Wandrers Nachtlied
Wanderer’s Night-Song
Ueber allen Gipfeln
Ist Ruh’,
In allen Wipfeln
Spürest Du
Kaum einen Hauch;
Die Vögelein schweigen im Walde.
Warte nur! Balde
Ruhest du auch.
O’er all the hill-tops
Is quiet now,
In all the tree-tops
Hearest thou
Hardly a breath;
The birds are asleep in the trees:
Wait; soon like these
Thou too shalt rest.
The walk
On 6 September 1780 Goethe went up the Kickelhahn (he spelled it Gickelhahn), above Ilmenau in Thuringia, and spent the night in a wooden hunting lodge near the top. In a letter dated that day he told Charlotte von Stein he had come up to get away from the little town, its complaints and its demands.
Probably that evening he wrote eight short lines in pencil on the wooden wall. He did not mention them in his letters.
On 27 August 1831, the day before his 82nd birthday, he went back up with the mining inspector Johann Christian Mahr. Mahr reports that Goethe read the lines on the wall, wept, and said: “Ja: warte nur, balde ruhest du auch!” Then: “Nun wollen wir wieder gehen!” (Now let us go on.) He died the following March. The pencil lines on the wall have not survived.
The line
“auf dem Gickelhahn dem höchsten Berg des Reviers”
In English: on the Gickelhahn, the highest mountain of the district.
Switchbacks that tighten as the path climbs, one small closed loop at the top for the hut and the night, then a long, easy way down.