A cut above the Saxe-Coburgs

Centuries of patronage by Weimar's first family has made the German town a byword for high culture and impeccable taste.

"Before the end of the winter I shall come in person to renew to Monseigneur the expression of the profound and respectful attachment with which I have the honour to be Your Royal Highness's very humble and grateful servant." Even if you were a musician as distinguished as Franz Liszt, you took pains in the middle of the 19th century to be polite to Carl Alexander, the Hereditary Grand Duke of Weimar.

Over the centuries a succession of great and famous people – Martin Luther, Lucas Cranach, Johann Sebastian Bach, Herder, Goethe, Schiller, Walter Gropius, the architect and a founder of the Bauhaus, Marlene Dietrich, Thomas Mann the novelist – have lived or settled in this beautiful little town in Germany. Many of them were polite to its very discriminating ruling family, benefited from the largesse at one of the most remarkable centres of patronage in Europe, and helped to make Weimar into a place of culture.

The great days of the Grand Duchy can still be sensed in the palaces, market places, streets and museums of Weimar, even if your German is not up to tackling Goethe's and Schiller's poetry in the original. Over the centuries the grand-ducal family had built up a fine collection of paintings in their schloss, which their friend Goethe helped them to re-design after a fire. These were preserved even after the Grand Duchy itself was abolished after the First World War by the German republic, proclaimed in Weimar's own theatre a few hundred metres away. The rulers' descendants occupied the schloss right up to the Second World War.

Saved from destruction in the fighting, the Russian occupation and the German Democratic Republic, the pictures hang there still. They comprise fine portraits of Luther and Catherine, the former nun whom he married; works by Dürer and Rubens, by 19th-century painters from the grand-ducal art school and by 20th-century masters such as Kandinsky and Klee.

With treasures like these and their brilliant court, the Weimars had reason to be a bit sniffy about their less sparkling neighbours in the duchy up the road, the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas, later known as the Windsors. Indeed, the citizenry as a whole acquired a bit of a reputation for sniffiness. Liszt complained of the snubs he received for having the bad taste to be a Catholic in a Protestant town, and Gropius decided to move the Bauhaus to Dessau in 1926 because the townspeople moaned on and on about the architecture students' behaviour.

Today, the memories of Weimar's golden age are being well conserved and restored after lean times before the Berlin Wall came down. In the town church of Saints Peter and Paul, where Bach was the kapellmeister, and Herder the minister, the organ shows off its baroque curlicues, and Cranach's altarpiece pays tribute to Luther. Severely damaged in 1945, the church was restored in part by the artistic tradition Weimar had generated. Thomas Mann, who wrote, among other famous works, the novel Lotte in Weimar, donated the cash from the Goethe Prize he had received for its refurbishment.

In the small town, full of fine public monuments and attractive domestic architecture, it is difficult to turn any corner without meeting some remembrance of former distinguished citizens: Goethe's town house, Goethe's garden house, Schiller's house, the Goethe-Schiller Archive, the Nietzsche Archive, the Albert Schweitzer memorial, the Bauhaus museum – and so on.

One house, the Altenburg just across the little river Ilm from the schloss and a few hundred metres from Sts Peter and Paul, is particularly atmospheric. For 13 years from 1848 – that is, on those rare occasions when the greatest pianist of his generation was not touring the concert halls of Europe – Liszt lived there by courtesy of the grand-ducal family with Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, a wealthy Ukrainian princess. Here, Dr Irina Lucke-Kaminiarz now tends a small museum and rooms in which concerts are still regularly held, as they were used in Liszt's own time. After decades of the East German government not providing the money to keep the premises in good repair she says, "I'm thankful there are funds to maintain it now."

Not far away, on the edge of the park, stands the Hofgärtnerei, the Residence of the Court Gardener, where Liszt spent most of his later years and which is now also a museum.

Few places on earth can be more soaked, more comprehensively doused, in culture. Few carry their culture so lightly and elegantly: perhaps the Marxist-Leninist years of the GDR, despite its grievous faults, kept at bay the commercial vulgarity which has overwhelmed other places in Germany, not least West Berlin. Neon signs in Weimar are few. In the immaculately kept Market Square, neat stalls offer immaculately scrubbed turnips and carrots, handsome baskets and workman like pottery. There are prosperous shops in the neat pedestrian streets. The cafés beside the theatre serve visitors good coffee and delicious, sugary bakers' confections called Swine's Ears. Though I admit I did not try very hard, I never found a McDonald's.

This part of the country being Thuringia, Weimar's restaurants serve good Thuringian fare. In Zum Weissen Schwan (the White Swan pub), first mentioned in 1533, where Goethe certainly drank a pint or two and where la Dietrich as a 20-year-old student could well have learned to smoke through that long cigarette-holder, they serve you potato cushions with red cabbage and vegetables scented with cloves, all washed down with wines from Baden.

The place to stay is the Elephant, which has traded in the market square since 1698 and in which Mann set his novel about Lotte. The beautiful people of the town gather every evening in the Franz Liszt Bar, elegant with yellow flowers on its black tables. The hotel also stages regular musical and literary evenings for gastronomes throughout the year. The more modest Hotel Liszt is a recommended alternative.

To its great credit, the city does nothing to hide the darker side of the town, which Hitler named his personal capital in the 1930s and which turned out en masse to salute him as he appeared on the balcony of the Elephant. Eight kilometres to the north lies the site of Buchenwald concentration camp, in operation between 1937 and 1945, when it was captured by the horrified and incredulous US troops. A reservoir of slave labour rather than an extermination centre, it held during that time a total of 250,000 captives, of whom one in five died. A number 6 bus hourly takes a stream of visitors, including many schoolchildren and students, to the vast camp site where through films and exhibits they learn of the atrocities carried out there. Dietrich Bonhoeffer and other leading resisters against Nazism held there have been accepted into the Weimar pantheon alongside Bach, Goethe and Liszt.

There can be few towns in Europe where so much is packed into such a small area, and that are so deserving of the title Unesco World Heritage Site. In Lotte in Weimar, Thomas Mann's heroine, fearful of a great long walk, asks one waiter at the Elephant, "Is it far from here to the Esplanade?"

"No distance at all, Frau Councillor," he replies. "The merest step. In Weimar there are no distances. Our greatness is of the spirit alone."

A touch complacent, perhaps, but not totally inaccurate.

Getting there: The easiest way to reach Weimar is by air to Frankfurt (around £93 return from Stansted on Buzz, £99 from Heathrow on BA, £108 on BMI from Birmingham and £123 from Manchester on Lufthansa), and then by train.

Accommodation: Hotel Elephant, Markt 19 (00 49 3643 80 26 31); Hotel Liszt, Lisztstrasse 1-3 (00 49 3643 54080).

Tourist Information: Markt 10 (00 49 3643 24000, www.weimar.de). Visiting Buchenwald: 00 49 3643 4300, www.buchenwald.de.