page_title: Harzreise im Winter
section_title: Creation and publication
hierarchical_section_title: Harzreise im Winter / Creation and publication
caption_attribution_description: Deutsch: Gedenkstein an Goethes Anwesenheit
context_page_description: "Harzreise im Winter" is a poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, inspired by his ascent of the Brocken in the Harz mountains during the winter of 1777. He reached the summit in the heat of midday, in deep snow, with the landscape below him shrouded in cloud. The Brocken had always been a place of mystery, connected with witches and devils; where illusions such as the Brocken spectre might confuse an unwary traveller, and where few ventured by choice. This was the inspiration and the setting for his poem.
  "Harzreise im Winter" was the last of Goethe's works in his Sturm und Drang period, marking the end of a series of long, free-verse poems hymns by the young poet that had begun with ‘Wandrers Sturmlied’, and it is less self-absorbed than his earlier writing. It was first published in 1789 in the eighth volume of his works.
context_section_description: Goethe wrote the poem during his first trip to the Harz when he spent two weeks on his own, with only local guides to accompany him, from 29 November to 14 December 1777.  During this trip he signed himself in hotel guest books as "Johann Wilhelm Weber from Darmstadt". On 16 November he had referred in his diary to a "Project on the Secret Journey", an undertaking that he described on 7 December in a letter to Frau von Stein as a "pilgrimage". On the first of December, several days before the ascent of the Brocken, he had already conceived of the opening words of the poem, “Like the vulture”. The 'pilgrimage' up the Brocken was intended to be the highlight of his trip, but as well as being considered dangerous, the weather conditions made it uncertain,  and he was not able to make the ascent until 10 December. Many years later, in his autobiographical essay “Campaign in France”, he declared that he had seen a vulture "in the gloomy snow-capped clouds that rose from the north" on the Ettersberg, and that he had already begun the poem that day.
  The original manuscript of the poem has not survived, so the earliest known version is a transcription by Philipp Seidel, attached to a letter to Johann Heinrich Merck dated 5 August 1778. Goethe did not include the work in his handwritten collection of texts which he put together in 1777 for Charlotte von Stein. He edited his early version for the eight volume of his writings in 1789, making some minor changes in the final stanza.
caption: Commemorative plaque for Goethe on the Brocken
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