Across ‘Saxon Switzerland’ in the footsteps of Caspar David Friedrich

The fog arrived in the village of Schmilka early on a Monday morning. It began as a film of mist moving along the Elbe valley, scouting its way around a river bend, breaking against the bows of the antique ferries moored at the jetties. Soon it grew into a great bank, billowing from the waterline. A wedge of geese burst out from the whiteness. An articulated lorry braked as it entered.

Watching from my window, in an attic bedroom of a riverside hotel, this fog soon obscured signs of modernity. Houses, restaurants, roads and car parks below were smothered, as if dust sheets had been flung on furniture. For a brief moment, all that was perceptible of the world were beech forests and sandstone cliffs above, afloat on that rolling tide of fog. By the time I went down for the breakfast buffet all the fog had cleared. I never saw it again.

Though, in another sense, I had seen the fog some days before — hundreds of miles downstream where the Elbe meets the North Sea. Here, I had visited the Hamburg Kunsthalle, where a new exhibition, Caspar David Friedrich: Art for a New Age, is one of a series of events and shows across the country this year to mark the 250th birthday of Germany’s great Romantic painter. Inside were Friedrich’s sketches and paintings, many of which show individuals — pilgrims, shepherds, monks — humbled by the immense landscapes in which they stand.

The artist’s preoccupation was with boundless space — seas and skies, hills and horizons — that sometimes seemed metaphysical in their extent, and at other times seemed to speak of his own inner world. Friedrich’s art could be both infinite and intimate.

His fame waxed and waned over time. For the Nazis, his paintings implied mastery over the land. Later, those far-roaming figures promised a kind of escape from the claustrophobia and surveillance of East Germany. Now, in this new age of climate breakdown, Friedrich’s art is sought-after again in his homeland and beyond, partly for its meditations on humankind’s relationship with the environment.

At the Kunsthalle, signs announced tickets for the day had sold out. Crowds scrummed for a view of Friedrich’s most famous painting, “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog”. This mountaintop figure was painted around 1818. Beyond that, little about it is certain — the wanderer’s identity is disputed and, as one academic told me, it was “not even clear if his eyes were open.”

In the footsteps of . . . 

This is the latest in a series in which writers are guided by a notable earlier traveller. For more, see ft.com/footsteps

Nonetheless he is a German icon, an Instagram meme, and perhaps a cryptic key to the national soul. He is, I was told, a popular request in tattoo parlours. But where, for example, the “Mona Lisa” holds court and smiles at adoring crowds in the Louvre, Friedrich’s wanderer had his back to the countless followers who had flocked to the Kunsthalle to see him. It was as if this solitary figure had been suddenly caught up by the world he had sought to escape.

And so, to understand more, I had travelled upstream, to try to stand where the wanderer had stood, and to trace the elements Friedrich had sourced for his composition: the distant blue hills, the stunted clifftop trees. And, of course, the fog along the Elbe, which seemed almost dreamlike as it stole down the river valley early that Monday morning.

Curiously, Friedrich himself never wandered especially far. Born beside the Baltic in Greifswald in 1774, he studied in Copenhagen but moved to the Baroque city of Dresden in his twenties, where he lived for the remainder of his life. He never saw the Alps. Unlike many peers, he did not make a Grand Tour to Italy. Instead, he found the sublime in a range of hills a summer day’s march from the city.

Here, the Elbe Sandstone Mountains rise along the German-Czech border. A broad, brown river steers its way though slopes forested with spruce and birch. This is a place long characterised by the flow of water: in the Cretaceous period the area was a strait between two landmasses — vast quantities of sand were swept here by ocean currents. Today, the sand lingers on in the form of sandstone table mountains, ramparts of rock sculpted into fantastical forms by wind, rain and ice. At sunrise and sunset, their silhouettes almost recall the mesa country of the American West.

One morning I set out to hike part of the Malerweg — the “Painters’ Way” that meanders in the footsteps of Friedrich and others through these hills. It is a landscape with a rich colour palette: emerald beds of mosses, bright daubs of sulphur-dust lichen, the streak of a dipper above a glass-clear mountain brook. Steeples of sandstone teeter above, the rock running a spectrum from biscuit to burnt black. Two of Friedrich’s predecessors at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts, where he was an associate professor, said this landscape reminded them of their homeland in the Jura. Ever since, the region has been known as Saxon Switzerland.

The highest peak here measures a modest 560m. Indeed, the Saxon Switzerland National Park covers an area smaller than certain Swiss glaciers. Rather, this is a place where geological drama is concentrated. There are many layers of habitats and ecosystems, which my walking guide Kristin Arnold described as being “like the storeys of a house”. The cellar-like coolness of the canyons. The rooftop of the summits.

“Friedrich found his peace here,” said Kristin, as we emerged on to a plateau. “You can imagine him standing still for hours, watching the movement of the fog.”

Friedrich walked alone in these hills and spoke to no one. He was fleeing many demons. His mother had died when he was seven, and aged 13 he had witnessed the death of his brother, who had fallen through the ice while skating on a frozen lake (in some versions, while attempting to rescue Caspar himself). Wracked by grief and maybe guilt, Friedrich suffered spells of depression, and is said to have attempted suicide.

Political events also left their mark on him: he painted at a time when bloody Napoleonic battles were being fought on Saxon soil, and French troops occupied his home city. To step out on to these trails was to seek transcendence — to escape the trauma of the wider world, to outpace the fog of melancholy that held him in its grasp.

Outside the village of Krippen — where Friedrich lodged during his walks in Saxon Switzerland — our path made a turn at the spot on which he based his painting “Two Men Contemplating the Moon” (c 1825-30). Far across the valley were the sandstone spires evoked in “Rocky Ravine” (1822-23). His paintings imply profound silences, but when Friedrich worked on his sketches the ground would have quaked with quarry workings nearby. Architectural masterpieces have been hewn from Elbe sandstone: blocks were often floated downstream, to be found in structures such as Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate and Dresden’s Frauenkirche. Higher up, the sandstone was softer: Kristin said the material from these quarries was often used to sculpt angels.

In subsequent decades, a different kind of commotion ensued. By the mid-19th century, steamboats and railway lines carried the first tourists to fashionable resorts in Saxon Switzerland. Visitors came for thermal baths, hot air balloons and high society intrigue. But as much as anything, they came for the instant elevation this steep geography afforded — to be swiftly carried in sedan chairs up to the precipices, and experience the novelty of drinking beer and sending postcards from little kiosks above the clouds.

Some made their way to the Kaiserkrone, a table mountain, where a local entrepreneur sculpted animals on the summit for the amusement of visitors. It was this same hill on which Friedrich had partly based his masterpiece, “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog”.

The painting suggests the wanderer stands on a remote and lofty peak. In his book Mountains of the Mind, Robert Macfarlane describes the wanderer as “the archetypal . . . mountain climbing visionary”; the painting is one for a generation caught up in the “adoration of the summit”. In reality, the Kaiserkrone is a 351m-high stump. The group of rocks on which the wanderer stands are, I soon discovered, actually at its base.

Today Friedrich’s wanderer would find himself close to a nondescript village, overlooking lawns, garden sheds and a trampoline from Lidl. Trees partly obscure the famous view; Kristin said villagers had considered chopping them down but decided against it, lest they encourage Instagrammers.

Even without the trees, the panorama would be radically different to the painting: two mountains have swapped positions, crags in the foreground have been imported from downriver. “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog” has been regarded as a quintessentially German painting, yet the wanderer seems to be gazing into the modern Czech Republic. The fog is the glue that holds this curious collage together — a rearrangement that Kristin describes as being like “historical Photoshop”. She added many Friedrich pilgrims she had guided here had left disappointed.

“To try to find the places in Friedrich’s paintings is a game: a wild-goose chase,” explained Holger Birkholz, a curator at Dresden’s Albertinum gallery, when I visited two days later. “You think if you stand where the wanderer stands you will reach a kind of promised land. That you will understand who he is, what he is thinking. But it is not so simple. The details are accurate. The overall arrangement is not.”

Birkholz is preparing to launch another Friedrich anniversary exhibition this August at the Albertinum and we discussed the significance of these warped scenes: that they might represent the fog of memory, redrafting a landscape in recollection. Birkholz noted, too, the importance of Stimmung, a German word approximate to “mood”, the artist reordering landscapes to evoke feelings or psychological states. As Friedrich once famously wrote, “the artist should paint not only what he sees before him, but also what he sees within himself”.

Underpinning all of Friedrich’s art, Birkholz noted, was his fervent Lutheran faith. “Friedrich found something sacred in the natural world, but not in a pantheistic sense. Rather he believed God spoke to us all directly through nature.”

He led me to another famous work hanging in the Albertinum, “The Cemetery Entrance” (1825), a painting now too fragile to be moved from Dresden. It shows two figures: bereaved parents peering into a dark, wooded cemetery. The scene initially seems hopeless. Only when you press your nose closer to the canvas do you notice two small details — fine white lines representing a child’s soul ascending from an open grave, and an angel descending from the treetops to meet it. Birkholz explained that it may have been painted soon after Friedrich and his wife had a stillborn child. It was unclear whether the artist understood it was this cemetery in which he himself would be buried in 1840.

Before I departed Dresden, I took a tour in the company of local guide and Friedrich devotee Anett Orzyszek. We stopped at the Academy of Fine Arts where Friedrich was employed. We passed the site of his riverside house — destroyed, she said, by the firestorm of February 1945 — where he worked in a spartan, dimly lit room, applying slow, methodical brushstrokes.

In the gathering dusk we arrived at the gates of Dresden’s Trinity Cemetery — the basis for “The Cemetery Entrance”. Once again, there were inconsistencies with the painting: the real-life gates are less ornate, the consecrated ground more sparsely wooded. But Friedrich had captured the essence of that place. Within those brushstrokes you could almost hear the clang of the iron gates, the call of the crows, the wind in the trees early on a winter evening.

Standing over Friedrich’s grave, I reached for my phone and loaded the picture of the Wanderer one more time. Some recognise it as a positive image: a man in contemplation of life’s path ahead. For others, it stands for banishment. Often it is a mirror to the beholder. I asked Anett what she believed the meaning of the painting to be.

“I think the mountains rising beyond the fog represent heaven,” she said. “It makes me ask myself, how will I get there? When will I get there? One day I will have a place in a cemetery like this one. But I also hope to go further, into that ‘beyond’, where life is unending.”

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