2 Best Sights in Weimar, Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia

When Walter Gropius founded the Staatliches Bauhaus (Bauhaus design school) in Weimar, it quickly became Germany's most influential and avant-garde design school, and it ushered in the era of modern architecture and design just before the start of World War II. Weimar's Bauhaus Museum is a modest, yet superb collection of the works of Gropius, Johannes Itten, and Henry van de Velde.  The emphasis is on the early phase of the Bauhaus and displays the world's oldest collection of Bauhaus work. The Bauhaus is still alive today, and the museum tells the story of how our contemporary visions of our living environment have evolved and how they continue to develop.

The city is proud of eastern Germany's first museum exclusively devoted to contemporary art. The building, dating from 1869, houses an outstanding international collection of Realist, Impressionist, and Art Nouveau works. Early modernism is at home in Weimar, and the works of the Weimar School of Painting and the avant-garde promoted by Harry Graf Kessler, from Claude Monet to Max Beckmann, help explain the contradictory and glamorous period at the end of the 19th century. In addition, it regularly presents international modern-art exhibitions.