The Harz, Part II: Land of the Witches
Our second day in the Harz was a slow one in Wernigerode. We stayed in a cool old hotel on the hillside below the castle, and we spent the day on the castle, the town and a little bit of witch lore.
The Castle
Schloss Wernigerode started around 1110 to 1120 as a Romanesque fortress where German emperors could stop on hunting trips in the Harz, and it is first mentioned as a castrum ("fortified camp", the Latin word for a castle) in 1213. Almost nothing of that first building survives. The Counts of Wernigerode held it until their line died out in 1429, and then it went to the County of Stolberg. It was rebuilt as a Gothic castle in the late 1400s, a Renaissance fortress in the 1500s, and a Baroque residence in 1710.
What you see today is mostly the work of Count Otto of Stolberg-Wernigerode, a Prussian statesman who became Germany's Vice Chancellor in 1878. He had it rebuilt in a Neo-Romantic style in the 19th century, finished in 1893. We'll run into his name again on the hike.
The history after that was rough. The Stolberg-Wernigerode family gave up the castle in 1929, and it was expropriated in 1945. In 1946 Soviet personnel destroyed historical weapons, armor and paintings there. It is a museum now. I'll be honest, the castle itself was just okay for us. The art collection was the best part, with rooms of paintings hung on deep blue walls.
The brass plate on this one reads Heinrich Croix, 1870. It shows a gorge with a natural stone arch, a small footbridge, and a couple of walkers with a white dog. It looked a lot like the kind of scenery we'd hike through the next day.
Witches
At the hotel we learned about the Harz and its witches. The Harz is full of them. According to the legend, witches ride their brooms to the top of the Brocken, the highest peak in the range at 1,141 meters, on Walpurgisnacht, the night of April 30 to May 1, to meet the devil around a fire. Many people think the festival goes back to pre-Christian Celtic and Germanic customs, and May 1 is also the name day of St. Walburga, an English-born woman (710 to 779) who founded a convent in Swabia. Goethe put a Walpurgisnacht scene in Faust, which is a big reason it is so famous.
The first tourist-organized Walpurgis celebration on the Brocken was in 1896, and the steam Brockenbahn began carrying visitors up the mountain in 1899. In 1901 the Prince of Stolberg-Wernigerode, who owned the Brocken, ended the event by decree. After reunification it came back, and today about 20 places around the Harz hold fires, festivals and torch parades on the evening of April 30. There's even a 100 km Harzer-Hexen-Stieg ("Harz witches' trail") you can hike.
This is the hotel. The sign on the front says Schlossberg Hotel, and a Schlossberg is a "castle hill", which is exactly where it sits. It looks like a small castle itself, with sandstone walls, pointed Gothic windows and a little tower. It was a great place to stay.
Possum et ego.
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