Rebellion, Community and Custom in Early Modern Germany

Folklore, April, 2005 by David M. Hopkin

Rebellion, Community and Custom in Early Modern Germany. By Norbert Schindler. Introduction by Natalie Zemon Davis. Translated by Pamela E. Selwyn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 328 pp. Illus. 55.00 [pounds sterling] (hbk). ISBN 0-521-65010-0

The essays collected here were originally published in German in the 1980s. The varied topics include the practice of lordship, nicknames in Nuremberg, carnival conflicts, the rituals of courtship--but they are all studies in Volkskultur. Given Nazi misuse of all things volkisch, Schindler is careful to define what he means by "popular culture." He has no truck with romantic notions of a common heritage shared by all Germans; for him, popular culture is "a social formation distinct from elite culture that possesses a practice of autonomous symbolic actions" (p. 92)--not only autonomous, but necessarily in conflict with the emerging "civilised" culture of the educated elites. Popular culture was a battleground on which the "common folk" fought back against the attempts of Church and State to control them. In these essays that battle was fought in the towns and cities of southern Germany and Austria. Schindler makes few bones about his preference for the "urban attitude towards life" with its ambiguities and ironies, compared with the "crude and obvious" practices of the countryside (p. 173). In the essay on "nocturnal disturbances", for example, the ownership of the night by male youth groups--who used it for courting, drinking, and playing pranks on their elders and betters--was contested by the municipal guard, supported by both the courts and by the reformed and Catholic clergy, who were frequently the victims of the young men's insults. Unlike the village, under the eye of lord and priest, urban space gave room to Schindler's real enthusiasm: resistance. The German original of this book was entitled, appropriately, Unruly People.

This was a battle that the people were destined to lose. The middle classes, following the logic of Bourdieu's "civilising process" (a frequent reference), distanced themselves from their boisterous neighbours as greater economic opportunities led to increased social disparities, one mark of which was their refusal to accept or use nicknames. The old nobility of the sword, who had taken "undisguised pleasure" in the people's violent games, even if for their own purposes, were brought to heel at the courts of princes or replaced by the new legal and bureaucratic nobility of the robe. Autonomy, and with it fun, was being extinguished. The endgame is played out in Schindler's final essay on the Zaubererjackl witchcraft trials undertaken in the Archbishopric of Salzburg between 1675 and 1690, one of the last of the major European witch-hunts. The two hundred or so victims, mostly vagrants, were unusual in that the majority were young men. The Jackl was a Devil who assisted beggars to make a living; he gave them potions with which to earn alms, he made them invisible when they stole, and he taught them curses with which to threaten charity out of the recalcitrant. According to Schindler, these are less examples of folk belief than "rituals of revenge performed by the powerless" (p. 286). The trials were, essentially, social conflicts. The growing alienation of the elites had turned poverty from an opportunity for the Christian virtue of almsgiving into a sign of moral failure. The Zaubererjackl trials were not so much the end of the witch-hunts as the beginning of the coercive urge that led to the workhouse.

It should be clear from this example that Schindler is very much a social historian, for whom culture is the expression of how humans relate to one another, not an ideological imposition on their behaviour. Although theoretically astute, Schindler is suspicious of ideology, and this is only one of several connections with the historian E. P. Thompson (who makes a personal appearance in the afterword, inspiring a generation of German historical anthropologists). Like Thompson, Schindler practices the long essay; he illuminates the grand historical trends through small, localised examples. They share an ethnographic approach, the reader experiences an immersion in the period through a detailed knowledge of the archival sources, and they share a subject: class conflict without (or before) class. As Natalie Zemon Davis hints in her introduction, some readers may find this Marxist bi-polar vision of plebs and patricians a little old-fashioned, and this is not the only sign of age. The essays themselves, now twenty years old, are full of proselytising zeal for the infant discipline of popular culture, whereas the foreword and afterword, written more recently, are much more defensive in tone. Popular culture has given way to popular cultures, in which identities other than class (ethnic, religious, sexual, occupational, etc.) have been emphasised. Even more threatening for the social historian is the postmodernist challenge that melts all social realities into mere discourses. However, the critics that Schindler decides to tackle head-on are the folklorists.