Ilm-Kakanien. Weimar am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkriegs. Ed. Franziska Bomski, Hellmut Th. Seemann and Thorsten Valk (Jahrbuch der Klassik Stiftung Weimar).

• Stefan Davies

In the BBC radio series to accompany the British Museum’s recent exhibition, Germany: Memories of a Nation, the Museum’s director, Neil MacGregor, suggests that ‘if Americans are one nation under God, the Germans are one nation under Goethe’. The 2014 Yearbook of the Stiftung Weimarer Klassik tests this claim for Goethe’s Weimar before the First World War. Its comparison of Weimar with Robert Musil’s ‘Kakanien’ not only places the town on the eve of catastrophe, but, most importantly, situates it between myth and reality. Divided into three sections, ‘Weltanschauung und Wissenschaft’, ‘Gesellschaft und Politik’ and ‘Kultur und Kunst’, the volume thus covers a broad spectrum, from Weimar’s place in clashing concepts of nationhood through to its artistic representation and its changing architecture.