Tonight, across Germany, bonfires are being lit.
Not for warmth. Not for light. For the same reason they have been lit on this night for centuries: because something old stirs on the last evening of April, and fire is the oldest answer humans know.
Welcome to Walpurgisnacht. The night the witches ride.
The Saint and the Sabbath
The name belongs to a woman who would be appalled by the association. Saint Walpurga was an 8th-century Anglo-Saxon abbess, sent from England to Christianise the pagan Germanic tribes of central Europe. She spent decades doing precisely that. When she died and was canonised, her feast day was assigned to the first of May — and from that moment, her name became permanently entangled with everything she had spent her life fighting against.
Because the first of May was already spoken for.
The night before it — April 30 — had long been a threshold in the Germanic seasonal calendar. A liminal night. One of those points in the year when the boundary between worlds grows thin, when the dead walk closer and the creatures of the forest press against the edge of the firelight. It was the counterpart to what we now call Halloween, sitting exactly six months opposite on the wheel of the year — both of them descended from the same ancient understanding that the turning of seasons is not just agricultural, but spiritual.
The Church did what the Church always did: it placed a saint's day over the threshold and hoped the older observances would fade. They didn't. Instead, they merged. And in the merging, they became something richer and stranger than either tradition alone.
The Brocken
If Walpurgisnacht has a geography, it is the Harz Mountains in central Germany — specifically the Brocken, the highest peak in the range, perpetually wreathed in mist, its summit frequently obscured even in daylight. This is where German folklore placed the great witches' sabbath: the Hexentanzplatz, the witches' dance floor, where on the night of April 30 the witches of the land would converge, riding broomsticks or goats, to meet with the devil and scheme the coming year's mischief.
This was not metaphor to the people who believed it. By the 16th century, the fear was institutional. The Brocken's association with witchcraft was so established that it shaped legal codes and fuelled the witch hunts that swept Germany with particular ferocity — some of the largest and most brutal in all of European history. The night was called Hexenbrennen, the burning of the witches, for a reason that was not allegorical.
Goethe knew exactly what he was doing when he sent Faust and Mephistopheles to the Brocken in the most famous German literary work ever written. The mountain was already a landscape of dread. He made it a landscape of the uncanny sublime.
The Germany Tourists Don't See
Most visitors to Germany get the postcards. The Rhine castles, the Black Forest cuckoo clocks, the Bavarian beer halls. What they don't get is the Germany that kept its bonfires burning through Christianisation, through Reformation, through the Romantics who tried to tame it into folklore, through modernity that tried to dress it up as Halloween-lite.
The Germany we know from Berlin — the one Caipora Books is grounded in — is the country of Schauerroman, the shudder-novel, the literary Gothic that flourished here before it even had an English equivalent. It is the country of E.T.A. Hoffmann and his clockwork women and his uncanny doubles. Of the Grimm Brothers, who knew perfectly well that the stories they collected were not children's entertainment — they were something older, something with teeth.
It is the country where, on the night of April 30, thousands of people still climb to the Brocken. Where villages in the Harz Mountains and across the north still light bonfires and bang pots and make noise, because noise drives off what shouldn't be walking tonight. Where in some regions the tradition of leaving offerings and hanging protective greenery continues, not entirely as performance, not entirely as play.
Germany remembers. It just doesn't always explain what it remembers, or why.
What This Night Carries
Walpurgisnacht is a layered thing. At its surface, a spring festival. Beneath that, a night of reversal — of the world turned briefly upside down, of things normally kept out being briefly let in, acknowledged, named. Beneath that still, a memory of persecution: the witches who burned, the women condemned, the knowledge that was called diabolical and destroyed.
That is why, since 1977, Walpurgisnacht has also been the chosen date for Reclaim the Night marches across Germany. The choice was not accidental. This night carries the weight of what happens when a culture decides that certain women and certain knowledge are too dangerous to be permitted.
It carries Stoker, too — his short story "Dracula's Guest" is set on Walpurgisnacht, the night the protagonist stumbles into a German village preparing for what the locals won't quite explain, and finds himself in a graveyard before he understands what evening it is. It carries Faust. It carries Thomas Mann, who named a chapter of The Magic Mountain after it, that chapter of dissolution and fever and desire that breaks every boundary the rest of the novel carefully maintains.
Walpurgisnacht has always been where German storytelling puts the things it cannot say plainly.
What's Coming from Caipora
We published this post on the night itself, because tonight felt like the only right moment.
Our video on German Gothic — the Schauerroman, the dark literary tradition, the Germany the literary canon tends to half-obscure — is live now on our YouTube channel. If you want the deeper history of what this country has been producing in the dark for three hundred years, start there.
And if you want to go further: we are bringing Black Forest folktales — the real ones, the ones from before the sanitising, from before they became regional branding. Dense forest, strange creatures, older rules. They are coming.
We are also bringing E.T.A. Hoffmann's The Devil's Elixir — both volumes — in a Caipora edition. A Capuchin monk. A mysterious elixir. A man who drinks it and loses all certainty about who he actually is. Hoffmann at his most unhinged, which is saying something. If you have never read it, this is your edition.
We are also preparing a Grimoire by German witches. We will say only that when the right night arrived to mention it, it was not a difficult choice.
Tonight the bonfires burn. The witches ride to the Brocken. The veil is thin and the forest is loud with things that don't have names in the tourist guides.
We are exactly where we should be.
