Heritage Archive
A thousand years of history written into the Harz landscape. Mining, folklore, trade and nature — explored without simplification.
Stories from the archive
Selected accounts of the events, industries and traditions that made the Harz what it is.
How a century of silver extraction transformed Wildemann from a forest settlement into a working town — and what remains of that infrastructure today. The story of the Spiegelthaler and Grüner Hirsch shafts.
The legend of the Brocken witches and the Walpurgis Night celebrations that persist in Harz villages every 30 April — folklore, early modern trial records and landscape intertwined.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe made his first ascent of the Brocken in December 1777. The journey shaped his conception of nature, appeared in Faust, and established the mountain as a site of literary pilgrimage.
The engineering challenge of laying a metre-gauge track across the Harz massif at the turn of the century. How the HSB connected isolated mining communities and became the region's defining piece of infrastructure.
From 1952 to 1989, the Inner German Border divided the Harz. The Brocken was in the GDR exclusion zone, inaccessible to western visitors. What the division meant for the region and what it left behind.
How German reunification enabled the creation of a cross-border national park. Thirty years of rewilding and what it has meant for the forests, the rivers and the trails.