In a divided Germany, civilians were banned from climbing their beloved Brocken, writes DEREK SCALLY
THE GLISTENING black steam engine jolts into life, yanking its carriages along behind it.
It’s 8.55am on a hazy summer morning and this is the first trip of the day up the narrow-gauge Harz railway to the Brocken, the closest thing Germany has to a zauberberg or magic mountain.
The tallest peak in the beautiful Harz region, the Brocken has been hallowed ground since the visits of literary giant Wolfgang Goethe, beginning in 1777. Setting a key scene of his Faust epic here secured the pedigree of a mountain that appeals to every German’s inner romantic.
After a 90-minute ride through glorious mountain forests – the fresh pine air interspersed with blasts of sooty engine air – visitors spill out on to the platform at the peak, 1,142m above where they started.
Tourists are nothing new here: the first hotel opened in 1800. Hitler came to appreciate the Brocken’s charms, too: he used the peak as a transmission station for the television pictures of the 1936 Olympics – the mast still stands – and Nazi troops were stationed here until they were bombed out by the Americans in 1945.
The new kings of the hill stayed just two years until the post-war borders were set and the Soviets took over.
At first, things went back to normal: locals could climb the mountain or take the steam train. This continued until August 1961, when the Warsaw Pact discovered the strategic value of the mountain, just 3km from the inner German border.
Civilians were banished from the Brocken and a listening station was constructed, able to pick up radio transmissions from neighbouring West Germany to as far away as Ireland. Joining the Soviets were officers of the East German People’s Army (NVA) and spies from the notorious Stasi.
The East Germans went to extraordinary lengths to censor the restricted zone: photography of the mountain base was banned and weather reports in newspapers quoting information from the Brocken’s weather station were forbidden from mentioning it by name. Instead, they referred to “the weather on the highest mountain in the region”.
“There was such a huge frustration among people that they couldn’t climb the mountain they could see out their windows every day,” says Rainer Schulze, a bookshop owner in Wernigerode, a town at the foot of the mountain. “In their frustration at the divide, many people tried as best they could to ignore it.”
There was worse to come: in 1985, a white concrete wall was constructed around the perimeter of the summit installation.
Just four years before the end of the country’s division, the paranoia of the East German authorities had, quite literally, reached new heights.
“We were puzzled that the snow on the peak didn’t seem to want to thaw that year. Then we realised what the snow really was,” recalls local man Gunter Karste.
Three weeks after the Berlin Wall was breached, the cold war ended on the Brocken, on December 3rd, 1989.
After waiting in vain for officials to act, the locals in the Harz region set out to reclaim the zauberberg themselves.
On a crisp, sunny winter morning, some 1,500 people marched up the snow-covered Brocken from all sides, with a video camera to record the occasion.
After reaching the entrance to the camp, they chanted for the gate to be opened and tossed snowballs over the three-metre concrete wall.
A panicked station commander tried to call his superiors in Berlin, but no one was picking up.
“No violence! We’re only 10 people in here,” said the officer and, in perhaps the best decision of his career, he opened the gate.
Video images from that happy morning, of soldiers and locals swapping stories and sharing vodka, can be seen today in the new Brocken museum.
Two decades on, the mountain has once again embedded in German hearts. Visitors stream happily from the look-out tower to the listening post’s fibreglass dome and then stop by the beautiful Brocken garden.
Created in 1890, the rock garden provides unique climate conditions for the study of rare species of moss and mountain plants. After running wild since before the second World War, conservationists descended in the early 1990s, preserving several unique Brocken varieties that were facing extinction.
“I come from the region,” says head gardener Gunter Karste, “yet I was 33 years old before I could come up here. And now I work here.”
The satisfaction in his voice is clear.
If Berlin was Germany’s divided heart, the Brocken was the country’s divided soul. Standing on the breezy summit, with breathtaking views in all directions, it’s hard to know which way is east, which is west.
And it doesn’t really matter. German poet Heinrich Heine once stood here and declared: “The Brocken is a German.”
It is: a united German.