Marian Evans in Weimar: arrival and lodgings
By Bob Muscutt
When Marian Evans (aka George Eliot) and George Henry Lewes arrived at Weimar’s spanking new railway station in the early hours of 3rd August, 1854, they were taken by coach to the Erbprinz Hotel, where foreign visitors usually spent the first night of their stay. With understandable dishonesty, they signed in as “George Henry Lewes and spouse”. Weimar, the capital of the tiny principality of Thüringen, was a liberal and safe refuge for artists and political fugitives, but nonetheless adultery was still illegal. The tiny town with an enormous reputation had achieved fame in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century thanks to the residence of the great German dramatist, poet and all-round genius Goethe. In fact, to speak with people who had known Goethe personally, thus adding the finishing touch to Lewes’s research for his classic biography of the poet,was the main purpose of the visit.

Although they regularly ate there in the next three months, Marian and George could not afford to stay at the luxurious hotel, which had provided accommodation for the Victorian sage Thomas Carlyle and achieved some fame in England as the Pumpernickel of Thacheray’s Vanity Fair. Unfortunately the Erbprinz no longer exists – there is a car park where it once stood, next to the even more luxurious and now more famous Elephant Hotel, which was also well beyond the budget of Marian and George.

Luckily, on the day of their arrival, they found inexpensive if humble lodgings in Kaufstraße, a narrow street on the north side of the impressive Market Square and moved in on the 4th. At that time the house number was 62 and their landlady was old Frau Münderloh, widow of a wallpaper merchant who also dealt in the transportation of goods, what we today would call a logistics. Young Münderloh continued the family business and lived with his family in the main house, while Marian and George illicitly occupied an annex in the yard, 62A.

One little irony: despite being introduced to everybody who was anybody in Weimar, Lewes apparently missed the fact that the deceased Herr Münderloh, in whose house he and Marian were living, had undertaken transport work for Goethe and so his widow or son might have been able to provide him with an anecdote or two.  

The house number today is 2 – 4 and the site is occupied by a modern fashion store which fronts onto the Market Square, although the address is still Kaufstraße. It is only 20 yards or so from the magnificent Town Hall, opposite a very fine timber-framed building which is now a bookshop.

I’d like to thank the head of the Municipal Archive in Weimar, Dr Jens Riederer, for supplying me with the information which identified the current location of Kaufstraße 62A.  

Photo 1 (source: Collection Magdlung and with kind permission of Stephan Liebig) shows a typical street scene in Kaufstraße in 1840.

Photo 2 (source: Collection Magdlung) is a pre-war shot of the building Kaufstraße 62 as it was in the 1930s, a general store. 62A may have been behind this building.

Photo 3 (Bob Muscutt) is a picture of the fashion shop which now occupied the site which was made vacant by Allied bombing in early 1945. It is the only building in the historic Market Square which clashes architecturally with its context.

In photo 4 (Magdlung Collection), we can see how that corner of the Square was totally destroyed by Allied bombing in 1945. Most of the Market Square had been carefully restored in the 1970s but the town planners had left that patch open as a small garden and seating area. The fashion shop was built after reunification. 

As far as lodgings were concerned 62 seems to have been Marian’s lucky number because the rooms they took in Berlin, after a short stay at the Hotel de l’Europe, from, the beginning of November were in Dorotheenstraße 62. 
Dorotheenstraße runs eastwards between the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag Building (see picture 5, Bob Muscutt), and so the part where Marina and Lewes lived was in what later became the GDR (East Germany). 

(Pictutre 5)

According to my information, the houses which existed in 1854 – 55 were demolished later in the century to make way for development. Unusual, however, much of the street survived the allied bombing and was only demolished after reunification to make room for the vast Bundestag (Parliament) complex which is the German equivalent of Parliament and Whitehall. What was number 62 in 1854 is now number 93, an unnamed building pictured in photo 6 (Bob Muscutt). 

Photo 6. Bob Muscutt