Reporting travels in piper Country
Chain Letters
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The Grimm brothers and Robert Browning have doubtless done more than anyone else to make the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin or "der Rattenfanger von Hameln" one of the most celebrated legends in the world. In case any reader has forgotten or perhaps never learned . the details of the popular account of the story, I venture to summerize it as follows:
Once the town of Hamelin near Hannover was afflicted by a terrible plague of rats against which no conventional means of extermination availed. During this time a piper dressed in a garb of many colours claimed that he could rid the town of this plague, in return for a financial consideration, of course. The mayor of the town agreed to this offer, whereapon the piper produced a melody on his flute which made all the rats follow him to the river Weser, where they drowned. However, the ungrateful elders of Hamelin refused to pay the piper the agreed sum. Later he played his instrument to a different tune and this time it was the children of Hamelin who followed him. He led them away to a hill where he and the children disappeared into a mysterious cavern and none of them was ever seen again in Hamelin, though it was rumoured that a people with vague memories of Hamelin settled in Romania or another place in eastern Europe.
As a recent visitor to Hamelin I can well attest that the town is still very much endebted to the Piper. Though the town is certainly worth a visit on the strength of its impressive architecture, typically adorned with ornate Renaissance facades, and of its pleasant natural setting, it could never have attracted such droves of tourists as it does from the Far East, America, not to mention families from all over Germany and Europe. Many shops offer a vast array of piedpiperobelia from ratlike figurines made of hardened bread to rat-suits comparable in size to Micky Mouse in Disney Land. In an unguarded moment I ordered a bottle of beer that cost 3.20 Euro against 1.80 in my home village. During the summer period (May to September) the town stages two public performances to commemorate the Pied Piper. Every Sunday the story is dramatized on a platform in the town's main square and it is here also that every Wednesday afternoon in the summer season the public enjoys performances of a musical - entitled - appropriately enough - "Rats".
While the play keeps close to the traditional story of the Ratcatcher presented in the folktales recorded by the Grimm brothers, the musical betrays the strong influence of Robert Browning's "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" with its rendition of the story with the element of a fable in which one surviving rat escapes to Ratland and gives a glowing account of the glorious consumerist paradise that the Piper's music had conjured up in his mind. In the musical the rats are endowed with the ability to speak and the sing. The satirical element implicit in Browning's poem it enhanced by the figure of the rat king, who strikes a bargain with the equally rapacious mayor of Hamelin. The story is suitably updated by references to the "drug"-like effect of the Piper's music, his "hippy" appearance and the bankrupt town's empty coffers. The music ranges from romantically evocative melodies to rousing tunes somewhat reminiscent of the "Marching through Georgia" song of the American Civil War.
This musical is yet one further eloquent testimony to the adaptability of the basic story as one ever able to convey an important message to the contemporary age without losing its essential matrix of associations. It is timely to recall what the earliest known account of the story was. This is to be read on the words inscribed on a beam of wood visible (to those willing to crane their necks) on the right side of the so-called "Rattenfangerhaus" standing next to the place where the east gate of medieval Hamelin used to be. The name of the lane flanking the wall translates into English as the lane without drums, the very street where even today music and dancing are forbidden in remembrance of the lost children of Hamelin. The very short account written in low German may be translated as follows:
On the 26th of June in 1284 on the day of John and Paul a piper dressed in many colours led away 130 children born in Hamelin to Koppen by Calvary, where they were lost.
First obvious point about this account is its noninclusion of any mention of rats. What, no rats The first account in which the original story merges with the tale of a ratcatcher cheated of his pay dates from the mid sixteenth century. By this stage the Piper had become truly demonized. The first version is, for sure, darkly ambiguous with its ominous implication that an ill fate befell the children of Hamelin, as it states that they were finally "lost". But in what sense - lost to the town, lost like sailors at sea or lost in theological terms? Writers in the 16th and 17th centuries placed the most severely negative construction on the story by identifying the Piper with the devil.
In keeping with its power to absorb new narrative elements that in turn reflect major historical developments, the rats recall the Black Death and all its havoc and terrors. The Piper associated with the rats also conveys something of the hysteria of an age obsessively fearful of witches, heretics and outsiders in general. I find it possible that the revamped story might express deep misgivings concerning the rise of a new wage-earning class that attended the emergence of money-based non-feudal capitalism and unrest among the peasant population. The dissatisfied classes had open ears to those challenging medieval catholicism such as Wyciffe and Luther. I raise this question again at the close of this report. The negative consructions placed on the story continue in interpretations according to which the parents of the town were in church when their children were led away, implying that the children under the Piper's influence became apostates from the Church. An explanation of the origin of the Piper story to which I shall later refer could well account for such a negative conclusion.
From the Romantic period onwards writers and musicians managed to rehabilitate the Piper, for the devil figure of medieval times became introverted so as to epitomize none less than Jesus Christ. In Browning's poem this identification is at least implicit from a close reading of its text, for a constrast of good and evil emerges from a bifurcation in the way the main players in the story are presented. The greedy rats and adults on one side stand against and the innocent and righteous Piper and children on the other. the piper becomes the Great Unrecognized. One psychologist Iakov Levi identifies Piper with Christ, evidently on the basis of noting the words found in Browning's poem.
A question arises. What are the secret ingredients of success in the original story? Is it in any case necessary to try to unravel origins of tale in terms of some historical event? - Nobody, not even poets like Goethe and Browning, have solved the riddle - but these poets were still able to interpret it in a new and significant light. However, a discussion of its origins may help us to better understand why the story has gained such vast and apparently contradictory ramifications.
I return to the Hamelin I find today. I visited the town archive during my recent visit. The most exhaustive collection of early accounts of the Pied Pied piper story I found were cited in a work by one Herr Hans Dobbertin, who supported the still most widely held view among scholars that the origin of story lies in some migration from Hamelin to places in eastern Europe, probably under the direction of the noble, a Count Spiegelberg, a local magnate, in 1284. Dobbertin cites place names in Brandenburg and elsewhere comprising the word Coppen. I then vaguely remembered seeing signpost in Hamelin giving the direction to Coppenbrugge, only nine miles or so down the road and leading in an easterly direction.
In the early evening I took a train to Coppenbrugge, recklessly trusting that the town or village offered a place to stay for the night. As I approached the town the silhouette of a high wooded hill loomed hehind the surrounding fields.
Luckily I was able to book a room at the town's only hotel. I mentioned to a gentleman in his fifties, the sole customer at the bar, something about my interest in the legend of the Pied Piper. At this point his hitherto dull eyes flared up and seemed to glint with a strange inner fire. He assured me that the Koppen mentioned in the legend was none other than the dark mountain I had just seen. To justify this claim he produced a book about town and its history. Without the least need to ply through its pages I opened it at the place where it revealed pictures of eerie headlike rocky outcrops. It transpired that these had been carved by human hand in megalithic times, about eight thousand years ago. He went on to affirm that the Calvary referred to in the original versions of the Pied Piper story was located at what is now the site of a gravel pit, the very one that I would have seen as the train approached Coppenbrugge. It had been a place of execution, the grim scene of gallows.
The heights of the Koppenberg, now the Ithberg,, he explained, were adopted by German tribes as sacred sites - hence a reference "Woden heads" in an old folksong. The Devil's kitchen (Teufelskuche") near summit of the Ithberg is a level basin-like structure scooped in the rocks and full of boulders strewn around as though shaken by the Deel himself. This was reportedly the site of human sacrifices or at least occult events in the past, some of them even after the introduction of Christianity. Norbert, the gentleman I referred to, is convinced that Count Spiegelberg, in order to get into the good books of the Church and civil dignitaries, organized a massacre of youthful miscreants known to visit the Koppenberg. In much the same temper of mind Charlemagne had had thousands of heathen Saxons slaughted in the eighth century. But christianisation was a slow process in parts of Germany - the Brocken (in the Harz mountains) and Luneburger Heath have harboured nature worshippers and their doings until recent times - perhaps even into them. The oldest church in Hamelin is dedicated to Saint Boniface, the Anglo-Saxon monk who greatly contributed to the christianization of German tribes in the ninth century.As to Count Spiegelberg, he disappeared from historical records only weeks after the 26th of June, his last location being Stettin on the east German border. According to which theory you choose, he was either about to embark on an ill-fated voyage in the Baltic and drown with his youthful followers or he was on the run after instigating a bloodbath.
Now the readiness of medieval narrators of the Piper legend to identify him with the devil becomes understandable. Prosper Merime in his Chronicle of the Reign of Charles IX makes the telling of the story an omen of the infamous massacre of Huguenots on another saints' day, on St Bartholomew's Eve in 1572. The more zealous defenders of the Church indeed saw little difference between heathens and "heretics". Norbert's account of these matters was to a great extent confirmed by the director of Coppenbrugge's museum, Herr Gernot Husam, whom I briefly met on the following morning. His thesis is lucidly and cogently set forth in his brochure entitled Der Koppen (which may be bought at Coppenbrugge's museum). He states that the Koppen referred to in the earliest version of the Pied piper legend is indeed the hill now known as the Ithberg, formerly as the Koppenberg noted in sources dating from the 11th century. The etymology of the name may mean "head", interesting in view of the ancient sculptures atop the Ithberg, or alternatively it may be derived from the word "cupa", a cup or grail, itself possibly alluding to the Teufelskuche and its scooped-out formation and dark associations with cultic practices. Heads of the kind found on the Ithberg have been discovered throughout Europe and catalogued by Dr Elisabeth Neumann-Gundrum. Typical of these is the appearance of a blind or vacant eye signifying inner vision. They also show the faces of humans and animals emerging from the mouth or head of a larger figure. They exhibit what appears to be astral signs including the hexagram. This fact has led to speculations that the Ithberg and similar sites once served as observatories or astral computers like Stonehenge. It is notable that the sun appears at the crest of the Ith when viewed from Hamelin on March the 21st (at the vernal equinox)and the Ithberg lies due east of Hamelin. The Piper story is set just after summer solstice. Could the motley colours of the Piper betoken an element of solar mythology as well as harbour a reference to the highly suspect wandering piper or jester? Did Browning intuit this, as his poem contains significant references to the sun and its apparent movements? As Gernot Husam argues, why search for the Koppen in Brandenburg or some other far-flung location when the Koppen stares Hamelin in the face, after a manner of speaking, a bare twelve kilometers down the road (i.e. within an easy walking distance for children) on the very road, the Oster Street, down which the Piper,according to tradition, led the children of Hamelin after passing under the East Gate? Why indeed? (See picture of Piper and the Koppenberg on the website marked f below) -
P.S. Coppenbrugge has another claim - for its castle lies at a fulcrum of history. Peter the Great on his famous incognito trip that took him to Amsterdam and London stayed there one memorable night in the August of 1697.Though shy at first, he made a deep impression on the German ladies he danced with, though he was first surprised by their apparent boniness, that is until he became acquainted with the structure of the then much-worn corset. He is also thought to have engaged in secret diplomacy with Sophia, the ruler of Hanover and her son, the future George I of Great Britain and all this under the famed Peterlinde (linden-tree) that still stands on the knoll above the castle.
After leaving the Hamelin area I stayed a few days in Hanover. For some time the kings of Great Britain were also the kings of Hanover, in fact from 1714 until the accession of Queen Victoria to the British throne 1837. When I visited a branch of my bank I was pleasantly surprised on finding an exhibition of medieval coins with information about the history of minting. The right to mint coints was acquired by a considerable number of towns, including Hanover and later even Hamelin. The history of minting reflected the transition of Europe from a feudal to a money-based capitalist system. This transition had its teething problems due to a tendency to debase the coinage by melting down coins and replacing them by those of inferior quality. The production of coins also entailed acts of embezzlement and pilfering. Thus it was that apprentices in the minting trade wore colourful attire and bells on their caps rather like jesters (or the Pied Piper for that matter) to lessen the danger that they would rifle the till. It struck me afterwards that money and coinage played a role of the Pied Piper story once it integrated the motifs of the rats and the denial of his promised fee. Could those who represented the Piper as the devil have it both ways? The major and corporation denied him a wage agreed by verbal contract. Even deals made with the devil are binding. But there is no hint in the story that the major and corporation willingly entered into a pact with the devil. They simply reneged on a wage bargain, and in so doing broke some of the most solemn injunctions in the Bible. The gospels tell of the strict procedures that God expected to be followed in matters of wage payment including a stipulation that a day's wage should be paid in the evening of the day labour was performed. Labour contracts were sacrosanct. This aspect of the story was evidently not lost on Robert Browning, in whose famous poem on the Pied Piper references are made to biblical texts which are particularly pertinent to questions of wealth and contracts. Why then was the motif of defrauding a worker in the pest control industry introduced in the first place? Concern with pacts with the devil found its full expression in Marlowe's "Dr Faustus" and "The Devil is an Ass" by the same author takes a more humourous view of the devil's connection with modern capitalism It seems to me that the combined story of a piper and ratcatcher reflects the growing emnity between the establishment and wage earners that was precipitated by the Black Death, when self-employed labour becamed a highly valued asset enabling workers and peasants to negotiate to their advantage and enhancing their self-esteem, but also their readiness to take the law into their own hands, hence the English Peasants' revolt and similar disturbances on the Continent, one of which was led by a "piper", the piper of Niklashausen, the leader of the so-called Bundschuh. By making the Piper the victim of a breech of contract, his detractors effectively blunted their own accusation that he was demonic, an irony that eventually helped Browning and others to rehabitate him.
Related websites (in English, German and Italian):
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My own website:
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