The last 100 years have been a time of recurring upheavals, declines, and transformations. A century full of utopias, visions of life and society, filled with hopes and disappointments, longing and suffering. One year before the founding of the state in 1920, the Weimar Republic adopted its constitution in Weimar—full of hope that the spirit of Weimar would inspire the first German democracy. Just a year later, the Kapp Putsch, which also left its mark in Thuringia, provided a bitter foretaste of the coming years filled with political tensions. This is reflected in the nearly 100 texts by writers collected in this book: testimonies of the human spirit's endeavor to find meaning in the fractures and contradictions of life, perhaps even to organize them towards a better world. They not only stand alone but also correspond with one another. Thus, literary and historical references and dialogues emerge. Those who engage with them will learn about individual experiences, encounters, and perspectives, from which, in the collective flicker—as Hans Magnus Enzensberger put it—history is created and becomes tangible.