Weimarer Land (Goethe)

If you're going to build a golf resort near Weimar, where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe lived and worked for many years, you might as well call your main course after him and hope to attract a few culturally interested golfers that way. Add a luxurious, but unusually casual wellness hotel for the golfer's widow and you might just have a winning formula.

As for the Goethe layout, while not quite as brilliant and inspired as the legendary poet, it does its job as a professionally designed resort course. The remote and unspoilt area is definitely an asset and there is ample width to most of the playing corridors. However, due to the long and narrow site, there are stretches, where several consecutive holes run in the same direction. This can make things a bit tedious when the wind is up.

The style is eclectic and decidedly American, inspired by the likes of Robert Trent Jones, which seems a surprising choice for a course dedicated to #7 on the "100 Greatest Germans" list. Perhaps someone was thinking of Goethe's poem "America, you've got it better". Anyway, the course is presented in an immaculate condition and has a good number of interesting holes with some variation. The greens are all gently sloped and pretty fast, which makes it quite challenging for an average player to time his chips and pitches. The fairways, while not sandy, are running nicely as well, thereby making the course play a bit shorter than the scorecard suggests.

All things considered, this track is great fun to play. It makes good use of the nicely rolling terrain without going overboard and the green complexes are mostly open to a running shot. Some holes can be a right slog into the wind, others are short and quirky, but never tricked up artificially or overly narrow. Although Weimarer Land is probably not a core golf attraction, it certainly is a very good tourist offering in a part of Germany that does not exactly suffer from overdevelopment.

There is a second 18 holer available, also by Christoph Städler's firm, which is named the Lyonel Feininger Course after another Weimar pundit.