Wartburg

In 1521 Martin Luther arrived at Wartburg not as a guest but as a fugitive — the Diet of Worms had just declared him an outlaw whom anyone could kill without consequence, and his protector Frederick the Wise hid him here disguised as a minor nobleman, "Junker Jörg," beard grown out and sword at his side. In that borrowed room he translated the New Testament from Greek into German in about eleven weeks, a translation so influential it helped fix the shape of the modern German language itself. Whether he really did throw an inkpot at the Devil in that same room, as the legend insists, generations of guides kept a convenient stain on the wall topped up for visitors who wanted to see it.

Centuries earlier, the castle was already said to have hosted the Sängerkrieg — a contest of minstrels sometime around 1206–1207, pitting poets against one another for the favour of the Landgrave. No contemporary record confirms it as fact rather than flattering legend, but the story had enough life in it that Richard Wagner rebuilt it into the second act of his opera Tannhäuser in 1845, cementing Wartburg's reputation as a place where German culture supposedly proved itself on stage.

In 1817, German students gathered here to burn books they associated with reaction and foreign influence — an early flashpoint of German nationalism decades before unification. A century later, the same "most German of German castles" framing was picked up and put to darker use by the Nazi regime. Between Luther's ink, the minstrels' contest and the students' bonfire, this is a castle whose myths kept being borrowed by whoever needed a usable past.

Getting there

Located in Eisenach. Erfurt-Weimar Airport (ERF) is about 46 km away.