The Witches of Wernigerode.

BY Kevin Dolgin
---I have never written about a destination in Germany. The omission has been glaring, but I do
have a couple of excuses. First of all, it just so happens I dont spend a lot of time in Germany
and second of all, Ive had a bit of a conundrum in that most towns that are big enough to have a
real story to them were utterly destroyed in the second world war and are therefore relatively
charmless. Ive thought about the (rebuilt) walls of Nuremburg, the buzz of Berlin, the thriving
center of Munich, but its never really worked out. I would very much like to write about the
Wuppertal Schwiebebann, but while Ive been to Wuppertal a couple of times I never managed to
actually ride the Schwiebebann, and Im loathe to make a journey to an otherwise dreary place
just to take a half-hour ride on a weird train (although Im dying to tell the story of Tuffi the
plunging elephant).
Anyway, Wernigerode managed to escape the bombs and it is just big enough and interesting
enough to have a good story of its own plus, it is dominated by a perfectly wonderful and very
Germanic castle and if youve read more than two or three of these things, youll know how
much I like castles.
So Wernigerode it is.
The town is in Saxony, near the Hartz mountains. From the center of town you can see The
Brocken, which the highest mountain in Northern Germany (dont get your hopes up, its just a
really big tree-covered hill with an ugly antenna on top). Since the mountains are common tourist
destinations for Germans, Wernigerode gets two million day-trippers a year, who come through
on their way to hike or just to visit the surrounding countryside. There is also the considerable
wedding trade, since the town boasts a town hall dripping with Teutonic charm. German couples
like to go there to tie the knoten.
But the most interesting thing about Wernigerode is not the influx of hiking/marrying tourists,
its the influx of witches.
The Brocken may not be a very awe-inspiring mountain but it is witch central for many
continental purveyors of the black arts. In fact, the entire Harz mountain range is suspect. Goethe
had his witches fly there to conduct Sabbath ceremonies with Mephistopheles, and there are
myriads of older tales featuring hags and sorcerers and assorted nasty magical creatures
carousing on The Brockens slopes.
Since Wernigerode is the closest big town to the Brocken, and the natural starting point for those
who want to visit, many people who come through have something to do with witches,
particularly on the night of April 30, Walpurgisnacht, when the witches are supposed to dance
and cavort on the peak.

Visitors who come through Wernigerode on witchy matters tend to fall into one of four
categories:
1. The visitor might be a witch (she turned me into a newt!). In this case, he or she has a good
chance of being burned, at least from a statistical perspective, since hundreds of people were
burned as witches in Wernigerode and its environs over the years. Its true that things have
calmed down considerably these last couple of centuries, but the long-term figures are not
encouraging. This doesnt stop them from coming. 2. The visitor might be a witch-watcher. What
the hell, there are people who catalogue cows (or so Ive been told). 3. The visitor might be a
non-witchy cavorter, since Walpurgisnacht is a long-standing German tradition with overtones
that would remind Americans of Halloween (think Halloween without candy but with rolling
bales of flaming hay). 4. The visitor might just have come to observe the general sense of
mayhem. Mayhem is rare in Germany, which is usually such a well-ordered place.
Wernigerode is itself well in line with German orderliness. It has impeccable streets, neatly
ordered black cobblestones, well-tended parks. I was there in the fall and I had the distinct
impression that there was exactly the right number of leaves on the ground: enough to give a
crisp autumnal feel to the place but not enough to be anywhere near untidy. I couldnt help but
wonder if they didnt somehow pick and choose which leaves to blow away and which to leave
on the ground. Maybe they have special leaf blowers with ultra-thin, drinking-straw-like nozzles
that allow you to choose your leaf.
And of course there is indeed the pretty little Germanic town hall situated on a pretty little
Germanic central market square. Like the rest of the town, the town hall is built of a mixture of
stone and wood, not too big (German buildings quickly reach the point of looming at you when
they are too big) but not too small, with a nice clock that chimes away the hours.
A long aside not far from the town hall is a bookshop with a big outdoor set of bells
(glockenspiel) that pings away its own hourly tune (Annchen von Tharauso I learned when I
ran in to ask). In order not to compete with the official town clock, it does this five minutes after
every hour. I can imagine the suffering of the glockenspiels ownerhis only choices were either
constantly being late or disrespecting authority. For a German in a quaint little city this is a
serious dilemma. A Frenchman, for example, would have had no problem whatsoever with either
option.
There is one building in Wernigerode that doesnt shy away from a good loom, and that is the
castle. Its a doozya big old twelfth century monster of a castle perched on a pinnacle that
takes up the Eastern part of the town. Like many castles of the period, it was burned and rebuilt a
number of times, each time shedding some of its defensive stance in favor of prissy things like
windows, but it still looms the ass off of most French castles. Plus, it has plenty of high pointy
towers to hold sequestered princesses and long tunnels and portcullises and stuff. They should
make a Lego version of this castle.
Having a castle like that loom above a medieval town in the middle of forested hills can easily
give one the creeps, so perhaps its not surprising that Wernigerode has always been associated
with witches. What the hell, maybe Ill come by next April and join in the revelry myself.