rooms for the town's great writers, Goethe, Schiller, Herder and Wieland.
Since 1923 the palace has housed a museum, now run by the Klassik Stiftung Weimar. Among its paintings are Albrecht Dürer's portraits of the Nuremberg couple Hans and Felicitas Tucher, painted in 1499 as a pair, and one of Claude Monet's views of the portal of Rouen Cathedral. Caspar David Friedrich's Hutten's Grave shows a lone figure at the tomb of Ulrich von Hutten, the Renaissance knight and humanist, inside a ruined Gothic church.
