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Quite a lot of jokes were made about Christo the Bulgarian wrap-up artist in eastern Germany in the years after unification. Throughout Saxony you see town squares half-shrouded in scaffolding and plastic sheeting. ‘As you can see, he didn't only go to Berlin and wrap up the Reichstag.’

At first glance, Saxony was a rather a daunting prospect. A fearsomely complicated history - a string of margraves, landgraves, dukes and elector-princes who ruled ever-shifting principalities: Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, Saxe-Meiningen-Hildburghausen and Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach; renaissance, baroque, rococo, historicist, Jugendstil and Bauhaus architecture, and then a string of cultural heavyweights I was rather cowardly saving up for my retirement: Luther, Bach, Goethe and Schiller, Wagner and Liszt. A little light relief in Meissen porcelain, perhaps?

But of course they begin to come alive when there you see them in place. Bauhaus and its striking and stylishly functional buildings, the door where Luther nailed his theses and a statue of Goethe torn between his work and Auerbach's Keller - he was quite a dandy by all accounts (which I never suspected from studying him at university).

I arrived in Dresden, the Saxon capital (for one of the Saxon lines, at least). The story of the fire-bombing is well known - there are figures of 85% destruction. You might think that nothing remains of the original city, rather that it was concreted over in a post-war rush of brutalist optimism, making it an assembly of concrete tenements. True, the romance of the old Central European city is lost to a street worthy of any May Day parade, but the clutch of old palaces and monumental buildings along the Elbe has been restored and so there is an impression of the capital as it once was.

Look up, look up, they say, when visiting a city. Dresden positively drips with statuary. The Zwinger, the early 18th century orangery and royal pleasure ground (also considered Germany's finest high baroque building), has a soaring host of cherubs, eagles and angels, supported by mute and stalwart caryatids. The Semper Operahouse and the Catholic Court Church (some elector-princes of Saxony were also Kings of Poland and Catholic) are also fringed with great Saxons, set in blackened sandstone. The royal line itself is depicted by the Fürstenzug, a 300ft ceramic portrait (made of Meissen porcelain, the town being close by) on the walls of the Schloss. And the Saxon crown jewels, in the Grünes Gewölbe, are stunning - ceremonial swords and axes encrusted with jewels, gold chains measured by the yard, outrageously appointed mirrors and clocks and a two-person coffee service that must have cost millions.

Of course the most impressive feature of the Dresden skyline, as immortalized by Canaletto, is really the Frauenkirche. With the help of computerized technology, it is slowly being restored to its former domed and pinnacled baroque shape. 10,000 original pieces of stone are lined up waiting to be reassembled, completion expected in 2006.

After the footslogging it was a pleasant break to stop off on the Bruhl Terrace, or the Balcony of Europe as it was called, which overlooks the River Elbe. The Saxons are great coffee drinkers and so I took some time out in a cafe to watch them, to the strains of Mozart played by a violin duet of buskers (I could tell this from the front of the score).

The Saxons are gemütlich and welcoming to visitors, so the cliche runs (as, to be fair, does my experience of them). They travel well, apparently, so like the Scots, you will find them all over the world. Of course they are good Germans too, bürgerlich, with an exact and slightly stern formality, behind which lie twin strains of twittering self-doubt and beer-drinking robustness. Physically at least they seem surprisingly similar to the English (the Saxons also spread across the Channel of course).

As with national cliches, it is always fun looking at traditional enemies. In Saxony there is an excited competitiveness vis-a-vis the Prussians, their 'arrogant and self-opinionated' neighbours to the north - in return the Prussians consider them dumpy and slow, their language plump (unrefined). During the communist years the Saxons got by (that is another trait), but they are on more even ground now that everything is not centrally run from Berlin. And it was in Saxony of course, that the fall of East Germany originated, in Leipzig.

Leipzig was not a capital city, but it has always been a city of trade. In Roman times it was the meeting point of the via Regia and the via Imperii and then in the 12th century it grew in importance as a trading town (which it maintained even into the GDR years because of its trade fairs). Apparently it is a natural home for commerce - since the collapse of the wall 130 banks have moved in. Many of the buildings that have not already been restored are under shrouds.

The pattern of the medieval town was more visible here, with the tall buildings enclosing the old market square. I followed a sweep of magnificent trading-houses leading in to the old City Hall - baroque, rococo, rococo, bauhaus, bauhaus, neo-renaissance, baroque, communist, baroque. Their overtall roofs (five stories of dormers in places) make them look unbalanced. There was a law that limited facade (but not roof) height and this was their sneaky way around it, giving them in the process an excellent, airy place to store their goods.

It wasn't only Goethe's statue that was so playfully illustrative. Pictured by the same sculptor, Bach stood between St Thomas's Church and the museum dedicated to him, a button undone on his waistcoat for carrying scores while conducting and his pocket turned out to show that he was permanently short of cash.

Leipzig has always been a cultural centre and the cafes and bars are reappearing almost as fast as the banks. Unfortunately the Zimmermannische Kaffeehaus of Bach's Coffee Cantata is no more than a plinth backing onto a huge open square now - but the drinkers were out in force in the streetside compounds, chatting over a cup of coffee and into their mobile phones. The Leipzigers don't seem to have had much trouble adapting to the new way of life.

The most pronounced differences between the old East Germany and West Germany are out in the country, which seems to have been locked in a time-warp for 40 years. Driving out I passed through rolling land with farms and forests and so many alleys of trees. There is a certain pastoral and lazy peace, which seems a little unlikely for Germany.

A surprising effect of the near-mystical history of the principalities is the number of small capital cities dotted around the area. I came to Eisenach, Rudolstadt and Gotha, which had their own castles, courts and monumental buildings, but the best known of all though is probably Weimar, which lies in the State of Thuringia.

Weimar had its Golden classical age (Goethe, Schiller and Herder) and a silver age (Liszt); there was a string of Grand Dukes, Nietzsche, early Bauhaus and of course the proclamation of the Weimar Republic. Now there are libraries, galleries and regional museums, all set in the grand old buildings and parks of a pretty German town.

I opted for Schiller and Goethe, dredging the recesses of my mind (since it was re-filed after my finals a decade ago) - The Robbers, Young Werther and of course Faust. Hardly a laugh a minute. But suddenly there was life breathed into the men themselves.

Schiller had admirable working patterns - he worked all night and slept in the mornings. And apparently he encouraged his children to play music in the next room. He battled with illness for much of his working life and died much earlier than his friend Goethe. An autopsy showed that all his organs were affected by tuberculosis.

Goethe himself used to work astride a curious seat resembling a practice polo pony. The Goethe House takes in a Museum and his apartment of 50 years. This is decorated according to the man's own theories of colour - yellow and blue for different amusements, with classical sculptures everywhere (he had assembled a collection of 27,000 pieces of art by his death). Green was for work and so his library and study are this colour. He also stood to work and so there are sloping desks at waist height.

Having thought it would be 30 or 40 years before I next struggled through Faust I have actually found myself dipping into it again with renewed interest. I might leave Liszt for a while, though.

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