Wunsiedel

Wunsiedel possesses a stage that geology built. The Luisenburg above the town is a labyrinth of colossal granite boulders — a "rock sea" piled by weathering into gorges, caves and stairways, which Goethe climbed in fascination and analysed correctly as the work of erosion, not catastrophe. At its foot, the citizens began performing plays in the boulders' natural arena, and the tradition never stopped: the Luisenburg Festival, with roots in the eighteenth century and continuous seasons since the rock theatre took form around 1890, is Germany's oldest open-air stage — every summer, opera, operetta, drama and musicals play against walls of granite older than the continent's memory, before audiences of thousands.

The town below is the capital of the Fichtelgebirge, the horseshoe of forested granite ranges in Bavaria's northeast corner, and the birthplace of Jean Paul, the beloved eccentric of German letters, born here in 1763 — his routes and memorials thread the region. Wunsiedel's own calendar peaks twice: at the festival, and at the Brunnenfest in June, when the town's fountains are decked in flowers and greenery, a custom kept since the Thirty Years' War.

All around lie the pleasures of the granite country — the Ochsenkopf and Schneeberg summits, porcelain towns strung along the valleys, trout streams and snow winters. A theatre made of mountains, a poet made of whimsy: Wunsiedel is the Fichtelgebirge's imagination, staged annually.