Brocken
The Brocken, also sometimes referred to as the Blocksberg, is a mountain near Schierke in the German state of Saxony-Anhalt, between the rivers Weser and Elbe. The highest peak in the Harz mountain range, and in Northern Germany, it is subalpine, yet has a microclimate resembling that of mountains nearly higher. The elevation above its tree line tends to have snowcover from September to May, and mists and fogs shroud it up to 300 days a year. The mean annual temperature is only. It is the easternmost mountain in northern Germany; the next prominent elevation directly to its east would be in the Ural Mountains in Russia.
The Brocken has always played a role in legends and has been connected with witches and devils; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe took up the legends in his two-part tragic play Faust. The Brocken spectre is a common phenomenon on this misty mountain, where a climber's shadow cast upon fog creates eerie optical effects.
Today the Brocken is part of the Harz National Park and hosts a historic botanical garden of about 1,600 alpine mountain plants. A narrow-gauge steam railway, the Brocken Railway, takes visitors to the railway station at an elevation of.
FM-radio and television broadcasting make major use of the Brocken. The old television tower, the Sender Brocken, is now used as hotel and restaurant. It also has an observation deck, open to tourists.
Geography
Location
The Brocken rises over the Harz National Park in the district of Harz, whose main town of Wernigerode lies about east-northeast of the mountain. The state boundary with Lower Saxony runs past the Brocken some to the west. At the southeastern foot of the Brocken lies the spa resort of Schierke.Somewhat to the north below the summit of the Brocken is a reservoir, the Brockenteich, constructed in 1744. On or near the mountain are the source areas of the rivers Bode, Ecker, Ilse and Oder. The rounded summit of the Brocken is treeless, but vegetated with dwarf shrubs.
Summit and subpeaks
The highest point on the Brocken reaches an elevation of . Its subpeaks include the Heinrichshöhe, Königsberg and Kleiner Brocken .Before 1989 the height of the Brocken was recorded in almost all the relevant maps and books as . A survey of the summit at the beginning of the 1990s based on the current reference system, however, gave the height as. In order to provide a reference point for the old data, granite boulders were set in the mid-1990s on the highest point of the Brocken to a height of approximately 1143 m, and a benchmark of "1142 m" was established on them.
Geology
From a geological point of view the Brocken and its surrounding terrain, the Brocken massif, consists mainly of granite, an igneous rock. The granitic plutons of the Harz – the Brocken, Ramberg and Oker plutons – emerged towards the end of the Harz mountain-building phase of the Upper Carboniferous, about 300 million years ago. First, alkaline magma intruded into the overlying sediments, crystallized out and formed gabbro and diorite massifs, such as the Harzburg gabbro. A little later, silica-rich granitic magma rose, some intruding into voids and gaps in the older rocks, but most being created by the melting of existing sediments. On the boundary between granite and host rock, the so-called contact zone, a great variety of transitions may be seen. For example, the summit of the Achtermannshöhe consists of contact-metamorphosed hornfels of the contact zone that, here, lies over the Brocken granite. The subsequent erosion of the Harz mountains that followed the uplifting of the Harz during the Upper Cretaceous saw the disappearance of the protective hornfels summit, thus exposing the granite that had crystallized underground during the Upper Carboniferous. The alleged hardness of Brocken granite is not the reason for the height of the mountain, but the geological fact that it was well protected by its weather-resistant hornfels crest for a long time before erosion set in.Only in recent geological times, since the Tertiary period, did the typical, rounded, spheroidal weathering of granite outcrops and granite boulders of the Brocken take place. Such blockfields are very rare in Central Europe outside the Alps and are subject to conservation measures. They originated mainly under periglacial conditions, i.e. during the course of the ice ages, and their retreat. Today's blockfields of Brocken granite, as well as other rocks in the Harz National Park, particularly in the Oker valley, are therefore at least 10,000 years old. Physical weathering, such as frost shattering, has played a key role in their formation, resulting in giant piles of loosely stacked rocks. In 2006, the granite blockfields of the Brocken, together with 76 other interesting geotopes, were designated as a "National Geotope".
Climate
The Brocken is a place of extreme weather conditions. Due to its exposed location in the north of Germany its peak lies above the natural tree line. The climate on the Brocken is like that of the alpine zone or even that of Iceland. This is due to its short summers and very long winters, with many months of continuous snow cover, strong storms and low temperatures even in summer. The summit, however, does not have an alpine climate, as the average summer temperature is above.Due to its significant height difference compared with the surrounding terrain the Brocken has the highest precipitation of any point in northern central Europe, with an average annual precipitation of. Its average annual temperature is.
The Brocken weather station has recorded the following extreme values:
- Its highest temperature was on 25 July 2019.
- Its lowest temperature was on 1 February 1956.
- In 1973 it had 205 days of snow cover.
- Its greatest depth of snow was on 14 and 15 April 1970.
- Its highest measured wind speed was on 24 November 1984.
- Its greatest annual precipitation was in 1981.
- Its least annual precipitation was in 1953.
- The longest annual sunshine was 2004.5 hours in 1921.
- The shortest annual sunshine was 972.2 hours in 1912.
Flora
The harsh climate of the Brocken makes it a habitat for rare species. The mountain's summit is a subalpine zone with flora and fauna almost comparable to those of north Scandinavia and the Alps.The Brocken is the only mountain in Germany's Central Uplands whose summit lies above the treeline, so that only very small spruce grow there and much of it is covered by a dwarf shrub heathland. In the Brocken Garden, established in 1890, flora are nurtured by national park employees; visitors are allowed to view it as part of regular guided tours. The garden does not just display plants from the Brocken, but also high mountain flora from other regions and countries.
Amongst the typical species of the Brocken that are rarely if ever found elsewhere in North Germany and which occur above about are the variant of the alpine pasqueflower known as the Brocken flower or Brocken anemone, hawkweeds like the Brocken hawkweed and the alpine hawkweed, vernal grasses, the lady's mantle, the tormentil, the alpine clubmoss, the lichens, Iceland moss and reindeer lichen. The crowberry is also referred to here as the Brocken myrtle.
On the raised bogs around the summit of the Brocken there are e.g. cottongrasses, sundews and the dwarf birch.
Fauna
Several animal species have adapted to the conditions of life on the Brocken. For example, the water pipit and the ring ouzel both breed in the area around the summit.The viviparous lizard occurs on the Brocken in a unique, dark-colored variant, Lacerta vivipara aberr. negra. The common frog can also be found here. Insects are very numerous. There are many beetles including ground beetles such as Amara erratica, and hundreds of species of butterfly. The cabbage white here produces only one generation per year compared with two in the lowlands.
Some mammal and bird species that occur here are relics of the ice age, including the northern bat, the alpine shrew and the ring ouzel.
History
Ascent, construction and use
The first documented ascent of the Brocken was in 1572 by the physician and botanist, Johannes Thal from Stolberg, who in his book Sylva Hercynia described the flora of the mountain area. In 1736 Count Christian Ernst of Stolberg-Wernigerode had the Wolkenhäuschen erected at the summit, a small refuge that is still preserved. He also had a mountain lodge built on the southern slope, named Heinrichshöhe after his son Henry Ernest. The first inn on the Brocken summit was built around 1800.Between 1821 and 1825 Carl Friedrich Gauss used the line of sight to the Großer Inselsberg in the Thuringian Forest and the Hoher Hagen mountain near Göttingen for triangulation in the course of the geodesic survey of the Kingdom of Hanover.
A measurement carried out by the military staff of Prussia in 1850 found the Brocken's height to be at its present level of. After the first Brocken lodge had been destroyed by a fire, a new hotel opened in 1862. The Brocken Garden, a botanical garden, was laid out in 1890 by Professor Albert Peter of Göttingen University on an area of granted by Count Otto of Stolberg-Wernigerode. It was Germany's first Alpine garden.
The narrow-gauge Brocken Railway was opened on 27 March 1899. Brocken station is one of the highest railway stations in Germany lying at a height of . Its gauge is. In 1935 the Deutsche Reichspost made the first television broadcast from the Brocken using a mobile transmitter and, in the following year, the first television tower in the world was built on the mountain; carrying the first live television broadcast of the Summer Olympics in Berlin. The tower continued functioning until September 1939, when the authorities suspended broadcasting on the outbreak of World War II.
In 1937 the Brocken, together with the Wurmberg, Achtermann and Acker-Bruchberg were designated as the Upper Harz nature reserve.
During an air attack by the United States Army Air Forces on 17 April 1945 the Brocken Hotel and the weather station were destroyed by bombing. The television tower, however, survived. From 1945 until April 1947, the Brocken was occupied by US troops. As part of the exchange of territory the mountain was transferred to the Soviet occupation zone. Before the Americans left the Brocken in 1947, however, they disabled the rebuilt weather station and the television tower.
The ruins of the Brocken Hotel were blown up in 1949. From 1948 to 1959 part of the Brocken was reopened to tourists. Although a pass was required, these were freely issued. From August 1961 the Brocken, which lay in East Germany's border zone, immediately adjacent to West Germany, was declared a military exclusion zone and was therefore no longer open to public access. Extensive military installations were built on and around the summit. The security of the area was the responsibility of the border guards of the 7th Schierke Border Company, which was stationed in platoon strength on the summit. For accommodation, they used the Brocken railway station. The Soviet Red Army also used a large portion of territory. In 1987, the goods traffic on the Brocken Railway ceased due to poor track conditions.
The Brocken was extensively used for surveillance and espionage purposes. On the summit were two large and powerful listening stations, which could capture radio traffic in almost all of Western Europe. One belonged to Soviet military intelligence, the GRU, and was also the westernmost outpost of the Soviets in Germany; the other was Department III of the Ministry for State Security in the GDR. The listening posts were codenamed "Yenisei" and "Urian". Between 1973 and 1976 a new modern television tower was built for the second channel of the GDR's television service, the Deutscher Fernsehfunk. Today it is used by the public Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen television network. The Stasi used the old tower until 1985, when they moved to a new building – now a museum. To seal the area, the entire Brocken plateau was then surrounded by a concrete wall, built from 2,318 sections, each one in weight and high. The whole area was not publicly accessible until 3 December 1989. The wall has since been dismantled, as have the Russian barracks and the domes of their listening posts. Today the old tower beside the lodge again is home to a weather station of the Deutscher Wetterdienst.
Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, beginning on 3 December 1989 the Brocken was again open to the public during a demonstration walk. With German reunification there was a gradual reduction in border security facilities and military installations from 1990. The last Russian soldier left the Brocken on 30 March 1994. The Brocken summit was renaturalised at a cost of millions of euros. It is now a popular tourist destination for visitors to the Harz.
As a protected area since 1939 and due to the decades of restricted access the unique climate of the Brocken provided outstanding conditions. The massif is partly still covered with primary forest extremely rare in Germany. It provides perfect conditions for endangered and nearly extinct species like the Eurasian lynx, wildcats and capercaillies. The Brocken was therefore declared part of a national park in 1990.