This Is What Mankind Is Like

Kindergarten / Peter Rushforth

It might be supposed that a man as old and as ill as he was – almost at the point of death, indeed – would weary of ill-doing and feel indifference as to his successor.  But it was not so.  There should be no other king but Herod!  No other king in all the world!  Hence this command – the most hideous of any he had given.         ~Pär Lagerkvist, Herod and Mariamne

   The action of the novel Kindergarten takes place on two days:  Christmas Eve and December 28, Holy Innocents Day, 1978.  The light has come.  The king tries to extinguish the light.  "But when the massacre took place in that little town," Lagerkvist writes, "the child and its father and mother were no longer there."

   Cornelius "Corrie" Meeuwissen turns sixteen on Holy Innocents Day 1978.  His eleven year old brother, Jo, gives him two birthday cards, one for a ten year old and one for a six year old.  Days before, Corrie has discovered, in a locked storage room of a former headmaster's room at the English school in which his father is now headmaster, letters dating from the 1930s.  Mr Anthony High, headmaster at the time, has opened the school's doors to German Jewish children.  Now the letters are charred and scattered, and Corrie spends his Christmas holiday sorting them out, reading them, tracing the children's stories.  All the while, a domestic terrorist group in Germany is holding a classroom full of kindergarten children hostage, threatening to kill them if their jailed comrades aren't released.  This is the same terrorist group that, nine months before, fired at random in an Italian airport, killing Margaret Meeuwissen, Corrie and Jo's mother.

   This will be the boys' first Christmas without their mother, and their father is in the United States, raising money for an organization for survivors of terrorism.  Corrie and Jo, and their youngest brother, three year old Mattie, are left in the care of their grandmother, Lilli, who plans for them a traditional German Christmas.  But Lilli has never known a traditional German Christmas.  Lilli was a German Jew, an artist known for her illustrations of Grimms' Tales, who fled Germany after Kristallnacht and never painted again, never mentioned to her children and her grandchildren that she had once been famous until two years before this story begins.

Here there's as much noise as though there were a Carnival Fair, there are a hundred thousand streets and squares.  I'd always be losing my way.  Just imagine what would have happened to me if I hadn't found all of you, and were quite alone here.  It scares me even to think of such a thing.                         ~Erich Kästner, Emil and the Detectives (1929, 1930)

Whether intentionally or not, Caligari exposes the soul wavering between tyranny and chaos, and facing a desperate situation:  any escape from tyranny seems to throw it into a state of utter confusion.                         ~Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler:                            A Psychological History of German Film (1947)

   I don't know enough about the author, Peter Rushforth.  He was a teacher, he discovered letters similar to the ones Corrie finds, Kindergarten (1979, 1980) was his first novel, followed years later by Pinkerton's Sister (2005) and A Dead Language (2006), and was at work on his fourth novel when he was killed in a car wreck.  Kindergarten won something called the Hawthornden Prize.  I'd never heard of the novel when I picked up the small, green pocket book at a bookstore some 25 years ago.  I've read it several times since.

'How is everything in Schumann Street?' Emil asked.    'All right, thank you.  Grandmother sends you her special love.  She says if you don't come home soon, she'll make you eat fish every day as a punishment.'    'Oh, dash it all,' Emil murmured, making a face.    'Why dash it all?' Mittler minor inquired.  'Fish is so good.'    They all looked at him in amazement, as he usually never said a word.  At that his face flushed a deep red and he hid behind his big brother.                         ~Erich Kästner, Emil and the Detectives (1929, 1930)

While the Germans were too close to Caligari to appraise its symptomatic value, the French realized that this film was more than just an exceptional film.  They coined the term "Caligarisme" and applied it to a postwar world seemingly all upside down…                         ~Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler:                            A Psychological History of German Film (1947)

   The Meeuwissens are a musical and literary family.  Corrie plays cello and piano and writes music.  Jo plays flute and sings.  Their parents were also musicians.  The family performs in concerts and plays and recite and sing.  Music, art, and literature fill the novel.  Jo listens to Bach's Saint Matthew Passion to remember his mother.  Corrie sets a German poem to music, hoping to include it in his projected Hansel and Gretel oratorio.  Lilli Danielsohn's paintings grace the walls beside Kate Greenaway playing cards and Thomas Bewick engraving bookmarks.  Mattie, "[o]f course," paints a havverglumpus.  Corrie and Jo recite Shakespeare to each other and alternate verses describing their imaginary land, Rousseau.  One series of postcards to Mr High is written by Nikolaus Mittler, on behalf of himself and his older brother.  Mittler is the name of two brothers in the 1929 German children's book, Emil and the Detectives, a fact not lost on Corrie.

   Rushforth has created a meditation – an accurate description, as much of the novel is made of Corrie's thoughts and memories in response to the horrors of his world – on the depths to which humanity sinks to create its New Worlds ("Great men are dangerous," says Morris West's Carl Mendelius in Clowns of God.  "When their dreams fail, they bury them under the rubble of cities, where simple folk once lived in peace!").  Like a symphony, motifs recur and develop, the letters of Nikolaus Mittler, Hannah Greif, and Katherina Viehmann; Corrie's music for "Auf meines Kindes Tod;" Lilli Danielsohn's German past; Margaret Meeuwissen's death; Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale; fairy tales, particularly "Hansel and Gretel."  Memory, story, music, and painting organize Corrie's thoughts as he organizes the letters from Germany.  Midway through the novel Rushforth's themes unite as Corrie imagines Emil walking, tour de force, through "the nation which was a city called Berlin," which Corrie has learned through books and movies, past department stores and nightclubs, from Caligari to Hitler.  Hansel and Gretel encounter the source of the witch's evil.

Suddenly it seemed to Emil as though the train was going round in a circle, like the little toy trains that run on rails in the nursery.  He peered out of the window and everything looked very strange.  The circle grew smaller and smaller.  The engine came nearer and nearer to the last carriage.  And it seemed as though the engine were doing this on purpose!  The train was rushing along like a dog trying to bite its own tail.  And within this black circle there were trees and a glass windmill and a large house with two hundred storeys and thousands of windows.                         ~Erich Kästner, Emil and the Detectives (1929, 1930)

The equation of horror and hopelessness comes to a climax in the final episode which attempts to re-establish normal life.  Except for the ambiguous figure of the director and the shadowy members of his staff, normality realizes itself through the crowd of insane moving in their bizarre surroundings.                         ~Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler:                            A Psychological History of German Film (1947)

   "Caligarisme" describes the world we've created.  "Never again" becomes "Yet again."  Resolve withers as the response promises to be more frightful than the original danger.  What part of the world we don't explode, explodes itself in our faces.  The news becomes a litany of terror.  A smile makes the neighbors suspicious.  People relate better and more readily to the machine in the palm of their hand than to the people sitting next to them.  I drive home, anxious to duck into my apartment and, like Salinger's Boy in France, Babe Gladwaller, "bolt the door."

   We live in a cacophony of opinion.  None of it will save us.  Whim is taught as today's wisdom.  "Decide for yourself" is the advice given to those whose heads are still empty.  With apologies to Sondheim, "You decide what's right, You decide what's good" was answered by Adolf Hitler many, many years ago.  Thomas Elsaesser says "we have become mature enough to live with such radical skepticism, that we enjoy ambiguity and reversibility rather than being driven insane by it."  I beg to differ.  We have become immature enough to believe we "enjoy" (judging by his context, I believe he meant "master") ambiguity and reversibility while being twisted by it.  This condition has driven us insane enough not to recognize our insanity, as we destroy our world and each other, proclaiming it as progress and freedom and maturity.  What would Kracauer make of our movies?

And then – in through the street door came ten boys running into the bank, Emil leading them.  They completely encircled the man.                         ~Erich Kästner, Emil and the Detectives (1929, 1930)

In their triumph the philistines overlooked one significant fact:  even though Caligari stigmatized the oblique chimneys as crazy, it never restored the perpendicular ones as the normal.                         ~Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler:                            A Psychological History of German Film (1947)

   Art is humanity's response to horror.  Creation fills where destruction has left its gaping holes.  Andrei Tarkovsky wrote in his diaries, "Since the war culture has somehow collapsed, fallen apart.  All over the world.  Along with spiritual criteria….Never before has ignorance reached such monstrous proportions.  This repudiation of the spiritual can only engender monsters," and "every time we experience beauty anonymously, as it were, we're experiencing a touch of God."  Conrad creates The Heart of Darkness out of Kurtz' and King Leopold's "horror."  Picasso creates Guernica.  Akhmatova describes mothers waiting to hear news of their imprisoned sons.  Britten sets Owen's poetry to music in hopes that war will rest in peace.

   In view of the first two Commandments, hope generates from a single human being's response to the "Tears of the World," and, in fact, to the pain of the brother "in the dark at the foot of the wall" (to reverse Ursula K Le Guin's The Dispossessed).  "There is no one but us," writes Annie Dillard.  "There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead – as if innocence had ever been – and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved.  But there is no one but us.  There never has been."

   Without us, God can't or won't work in the world.  One lights a candle, one lays down a stone, another teaches his grandmother to speak again after her stroke, still another lets in refugees one child at a time.  Lilli tells her grandsons, "God would spare a city for one righteous man, but there were many little candle flames in all that darkness."  Like Meg in A Wrinkle in Time, Lilli has realized that the work of a single individual is a beacon of light that slashes away the darkness trying to engulf the universe.  Years ago, I fashioned a middle school retreat around a slogan and a poster used by Compassion International, "I can't change the world, but I can change the world for one person."  "And how many people can one person reach," I said, holding up a construction paper chain, with several middle school kids, made of links of one good deed each student realized he or she could perform immediately, "if each of us is that one person?"

   Solzhenitsyn told us in his Nobel lecture, "world literature is no longer an abstract enveloping curve, no longer a generalization coined by literary scholars, but a kind of collective body and a common spirit, a living unity of the heart which reflects the growing spiritual unity of mankind."  The same can be said of painting and sculpture, architecture and music and all creations of the human heart.  I express to you what calls out of my heart.  You respond with what comes out of yours, with what thoughts my work has inspired, and the dialogue goes on.  The light goes on.

Jo sat down again on the bed beside his brother, leaning in against him.    "Comfort me, boy."    Corrie put his arm around Jo's shoulders.

   Le Guin and Virginia Woolf's Mrs Brown, Seymour's Fat Lady, Isaiah jumping up and shouting, "I'm here!  Send me!"  Peter Rushforth once discovered a cache of letters about German Jewish children in the 1930s, desperately trying to leave Hitler's Germany.  He created Kindergarten, a quiet novel about one family, one boy in one family, responding to the horrors of the world, both past and present, responding to the beauty of the human spirit, as Annie Dillard says in Holy the Firm, "in flawed imitation of Christ on the cross stretched both ways unbroken and thorned."  Asher Lev painting the crucifixion of his mother.  Bastian learning that the more he wishes the more rich and varied Fantastica will be.  Mittler minor stepping out of Emil and the Detectives to write his further adventures, a series of postcards to get him and his older brother away from a barbarian burning humanity's thoughts before he burns the human beings themselves.

   "They had names," Corrie tells us.  "They had faces."  Scattered across the floor of what was once a bedroom in the old headmaster's house, now the music building.  December 28, Corrie's birthday, is the feast of the Holy Innocents, the children Herod ordered killed, hoping to murder the Christ child.  But that one child escaped, taken into exile to a land where his father was not required to wait in line and obtain permission to enter.  Corrie's Hansel and Gretel oratorio was to end with the poem he set to music on the death of a child.  But Hansel and Gretel lived.  For which child is "Auf meines Kindes Tod," "On the Death of My Child," to be sung?  Which face does Corrie remember most?  Which name?  "Everyone is so hospitable and kind," Pieter Meeuwissen tells his son, Jo, on a bad telephone line from the United States, "but I'm lonely here without you.  I'm here because of Mum.  What I'm trying to do is for Mum."  Peter Rushforth sings for his children who never made it out of Germany, those whose stories he read in the letters and postcards he found, or those who escaped only to be trapped again.  He sings for those who lived, those whose stories he heard, researching the novel.  He gives voice to those who still have names, who still have faces.  "This," Lilli Danielsohn says, "is what mankind is like." – Kindergarten, a Symphony of Hope.

Emil turned round and waved to Herr Kästner and Herr Kästner waved to him.

~Erich Kästner, Emil and the Detectives (1929, 1930)

Red is Really a Complicated Color

My Friend the Painter / Lygia Bojunga Nunes

                      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SantaCruz-CuevaManos-P2210651b.jpg 

            Let all the strains of joy mingle in my last song – the joy that makes the earth

            flow over in the riotous excess of the grass, the joy that sets the twin brothers,

            life and death, dancing over the wide world, the joy that sweeps in with the

            tempest, shaking and waking all life with laughter, the joy that sits still with its

            tears on the open red lotus of pain, and the joy that throws everything it has

            upon the dust, and knows not a word.

                                  ~Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, #58  (1910)

White

Do me a favor and listen to what I'm telling you.

   Claudio's friend is a painter, and he put together a notebook to explain to Claudio how to understand color.  "My friend told me that the more you look at a color, the more you get out of it.  I sat there staring at him without understanding."  Then one day Claudio understood, but he had no one to tell because his friend was dead.  For the next two weeks, Claudio will think only of his friend.  He'll relive their conversations, study the colors in the notebook, examine dreams about his friend, and gather together as much information as others will allow him.

   Because Claudio is ten years old, no one will talk to him about death.  "At your age you should be thinking about life and not death," his mother tells him.  "You have other friends—"  But his other friends don't understand him.  His family tries to give him simple answers.  The caretaker and his daughter taunt him for his love.  Claudio has to work through his grief alone.

Yellow

This morning here was life in the air 

but it now looks as if it wants to die.

   We never learn the painter's name.  Claudio refers to him only as "my Friend" and "my Friend the Painter" ("I think it's better to write it with a capital F and a capital P," he tells us).  We never see the Painter except through Claudio's eyes.  We hear him through Claudio's voice.  He lived alone, in his apartment above the boy, and they played backgammon together and discussed color and art.  Age made no difference between them, except when the Painter wanted to avoid a subject:  "Politics is a really complicated affair."  "Red is really a complicated color."

   Claudio loved his friend and was pleased when the Painter said he loved him, "Sometimes I like you as a father….But at other times…I only want to be your friend…Sometimes I like you because you're my playmate; at times because I wish I was you….And if you put them together, you'll see that I like you a lot.  You'll see that it's love."

  

Color-of-Longing

One day you'll understand.  Or you won't.

   Claudio doesn't understand why his Friend took his own life.  Neither does anyone else around him.  But they all think they know.  Only Claudio searches.  His are the eyes and the mind of the young, inexperienced at life and ignorant of the lives of others.  The adults are inexperienced at life and sophisticated, just as ignorant of the inner lives of others but less willing to admit it.  The Painter was crazy, he died for love, for politics, for art.  Everybody knows.  They just know different things from one another.  Claudio has the soul of an artist, sensitive, able to read his Friend's paintings and to learn from memory and dream.  Unlike the adults, he has no answers.  He seeks for them in grief and in love.

Green

"How does one get crazy about politics?" I asked.  

                                        "Is it just like getting crazy about girls?"

   Memory brings back Claudio's Friend, tells him about his Friend's three passions, Clarice, the woman he loved; politics, for which he went to jail and still had to answer for to the police; and painting, which he struggled to make come to life.

   Dreams help Claudio bring these insights together.  They help him make sense of his confused thoughts and emotions, in the absence of adult help.  Of all the characters, Claudio is the only one who tries to reconcile the Painter's passions, to make sense of each aspect of his Friend's life, to see how each contributed to his Friend's suicide and his love.

Red

And so I put them together.

   A heart that lacks sensitivity divides, separates one person from another, one aspect of a person from all the rest.  A sensitive heart unites, brings together people and all their passions.

   My Friend the Painter is a novel about grief, about love, and about the colors of human passion, told through the eyes of a sensitive boy over the two weeks after his Friend's death.  Passions, reasons, emotions, ages, and colors come together in this short novel.  Its narrator grows through his attention, to detail, to the things his Friend told him, to the emotions his Friend felt, symbolized by Claudio's study of the meaning of color.  Nunes tells her story simply, in rich, painterly detail and realistic understanding of its young narrator.

"And then something happened:  yellow began to appear there inside my red."

The Pull of the Piper

A Review of The Pied Piper A Handbook by Wolfgang Mieder

Well, those steps go down to the old cellars, so the whiffs come up.  Lord knows what's down there, it's so moldy and dark.  Always a couple o' rats gone home to Jesus.    ~Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, 1979,       Hugh Wheeler, Stephen Sondheim

I think there are two Hamelins.  One is an actual town.  One day, seven hundred years ago, a man walked onto one of its streets.  He played his pipe, and 130 of the town's children followed him out the Weser Gate toward the mountains in the distance.  You can visit the town.  You can buy its plastic rats and T-shirts.  You can see the statues, the restaurants, and the shops.  You can watch the musical.  Then there's the Hamelin that appears in the story, overrun with rats, bargained over before the scene of that strange dance, where a man in many colors leads out rats and children with an enchanting melody.  This is the Hamelin of legend, just as much legend as the Pied Piper himself.

I know about living in a legend.  I come from a city people see movies about, noble fighters defending their lost cause, the screen fading on John Wayne making his last stand.  The actual building stands across the street from a drug store.  To its right stands a department store.  You can visit them if you can avoid being hit by traffic.

The reality of the historical events wouldn't recognize the legend they've become.  The Alamo and the Pied Piper.  I sometimes think the two existed only to provide convenient names for businesses, the Pied Piper for pest control companies, the Alamo for everything else.

But for all we make of the Pied Piper, the legend is still there, still growing, still transforming, still calling people to follow.  Who is he, the piper?  Where is he from?  How did he attain his power?  From the legend of Paganini to The Music Man to "The Devil Went Down to Georgia," we've wondered about the power of music and the musician who wields that power.  Like the other medieval enigma, Faust, the Pied Piper's story echoes across time, like thunder, adapted to current needs, filtered through artists' psychology.  How many different ways can we tell the story of a mysterious, colorful man who plays a melody and leads out rats and children, none of whom are ever seen again?  Wolfgang Mieder, in his study The Pied Piper A Handbook, tells us the medieval ratcatcher's tool of trade was the flute.  A familiar object to the tale's original audience, and yet even in the Middle Ages, his music caused people to fear, to talk of demons and God's justice.  John Steinbeck says of the story of Cain and Abel, "No story has power, nor will it last, unless we feel in ourselves that it is true and true of us."  How much of ourselves do we invest into the piper's story?  How can one mystery bear so many interpretations?

In 2007, Wolfgang Mieder, professor of German and Folklore at the University of Vermont, known particularly for his studies on the use of proverbs, published as a part of the Greenwood Folklore Handbooks series, The Pied Piper A Handbook, the first English language book-length study of the Pied Piper.

All the books in the series follow the same format.  After their introductions, the books divide into four segments, "Definition and Classification," which gives general and specific background to the subject; "Examples and Texts," a compendium of complete versions of stories and poems with a brief analysis of each; "Scholarship and Approaches" (or "Scholarship and Beliefs"), which summarizes the history of scholarship in the various categories of investigation (historical, anthropological, psychological, as well as the different schools of theory); and, finally, "Contexts," which outlines the uses various artists have made of the topic (the Pied Piper, fairy- and folk tale, mythology, proverbs, legend).  The Pied Piper volume runs to 189 pages, including, glossary, bibliography, web resources, and index, deceptively short for so much information.

Mieder examines the history of the legend, that is to say, its variations over time and its accretions as it evolved into the versions we're familiar with today.  He gives us stories of the same type, tales of other ratcatchers and mysterious musicians who bewitch children into following them.  He reviews the research into the history of the original event, the theories of the story behind the legend.  And, in the book's final section, provides Pied Piper cartoons and advertising and lists quite a number of adaptations to novel, stage, film, and musical composition.  The deceptively simple tale has become the center of a web of research, each of its strands branching into theory and variation, a call and response as much pulling us as dancing after the tune the legend has inspired in us.

Definition and Classification

On the feast day of Sts. John and Paul in 1284, a man in multi-colored clothing appeared in the middle of a medieval German town and played his silver flute, leading 130 children toward the local hill of execution.  This is the legend's enigmatic beginning.  Like a sculptor in front of raw wood or stone, a writer would love to shape this material.  As it first existed, specific in its setting, growing increasingly vague, an author would question the characters' identities and the flute-player's motivation, the historical accuracy of the account and identities of the original reporters, even the other townspeople's reactions – just how many adults would it take to overpower a man busy playing a flute and dancing?

The legend as originally reported begged too many questions, bore too many interpretations.  How many times, in repeating a story we once heard, have we added details that attempt to explain away its holes?  Mieder traces this legend's evolution as reporters grappled with its mysteries and attempt to turn it into a story.  Details attached themselves to the bare plot, both to clarify its problems and to personalize the tale.  The piper threatens to return in 300 years; two children, one blind, the other mute, survive; the piper plays the part of devil sent to punish the townspeople for their undisclosed sins.  Two hundred and eighty years would go by before a ratcatcher tale grafted itself onto the story's beginning.

The story originates in inscriptions that date from the thirteen- to sixteen hundreds, the sparest of commemorations with much of the detail unwritten.  From there Mieder outlines the directions the piper's followers have danced.  This first section functions more as an in-depth introduction, for Mieder will examine many of his material here in later sections.  Is the story a half-rememberred account of the Children's Crusades? a cryptic account of plagues or wars? a transformed myth? a partially-told account of a  settler-recruitment campaign?  Is the Pied Piper a demon, with or without being an envoy of God's justice?  Proverb scholar that he is, he even examines the phrase "to pay the piper" and its doubtful connection to the Pied Piper.

And what of its many variations and interpretations?  Is that what keeps the legend so popular?  Does it still exist as a vibrant story because of what we can do with it?  Does it still live because of what we can think about it?  Undoubtedly so, if the examples can be taken as evidence.  The piper's story has become children's story and political quarterstaff (or "dollar and a quarter quarterstaff," as Daffy Duck says, but that's another story and shall be told at another time).

Examples and Texts

An inscription becomes a story much the same way gossip mutates.  The human mind adds details, convinces itself of its wisdom and omniscience as if, of course, if I think of it, it must come from God.  Later tellers more consciously embellish because the thrill becomes the telling itself, the salaciousness having run its course or become outmoded.  In the same way, the bare incident in Hamelin gained, from the mid-1400s to the late 1700s, survivors.  A blind and a mute child and a girl who followed too far behind.  The piper now threatens to return 300 years later to take more children.  The date of the incident changes and changes back again, and the piper becomes more supernatural.  One chronicle claims to be the summary of an account written by the son of an eye-witness.  Another reproduces a stained glass window commemorating the event.  In 1565, we find the first mention of rats.  The piper is a foreigner, and he haggles with the town council over his fee.  His "art" is called unusual, and he takes children under the age of nine.  This also seems to be the first account in which the side of the mountain opens.

Our story has now become a didactic tale, warning people of the dangers of acting unjustly.  For now, the question of where the children went is put aside.  The tale tells of parents grieving, traveling to other cities, looking for their children.  But centuries have gone by, and the children's generation has long since died.  The story's mystery transfers.  The question of where the children went is now beside the point, and the why of the tale transfers to the piper himself.  If grief could find a reason for being, then part of it can be borne more easily.  If fear can be allayed (the piper did, according to some versions, promise to return in 300 years), a reason implies prevention.  Imagination and invention mine the field of Cause.  That resolved, taletellers can get on with the business of telling the story.

In 1816, the Brothers Grimm published the seminal account in their book German Legends, edited and translated into English in 1981, in two volumes, by Donald Ward.  Their account is still somewhat spare, but the folklorists followed their version with another ratcatcher tale, indicating "The Children of Hamelin" is another example of a particular type of folk tale.  Mieder then reprints a number of ratcatcher and stolen children tales.  Next he examines the English tradition of the tale of Hamelin (Hammel, Hamel, Hamelen), leading up to Andrew Lang's 1890 version ("The Rat-Catcher") from his Red Fairy Book.  Here the musician plays the bagpipes.  This version also features the intriguing conversation between the rat-catcher and a rat named Blanchet:

               "Are they all there, friend Blanchet?" asked the bagpiper.

               "They are all there," replied friend Blanchet.

               "And how many were they?"

               "Nine hundred and nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine."

               "Well reckoned?"

               "Well reckoned."

               "Then go and join them, old sire, and au revoir."

               Then the old white rat sprang in his turn into the river, swam to the whirlpool and disappeared.

   Finally, Mieder gives us a wonderful 1948 English-German dialect version, "Der Tootlen und Der Ratz," by David Morrah from his book Cinderella Hassenpfeffer and Other Tales Mein Grossfader Told Me:

               "Ach!  Der younger folken ben starten der jitterbuggen mit swingen und

            jumpen und stompen!  Das tootler ben outen-geblaren mit hotten lickers!"

Then he finishes off with a number of German folksongs, the earliest being mere retellings, the later two presenting the piper happily leading rats (and the occasional young woman) and hoping for the joys of heaven.

Scholarship and Approaches

A story walks many roads at once.  Research is a prism that breaks the tale into its component parts to examine and appreciate its colors.  I can study a Shakespeare play for its observation of character and its themes.  I can study its origins in history and literature, including Shakespeare's possible sources and insights into the playwright's psyche.  I can study the methods of production in Elizabethan England and even trace how performances of Shakespeare's plays changed with the times, technology, and social and psychological views.  I can study the works a given play has inspired, alternate views, modernizations, even the history of the research itself.  Each gives invaluable insight into the original work.  As I've told my students, when they begin moaning, the more you understand a work the more you can enjoy it.  All the work's background is available to you as the story unfolds, and suddenly Hamlet can be played by four actors at once.

The Pied Piper dances toward Hamelin's Calvary along the roads of history, folklore, and literature.  Historical investigation gives the story back to the children, asking, again, whatever happened to them?  Historical investigation reminds us that legend often has its basis in fact, and so what evidence do the skimpy details give us that can lead us to a rebuilt rendition of the story?  Folkloric studies place the legend within the context of the stories we tell, the "files" in our brain Garrison Keillor once built a sketch around that we open as we hear people's stories and try to find another that relates to them.  The world of literature is, I suppose, by definition self-referential.  Storytellers nearly always allude to some earlier story.  Writers began as listeners and readers.  We take literally the Biblical injunction to become doers of the word and not remain hearers only, although in a decidedly more secular fashion.  Having once loved a particular story, we write our own stories in the light of its inspiration, in the prodding of its example.

Mieder perhaps too briefly reviews Pied Piper scholarship.  I say too briefly especially in light of the fact that most of the work is in a language and in texts that are often inaccessible to many of us.  He does, however, place a number of the texts listed in his extensive bibliography in a context so that if I ever do learn German I'd be able to select fairly judiciously, if I could find or afford them.  I also question his identifying Moravia with Transylvania.  Repeatedly, and particularly on page 10, he refers to the region of "Moravia (Transylvania)."  Transylvania, speaking of a land of legend, once incorporated a portion of what is now Hungary, but it never extended north or east enough to incorporate Moravia.  The legend tells us the children emerged from the mountains outside of Hamelin into Transylvania, where they settled, and some research bears this out, but history and philology indicate the children, or probably more accurately young adults, followed a recruiter sent by the bishop of Olmütz to settle in the underpopulated Moravia in what is now the Czech Republic.  I mention this because I spent over half an hour trying to untwist the rather murky map I held in my head as I tried to keep track of all the theories' geography.  Fact is as mysterous as the legend.

Contexts

As an English and social studies teacher, I occasionally find my interests at battle with each other.  The historian reads investigations into what could have been the "real" story while the literatus rolls his eyes, grumbling, "The legend is the real story!  The raw material isn't this historical figure's document or that investigator's research into surnames.  The raw material is an enigmatic figure walking into a town drowning in rats, a silver flute gleaming in the waning sunlight, rodents spilling into a river, frightened and greedy councilmen, and children who are for some reason all too ready to follow a stranger playing a tune about a new life away from Hamelin!"

Robert Browning took this approach.  So did Marina Tsvetaeva, Nevil Shute, Günther Grass, Russell Banks and Atom Egoyan, Jiří Barta, John Corigliano, and Meredith Willson.  They tell the story as social criticism, bitter political satire, humorous social satire, and historical and contemporary drama.

Mieder reviews the significance of Browning's poem, especially in the English-speaking world, and even reprints a long Pied Piper poem written by Browning's father.  He includes Pied Piper poems by Goethe, Ambrose Bierce, Brecht, Fritz Eichenberg, Edward Bond, and Günther Grass.  His latest example, however, is a disturbing poem from 1998 in which the poet filters the story through the worst of current headlines.  What makes it so disturbing is its self-righteous assertion that, of course, he, the poet, knows "how it really was," blaming Robert Browning of white-washing sexual and cannibalistic rituals into "a sanitized nursery rhyme" (as if writing a nursery rhyme were Browning's intention to begin with).  This poet has obviously been disturbed by anominalistic outrages that make the news ahead of commonplaces, but to pretend to higher knowledge and point to The Other (i.e., anyone not myself) as a danger is to place oneself in the danger of being overtaken by what one fears.  How many times have we heard people who were not there and who only half-heard the tale declare to us they know how it "really" was, they know what "really" happened, when all they could possibly do is canonize their own imagination, which, more often than not, runs in directions they'd do better to control?  An equal horror is to turn all our neighbors into sadistic anomalies who sadly sometimes do live next door.  As Mieder points out, writers have for centuries examined their world through the tool of the Pied Piper, but overreaction is not reaction and the gut has no better angels.

Finally, Mieder includes a collection of comics ("Half a Mile Out of Hamelin":  children whining, "I have to go to the bathroom!"  "Carry me!"  "Hans pushed me!"  "I wanna play the pipe!"); editorial cartoons (the Pied Piper as Nazi, Communist, nuclear armaments, and H. Ross Perot); paintings (including a small, black and white reproduction of Maxfield Parrish's painting that I recommend looking up in color); advertising; a list of film, book, drama, and music titles; and finally, a selection of sites in Hamelin itself.

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So why has he lasted all these centuries?  Certainly, we human beings are followers by nature – even if we don't like to admit it.  Life is too difficult to remain confident for long.  We look for someone to lead us, politicians, celebrities, spiritual and financial directors, doctors, pop songs, slogans, and web sites.  Still, underneath it all, we fear having chosen the wrong one.  What we happily and successfully followed yesterday we pridefully continue to trudge after, despite trepidation, today and see no way to get away from tomorrow.  The Piper embodies all of these.  Is he the children's savior or a demon?  Does our view of him depend on where we believe the children wound up, inside the cave or in Transylvania?

Could the piper himself even tell us what his power is?  I doubt it.  He's an artist, one whose music speaks for him.  Certainly, according to his own story, his words had little effect.  What he has to offer is his mystery, that is the subject of his song.  Our encounter with him compels us, like a child set dancing, like the girl in the red dancing slippers, after the images his song sets off in our brains, variants, history, folkloric categorization, off-shoots, adaptations, modernizations.  The way to that mountain is far across the field.  It leads to dark places and places we're not even sure of where they are.  It leads to monsters.  And to nursery rhymes.

Three PSs:

1)  Professor D. L. Ashliman, author of the Greenwood Folklore Handbooks' Folk and Fairy Tales, maintains an excellent web site of folklore and mythology, Folktexts, from the University of Pittsburgh, at www.pitt.edu/~dash/foltexts.html.  The site includes Pied Piper and ratcatcher stories from around the world, as well as many, many other tales, and he's constantly adding to it.  I've given up trying to keep up with him.

2)  A word of advice.  Greenwood books are vastly overpriced.  Buy them used.  Search http://www.bookfinder.com/ and http://used.addall.com/.  The volumes I've bought came to me in pristine condition; although, I checked The Pied Piper out of my local library some four or five times over the course of a year and a half before the used price came down to something I could afford.

3)  Shameless self-promotion:  I published an essay on the history of the Pied Piper, the story's variations leading back to its possible origins, on HubPages at http://anthonydeleon.hubpages.com/hub/piedpiperhistory

Illustration credits (some links no longer work):
- Line-Dancing Mice by Francis D. Bedford from the book Battle of the Frogs and the Mice, which I got from http://fithfath.com/images/?tag=ps7-brush-sets

- Pied Piper & Children Silhouette from Karen's Whimsy at http://karenswhimsy.com/silhouettes.shtm

- Rats running up the stairs ("The Pied Piper of Hamelin") by H. Kaulbach, from The Project Gutenberg EBook of Myths of the Norsemen, by H. A. Guerber, obtained at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/28497/28497-h/28497-h.htm#p028

- Piper Leading the Rats drawing from http://kcsummers.hubpages.com/hub/The-Pied-Piper-Of-Hamelin-Fact-or-Fiction, listed only as "public domain."

- Pied Piper on the map of the Hamelin area from the Wikimedia Commons, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pied_piper.jpg

- All photographs, including the Whylom Forest, are by Anthony de León