In 2023, I wrote about my desire--inspired by the painting Der Wanderer ueber dem Nebelmeer by Caspar David Friedrich--to hike the Malerweg, an almost-loop hike in the Saechsische Schweiz of east-central Germany. The trail has a reputation as one of Germany's most beautiful hikes. It includes acrophobe-challenging cliffs, bridges, and stairs that have drawn tourists for generations.
Alas, the stars (i.e. distances and train schedules) didn't align for hiking it in 2023, but the trail remained on my list of aspirations.
2024 marked the semiquincentennial (250th) anniversary of Caspar David Friedrich's birth (Sept. 5, 1774), but we had too much other hiking planned last summer to include the distant Malerweg.
This summer is looking to be the time to hike it--and goodness, how the stars are aligning.
The most essential star: S will be serving as a mentor for three weeks in Dresden, where grad students from Nearly Ivy, Backyard State, and UBY will be participating in a research exchange program with the Technische Universität Dresden. While he's busy mentoring, I'll be busy hiking, with hopes that he can meet up with me for weekend sections of the trail. The Malerweg has the advantage of easy S-bahn access from Dresden. Indeed, instead of staying in huts/hotels every night along the way, several segments offer opportunities to cross to the south side of the Elbe and catch a train back to Dresden.
The second star is quite the treat: Der Wanderer ueber dem Nebelmeer, along with ~75 other works by Friedrich, will be on exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC this spring, from Feb. 8 - May 11, 2025. Normally these paintings are scattered in various museums in Germany and beyond. Der Wanderer usually resides in Hamburg, a long enough schlepp from Steinebach--and even from Dresden--that we've never seen it in person.* What a treat to be able to see all of these works gathered in one place, a short, cheap flight from Durham. Hooray for international collaborations and semiquincentennials!
The third star also promises to be magical. We seem to be in the recent habit of seeing at least one opera per summer. In the spirit of German Romanticism and art inspired by the Saechsische Schweiz and Bayrischer-/Böhmerwald, we've purchased tickets to see Der Freischuetz at the Bregenzer opera festival in July. The previews look both fantastic and phantasmagoric, and it's hardly a surprise that librettist Friedrich Kind and composer Carl Maria von Weber both lived in Dresden when Der Freischuetz was composed. The Wolfsschlucht on the Hockstein along the Malerweg is one of several presumed candidates for the landscape that inspired the opera's famous Wolf's Glen scene, wherein the eponymous magic bullets are melodramatically cast.
*It's possible that we saw Der Wanderer ueber dem Nebelmeer in 1992, the first time I visited Germany with S; we took a long road trip that included Hamburg, where he had been a college student before transferring to the U.S. S has no recollection of visiting the Hamburger Kunsthalle on that trip, nor when he was a student, because "why would I want to do that?" But here we are now, 33 years later, and all grown up...
