Germany Guide
Lower Saxony
Kestner-Museum
Address: Friedrichswall
Opening time: Tues– Sun 11am–6pm, Wed till 8pm
Price: €4, free on Fri
To one side of the Neues Rathaus is the Kestner-Museum, a six-millennia tour through applied arts. The exhibits are founded on the collection of August Kestner, an art-loving chargé d'affaires of the Vatican. He was the most successful son of Charlotte Kestner, née Buff, who so captured the heart of a 23-year-old Goethe that she became immortalized in his The Sorrows of Young Werther, much to the chagrin of her future husband, who believed himself "grievously exposed and prostituted". Thomas Mann rendered a later, painfully polite meeting between Goethe and Charlotte as Lotte inWeimar. Inside, Kestner's collection of Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan and Roman antiquities is updated with Art Nouveau and twentieth-century design classics.