A small city in the middle of Germany, famous far beyond its size because so many great writers and thinkers lived there. In the late 1700s and early 1800s the poets Goethe and Schiller both settled in Weimar, and the town became the centre of German literature — people still visit their houses today. Later, the Bauhaus art and design school started there. The name comes up in history class most often in "the Weimar Republic": that was the German government from 1919 to 1933, named Weimar because the new constitution was written in this town, in the calm countryside, away from the fighting in Berlin. So when a history book says "Weimar Germany", it means the whole country in those years, not the little city. In English it is said roughly VY-mar, with the German w sounding like our v.