Kyffhäuser is a modest range of wooded hills on the border of Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt, just rising out of the Goldene Aue plain, and it is soaked in legend. The hills are low, but they stand alone above the flat plain, so the views from the top are remarkable.
The legend is that Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, who died on crusade in 1190, is not dead but sleeping inside the mountain, his beard growing through a stone table, waiting for the day Germany needs him. In the nineteenth century this story was bound up with German nationalism, and in the 1890s a huge monument was built on the ridge, a tower about eighty metres high topped by a statue of Emperor Wilhelm I, with a stone figure of Barbarossa at its base. The monument is vast and rather forbidding, and the view from the top, across the Harz, the Thuringian Basin and the plains, is excellent.
The road itself is a good one, narrow and curved, climbing through forest with a series of hairpins and a surface that is generally smooth. Traffic is modest, apart from weekends, and the bends are tight enough to be fun and open enough to see around. Beware of damp leaves in autumn and of ice in the shade, which lingers in winter. The nearby reservoir at Kelbra is popular with birdwatchers, and thousands of cranes gather there in autumn on their way south.
Bad Frankenhausen has a very different monument: the Panorama Museum, which houses an enormous circular painting, by Werner Tübke, of the Peasants' War battle fought there in 1525, when Thomas Müntzer's army was destroyed. The town also has a church tower that leans more than the tower of Pisa, owing to subsidence in the old salt-bearing ground. Fuel and food are available in Bad Frankenhausen, and the old salt spa there is still in use.