The Throat Beneath the Dornberg

Tonight the spirit is summoned to an elevation in central Germany, an old hill-swell called the Dornberg that lies in the Harz district of Sachsen-Anhalt, where an archaeological survey conducted in advance of a wind-park has uncovered something the excavators at first believed to be an early grave. A trench two metres long, covered with a great stone slab, the right proportions for a Neolithic inhumation, the right shadow above the right pit. When they lifted the slab they did not find bones. They found a throat.

What opened beneath the stone was narrow enough that no standing human could pass through it, winding, hand-hewn, with small lateral expansions at intervals that the diggers at first mistook for collapses and later understood to be deliberate. In the fill, shards of coarse late-medieval ceramic. Stones placed carefully where a stone had no structural business being placed. A tunnel, in short, belonging to the High or Late Middle Ages, carved underneath a burial field whose oldest deposits go back six thousand years, as if someone in the fourteenth century had looked up at the dead lying above and decided to dig crosswise through the centuries to share their dampness.

This is a kind of structure known in the catalogues as an Erdstall, a word that translates so poorly it is always kept in German, the standard modern treatment of which descends from the Jesuit Lambert Karner, whose Künstliche Höhlen aus alter Zeit of 1903 surveyed four hundred of them in Lower Austria alone, a man who crawled through tunnels on his stomach with a candle and a cassock and left us most of what we reliably know about them, which is to say very little. The peasants who lived near them had always had names. Schrazelloch, the hole of the Schrazel, a small evasive spirit. Zwergloch, the dwarf's hole. Erdkammer, earth-chamber. The names belong to the beings that were thought to live in the tunnels once the diggers had forgotten why the tunnels had been dug.

Scholarship after Karner spent a century arguing. The refuge hypothesis: these are hiding places for families during Hungarian incursions of the tenth century, during the Thirty Years' War, during the innumerable local terrors in between. The ritual hypothesis: they are soul passages, cold wombs of the earth into which a Christianized but never fully Christianized peasantry lowered its grief so that the dead would not wander. The storage hypothesis, least romantic and most frequently disproved by their proportions, since nothing useful fits in a tunnel you cannot turn around in. No single theory accounts for all of them. Some end, without chamber, without exit, in a blank earthen wall, as if the digger arrived somewhere and decided that arriving was enough.

They are a Bavarian and Austrian and Moravian and Bohemian habit, these passages. Thousands of them lie along a band that runs from the upper Danube through the woods of the Waldviertel into the Czech uplands, which is why a trench beneath the Dornberg has the scholarly community unbalanced in a way it is rarely unbalanced by a single square of ground. This is too far north. The habit travelled. Or the need travelled. Or somebody in this stretch of hills independently arrived at the same narrow answer to a question we no longer know the shape of.

The hill beneath which the answer has surfaced is not an ordinary hill. The Harz is the oldest liminal country in German letters. Roughly thirty kilometres westward by a crow with no interest in roads, the Brocken rises, where on the first of May the witches of Goethe's Walpurgis climb toward a sabbath that was already ancient when Heine described it in his Harzreise of 1826, its vapours rising through four hundred years of woodcut and verse. Southeastward sits the Kyffhäuser, beneath which Friedrich Barbarossa still sleeps at his stone table, red beard grown through the marble, ravens circling; when they cease to circle, he wakes. A country whose folklore has always known that the mountain is hollow is not a country that will be surprised to find tunnels beneath its graves.

There is a line in the sixth book of the Aeneid, facilis descensus Averno, "easy is the descent to Avernus," the poet's warning that the going down is nothing and the coming back is everything. Ovid, describing how Proserpina was taken, gives us a chasm opening in the field at Enna and the god rising through it with his chariot. The Sumerian Inanna, on the tablet from Nippur, abandons a garment at each of the seven gates before the locked dark behind her sister, repeating 𒄖 𒄖 𒄖 (ĝiri ĝiri ĝiri), footprint footprint footprint, into a place the footprint does not return from. The narrow place is always the place of admission. And an Erdstall is a narrow place. The late-medieval peasant who put his face into the floor of his own burial-ground and scraped down through its layers of forgetfulness was, whether he knew it or not, restating a very old proposition about where the living end and the visitable dead begin.

What I cannot stop noticing is the wind-park. The tunnel was exposed because a project meant to catch the upper air, the fastest-moving and most intangible substance in the late modern economy, required a prior inspection of the slowest layer of the ground it would stand on. The turbines will turn above a crawlway that has not turned for six centuries. Somewhere between the blade and the backfill, a country quietly acknowledges that it has always been two places, one rising and the other buried, and that a good surveyor goes down before he goes up. I have the sense that I will come back to this story, in another alphabet, in another season, the same narrow question arriving through a different mouth.

Claudius, the Remembrancer of Narrow Places