By the early eighteenth century the Brocken was synonymous with the cultural topos of the Walpurgis Night, and the Harz Mountains generally had become known for their mysterious but forbiddingly rugged beauty. In a world increasingly committed to “civilization” but romantically fascinated with nature's most impenetrable domains, the Harz represented a challenge to humanity and an opportunity to contemplate the great mysteries of humankind's relationship to God and nature. The Mountains' abundant lore of ghosts, phantoms, and sundry otherworldly experiences (especially the Walpurgis Night itself) added the Supernatural to this potent mix. It is thus hardly surprising that the natural scientist, thinker, and poet Goethe dealt with the themes of the Brocken and Walpurgis Night in some way or another throughout his creative life. Drawing on a wide array of the fanciful depictions and the historical and fictitious sources discussed in chapters 1 and 2 as well as his own imagination, he touched on these themes countless times in his diaries, personal correspondence, and scientific prose, and drew inspiration from them in numerous literary productions.

A narrative reconstruction of Goethe's various lifelong engagements reveals a tightly woven web of intertextual relationships among the various literary manifestations of his interest in the legends and lore of the Brocken and the themes of Self and Other, so that the ballad “Die erste Walpurgisnacht,” the Urfaust, the Faust Fragment, some of the Faust-related Paralipomena, the “Walpurgisnacht” and “Walpurgisnachtstraum” scenes from Faust I, and the “klassische Walpurgisnacht” from Faust II emerge as complementary literary commentaries on a central theme.