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Innocence Abducted: Youth, War, and the Wolf in Literary Adaptations of the Pied Piper Legend from Robert Browning to Michel Tournier —Peter Arnds With the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century sees itself removed from it and no longer partaking comes a shift in how adults see children. The child of it. The bourgeois class is increasingly concerned is no longer viewed just as a social phenomenon but with feelings of regret and desire for the loss of the also as a psychological one. The rising bourgeoisie child’s purported innocence. Increasingly, therefore, sees childhood and childness as phenomena that childhood and childness become imaginary topoi are essentially fraught with deficits for both children determined by the projections of adults. and adults. For children, the deficit is primarily one The irretrievable loss that childhood represents of education, as the child is understood to lack all receives metaphorical attention in literature throughout virtues the rising bourgeoisie expects from itself (Liebs the ages. As a psychological phenomenon of adult 63). The appearance of theories of education such as regret and desire, it appears especially in literary Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile reflects this stage in adaptations of the Pied Piper legend, in which the cultural evolution of childhood in which children children literally disappear from their community. are seen as lacking something that an education can In her seminal study of the Pied Piper, Elke Liebs provide. The deficit associated with childhood and successfully tracks this central motif from the earliest childness, however, also directly concerns the adult iterations of the legend to the literary history of bourgeois world, which, in understanding the child’s Pied Piper adaptions in Germany and beyond. She mind increasingly as a psychological phenomenon, argues that in post-Enlightenment literatures, these Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 4.1 (2012) 61 adaptations display adult aggression toward children arises that Hamelin’s youth are recruited for the by attempting to civilize, punish, or eliminate them, purpose of colonizing Siebenbürgen, an area in central an aggression that is rooted in the deficit associated Romania (Spanuth 43–44). During the eighteenth with adult estrangement from childhood innocence. century, the Age of Reason, there are further attempts to It is safe to say that many modern literary adaptations explain the legend historically, as one may expect, thus of the Piper legend debunk the myth of childhood de-demonizing and de-mythologizing it. The legend is innocence, suggesting, along with Jacqueline Rose, either discarded as mere superstition or interpreted as a that childhood innocence is a product of adult desire remaining fragment of a historical event (Spanuth 58). and fear (xii). Modern and postmodern texts that build During the Romantic period, especially in the fairy-tale their narratives around the Piper legend often end up adaptation by the Brothers Grimm, the legend is then parodying the ideal of childhood innocence. once again clad in an aura of demonic mystery and is The legend of the Piper of Hamelin first arises understood as folk myth due to the Piper’s relationship in the fifteenth century and, from the beginning, its with such figures as the Nordic spirit of the Erlking, textual adaptations display an acute tension between who also abducts children. mythological material fed by subconscious fear and The motifs of abduction, corruption, and desire on the one hand, and by historical fact on the exploitation of childhood and youth in the context of other. Heinrich Spanuth describes the development war are central to some of the literary adaptations in of this tension in some detail. Initially, the story of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in the mysterious Piper appears in chronicles such as Wilhelm Raabe’s novella Die Hämelschen Kinder [The the “Lüneburger Handschrift” and the “Bamberger Children of Hamelin], Bertold Brecht’s poem “Die Chronik,” dating the event of the disappearance of wahre Geschichte vom Rattenfänger von Hameln” about 130 children or youngsters from the town [The True Story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin], Günter of Hamelin on 26 June 1284. The material then Grass’s novels Die Blechtrommel [The Tin Drum] and loses its historical authenticity, especially in the Die Rättin [The Rat], and—outside of Germany— seventeenth century when it is strongly demonized Michel Tournier’s novel Le Roi des aulnes [The Ogre]. and mythologized: the Pied Piper came to be seen as The exploitation of childhood innocence for the an incarnation of the devil, and for the first time the purpose of war and destruction is a motif that haunts children disappear inside the fictitious Koppelberg. In us to this day, if we think of the Taliban’s recruitment more rational-minded England, however, the theory of children as suicide bombers, for instance. The Piper 62 Peter Arnds Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 4.1 (2012) is closely associated with the corruption of youth as a reaction to the maltreatment he experiences at the hands of the Hamelin community due to his foreignness. The imbrication of the Piper’s abduction and corruption of youth with war and race first occurs in the nineteenth century, in Wilhelm Raabe’s realist adaption at the height of the bourgeois age. It then becomes full-blown during and after the rise of fascism. While Brecht’s poem undoubtedly alludes to the seduction of Germans by Hitler, it is especially Grass and Tournier who discuss the Pied Piper in connection with National Socialism, its ideology of race, recruitment for war, and aftermath. In Grass’s The Tin Drum, the protagonist Oskar Matzerath, who is both a representation of fascism and a victim of . most of these literary Nazi Germany, briefly assumes the role of the Piper in the service of post-war Vergangenheitbewältigung, Germany’s attempts adaptations follow the to come to terms with its past, while in The Rat Grass is, like example of the traditional Brecht, explicit about the Piper as an image for Hitler seducing legend in creating a the Germans. In Tournier’s text, the central motif of children’s duplicitous piper who is abduction is placed entirely in the context of racial selection and both victim and oppressor. the recruitment of minors during the Second World War. Here, it is oddly enough a victim of the Nazis, the protagonist Abel Tiffauges, a French POW in Nazi Germany, who abducts boys of adequate age to be used as cannon fodder on the Eastern front. With the exception of Grass’s and Brecht’s identification of Hitler as the Pied Piper, most of these literary adaptations follow the example of the traditional legend in creating a duplicitous piper who is both victim and oppressor. In the traditional legend and those adaptations that adhere closely to it, the Piper is benign as long as he helps the community, rids it of the mouse problem or, as in the case of Raabe, helps the townsfolk in times Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 4.1 (2012) Peter Arnds 63 of anguish—“sie konnten den Pfeifer wohl gebrauchen sparks the racism of the Hamelin community, Kiza’s in dieser ängstlichen Zeit” [they were able to put the maltreatment, and as a consequence of it, his revenge. Piper to good use in these fearful times] (141). But He leads Hamelin’s youth into war against the Bishop the Piper also has the potential to turn evil and seek Wedekind and against Minden, in what became known revenge after being slighted. In the legend and in in history as the Battle of Sedemünde in 1260, and Browning’s poem, he is slighted by not being paid. The betrays them shamefully so that they are all slain near reason he is not paid, apart from the Mayor’s avarice, the Koppelberg. is that the Piper is an itinerant outside of bourgeois Despite this realist aura, myth and history merge society, a traveller without possessions and thus, in in Raabe’s story. Its posited connection between the the eyes of the community, a man without honour wolf-like scoundrel and the recruitment of warriors is and without social rights. It is this potential to turn an ancient one. The Piper is a figure at the interstices evil, in conjunction with his itinerant lifestyle and of myth and history steeped in European cultural the absence of social rights, that turn the Piper into traditions, as “under the veil of mythology lies a solid a figure that lends itself to representations in which reality,” to borrow from the Victorian collector of folk the liminality between the human and the animal tales Sabine Baring-Gould (12). The Piper’s intoxication becomes visible. In his corruption of youth, the Piper of youth in the context of war and of sexual awakening, appeals to the animal instinct in humans while also as we see it especially in Raabe’s story, aligns him with being the emissary of such an animal instinct, primarily a figure from the depths of Northern European history, in the sense of a sexual, Dionysian impulse. He is the vargr or berserkr. I would argue that the Piper is consequently represented in an aura of animality in a cultural manifestation of the medieval political and many adaptations. legal paradigm of the wolf man, and that in this figure This is especially prominent in Raabe’s story, in the treatment of outsiders and the idea of recruitment which the Slavic Kiza is described as a wolf-like of youth for war are extremely close. Vargr is the Old person, especially his bright eyes that have “mehr Norse word for “wolf” and “outlaw.” In the Volsunga vom Wolf als vom Menschen” [more of the wolf Saga from the late thirteenth century, the hero Sigi than of man] (134), a set piece in adaptations of the is pronounced a vargr, “a wolf in the holy places” legend, given that Browning also places emphasis on (Douglas 67) and, according to Baring-Gould, vargr the piper’s “sharp blue eyes, each like a pin” (104).

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