Goethe National Museum

located in Weimar; founded in 1886 in the house where Goethe lived from 1775 to 1832. A considerable number of Goethe’s manuscripts are kept there, as well as more than 2,000 of his drawings and his collection of paintings and graphics (more than 2,500 paintings and more than 9,000 prints). The museum’s holdings also include coins, medals, sculpture molds, more than 18,000 mineral samples, zoological and botanical specimens, and physics and chemistry instruments. The archives of the Goethe National Museum (the Goethe and Schiller Archives) are the most important literary archives in the German Democratic Republic. (They contain approximately 800,000 items.) The museum’s first exposition was opened in 1890. The Goethe National Museum and other museums and memorials connected with the history of classical German literature, such as the Institute of German Literature at Weimar and the Central Library of the German Classics, have belonged to the National Museum of Classical German Literature since 1954.