Regenstein from the Southwest

Of course, the exploration has to start with a visit to the castle and fortress ruins of Regenstein. Outside the museum that requires an entrance fee, and also reachable by a footpath, lies the Scharfe Ecke. A longer walk to the sandstone caves at Heers (stamp site of the Harz Hiking Badge) or into the Papenberge is highly recommended. It’s easy to imagine that where today a monotonous pine forest surrounds the Regenstein, an open, sparsely wooded pasture landscape dominated the area until the Second World War.

Rudolf Cronau (1855–1939) combined the reporter and the painter in one person. As a young artist, he began in 1872 creating illustrations for the Leipzig magazine “Die Gartenlaube”. It was the first weekly illustrated magazine, sold in the then incredible number of over 300,000 copies, and correspondingly cost only a few pennies. It became Cronau’s most important employer, almost his playground. He moved from Düsseldorf to Leipzig, but as early as 1881 he set out for America for the first time. From then on, that became his main subject of reporting — from his encounter with the Native American chief Sitting Bull, from noble German settlers, or from the giant sequoias in California. He heightened a subject such as the local Regenstein with the lightning of a thunderstorm. In the foreground, an old woman feels her way along a rock, which, by the way, is Cronau’s invention. His text for the picture begins fittingly sensational: “In immense, threatening masses a partly wooded, partly wildly rugged block of rock rises at the northern edge of the Harz, dominating the whole region between Halberstadt and Quedlinburg — the Regenstein.”