The Brocken and Walpurgis Night: the witches' mountain

At 1,141 metres the Brocken is the highest peak of the Harz, the mountain range of central Germany. Often wrapped in fog and swept by icy winds, the mountain has fed popular imagination for centuries, which placed there the great gathering of witches on the night between 30 April and 1 May. This reputation, consecrated by German literature, has made the Brocken one of the most legendary mountains in Europe and Walpurgis Night one of the most famous dates of the magical calendar.

Saint Walpurga and the night of May

The name of the festival comes from Saint Walpurga, an Anglo-Saxon nun who came to Germany in the eighth century as a missionary and became abbess of Heidenheim, where she died around 779. Her relics were translated to Eichstätt on 1 May in a year of the second half of the ninth century, and that date became her feast day. The saint was invoked, among other things, against illness and evil influences.

The night before 1 May, a moment of passage between the cold season and the season of rebirth, had long been surrounded by popular beliefs. Fires were lit, noise was made to drive away spirits, and houses and stables were protected. In the course of the early modern period this night became ever more closely associated with the sabbath, the supposed assembly of witches with the devil.

The Blocksberg, mountain of the witches

In the German-speaking lands the name Blocksberg came to indicate the place of the sabbath, and already in the seventeenth century it was identified with the Brocken. In 1668 the scholar Johannes Praetorius published a work devoted precisely to the alleged activities of the witches on the Blocksberg, helping to fix the legend. In those same decades, in many German regions, witch trials were sending thousands of people to their deaths.

In the Harz area many places preserve the memory of this tradition. Near Thale lies the Hexentanzplatz, the “witches' dancing ground”, a rocky height that according to some scholars may have been an ancient place of worship, although the evidence is scant. Even today many small towns in the region celebrate Walpurgis Night with costumed festivals.

Goethe, Heine and the Brocken spectre

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe climbed the Brocken in December 1777, a feat then considered arduous in winter. In the first part of Faust, published in 1808, he set on the mountain the famous Walpurgis Night scene, in which Mephistopheles leads Faust among witches, spirits and apparitions. In 1826 Heinrich Heine described his own ascent in the travel narrative The Harz Journey, in a tone both ironic and romantic.

The Brocken also has an optical phenomenon named after it: the Brocken spectre. When the sun is low behind the observer and fog or clouds lie in front of him, his shadow is projected onto them, magnified and often surrounded by a coloured halo. Described at the end of the eighteenth century, the phenomenon helped to give a natural explanation for some of the apparitions attributed to the mountain.

During the division of Germany the Brocken lay in a military zone closed to the public, and it became accessible again only after 1989. Today a steam railway climbs it, and the summit welcomes visitors seeking the landscape, the history and, on Walpurgis Night, the echo of an ancient legend.