Exit poll: the Weimar Republic’s president, Paul von Hindenburg, leaves a polling station during Germany’s fateful 1933 elections. Photo by Central Press / Getty Images For a small town in Germany, Weimar has a remarkable history. Goethe wrote his masterpieces there, as did Schiller. They ran the Weimar theatre together. Bach lived in Weimar for a time, and so did Liszt, as well as Nietzsche. Germany’s first parliamentary democracy was founded in Weimar, whence came the ill-fated republic’s name. The same year, Walter Gropius established the modernist Bauhaus school there. Weimar is where Marlene Dietrich met Alma Mahler, Gropius’s ex-wife. While holding out her hand for the young Marlene’s kiss, Mahler exclaimed: “What eyes this child has! What eyes !” After the town’s rightward turn forced Gropius to move his hated (by conservatives) Bauhaus elsewhere in 1925, Hitler considered moving his Nazi headquarters to Weimar.…