A German professor sets the story of the Pied Piper on the right track

By WENDELL STEAVENSON

t's an odd little story. A stranger, dressed in multi-colored rags, rids a town of its troublesome rats and when the town corporation refuses to pay him for this service, leads the town's children, dancing to the tune of his flute, into the countryside where a cave opens up into which they vanish. The plot doesn't seem to follow the usual prescriptions of children's stories. Where is the happy ending? What is the Aesopian moral? Who is the bad guy and who the hero? The piper, the ratcatcher, an ambiguous character, sinister and foreign, charmed and mystical, appears to be both. And furthermore, whatever happened to the children? Did they come to harm or did they ultimately find a "joyous land...Where waters gushed and fruit trees grew" as Robert Browning describes in his 19th century poem of the tale?

In fact The Pied Piper of Hamelin is not only a fairy tale, but a grand and alluring historical Chinese whisper. Something did happen in medieval Hamelin, but subsequent generations have put their own spin on it. A Luneburg manuscript dated 1384 is the first to mention a flautist; a 1557 chronicler added the rats; in 1605 Richard Verstegan, an English travel writer, coined the term Pied Piper ("pied" refers to markings of two or more colors). By the time the brothers Grimm published their definitive collection German Legends in 1816 and Browning had contributed his version in 1842, the embellishments had overtaken the truth. But the question remained: What did happen to the inhabitants of a medieval Westphalian town on June 26, 1284--a date which seems to have been the only constant fact throughout the centuries of storytelling?

Now Jurgen Udolph, professor of linguistics at Gottingen University, claims to have the answer. In a widely acclaimed article published at the end of last year in the Lower Saxony State History Yearbook, Udolph argues that the Pied Piper story was extrapolated from a 13th century movement of people from Lower Saxony and Westphalia eastwards into the area between Berlin and the Baltic, and he's got the place names to prove it.

The theory of migration--distinct from other theories of earthquakes, epidemics and the Children's Crusade used to explain the disappearance of Hamelin's children--has been popular in the past. The original clue to the riddle, a terse inscription on a window in a Hamelin church, simply read, "On the day of St. John and St. Paul, 130 people left from Hamelin to Calvary [a hill] and were led into all kinds of danger to Koppen [another hill] and vanished." Centuries later, the Grimms described how, "In droves, the parents ran out all the gates and searched for their children with a sad heart; the mothers began to wail and cry piteously." The story that grew from a small record scratched on a window was the story of the people who were left behind, passed down by witnesses to an exodus.

There are pockets of displaced Germans all over Europe: up around the Baltics, down the Volga, in Transylvania, mixed into the Moravian population. Browning and the Grimms reiterated the prevailing theory of a Transylvanian destination, but while there have been Germans there for over 700 years, Udolph claims they are not originally from Hamelin. He similarly dismisses a mid-20th-century theory of German historian Wolfgang Wann's, that the Hameliners were recruited by a Bishop of Olmutz, Bruno von Schaumburg, to settle Moravia, now in the eastern Czech Republic. But Schaumburg died in 1281, three years before the strange events in Hamelin.

Udolph's theory rests on a basic likelihood: settlers tend to name their new towns after the ones they came from (like the New World examples of Worcester, Manchester and Northampton in New England), and so it should be possible to trace the Hameliners by place names. "After the defeat of the Danes at the Battle of Bornhoved in 1227," explains Udolph, "the region south of the Baltic Sea, which was then inhabited by Slavs, became available for colonization by the Germans." The bishops and dukes of Pomerania, Brandenburg, Uckermark and Prignitz sent out glib "locators," medieval recruitment officers, offering rich rewards to those who were willing to move to the new lands. Thousands of young adults from Lower Saxony and Westphalia headed east. And as evidence, about a dozen Westphalian place names show up in this area. Indeed there are five villages called Hindenburg running in a straight line from Westphalia to Pomerania, as well as three eastern Spiegelbergs and a trail of etymology from Beverungen south of Hamelin to Beveringen northwest of Berlin to Beweringen in modern Poland.

The elusive nature of the story has, however, served the Pied Piper's literary afterlife well. 19th and 20th century authors have recycled the themes of persuasion, betrayal and disappearance. Goethe turned the piper into a seducer of girls and Bertolt Brecht's satirical poem, The True Story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, casts Hitler as the piper, seducing his Germans with the magic of rhetoric. Perhaps the moral of the story is "Beware of strangers;" perhaps it is "Always pay your debts." Or perhaps the story has survived as a universal recognition that some people leave and some stay behind to remember their leaving.

--Reported by Ursula Sautter /Bonn