Weimar is a city in the state of Thuringia in central Germany. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was a center of cultural and intellectual activity, drawing writers, philosophers, and musicians to the city. It gave its name to Weimar Classicism, a literary and cultural movement in which Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller were involved. The Bauhaus art school was founded in Weimar by Walter Gropius in 1919. Germany’s first democratic constitution was signed in the city after the First World War, giving rise to the Weimar Republic which lasted from 1919 until 1933.