concerning this particular nickname in connection with the modern uses of the mountain Brocken that causes one to wonder if the narrator did indeed possess genuine gifts of foresight and prophecy:
As has already been noted several times, Brocken was, prior to the twentieth century, popularly considered the most sinister mountain in Germany and perhaps all Europe, the meeting ground not only for human witches and warlocks, but for the supernatural demons and other unholy creatures with whom those humans cavorted, as well. It is perhaps fitting, then, that after the assumption of national power by Adolf Hitler in 1933, the mountain found particular use to the propaganda machine of his Nazi party — as the site of the world’s first long-range television broadcasting tower. It was Brocken’s tower that broadcast the 1936 Summer Olympic Games to a very large (by the standards of that day) area of northern Germany: the first time the Olympics had appeared on television anywhere. A weather station and hotel had also been constructed; but Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, preferred radio to television, as a tool for indoctrinating the German people (and when one considers the physical peculiarities, not only of Goebbels, but of nearly all the Nazi leaders, one can understand why); all activity on Brocken, along with broadcasting from the television tower, was therefore suspended during World War II. The mountain was bombed by the Western allies at the very end of the European war (April 1945). Although the hotel and the weather station were destroyed, the television tower miraculously survived; and when American troops occupied the mountain, they rebuilt the weather station and used the television tower for their own propaganda purposes. But when Brocken fell into the Soviet zone of occupation in 1947, the Americans disabled both the tower and the station before relinquishing control of the mountain.
During the early decades of the Cold War, Brocken comprised a “security zone” for the Communist government of East Germany: it was the site of an enormously ambitious fortification project, one that recalled the achievements of the “Mad King” Oxmontrot some thirteen hundred years earlier. Recognizing both Brocken’s continued suitability as a site for a television tower and, even more importantly, the mountain’s larger strategic significance (in the wrong hands, Brocken could have proved a strong threat to the advance of East German and Soviet troops into West Germany along the route that eventually leads through the Fulda Gap to the southwest, popularly considered the primary path of entry for such an invasion by Western military leaders), the East Germans and their Soviet “protectors” in 1961 declared Brocken a top secret security zone. Large numbers of troops began using the area just as the army of Broken had once done, as a location in which to train for what seemed an inevitable war. The summit of the mountain was once again turned into a fortress, this time for the use of the East German and Soviet militaries; and construction soon mushroomed into one of the most ambitious Cold War building projects ever undertaken:
The military installation was enclosed by a massive concrete wall, built of 2,318 sections, each of which weighed two and a half tons, and the whole of which was of a scale almost equal to the natural stone walls of Broken. Within the new walls, the mountaintop became the site of a major Communist listening post, from which were monitored any and all broadcasts in West Germany, private and public, military and civilian — an operation that was controlled by the Soviet KGB and the East German Ministerium fur Staatsicherheit (the “Ministry for State Security”), or secret police, whose popular name was the Stasi.
German reunification occurred before the long-expected invasion of Western Europe through the Fulda Gap by the forces of Eastern communism, and the massive concrete walls atop Brocken were dismantled along with the more famous wall in Berlin; the television tower now broadcasts one of the television stations run by the democratic government of the unified Germany. Tourism has come to the mountain, its former secret status having made it a haven for rare species of flora and fauna, and it was included in the Harz National Park in 1990; but memories of the Stasi remain burned into the memory of the people of East Germany — hardly what the old man had in mind when he named his savior and companion. —C.C.
‡ Anastasiya Gibbon provides no explanation of this name, and little need be added to that in the text, except to say that the name was and remains ubiquitous among Baltic, Nordic, and Slavic peoples, in many slightly varied versions, and that it long ago entered English as Anastasia. Other than that, the narrator’s interpretation of its meaning is quite accurate; although we may pause in wonder at how many times it has been the name of females destined for remarkable feats of survival in fact, legend, or both. The most obvious of these cases, of course, is the Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia, famous in legend as the sole child of that country’s last tsar and tsarina, Nicholas II and Alexandra, to have (purportedly) survived the family’s savage massacre in Yekaterinburg, in the Ural district, in 1917: even if this “survival” is wholly apocryphal, it only underscores the resurrectionary associations of the name. —C.C.
† “… companion …” It is worth noting, here, the true meaning of the word “companion” in the Manuscript (and indeed the English language), especially as it relates to the old man and his great cat. Because of one of the many misapprehensions popularized by Dan Brown’s engaging yet nonetheless terribly misleading The Da Vinci Code—this one claiming that the word “companion,” from before the time of Christ to well after it, could indeed imply “wife” (as Brown claims was the true meaning of biblical and Gnostic gospel references to Mary Magdalene as Jesus’s “companion”) — one might be tempted to assume that some sort of bestiality was occurring inside the great panther’s cave. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, however, and a list of experts too long to list here, such a connotation only applied retrospectively: in other words, a man’s or woman’s “companion” (say, in the phrase “companion in life”) could indeed be their legal spouse — but only if they were established as being in such a relationship. It did not mean, in other words, that companion was always an alternate word for “legal spouse,” if the couple in question had not already been legally joined. This point needs to be stressed because Stasi is so often referred to as “the old man’s companion,” and because her very intimate — but, of course, platonic — relationship with the old man was used by the rulers of Broken (and even, at first, the Bane) as further evidence that he was actually a sorcerer. —C.C.
† “… traces of those markings …” Although he could not have known it, the narrator is describing both the metallurgical formula and the color associated with the gold amalgam that would gain great popularity, in the 1920s and thereafter, as “white gold.”—C.C.
‡ “… the long, dipping spine …” Gibbon, again, dismisses the panther’s dimensions, since fossil evidence that such massive creatures existed so comparatively recently in Europe was either unknown or seriously misunderstood during his era. Regardless of whether this particular specimen was a representative of what is today known as the European jaguar or the European cave lion (the latter being somewhat older and larger), we cannot help but be struck once more by her amazing — and yet, for her species, apparently unremarkable — size: with a nine-foot body (excluding the tail, meaning nine feet from nose to rump) that stood roughly half that at its spine, this is an animal more than capable of all the remarkable feats attributed to her in the Manuscript. The “white” fur was not, if we are to judge by the color of both the eyes and the dark “eyeliner” around them, an indication that she was either an albino or a separate species or, indeed, truly white; rather, it is a color that still appears, occasionally, in lions and other great cats around the world, which is very nearly white. (The faint, light markings also confirm the presence of pigmentation.) We also can see, with the revelation that the “warrior queen” was in fact a great cat, why the old man’s medicines and poultices would have been so helpful to her: his treatments appear to have been grounded in opiates, willow bark (the “natural aspirin”), and naturally occurring antiseptics, none of which are or would have been toxic to cats, as so many other, seemingly milder, drugs are. Acetaminophen, for example (most popularly known by its major brand name, Tylenol) is generally considered an extremely benign drug, among humans — but it is fatal to cats, even in very small doses.
†† “… against his nose and face …” It will not need stating or restating, to those who live with and/or work with cats, large and small, that this delicate touch is their most intimate indication of affection, and of the granting of their trust — usually not easily gained (particularly in areas like northern Europe, the nations of which, especially France, have a long history of believing cats the familiars of witches and creatures of Satan). —C.C.
† “the Northeastern Sea” Gibbon writes, “Having reliably determined that the ‘Seksent Straits’ to which the narrator refers is our own Channel, we may infer that this ‘Northeastern Sea’ is that which lies
