Harz Mountains, Germany
The starlight fades, the wind has died,
The dismal moon creeps out of sight.
A thousand sparks blaze in the night
As the witches to the Brocken ride.
—GOETHE, FAUST
TO GERMAN WITCHES—HEXEN—THE HARZ IS HOME. This mountain range, steeped in Pagan lore, offers an array of natural witchy wonders: the Hexentanzplatz (Witches’ Dance Floor); the Teufelsmauer (Devil's Wall); and the Brocken, the tallest peak and site of the most infamous of sabbaths, Walpurgisnacht. Although most accused witches were executed in other parts of the country, this isolated region with a long heathen history inspired an entire genre of witchcraft tales.
There are no direct trains from any major German cities to the Harz. I transferred three times from Hanover before I arrived in Wernigerode. It was nearly midnight and the streets were empty. I watched the last train pull out of the station, the last passenger disappear into their car, and found myself alone. Cutting across a small park, I prayed my cell signal would sustain as I navigated the streets. Around every corner shadows danced, mocking my credulous mind. Creeping through a medieval town in the dark as a solo female traveler, nearly everything can shape-shift into danger. I found myself fixated on the region's malefic superstitions to take my mind off my real fears. Better the threat of a mythical beast than the reality of an ill-intentioned man.
Upon finally reaching my half-timbered hotel plucked from a German fairy tale, I slept safely and soundly. The Travel Charme Gothisches Haus is inside a building that dates back centuries and, like other establishments in the area, has a few winks and nods to witches inside. I rose early to continue on to the heart of the Harz, stopping by the hotel's Hexenstube (Witches’ Room) for breakfast.
Heading back to Wernigerode station in broad daylight, I felt foolish for having been so frightened the night before, but the dark has ways of conjuring more than you bargained for. Next to the train tracks I arrived on, I found those of the Brockenbahn, a narrow-gauge railway traversing the Harz all the way up to the Brocken. (The only way to reach the top of the mountain is by train, bike, or hike.) I bought a ticket to ride and waited. A vintage 1931 coal-burning steam locomotive rolled in with much fanfare, and my descent in time began. I climbed aboard and settled into a seat complete with a map of the train's stops carved into a small wooden table. The Brockenbahn pulsed smoke as it pulled away from the station, and with it, human civilization dissolved from view.
The leafy canopy above became a verdant tunnel as the foliage grew denser. Beech trees gathered in congregation. Ash sprouted up here and there. The ground was dense with ferns and alpine flowers. This forest was sacred to the Saxons who once worshipped in the open air, in elevated spaces, and who made the Harz a stronghold as they fought back against encroaching Christians in the eighth century.
During the ascent, flora and fauna began to transform outside my window as we went higher and higher. The rhythmic sound of the train on the tracks became a mesmeric hum, dragging me deeper into the woods and further into hellish fables. Half-asleep, half-awake, I locked into the collective breath of everything around me and listened to the land.
This mountain is alive. The bedrock its marrow, the craggy cliffs that undulate upward a spine, the trees connective tissue. Skin and hair a skein of pine needles, almost noxious in their fragrance. Animals—mice, deer, wildcats, and birds—are the Brocken's blood, teeming, scheming, stalking among its spindly bones. The train curved up the mountain's back across tracks staked to her flesh, sliding between rows of tall, tall conifers like a lone finger raking through a thick green mane. Black clouds billowed from the coach like smoke from the fires of Walpurgisnacht that belch forth on the Brocken to hail the great below. Straddling my seat, I waited impatiently for the train to reach the peak. A woman made the rounds selling small bottles of brightly colored schnapps that some travelers gulped eagerly. Twisted sisters straddling broomsticks on their way to the Brocken would be in similar anticipation, their elixir a flying ointment lubricating their loins. Hair whipping in the wind, we were all unsure what delights awaited us at the summit. The mountain groaned in pleasure with the coming of the witches.
Germanic tribes were first to lay lasting claim to the Harz. Their temples and altars were trees and rocks, their gods and goddesses of the earth and sky. When the Franks Christianized and allied themselves with the Roman Catholic Church—the beginnings of the Holy Roman Empire—the Saxons were one of the few peoples who managed to stave off conversion, at least for a little while. Over a thousand years ago, their links with this land began to set it apart as haunted, heathen, Other.
The train chugged on through a vast expanse of spruce forest, and I began to see hikers with staffs making their way to the top. Not all have it so easy to reach the peak of the Brocken. Some choose neither locomotive nor enchanted object, but their own feet for their pilgrimage, as Goethe's Faust insisted to Mephistopheles when the two journeyed here for the springtime bacchanal.
“A broomstick's what you really need—Or a randy goat would make an even better steed,” the Devil's emissary says to his human companion as they walk through the woods. “I find it very pleasant just to stray/Along the winding valley, then/To climb the rocky cliffs again,” Faust replies. “Why shouldn't our legs feel its bracing thrill?” he asks.
The two soon stumble upon what appears to be the Brocken Spectre—called will-o’-the-wisp in translation—an optical illusion common on the mountain, where a shadow is cast by the observer from behind, producing rainbow rings of light around an eerie orb. The spectre is friendly, though—at least in Faust—and he guides the two travelers with his light to the top, where the fiendish festivities of Walpurgisnacht are in full swing.
When my train stopped at the final station, the steam engine noisily exhaled. I was a thoroughly modern witch of leisure who had reached the Brocken's peak not by broomstick, but old-fashioned rail. I climbed out of the black and red painted coach and hit the ground, primed to begin my excursion. In the sky, the clouds were diaphanous ghosts. The summer sun shined to no avail. Though it is only some 3,700 feet above sea level, the Brocken has its own microclimate that makes it feel as if it is nearly twice that altitude. At the height of summer there was still a bone-deep chill—but I had the fantasies of Walpurgisnacht to keep me warm.
Witches and demons and beasts of all sorts would brave the spring cold for they knew there would be body heat aplenty on the Brocken. Invited by Satan himself, they tangled tongues, pressed parts, and split their flesh at the seams in macabre dances of vice. When Faust and Mephistopheles arrive, they find that the “whole mountainside is ringing/With the witches’ furious singing.” They see Medusa and Lilith among the hordes, witches young and old offering sexual services, and amateur actors putting on the Shakespeare parody, “A Walpurgis Night's Dream.” Faust is forever changed after he partakes in an orgy of wine and lust and laughter with the denizens of the dark side.
The exact origins of Walpurgis Night remain shrouded in mystery. Some historians suggest the holiday results from a confluence of spring fertility rites, the cult of an ancient goddess named Walburg, and the works of a certain British Benedictine abbess of the eighth century. This Anglo-Saxon missionary was Walpurga, who converted many German heathens in Frankish territory and was canonized on May 1, the day on which her feast has consequently been held. Just as summer bonfires burn the night before Saint John's Feast, the spring flames of Walpurgis Night lap at the stars the evening before Saint Walpurga's.
“For centuries [the Brocken] was believed to be the site of the greatest annual witches’ Sabbath in Germany (if not Europe),” Gerhild Scholz Williams explains in Ways of Knowing in Early Modern Germany: Johannes Praetorius as a Witness to His Time. It was then that “the beauty and vastness of this rugged landscape was thought to be teeming with Satan's subjects, witches and their demonic familiars who flew to their annual satanic reunion to cavort in a space that was,” Williams affirms, “at once real and imaginary.”
The Brocken remains a liminal space. The interplay between Christian and Pagan, past and present was all around me in this beautiful national park rich with unholy history. Offset by a cluster of rocks centered in a circle marked with the cardinal directions, the highest point on the mountain is an ideal setting for a ritual. I walked the perimeter, dodging other travelers before moving close enough to place both hands on the jagged granite that features a plaque with the words “Brocken 1142m.” The clouds were a gauzy blanket and the sun ached to part them, but instead remained a fuzzy mass just out of view. I headed downhill to see two rock formations associated with the Brocken's haunted happenings: the Teufelskanzel (Devil's Pulpit) and Hexenaltar (Witches’ Altar). But like a magnet, I kept coming back up to the summit, past the triangular signs with witches on broomstick that mark the Harzer Hexensteig (Harz Witches’ Trail)—the path Faust and Mephistopheles might have taken to the top.
For Christians, Walpurgis Night has been a time to scare away demons and their devotees by lighting pyres, playing pranks, making noise, and donning the colorful costumes of evil in a springtime Halloween of sorts. For heathens, Walpurgis Night has been an occasion to honor the changing seasons, plant seeds, foster fertile beginnings, and hew to ancient rites that were all but snuffed out long ago. (Heathen is the loose Germanic equivalent of Pagan.) As I flipped between the reality of day and the fantasy of Walpurgis Night, I vowed to return for the festivities of April 30, which draw thousands of revelers each year. The holiday isn't only celebrated atop the Brocken, though, and you can find events across the Harz and throughout Europe. Now Walpurgisnacht exists as much in fantastical tales as it does in real practices. It is a flirtatious and fecund affair that has inspired countless creators over the past millennium to spin Walpurgis Night legends into music, poetry, paintings, and plays.
“The Walpurgis Night's artistic appeal derives in part from the pronounced cultural, historical, and political implications that have come to be inextricably bound up with it,” writes John Michael Cooper in Mendelssohn, Goethe, and the Walpurgis Night. The eve of April 30 “is far more than just an event,” Cooper affirms. “It is, rather, a highly symbolic cultural phenomenon.”
Walpurgisnacht symbolism was taken to radical new heights in the 1970s when German feminists began to look to Walpurgisnacht—and the witch—in their activism. “This image evoked women as both dangerous to men and historical victims of male violence,” Myra Ferree explains in Varieties of Feminism: German Gender Politics in Global Perspective. Inspired by the American “Take Back the Night” rallies against sexual assault that were popular at the time, German feminists staged their own demonstrations on Walpurgisnacht beginning in 1977. “The choice of Walpurgis Night, the historical gathering of Goddess worshippers, invoked not only women's potential power but also the European history of gendered political repression by church and state,” Ferree elaborates.
I thought of these women as I traversed the top of the Brocken, boots caked in dirt, tuned in to the mountain's frequency. Walpurgis Night has been constructed with layer upon layer of fearsome femininity: mother earth, heathen goddess, female saint, wayward witch. These are the bodies, both literal and figurative, that birthed this springtime festival. Their auras permeate this space year-round.
Most Walpurgisnacht lore, however, has been decidedly anti-woman. Tales of witches flying to their sabbath at a high elevation can be traced back to the most notoriously misogynistic witch hunting manual of all time: the Malleus Maleficarum. A poisonous tract for detecting the damned, the Hammer of the Witches did much to define the witch as we know her today: as a sex-crazed femme fatale; a penis-pilfering shapeshifter; and a man-corrupting, absolutely putrid and disgusting hag.
Written in 1486 by Dominican friar Heinrich Kramer, the Malleus was a culmination of the work Kramer had done as a witch-persecuting inquisitor. In the 1480s, he staked his claim in southwestern Germany by burning women at the stake, boasting hundreds of deaths in his little black book. He was said to have indulged in lengthy interrogations about female suspects’ sexual histories during a trial at Innsbruck and was eventually perceived as so dogged in his methods that he was forced out of town. It was after this expulsion that Kramer went off to the cloister to lick his wounds and pen his maleficent magnum opus.
Heinrich Kramer's treatise on witch hunting may seem excessive to modern readers, but was grounded in the demonological thinking of his time—with the sexism quotient stoked high to the heavens. There continues to be scholarly debate about the impetus and impact of the Malleus Maleficarum and its misogyny, but there is no denying the book made waves.
In “Witches, Saints, and Heretics,” Tamar Herzig explains how Kramer's “characterization of the diabolic female witch, which influenced the notions expressed in the writings of later demonologists and witch hunters, created a uniformity of discourse in the witchcraft debate of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” Kramer did a lot to streamline witch hunting for both Catholics and, later, Protestants, so we have him to “thank” for that. (His sexism apparently had its limits—at least according to Herzig—because though Kramer hated female witches, he respected virginal holy women who followed in the footsteps of Catherine of Siena.)
In a bid to gain legitimacy for the Malleus Maleficarum, Kramer printed the text of Innocent VIII's papal bull in its opening pages. This pronouncement from 1484 decreed that witchcraft was astir in Germany, and it gave inquisitors Kramer and Jacob Sprenger—who is often listed as a coauthor of the Malleus but likely had little to do with the writing of it—the power to seek and destroy witches wherever they might find them. Innocent VIII's bull declares:
Many persons of both sexes, unmindful of their own salvation and straying from the Catholic Faith, have abandoned themselves to devils, incubi and succubi, and by their incantations, spells, conjurations, and other accursed charms and crafts, enormities and horrid offences . . . do not shrink from committing and perpetrating the foulest abominations and filthiest excesses to the deadly peril of their own souls . . .
The Malleus Maleficarum is written in the same florid key of condemnation, expounding in detail on devils, incubi, succubi, and witches—who are likeliest to be women because “witchcraft comes from carnal lust which is in women insatiable.” These she-witches partook in orgiastic parties at their sabbath meetings, but had to arrive in style. The method of their unholy transportation? Well, according to Kramer, witches would sometimes make a paste from the flesh of unbaptized children. Then, they would apply the unguent to a seat or piece of wood and be “immediately carried into the air, whether by day or night, and visibly or (if they wish) invisibly.” Other times, they'd catch a ride on a demonic animal.
Before the Malleus, magical flight was avidly discussed among demonologists. As church law set forth in the ninth century, some women were known to have flights of fancy, joining a heathen goddess and her animal hordes in a night ride. The Canon episcopi explains:
It is also not to be omitted that some unconstrained women, perverted by Satan, seduced by illusions and phantasms of demons, believe and openly profess that, in the dead of night, they ride upon certain beasts with the Pagan goddess Diana, with a countless horde of women, and in the silence of the dead of the night to fly over vast tracts of country, and to obey her commands as their mistress, and to be summoned to her service on other nights.
The official opinion of the church at the time of the Canon episcopi was that women who confessed to night flight were either dreaming or deluded by the Devil, not actually leaving their beds to travel through the air. This belief changed in the ensuing years and was challenged by the Malleus Maleficarum, but it also shifted shape, as Kramer differentiated between the oneiric fantasies of Diana's harmless followers and the reality of the malevolent witch's Satanic flight. Such vivid imagery would sink into the vernacular through artistic renderings that followed Kramer's wildly popular work. (With the invention of the printing press, there were at least thirty editions printed and 30,000 copies in circulation by 1700.) And thus, the foundation was laid for witches flying to the Brocken by broomstick.
“The Malleus did not name the Brocken or any other specific elevated locale,” explains John Michael Cooper, “but its insistence that witches and those possessed by devils had to fly to their destinations and its several case studies involving witches in elevated locations evidently combined with the lore concerning the witches’ Sabbath atop mountains to fix this image firmly in the mind of the witch-obsessed populace.”
One Osnabrück witch trial in 1589 supposedly had dozens of women accused of attending a sabbath on the Brocken with 8,000 other witches. Other trials across Germany made mention of the Brocken or their own local version of a desolate mountain sabbath in confessions, too.
By 1620, Michael Herr had crafted the first known artistic rendering of the Brocken sabbath in a lurid copperplate. In it, some witches gather on the ground, some fly on goats, some on cooking forks, and other demonic beings wing through the air. They carouse, beat on drums, scream, and seduce. Casks of wine are at the ready, and a few magical gourmands surround a cauldron of body parts that a cat watches over curiously.
Further circulating Brocken lore, Johannes Praetorius compiled a popular work about the Harz in 1668, Blockes-Berges Verrichtung (Tales about the Blocksberg)—Blocksberg being another name for the Brocken. This would be the book that Goethe would consult in writing Faust over a century later. By the late 1600s, Walpurgisnacht discourse had been percolating for some time, and Praetorius infused even more sensationalism into the retelling of its tales, citing witchcraft skeptics and believers alike. (The drawing for his lively tome features a witch performing anilingus on a goat, center stage.)
As Williams explains, the “structure and content of the Blockes-Berges Verrichtung are very much influenced by the relationship of topography and demonology.” Praetorius demonstrated the magical connection between land and lore in evocative new ways, Williams writes, helping to solidify the landscape of the Brocken to the general German populace as a “witchscape.”
My time on the highest peak in north Germany was waning. My lungs were saturated with crisp, cool air, and I was beginning to wish I had warmer clothes on. Satisfied with my expedition, I stopped briefly to see the metal portrait of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe affixed to a rock (he wrote about the Brocken nearly as many times as he climbed it) before going inside the Brockenhaus Museum, which offers a historical look at the role of the Brocken in Cold War espionage, in Goethe's writing, and in German witch folklore.
Like the witch, the Brocken herself is a shape-shifter, transforming from mountain to military base to site of myth and magic. The museum's exhibition was educational, in-depth, and probably quite fascinating to a German speaker, but I spent most of my time trying to use the photo booth that makes it look as if you are soaring above the Brocken peak on broomstick. I can't resist a good souvenir.
During their time at the sabbath, Faust and Mephistopheles come face-to-face with witchy merch, too. They encounter an old witch peddling ritual materials and trinkets, the latter of which I like to think were similar to what I found at the Brockenhaus. The gift shop was brimming with witch pins, witch books, witch stickers and postcards, and small, multicolored hags on wooden broomsticks to hang in your home.
Because the Brocken represents a celebration of nature and feminine power and was never the site of murder and torture during the witch hunts, I allowed myself to go full-on tacky tourist. I splurged on a tiny old hag figurine, with hot-pink straw hair and a star-print sash riding a broom (who now resides on my ancestral altar). Her toothy grin reflected my gratitude for the experience of traveling halfway around the world to this magical place. Despite such commercialism—and the bratwurst stands and service vehicles emblazoned with the outline of a witch mid-flight—the Brocken retains a wildness that somehow hasn't been muted by merchandising.
German hag in hand, I reluctantly boarded another steam train to Wernigerode. At each stop down the mountain, I felt the mystery begin to dissipate. Soot from the exhaust swirled in through the open windows and sparked coughing fits among the passengers. I was a tourist on a train once more. The fires of Walpurgisnacht were no longer burning, but birds sang in the trees as we returned to the city limits. The landscape of the Harz is always in a state of flux, shifting from landscape to witchscape and back before your very eyes.
On my last full day in the Harz, I called a car service from Wernigerode. Within minutes, a van painted with a witch riding the word “TAXI” on it pulled up outside my hotel. Of course. I could barely conceal a snicker before greeting the driver and moving on toward Quedlinburg.
A dazzling medieval town untouched by the Second World War, Quedlinburg is a place of whimsical winding streets and over a thousand fully preserved half-timbered homes. The town has a rather feminist bent to its history, as women wielded great political influence here for over 800 years. In 936, the widow of the Saxon king Heinrich I, named Matilde, founded a convent, and the abbess of that convent would continue to hold considerable power in Quedlinburg and surrounding regions until Napoleon invaded in 1802.
Walking through town, I didn't see a single piece of trash on the ground, and there were few traces of witch camp—except for a small sign with a sorceress that said “buy before you fly” outside a shop window. It was effortless to rewind my way back to the Middle Ages while gazing up at Quedlinburg Castle and Saint Servatius’ church on a hill in the distance, surveying the bright orange roofs that light up the landscape.
I had thought parts of Wernigerode looked like a German fairy tale, but Quedlinburg in its entirety is storybook stunning. Most descriptions of Quedlinburg in travel literature include the phrase “fairy tale,” and true to the Grimms’ classic German fairy tales—not their softened American versions—this UNESCO World Heritage Site has a dark side.
During my walk, I noticed apotropaic symbols like hexagrams and crosses carved into the beams of the aged half-timbered buildings to ward off sickness and keep demons and witches at bay. Like many German towns, Quedlinburg had its own witch hunts. But they didn't have nearly the impact as the propaganda that later sprang from them would, for Quedlinburg is also the birthplace of one of the most misinformed assertions about the early modern witch hunts.
Between scholars, feminists, and practicing witches, there have been divergent views on how many people were accused of and executed for witchcraft in early modern times. American historian Anne Barstow estimates 200,000 people accused and 100,000 put to death, but she admits to the difficulty of coming up with such numbers. In Witchcraze: A New History of the European Witch Hunts, Barstow writes: “Working with the statistics of witchcraft is like working with quicksand.”
Australian historian Lyndal Roper estimates half of Barstow's number in Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany. “Over the course of the witch hunt, upwards of perhaps 50,000 people died,” she writes. “We will never know the exact figure because in many places the records of their interrogations have simply been destroyed, with allusions made only to ‘hundreds’ of witches killed.”
German historian Wolfgang Behringer concurs with Roper in Witches and Witch-Hunts: “For witchcraft and sorcery between 1400 and 1800, all in all, we estimate something like 50,000 legal death penalties,” he writes, adding that there were likely twice as many people who were punished with “banishment, fines, or church penance.”
But others—including feminist writers beginning with Matilda Joslyn Gage in the late nineteenth century and continuing with Margaret Murray and Mary Daly in the twentieth—have bandied about the absurdly large number of nine million. Wonder where that came from? Look no further than the quaint old town of Quedlinburg.
Ronald Hutton explains in Witches, Druids, and King Arthur that the eighteenth-century German historian Gottfried Christian Voigt supposed that over nine million witches were killed in Europe based on the witch hunt death toll in his hometown. Voigt “had arrived at this simply by discovering records of the burning of thirty witches at Quedlinburg itself between 1569 and 1583 and assuming that these were normative for every equivalent period of time as long as the laws against witchcraft were in operation,” Hutton writes. From there, “he simply kept on multiplying the figure in relation to the presumed population of other Christian countries.”
There is a method to the madness of this astronomical figure, even though it is completely off base. But now that historians have roundly disproved Voigt's number, focusing too much on the exact death toll can divert attention away from unpacking the lasting legacy of witch hunts in the West.
As I took in the thousand-year-old streets of Quedlinburg, I let myself wander without a map. Elderly people sat outside their brown and white abodes, sunning themselves. A small black cat in a park emerged from the bushes to meow sweetly at me when I passed. But try as I might to get lost in Quedlinburg, I've found that medieval European towns always seem to deposit you right back in the town square. There, the city hall or Rathaus has sat in the same place since the early 1300s, its stone face now masked with a thick veil of vines and flowers. Restaurants and shops line all sides of the square, and it was surprisingly quiet despite people sitting outside, drinking beer, deep in conversation. Refreshed by a tranquil ramble through Quedlinburg's medieval paradise, I was ready to tackle another part of witch history and continue on to Thale, a ten-minute train ride from the charming past to the kitschy, witchy present.
Thale is an ergot trip of a town. A witch theme park, museums rife with torture devices and psychosexual drama, and the notorious Hexentanzplatz plateau make it one of the most fascinating and absurd places I visited on my witch hunt.
Fresh off the train, I was overpowered by commercial offerings in the small Thale station. Crystals, candles, witch-themed liquor, witchthemed pins and postcards, and neon shirts printed with witches flying on broomsticks were everywhere I turned. I tore myself away from the mesmerizing call of merch only to discover the Obscurum Thale right next to the station. The outside looks straight out of a Party City on Halloween, but upon closer inspection, it revealed itself to be much more enticing. A skeleton in a black shroud pointed up the Obscurum entrance stairs, and on the wall hung a print of John William Waterhouse's The Magic Circle. My interest was piqued.
Inside this oddities museum, an ahistorical bricolage of fact and fiction rubs elbows in every room. A panel about the Malleus Maleficarum, a Befragungsstuhl (spiked interrogation chair), herbs associated with witchcraft, and logs assembled in a witch-burning pyre were near displays featuring vampires, werewolves, and zombies. There were so many rooms chock-full of occult paraphernalia I could barely see everything. It was an apt harbinger of what was to come during my adventures in Thale.
A sunny walk through a wooded area across from the Obscurum led me to the Funpark where my doppelgänger—a smiling blonde witch statue in fuchsia hat and dress—welcomed me inside. I passed a smattering of children's rides before joining families in line for the gondola that would lift us up to the Hexentanzplatz. Hundreds of feet in the air alone in my own glass car I had a panoramic view of the dense wilderness that permeates the Harz Mountains. Once more, I sensed uncertain shapes appearing. Sinister rock formations poked up like witches’ fingers summoning me from the forest below. Within minutes I was in the place where the Pagan party started before it crescendoed on the Brocken.
Nestled high above the Bode Gorge, the Hexentanzplatz is a rocky plateau with strong Saxon roots. (There are even remains of a Saxon granite wall over 1,500 years old near the site.) This clearing was supposedly where the Saxons once held rituals and sacrifices to their mountain gods and goddesses, and it thus retains a heathen tenor, drawing countless revelers every year to the Witches’ Dance Floor for its own Walpurgis Night celebration.
“We know that all over Germany a grand annual excursion of witches is placed on the first night in May (Walpurgis), i.e., on the date of a sacrificial feast and the old May-gathering of the people,” writes folklorist Jacob Grimm in his 1835 exploration of Germanic myths, Deutsche Mythologie. “The witches invariably resort to places where formerly justice was administered, or sacrifices were offered,” he continues. “Almost all the witch-mountains were once hills of sacrifice, boundary-hills, or salt-hills.”
Like the Brocken, the Hexentanzplatz is rich in witch lore. It is similarly located in the Upper Harz region, an area once described as “wilder, its rock scenery more grotesque” than the Lower Harz in an 1880 travel guide published in London Society. Long before the area's commercialization, long before a theme park was built, Thale had “the best, but also the dearest, inns in the Harz.” The nineteenth-century English travel writer goes on to describe the Hexentanzplatz as “a perpendicular cliff . . . which affords a yet finer view of the whole mountain chain.” These days, you can indulge in this view easily via gondola or through the old hiking trail that spirals up from the lush gorge below.
Once at the top, I was overwhelmed by German signs pointing in all directions to different attractions. The Hexentanzplatz is now part nature preserve, part witch theme park, with an open-air theater, a zoo, a multipart museum, and many witch-themed refreshment stands and gift shops to behold. My first instinct was to follow the crowds, which led me to a central area with statues of a naked Devil and witch that children were treating like jungle gyms.
One young girl straddled a hunched witch figure whose protruding backside was home to a large spider. She steadied her baby sibling in front of her as the two giggled. Another young boy studied an animal demon at the witch's side, while other children posed with the Devil manspreading (demonspreading?) on a large rock. The Dark Lord's genitals are carved in great bronze detail, rubbed to a bright sheen presumably by visitors pawing at them for good luck.
Nearby was the Hexenbufett (Witch Buffet), a restaurant where folks were gorging themselves on fast food, right near the edge of a rock overhang above a thousand-foot drop. Shutting out the noise, I focused on the mountainous terrain that was at once alluring and foreboding. (I heard no other language than the mother tongue in Thale, and no one even tried to speak English to me when I fumbled through my awkward German.) Moving away from the crush of screaming children and their parents, I entered the Walpurgisgrotte section of the Harzeum. It was eerily empty and offered an even stranger mix of material than the Obscurum. In every dim, musty corner, witch stereotypes came to life through creepy mannequins set against elaborate tableaux.
A solitary sorceress posed in a room full of potions and bundles of dried herbs. A witch mom and devil dad watched their hellspawn lie on the living room floor playing with a pentagram board game covered in snails. A woman in lingerie beckoned from a house covered in hearts and beaming red light. A wrinkled hag with long gray hair grinned in front of a cottage while a black cat perched on her shoulder and a demon peeked out from the window behind her. All the most vilified forms of femininity associated with witches—childless women, monstrous mothers, old women, promiscuous women—were represented.
Amid more witch torture devices I saw contemporary witchcraft ephemera—tarot, runes, and spirit boards—surrounded by cobwebbed candelabras and skulls. I spied what appeared to be death masks on the wall, in addition to a small child wearing a turtle shell as a hat. Right before I left, I walked by a scene with a woman in a wedding dress fanning out her credit cards and holding the leash of a man on all fours, because every woman is a witch in the eyes of her husband, I guess?
Darkly humorous and extraordinarily weird—especially to my American eyes—the Walpurgisgrotte left me a bit wobbly as I transitioned from the dark German fun house of witchcraft lore to a beautiful sunny day on a mountaintop. The epitome of the mythical German forest lay below, spreading out as far as the eye could see. Around me, families with young children seemed not to give a second thought to the surplus of witches and devils lurking about—it was all in good fun. I embraced the quite literal contrast of dark and light atop the Hexentanzplatz, keeping this feeling of dissonance alive throughout the rest of my explorations back down to the base of the mountain and returning to Quedlinburg.
The early modern witch—particularly in Germany—was entrancing but equally if not more so repulsing. If she had beauty, it only concealed rotting hag flesh beneath. I felt this unsettling juxtaposition viscerally in the Harz when confronted with bald commercialism offset by breathtaking natural beauty and the real horrors of witch hunting history masked by the ghoulish glee of kitschy witch museums and attractions.
I was constantly shocked, mouth agape, with no one to share my surprise. Horrified one moment, awestruck the next, and overtaken by demonic cackles at the absurdity of it all. Thousands of people died horrific deaths in Germany—the most of any region in Europe—and yet I saw little reverence for this history in the north. Or, to look at it another way, perhaps what witch lore I did see was more a celebration of Pagan beliefs and misunderstood magical women rather than a funeral for them. What I found in the south, however, was a completely different story.
