Kyffhäuser Monument

Listen first. Wind moves through beech trees on every side of this ridge, and somewhere below a raven calls. The path under your feet is uneven and worn. Then the trees open, and a wall of dark, rough-cut stone rises above you. It looks less like a building than a cliff that someone shaped by hand. You are standing on the Kyffhäuser, a low, wooded range in northern Thuringia, high above the small spa town of Bad Frankenhausen.

This is the Kyffhäuser Monument. It is one of the largest monuments in Germany, and it rises roughly eighty metres above the hilltop. It was built in the 1890s and dedicated in 1896. The architect was Bruno Schmitz, a man who designed several of the great national monuments of imperial Germany. The money came largely from German veterans' associations. They wanted a memorial to Emperor Wilhelm I, the first emperor of the newly united German state.

But why here, on a quiet hill far from Berlin? The answer is a legend. For centuries, people in this region told a story about a sleeping emperor. Deep inside this mountain, they said, Frederick Barbarossa sits at a stone table. Barbarossa means 'red beard' in Italian. He was a twelfth-century emperor who drowned on crusade in a river in Asia Minor. His body never came home, and so the story grew that he had never really died.

Legend has it that his beard keeps growing, slowly, through the stone table. Every hundred years, he wakes and sends a boy outside to check one thing. Are the ravens still flying around the mountain? If they are, he must sleep another century. One day, the story says, the ravens will be gone. Then the emperor will rise and restore the old empire to its glory. Older versions of the tale were told about his grandson, Frederick the Second. Over time, the story moved to Barbarossa.

In the nineteenth century, this folk tale became politics. The German lands were divided into many separate states. People who dreamed of a single nation used the sleeping emperor as a symbol of waiting and hope. When Germany was finally united in 1871, many saw the legend as fulfilled. Here is a detail that most visitors miss... Wilhelm I had a long white beard. Some admirers gave him a nickname to match — Barbablanca, the white beard. The red beard had waited, and the white beard had arrived.

Now look at the monument itself, because it tells this story in stone. Near the base, set into a deep niche, sits Barbarossa. He is carved from sandstone, and he seems to grow out of the rock behind him. His eyes are half closed. His hand rests near the table, and his beard spills down over it. This is the emperor of the legend, still asleep inside the mountain. The sculptor was Nikolaus Geiger.

Raise your eyes above the sleeping figure. High on a terrace stands a second emperor, this time awake and on horseback. This is Wilhelm I, cast in copper, which has turned a soft green with age. Two seated figures flank him — one is a warrior, and the other represents History. The whole monument reads from bottom to top like a sentence. The old emperor sleeps below, and the new emperor rides above.

Walk around the base and touch the stone. The blocks are rough and heavy, and many are left unpolished on purpose. Schmitz wanted the monument to feel ancient, as if it had grown from the hill. The masonry has a fortress-like weight. Notice how few decorative flourishes there are. The design depends on mass, shadow and height. On a grey day, the tower can look almost black. In low evening sun, the stone warms to brown and amber.

Here is the second surprise. The monument stands on top of a real medieval castle. Long before the veterans' associations arrived, the imperial castle of Kyffhausen stretched along this ridge. It was one of the largest castle complexes in medieval Germany. Much of it is now ruins, but you can still walk among old walls, foundations and a deep well. A stump of the old keep, the central defensive tower, still stands near the monument. So the legend of an emperor inside the hill had a real castle on top of it.

If your legs are willing, climb the stairs inside the tower. The steps turn tightly, and the walls close in around you. Then you come out near the crown at the top. On a clear day, the view runs far across the Goldene Aue, a wide, fertile valley to the north. Beyond it lie the Harz Mountains. Look south and you see the forests of the Kyffhäuser falling away towards Bad Frankenhausen. The wind up here is often strong, even in summer.

It is worth remembering what this place meant to the people who built it. This is a monument from an age of strong nationalism. It celebrates an empire, an army and a dynasty. In the twentieth century, Germany went through two world wars and deep political change. The way Germans look at monuments like this one has changed too. Today, many visitors come for the landscape, the legend and the castle ruins. They treat the monument as a document of its time, not as a message for today.

Before you leave the area, think about the wider landscape. Down in Bad Frankenhausen, on a hill above the town, is the Panorama Museum. It holds a vast circular painting by Werner Tübke about the Peasants' War of 1525. A major battle of that war took place near the town. In the town itself, the tower of the Oberkirche leans visibly to one side, because the ground beneath it is unstable. Nearby, at Rottleben, the Barbarossa Cave opens into the gypsum rock of the same range.

Stand still for one more moment in front of the sleeping stone emperor. Listen again to the trees and the wind across the ridge. Watch the sky above the tower for a while. You may see dark birds circling over the forest. If you do, remember the old story... the ravens still fly, and so the emperor still sleeps. As you walk back down the path, the tower slips behind the beeches, and the hill becomes quiet again.