Following in the footsteps of Caspar David Friedrich, born 250 years ago, reveals the dramatic landscapes and cultural touchstones that inspired Germany’s greatest Romantic painter

Words Andrew Eames

When I was a young undergraduate, way back in the mists of time, my cohort included one friend whom we all admired. His name was Mudd. He was witty and idiosyncratic, and he thought deeply about both literature and the wider universe, while the rest of us were still pondering how to boil an egg.

He was different, too, in his choice of pictures to hang on his wall. Most us tacked up typically immature stuff – it was the era of that infamous poster of the lithe tennis player’s rear – but his rear-view image was rather different. It depicted a frock-coated figure standing atop a mountain outcrop, gazing out over a fantastical carpet of mist pierced by rocky pinnacles, trees and distant mountains. It looked like an album cover, and for us it came to symbolise the point we were at in our lives: looking forward into an uncertain future, still mostly obscured, having climbed one big peak – egg-boiling notwithstanding – but with many more ahead.

Fast-forward some 45 years to this past winter, when I found myself standing statuesque on a rocky outcrop in those self-same mountains, looking out over that self-same mist pierced by pinnacles, trees and distant mountains. It seemed that little had changed since Mudd’s favourite Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog supposedly stood there, contemplating… we know not what. For me, all those decades on, re-enacting that moment of still contemplation was the culmination of a personal pilgrimage. A pilgrimage in the footsteps of an artist I’d not heard of back then, but of whom I know a great deal more now.

Origin story

Caspar David Friedrich was born on 5 September 1774 in the small town of Greifswald, on the coast of the Baltic. His origin in what’s now eastern Germany (and, therefore, behind the Iron Curtain for nearly half a century), together with the dubious distinction of having been lauded by the Nazis for his celebration of the nation’s landscapes, has hindered the spread of his reputation. But that is being remedied this year with huge shows in Hamburg, Berlin and Dresden, with events and exhibitions in Greifswald, and with a massively increased number of hikers setting out into the Elbe Sandstone Mountains south-east of Dresden to search out places that he most famously recreated in paint.

I know Germany pretty well, but I had never heard of Greifswald. Arriving there from Berlin after a long jogtrot of a train journey across the expansive winter wheat fields of Mecklenburg, I was gratified to find myself walking through remnants of the medieval walls into an old town whose fundamentals have been preserved since the Middle Ages. Its gable-flanked Market Square, rich in brick Gothic merchant’s houses, could readily become a weekend destination to match the likes of a Bruges or a Ghent – if it were uprooted and dragged westwards towards airports and Channel Tunnels.

Local guide Martin Felsch explained how it managed to hold on to its good looks. Founded by Cistercian monks in the 13th century, Greifswald later prospered thanks to maritime trade, both as part of the Hanseatic League and as one of the key cities of the Duchy of Pomerania. One of the oldest universities in Germany was founded here in 1456, and the town successfully swerved any major conflagrations until the 20th century. Then, in the dying embers of the Second World War, advancing Soviet troops – who were torching everything in their path – were promised that Greifswald would offer no resistance, so the town was spared. Wider Pomerania wasn’t so lucky: two thirds of it was ceded to Poland at the end of the war, relegating Greifswald to become a backwoods ‘university with a few houses attached’ – a bit-part player in today’s amalgamated German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.

It may be much diminished historically, but to me Greifswald felt like a vigorous, creative place – largely thanks to its student population, though I was told that its relative isolation can be a bit off-putting to undergrads. They cry when they arrive, it’s said, and cry when they leave – tearful initially at having to study somewhere they’d never heard of, and teary afterwards because they’d enjoyed their time here so much.

Caspar endured his own share of sadness in the town. One of 10 children born into a family grown moderately prosperous through the manufacture of soap and candles, his early years were blighted first by the death of his mother and then by the tragedy that befell his older brother, who drowned in a frozen lake while trying to save Caspar himself.

The young artist studied in Copenhagen, then started his career in Dresden, a major city in Saxony offering both wealth and patronage. He lived in Dresden for some four decades but returned north to Greifswald as often as possible, drawing inspiration from the Baltic’s stormy, reed-fringed shores, from the sail-traders in harbour, and from the crumbling ruins of Eldena Abbey, whose gaunt brick arches set among naked oaks resonated with him– and which still look much the same today. All remain easily reachable from the Market Square, following the signposted Caspar David Friedrich Trail.

In the mood

The day on which I explored Greifswald was cold and grey, which seemed entirely apt. Friedrich’s images are largely moody and Gothic, full of symbolism and with threatening, Turneresque skies epitomised in The Monk by the Sea. Previously, landscape in art had merely provided the background to the main subject – usually human, often a religious scene. In Friedrich’s piece, though, it becomes a representation of a divine world order into which a subservient human figure is placed.

Friedrich believed that a painting should not be merely a representation – it should be felt. To that end, he fused elements from disparate locations, becoming what some critics have dubbed ‘the first Photoshop artist’. Thus, in his Ruins of Eldena Abbey in the Riesengebirge, he transposes the Gothic arch of that monastic ruin standing outside his birthplace into mountains actually lying far to the south-east – two elements from distant places fused in one scene. It may seem no big deal today, but at the time this was trailblazing stuff.

After my walk along the Trail, I lingered over a handful of his paintings in the town’s Pomeranian State Museum, where they were displayed alongside a selection of works by other Romantics. Yet more are reproduced on sliding boards in the Caspar David Friedrich Centre, his birthplace museum, which still houses the family’s original cauldrons – used for making soap and candles – in its cellar.

Both of these places are holding special exhibitions for the anniversary year – the Museum mounting a huge show of his drawings – however, I was told that the challenge for visitors will be finding accommodation. The Hamburg exhibition, which ran until April, was overwhelmed by Caspar mania, and the signs are that this much-smaller town might struggle to cope with a tsunami of art-lovers.

The same won’t be true of Dresden, a fabulously good-looking city, rich in historic buildings and art collections, which is well used to a big seasonal influx of visitors. Having been here before, stepping out of the train after the five-hour journey south from Greifswald felt like renewing acquaintance with an old friend.

There was the Frauenkirche, the Altstadt’s (Old Town’s) circular centrepiece of a church, piebald with old stones and new, which looks to me like a giant ornate teapot. There was the Zwinger, a baroque palace that is Dresden’s Versailles, filled with Old Masters and porcelain treasures. There was the riverside promenade and its fleet of vintage paddle steamers, beneath a skyline painted repeatedly by Bernardo Bellotto – nephew of the more-renowned Canaletto, whose byname he adopted – which earned the city the soubriquet ‘Florence on the Elbe’. Much of downtown Dresden has been painstakingly reconstructed after carpet-bombing by Allied forces during the Second World War, and beautifully so. Walking through the Altstadt reminds me of an Oxford, or a Prague: relaxed, timeless, with music echoing off ancient stones, and statues of electors, dukes and margraves gesticulating down from lofty rooflines.

One of its imposing river-facing monuments is the Albertinum, a neo-Renaissance former arsenal that houses the New Masters Gallery, a collection of art ranging from the Romantic era onwards. It’s hosting the major exhibition ‘Caspar David Friedrich. Where it all started’ from late August, so I was there too early. Even so, the permanent collection features Friedrich’s Two Men Looking at the Moon, another of his images in which the figures have their backs to the audience, partners with the viewer in their communion with nature. Nearby is The Cross in the Mountains, painted for an altarpiece, which caused huge controversy in his time – the cross being too diminished and the crucified Christ too insignificant for popular taste. It isn’t a painting I warm to, not helped by being admonished by an over-zealous security guard for waving my pen around in front of it. I took that as my cue to leave.

Rocky road

My final destination had been prefigured along my route, not least with a multitude of sketches and paintings in the Albertinum. The Elbe Sandstone Mountains, popularly known as Saxon Switzerland, rise either side of that river south-east of Dresden, spanning the border with the Czech Republic. Here the soft sandstone, once a seabed, has been scrunched up by nearby volcanic activity and eroded into curious shapes, creating a world of tabletop mountains, gorges, cliffs and caves. It’s a place where wind-sculpted pinnacles look like elderly relatives frozen in the act of gossiping – and a happy hunting ground for Friedrich and his fellow artists, who came here in search of inspiration.

Back in his time, it took a day to travel here from Dresden, mostly by boat – an attractive but time-consuming trip that you can still take today. I took the train instead, arriving in just 40 minutes. The area’s main resort is Bad Schandau, where I exited the station onto a foot ferry to cross the Elbe.

Half an hour later, I was aboard a vintage tram from 1898 – the Kirnitzschtalbahn, a yellow rattler that trundles along the valley past spa hotels to the rather tame Lichtenhainer Waterfall.

It wasn’t always thus: back when Saxon Switzerland first became fashionable, a waterfall-puller would – for a fee – open a dam upstream to power a more impressive cascade. More locals were employed to transport society ladies in sedan chairs to the Kuhstall, a spectacular rock arch half an hour’s walk up a winding path.

The paintings of Friedrich and his contemporaries helped put these places on the map. Today, there are no more sedan chairs but the pathways are veritable highways for hikers. Local guide and Friedrich enthusiast Anett Orzyszek accompanied me along 12km of the region’s most famous route, the 116km Malerweg – Painter’s Way – pointing out places where Friedrich camped and sketched, collecting images that he would eventually deploy in paintings in his Dresden studio.

As we walked, I asked her what she thought made the artist important. Until he came along, she said, landscape painting had been a second-class skill. Previously, most art had focused on portraiture and Biblical stories, but he changed all that. And, while many of his contemporaries travelled to Italy to find their subject matter, he was more than happy with what he fossicked around Dresden and back on the Baltic coast, which made him particularly popular with Germans.

For us, the highpoint – literally and visually – was the Bastei, a soaring, spectacularly sculpted rock formation that looms a sheer, giddy 194m above the banks of the Elbe, with stupendous views upriver and down, as well as south across the mountains into the Czech Republic. A popular viewpoint for at least two centuries, now boasting a dramatically protruding Skywalk, the Bastei’s bulbous fingers also inspired a Friedrich painting, Rocky Landscape, depicting the tree-tufted pinnacles. We were lucky that it wasn’t too busy this early in the season; on warmer spring and summer days the Skywalk, bridge, car parks, hotel and restaurants draw dense throngs of tourists, said Anett. Even then, though, you don’t have to walk far into the surrounding woods to lose the crowds.

On my last day in the area, left to my own devices, I followed the Malerweg as it approached the Czech border. On this midweek day just before the advent of spring, I was practically alone in mossy-toed beech forests shrouded in a thick mist that turned winter trees into dripping ghosts of their summer selves. Unusual-shaped rocks loomed and retreated around me like silent watchers, and fallen battalions of timber told of passing storms.

It was a moody landscape: nature’s cathedral, auditioning for an artist – for a wanderer in a sea of fog.