The Brocken — the witches' mountain and its spectre

OVERVIEW

The Brocken, also called the Blocksberg, is a 1,141 m mountain near Schierke in Saxony-Anhalt, the highest in the Harz and in northern Germany. Mist and fog shroud it up to 300 days a year and its mean annual temperature is 2.9 °C. It has always played a part in legends and been connected with witches and devils.

HISTORY

The first documented ascent was by the physician Johannes Thal in 1572; Goethe walked up in 1777 along what is now the Goethe Way. The narrow-gauge Brocken Railway opened in 1899 and the world's first television tower was built on the summit in 1936. Bombed in April 1945 and held by US troops until 1947, the mountain then passed to the Soviet zone. From August 1961 it lay in East Germany's border zone and was a military exclusion zone: the GRU and the Stasi ran listening stations there (codenamed 'Yenisei' and 'Urian'), and in 1985 the plateau was ringed with a concrete wall of 2,318 sections. It reopened to the public with a demonstration walk on 3 December 1989; the last Russian soldier left on 30 March 1994.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

In German folklore Hexennacht, the night of 30 April to 1 May, is when witches meet on the Brocken and hold revels with the Devil; Goethe made it the centre of the witches' revelry on Walpurgisnacht in Faust (1808), perhaps inspired by two summit rock formations, the Teufelskanzel (Devil's Pulpit) and the Hexenaltar (Witches' Altar), which the folklorist Heinrich Pröhle examined when he collected the Brocken legends. The Brocken spectre — a climber's magnified shadow, ringed with rainbow-like bands, thrown onto cloud when the sun is low — was first reported here; it is an optical effect, and a common sight on this misty mountain. The article also records that the Saxons are supposed to have made sacrifices to Odin on the summit's blockfields until they gave them up at baptism under Charlemagne.

VISITING

The summit is open: the Brocken Railway runs to a station at 1,125 m, and hiking paths lead up from Schierke, Wernigerode and Ilsenburg. Brocken House, the national park's information centre, is in the former Stasi listening building. The Harz Witches' Path (Harzer Hexenstieg) starts here.