Rapunzels Children

The making of democracy in Germany

Part 1

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

Sam Kestenbaum

Timotheus Maria Mellage

Sarah Ledbetter

.
Cover by: Sara Mariani

Drawing by: Karim Madjer

Edited By: Sam Kestenbaum

2
 Book Bite
Occasionally we come across a book that widens our horizons, offering new ways of
seeing and interpreting the world. It is a magical experience to discover unexpected
meaning and true significance, not only in some remote and unknown resource, but
also in a familiar and well-known work such as a fairy tale.

Tim Mellages and Sarah Ledbetters interpretation of the fairy tale Rapunzel is such a
work of true originality. It provides a fascinating method to understanding the social
developments of Germany over the past five hundred years starting with the
Reformation of 1517, through the dark years of two World Wars, to the modern
democratic state that we know today based on the premonitions and symbols
contained within the fairy tale. As such it is a timely work for those seeking a wider
appreciation of the social and historical context and events that have conspired to
produce this vibrant modern democracy in Germany, so vital to the stability of
Europe today. But just as important, it is a handbook to all those of us interested in
uncovering the fascinating parallels and common themes between the myths created
and retold by our ancestors and those that inform our own lives.

This is that very unusual book a gripping story with an immediate pertinence to
our personal experience of the world, that also allows us to readjust our thoughts and
ideas about German history in the light of a new understanding.

Roger Wilson

Sorbonne, Paris 2007

The first three chapters of this book have been registered with the C. G. Jung
Library, Kusnacht Switzerland.

3
To Patricia Morales and Nanette VanWright

4
 Preface

Knowing that this is an unusual book, we are asking the reader to entertain a
rather novel approach in looking at history, in this case German history. Reviewing
history from a perspective that considers it as something living rather than the usual -
dry, mundane and generally boring approach, Sarah and I are hoping through this
fairy tale and the interpretation of its mythology to bring to you history thats alive: to
engage your imagination by showing how mythology and history are intricately
intertwined, and even anticipated, as certain books and films have already shown.
For some this approach will come across as somewhat arbitrary, but for others, we
are sure it will strike a chord. Mythology lives in all of us, and likewise we live it,
whether it is our own personal myth or the collective ones we are shaped by. For
those who are sensitive to these ongoing currents this interpretation should have
some resonance, and for others who just want to experience history through a
cultural lens, this book, we hope, offers both.

In 2007 when Sarah and I first set out on the long road of rejection, like so
many first time authors (we mean rejection by the publishers we sought out), little
did we know that the eBook revolution was just around the corner! After regaining
confidence and a second editing by Sam Kestenbaum, we can now hope to reach a
much broader audience with this new platform, which was always our intended goal.

(Please note that although the historical material in the book is all factual, it is
being presented as narrative non-fiction and not as an academic work. Also, this is a
work in progress, and all quotes in the first part will be referenced in the following
second part.)

The Authors

5
 Contents
Part I: The Enchantress Gain

Preface......................................................................................................5

INTRODUCTION.............................................................................................7

RAPUNZEL*................................................................................................10

(The fairy tale)...........................................................................................10

Chapter I...................................................................................................17

The Reformation and ...................................................................................17

The Revolution of the Common Man...............................................................17

(1517-1525)...............................................................................................17

Chapter II..................................................................................................42

Birth and the Tower.....................................................................................42

Court Culture and Absolutism..........................................................................42

(1525 -1713)...............................................................................................42

Chapter III.................................................................................................61

The Listener...............................................................................................61

and the.....................................................................................................61

German Enlightenment..................................................................................61

(1650 -1814)...............................................................................................61

Chapter IV.................................................................................................71

Frankenstein..............................................................................................71

6
and..........................................................................................................71

The New World Outlook..............................................................................71

(18141919)..............................................................................................71

Bio..........................................................................................................94

INTRODUCTION

Storytelling is one of our most basic human instincts. As members of families,

religions, societies and nations, we seek to explain the world around us and find our
place in it. Through myth-making we do this, extracting significance from experience.
We tell stories about heroes and villains, about gods, monsters and miracles. Stories
teach they can be instructive and enlightening. Stories also represent our
subconscious longing our desire to change, perhaps improve, the world.

The tale of Rapunzel, from the brothers Grimm collection, is one of these
stories. While this old legend has broad European roots (similar tales were told and
written in Italy, France and England), there is something distinctly German about it,
too. That is what this book is concerned with: exploring the distinctively German
character of the story.

Rapunzel would have been told in towns and villages, in traditional settings,
around a fire or at a dinner table. In Germany where historic changes were
underway this narrative had, and today still has, a particular resonance.

The story itself is full of archetypes: the sorceress, the kings son, the peasant
family and the beautiful, imprisoned would-be princess. Its a classic tale. And it deals
with some of our most universal challenges and impulses: temptation, bondage and
yearning.

7
 Is it possible that our stories empower us, giving us spiritual tools via the
unconscious to change our world? This, the authors believe, is exactly what the story
of Rapunzel gave to the German people. It would have been a source of entertainment
as all myths arebut it would also have resonated deeper in the cultural psyche. No
one could have known it, but this tale was readying the way for a great
transformation: the making of a modern democracy. Understood this way, the tale
becomes both allegory and premonition.

The following chapters are a collaborative work between Tim Mellage and
Sarah Ledbetter. What they have written is not an academic work, but a reflective
investigation into a fable. Drawing from historical, academic and literary sources, this
book offers a reading of Rapunzel that is both analytic and intuitive. It takes us to a
place where history, art and the unconscious intermingle.

From Martin Luther in the early 16th century to the establishment of

Germanys present day democracy, the authors trace the legacy of Rapunzel,
demonstrating how the text both preceded and envisioned great social change. Each
narrative development in the legend the birth of the heroine, her imprisonment at
the hands of the sorceress, her meeting the kings son, their escape is symbolic.

The symbols of the story represent distinct historical events in Germany over
the last, tumultuous 500 years. How can Rapunzel help us to understand German
history, through reformation, revolution, two world wars, the Holocaust, and
democracy? The following chapters carefully and methodically unpack the story,
revealing what is underneath the surface.

Our folk tales lie close to our hearts and within our collective unconscious.
Taken as a whole, they act as a kind of spiritual compass, helping us find our way
through the great transformations and upheavals which shape the world, and us with
it.

Certain myths drive us as individuals and as societies and in our actions

we fashion ourselves after our archetypal heroes and villains. As societies and peoples
in the past lived their lives using legends as guides however unconsciously their
lives would have naturally reflected their mythology. We do the same today.
Understanding this, the story of Rapunzel becomes a premonition and a self-fulfilling
vision of German society.

Rapunzel is allegorical, but it is also visionary. The myth can be understood

both backwards and forwards that is, it both propelled a people through history
and is also the lens through which we can look back on those human developments. It
is a tale of German society, which foretold what was to come.

The title of this book is Rapunzels Children. Who are her children? They are
the artists and intellectual, spiritual descendents of her story. Rapunzels children are
those people who have brought her fable into the present, who inherited this myth
and through their lives and work carried her legacy.

Rapunzel offers a framework through which the German people could imagine
a restructuring of human values, one that would ultimately give more rights to
individuals. It is a revolutionary text that touches on dictatorship, oppression, class

8
struggle, but most importantly, Germanys artistic heritage. Rapunzel offers through
the development of culture an outlet for that very human yearning for freedom. If we
overlook this fairy tale, and dont see it as a rich social text, we would miss out on
something significant: insight into the evolution of Germanys democracy today.

Rapunzel may be a fairy tale, but what is even more miraculous than this
otherworldly story is how it demonstrates through its symbolism our human capacity
to bring about revolutionary, democratic change to rethink how we govern
ourselves and treat each other.

Because this, I believe, is what the story of Rapunzeland the analysis that you
are about to readcan teach us: that we are a part of the myths we tell. Our lives are
intertwined with the larger sagas we are living out as societies. These myths fuel us
and we, in turn reify them in our world. The legend represents our subconscious fears
and hopes, anxieties and aspirations. What Rapunzels Children hopes to show is that
we are actors in a larger, ever-evolving myth our own history.

Sam Kestenbaum

9
 RAPUNZEL*
(The fairy tale)

There were once a man and a woman who had long in vain wished for a child.

At length the woman hoped that God was about to grant her desire. These people had

a little window at the back of their house from which a splendid garden could be seen,

which was full of the most beautiful flowers and herbs. It was, however, surrounded

by a high wall, and no one dared to go into it because it belonged to an enchantress,

who had great power and was dreaded by all the world. One day the woman was

standing by this window and looking down into the garden, when she saw a bed,

which was planted with the most beautiful rampion (rapunzel), and it looked so fresh

and green that she longed for it, and had the greatest desire to eat some. This desire

increased every day, and as she knew that she could not get any of it, she quite pined

away, and began to look pale and miserable. Then her husband was alarmed, and

asked: What ails you, dear wife? Ah, she replied, if I can't eat some of the

rapunzel, which is in the garden behind our house, I shall die. The man, who loved

her, thought: Sooner than let your wife die, bring her some of the rapunzel yourself,

let it cost what it will. At twilight, he clambered down over the wall into the garden

of the enchantress, hastily clutched a handful of rapunzel, and took it to his wife. She

at once made herself a salad of it, and ate it greedily. It tasted so good to her, so very

good, that the next day she longed for it three times as much as before. If he was to

have any rest, her husband must once more descend into the garden. In the gloom of

the evening, therefore, he let himself down again; but when he had clambered down

the wall he was terribly afraid, for he saw the enchantress standing before him. How

10
can you dare, said she with angry look, descend into my garden and steal my

rapunzel like a thief? You shall suffer for it! Ah, answered he, let mercy take the

place of justice, I only made up my mind to do it out of necessity. My wife saw your

rapunzel from the window, and felt such a longing for it that she would have died if

she had not got some to eat. Then the enchantress allowed her anger to be softened,

and said to him: If the case be as you say, I will allow you to take away with you as

much rapunzel as you will, only I make one condition, you must give me the child

which your wife will bring into the world; it shall be well treated, and I will care for it

like a mother. The man in his terror consented to everything, and when the woman

was brought to bed, the enchantress appeared at once, gave the child the name of

Rapunzel, and took it away with her.

Rapunzel grew into the most beautiful child under the sun. When she was

twelve years old, the enchantress shut her into a tower, which lay in a forest, and had

neither stairs nor door, but quite at the top was a little window. When the

enchantress wanted to go in, she placed herself beneath it and cried:

Rapunzel, Rapunzel,

Let down your hair to me.

Rapunzel had magnificent long hair, fine as spun gold, and when she heard the voice

of the enchantress she unfastened her braided tresses, wound them round one of the

hooks of the window above, and then the hair fell twenty ells down, and the

enchantress climbed up by it.

After a year or two, it came to pass that the King's son rode through the forest

and passed by the tower. Then he heard a song, which was so charming that he stood

11
still and listened. This was Rapunzel, who in her solitude passed her time in letting

her sweet voice resound. The King's son wanted to climb up to her, and looked for

the door of the tower, but none was to be found. He rode home, but the singing had

so deeply touched his heart, that every day he went out into the forest and listened to

it. Once when he was thus standing behind a tree, he saw that the enchantress came

there, and he heard how she cried:

Rapunzel, Rapunzel,

Let down your hair.

Then Rapunzel let down the braids of her hair, and the enchantress climbed up to

her. If that is the ladder by which one mounts, I too will try my fortune, said he,

and the next day when it began to grow dark, he went to the tower and cried:

Rapunzel, Rapunzel,

Let down your hair.

Immediately the hair fell down and the King's son climbed up.

At first Rapunzel was terribly frightened when a man, such as her eyes had

never yet beheld, came to her; but the King's son began to talk to her quite like a

friend, and told her that his heart had been so stirred that it had let him have no rest,

and he had been forced to see her. Then Rapunzel lost her fear, and when he asked

her if she would take him for her husband, and she saw that he was young and

handsome, she thought: He will love me more than old Dame Gothel does; and she

said yes, and laid her hand in his. She said: I will willingly go away with you, but I

do not know how to get down. Bring with you a skein of silk every time that you

12
come, and I will weave a ladder with it, and when that is ready I will descend, and you

will take me on your horse. They agreed that until that time he should come to her

every evening, for the old woman came by day. The enchantress remarked nothing of

this, until once Rapunzel said to her: Tell me, Dame Gothel, how it happens that you

are so much heavier for me to draw up than the young King's son, he is with me in a

moment. Ah! You wicked child, cried the enchantress. What do I hear you say! I

thought I had separated you from the world, and yet you have deceived me! In her

anger she clutched Rapunzel's beautiful tresses, wrapped them twice round her left

hand, seized a pair of scissors with the right, and snip, snap, they were cut off, and

the lovely braids lay on the ground. And she was so pitiless that she took Rapunzel

into a desert where she had to live in great grief and misery.

On the same day that she cast out Rapunzel, however, the enchantress

fastened the braids of her hair, which she had cut off, to the hook of the window, and

when the King's son came and cried:

Rapunzel, Rapunzel,

Let down your hair,

she let the hair down. The King's son ascended, but instead of finding his dearest

Rapunzel, he found the enchantress, who gazed at him with wicked and venomous

looks. Aha! she cried mockingly, you would fetch your dearest, but the beautiful

bird sits no longer singing in the nest; the cat has got it, and will scratch out your eyes

as well. Rapunzel is lost to you; you will never see her again. The King's son was

beside himself in pain, and in his despair he leapt down from the tower. He escaped

with his life, but the thorns into which he fell pierced his eyes. Then he wandered

quite blind about the forest, ate nothing but roots and berries, and did naught but

13
lament and weep over the loss of his dearest wife. Thus he roamed about in misery

for some years, and at length came to the desert where Rapunzel, with the twins to

which she had given birth, a boy and a girl, lived in wretchedness. He heard a voice,

and it seemed so familiar to him that he went toward it, and when he approached,

Rapunzel knew him and fell on his neck and wept. Two of her tears wetted his eyes

and they grew clear again, and he could see with them as before. He led her to his

kingdom where he was joyfully received, and they lived for a long time afterwards,

happy and contented.

*The Complete Grimms FairyTales, Pantheon Books, Random House, Inc. Copyright

1972 p. 73-76 (Please note that in this translated version, the herb rapunzel is called

rampion. The authors have chosen to stay with the original German, rapunzel, to

avoid any confusion.)

14
15
There are individuals who have an amazing knowledge of themselves, of the things
that go on in themselves. But even those people wouldnt be capable of knowing
what is going on in their unconscious.

For instance, they are not conscious of the fact that while they live in a conscious
life, all the time a myth is being played out in the unconscious, a myth that extends
over centuries, a stream of archetypal ideas that goes on through the centuries
through the individual. Really it is like a continuous stream, and it comes to light in
the great movements, say in political or spiritual movements. For instance, in the
time before the Reformation people dreamt of the great change. That is the reason
why such great transformations could be predicted.

C. G. Jung Speaking 1957

16
 Chapter I
The Reformation and
The Revolution of the Common Man
(1517-1525)

What is the function of desire in fairy tales? What is the function of desire in

history and in the German Reformation of 1517 in particular? In the years before, and

especially in the years after Martin Luthers protest against the corruption of the all-

powerful Church, a spirit of the times had begun to stir in the countryside of Germany

far from and close to Wittenberg. For the German peasant the omnipotent political

and religious structures of the Late Middle Ages systematically kept them tied down

on every front. In an era ruled by poverty, oppression, pestilence and constant feudal

warring, the range of personal agency for the peasants was limited. While feudalism

denied them basic human and economic rights, the Catholic Church denied them

access to ideological freedom, the sacred texts, and the right to have an unmediated

relationship with the divine. If change were to come, and come it did, it would have to

start from a place that neither the Church nor the feudal lords could reach: the belly

of folk wisdomthe transformative power of storytelling.

Desire goes in search of its outlet, and when the winds of time are at its back, it

will find it. During the Late Middle Ages in the land that would someday be known as

Germany, a fairy tale was born, the story of Rapunzel, the same one that children

today still listen to. At this same time in Germany a movement was born, the

17
Reformation. It reached such unparalleled force and scope that John Adams, the

second president of the United States and a framer of the Constitution, would call it

the first precedent in history for resistance to despotism and the sanctity of the

individual.

This chapter will trace the correspondence between these two phenomena,

going in search of the serpentine roots of a story through the evolution of social,

philosophical, and religious thought. In the towns and woods of 16th century

Germany, we meet a people torn by feudalisms terrors and clinging to a savoir-faire

the art and language of storytellingthat will be their only prayer and, indeed, a

self-fulfilling prophecy.

It is desire that animates and forces political change, desire that teachesthat

initiates heroism and sufferingin fairy tales. Both history and fable can teach the

way to cope with change as individuals and as keepers of cultural wisdom. It is this

way that we too will take, in order to learn how, once upon a time, fairy tale and

history collaborated in the name of the individuals freedom. Heres where our story

begins.

There were once a man and woman who had long in vain wished for a

child.

So starts the first line of Margaret Hunters translation of Rapunzel in The

Complete Grimms Fairy Tales, one of the German peoples most distinct myths. The

peasant society of Germany in the early 1500s was itself standing in the same shoes

18
as our mythical couple. The quality of their lives was hard, unstable, and extremely

base, hemmed in as it was by the interlocking systems of the Church, the Nobility,

and economic oppression. Having lived for centuries under feudalisms sway, the

serfs had watched their hope for a new life come and go with each passing generation.

But then, a stirring of a more significant kind began to appear.

At length the woman hoped that God was about to grant her desire.

Indeed, what began to take shape all around Germany was the ferment of

religious reform. To understand the German peasants worldview, first we must

understand the role the divine played not only for the individual but also in the

political arena. God was considered to be a participant in the affairs of mankind, a

keeper of order when order suited His will, and a force for change when change was

necessary. When word began to spread of Martin Luthers Ninety-Five Theses, it

appeared finally to the peasants that God Himself had begun to take sides with them

against the status quo, though in what respect they did not know. All they knew was

that change was afoot, and for those at the bottom of the hierarchy, change could only

be good.

The couple in the fairy tale, who have been wishing to have a child for a

seeming eternity, symbolize the peasantry. The husband and wife are moved by hope

to believe that the good thing is on its way, and ready to interpret events along those

lines. To believe that God will someday grant ones wish is certainly a different matter

than to hope that God is about to grant ones desire. The woman seems to be urging

19
God to step into action now. Likewise, the peasantry began to hear the news from

Wittenberg and dared to imagine the possibilities and consequences that a reformed

Church could bring to every aspect of life.

* * *

In the language of fairy tales, the mother figures as an archetype, representing

the larger collective culture. The mother is the mysterious root of all growth and

change, Carl Jung writes in Four Archetypes, the love that means homecoming,

shelter, and the long silence from which everything begins and in which everything

ends. In Rapunzel, shes easily recognizable as well. The mother-as-culture is

especially significant here because not only does the tale of Rapunzel begin with a

pregnant mother, but the Reformation also gained its teeth from the mother

culture, from movement in the folk culture of Germany. Certainly Luther, the

Church, and the nobility could have had their Reformation without the peasants. But

the Reformation that did take place owes its legacy to those peasants who would rise

up against feudalism and the corruption of the Church, setting a new precedent in

European history.

It is a potent utterance: mother gives teeth to the revolution. And its true that

out of the nexus to which the soul belongs before and after life, a person is born into

society. The institutions, rituals, traditionsand most of all, narrativethat human

beings create, are mediated responses by a mother-mind to the world which is its

necessary opposite and testing ground. The world in which the Late Middle Ages

20
German peasant lived was an especially testing one, and therefore gave rise to an

historical story of epic proportions, the Reformation of 1517. Just as the mother-to-

be wished for her child, so to were the people longing for change.

The fathers role in the fairy tale, as much as the mothers, speaks to specific

qualities at play in the German peasant culture in the early 1500s. Symbolically, the

father represents the knowledge and capacities necessary to fulfill a task, accomplish

wider territories, as well as effectuate ideas voiced by the mother. The father puts

himself in danger for the mothers wishes; the tale of Rapunzel is an ideal example of

this collaborative dynamic. In the German peasant culture of the Late Middle Ages,

father represents a society that is still predominantly led by men but which had

sufficient concern for the well-being of its culture (mother culture, the mothers

craving for the forbidden herb, rapunzel), to eventually take up arms in her defense.

These people had a little window at the back of their house from which a

splendid garden could be seen, which was full of the most beautiful flowers

and herbs.

The problem confronting the expectant couple and the peasant society is here

introduced. Not only is a new life needed, as represented by the unborn child, but

also a better quality of life: beauty, health, and well-being. Through the window they

gaze at a forbidden state of natural abundance and provision. Looking through the

window can be understood as an act of self-will towards consciousness. When the

subject seeks, she finds the object of her desire.

21
 It was, however, surrounded by a high wall, and no one dared to go into it

because it belonged to an enchantress, who had great power and was

dreaded by all the world.

The high wall can be read as the impregnable fortress of the feudal structure,

designed to prevent the citizen from going where he or she most desires to go: beyond

the garden wall, into a place of provenance and the end of all desiring. Because

human society is not yet perfect, this gorgeous and fertile space is not available but

coveted and guarded by the malicious presence of an enchantress, whom we will

come to know as the collective force of the nobility and the Church.

One day the woman was standing by this window and looking down into the

garden, when she saw a bed which was planted with the most beautiful

rapunzel, and it looked so fresh and green that she longed for it, and had the

greatest desire to eat some. This desire increased every day, and as she knew

that she could not get any of it, she quite pined away, and began to look pale

and miserable.

How curious is the craving for something one has never tasted? It is just as

curious as the concept that the human spirit is not derivative but creative in the most

fertile and functional sense of the word. The human spirit can see things that do not

22
yet exist and initiate the necessary work of making them so. The synchronicity that

occurred with the appearance of the tale of Rapunzel concurrently with the events

that led to the Reformation of 1517 gives an especially vivid example of this faculty.

Martin Luther published in 1517 a third edition of his rebuke of the institution

of the Catholic Church, entitled the Ninety-Five Theses. This document catalogued

ninety-five ways in which the Church offended against Gods word. These offenses

included the selling of pardons to nobles, the attribution of salvation by earthly

deeds, and the use of money for its own end, instead of the holy love and divine need

of the soul. As a result of Martin Luthers protest, the peasant populations

dissatisfaction with the status quo began to change shape. While there had been

political unrestpeasant rebellions had become frequent since 1476now, the

atmosphere was revolutionary. Change was coming. There was no turning back for

the peasant class once a clear enough image of the desired object had formed in their

consciousness. The same goes for the fairy tales young couple. Once the woman sees

the herb, she will be sick if she does not get the desired rapunzel.

The high wall surrounding the garden was meant to keep the young couple out,

just as the ideological, social, and political structures of the Late Middle Ages were

meant to exclude the peasants. The idea of representative government had not yet

dawned on the human mind, nor had welfare for the disabled, wounded, and elderly

human rights and the individual are merely anachronistic concepts when applied to

this moment in time. But this will no longer be the case after the peasants have risen

against the forces at large. In the end, whether they win or lose will make little

difference.

23
 Who is this enchantress in the fairy tale? The common definition of an

enchantress is one with an unusual allure or fascination. In this story, she symbolizes

an archetypal figure. She is not only herself, but also part of a whole body of meaning,

what Carl Jung refers to as archetypal ideas in Memories, Dreams, and Reflections.

As such, she signifies the presence of a dominant force that stands between the

protagonist and self-realization. In terms of the Reformation, she represents the

establishment, which the German peasants were beginning to recognize and abhor as

the enemy of their well being.

The story of Rapunzel, tells the story of the German people from the inside; all

of the elements which were in play at this crucial moment are present in fairy tale

fashion. After Luthers theses were posted on the Cathedrals doors, the people over

time became avid for change, and as their desire filled them, just as it did the

expectant mother in the tale, so the fulfillment of that desire at whatever cost became

inevitable. Yet as in tales, so in history, each victory is only provisional.

This desire increased every day, and as she knew that she could not get any

of it, she quite pined away, and began to look pale and miserable. Then her

husband was alarmed, and asked: What ails you, dear wife? Ah, she

replied, if I cant eat some of the rapunzel, which is in the garden behind our

house, I shall die.

The expectant mother has arrived at a point of no return: either she obtains

the rapunzel, or she dies. In true fairy tale manner, we are asked to trust the

24
storyteller. We must believe in the veracity of what the woman says. This is what her

husband does. The soon-to-be mother and father here represent the interplay

between the feminine and masculine principles together at work in the individual

in this case the ordinary citizenalong with all of her or his cultural and social fabric.

The couple has conceived the long-awaited child. Still its not enough; just as dreams

launch responsibilities, fecundity requires the right conditions in order to produce its

fruit. Now the couple will have to tell the world, permitting those outside their family

to be touched by this good news: a boundary awaits to be crossed. Were this an ideal

situation, which it could easily be mistaken for in fairy tales, the world of wish

fulfillment would match reality. Instead, the world outside of this tiny family will

become a place of unforeseeable challengesand an allegory for political change.

The man, who loved her, thought: Sooner than let your wife die, bring her

some of the rapunzel yourself, let it cost what it will.

What we risk reveals what we value. This is the kind of predicamentloves

challenge, desires costthat motivates a wide array of the stories that have shaped

Western and Eastern narrative thought, from films to sagas to urban legends. It isnt

difficult to imagine, either, how thoroughly entrenched, how serious, must have been

the longing of the third class in German society at this moment. In order to force the

clergy to change, they would have had to abandon the world as they knew it. But the

imagination and heart can do it when the conditions demand.

25
 The years between 1517 and 1524 saw the infusion of a great deal of excitement

and hope into the lifeblood of Germanys formerly sleepy towns, as the word of

Luthers protests spread through every channel possible and walked across the

barriers of illiteracy and Church indoctrination. All at once, everyone was demanding

reform of the clergy and evangelical preaching, in many cases adding demands for

even wider reforms of social and religious life. The Reformation began to become

itself: a ferment of concerns of a religious, political, economic, and social nature

emanating out to all parts of society. The gradual realization that the Church was an

institution standing in for a spiritual presencetherefore fallible and amendable

was a breakthrough of continuously greater proportions from 1517 onwards. God

became a concept worth considering for oneself, on an individual basis.

These years were especially formative because of the interaction between

culture and society that was now permitted to take place, a fact which is supported

and suggested by the interaction of mother and father in the Rapunzel tale. The

man, who loved her, thought is a decidedly effectual phrase. It refers to the

assimilation by the folk-mind of all the possibilities latent in the literature of the

Reformation. These creative possibilities, when brought forward by the society, can

be consequential at long last.

Because the mother in the story is pregnant when she gazes out of her window,

she gives the beautiful rapunzel in the enchantress garden serious thought.

Pregnancy and fermenting are apt concepts for a moment when hope and the

possibility of fighting the good fight are present. The people were therefore able to,

with curiosity and desire, look beyond their four walls, full of energy and activity. The

peasants had led six distinct revolts and numerous rebellions in forty-one years prior

to the Reformation. This illustrates their readiness to act.

26
 Luthers Ninety-Five Theses, in the fullness of its address against the real

nature of the contemporary Church, testifies to the deep predicament in which the

whole of German society, all classes included, found itself at that moment in time.

The Humanist Movement of the Renaissance on the one hand promised an end to

what would become known as the Dark Ages by proposing a return to the ethics and

philosophy of the Classical Era; on the other hand, in the environment of late

medieval Germany, there still lay deeply entrenched habits of superstition, where the

role of the Devil was taken seriously in everyday life. This tension played itself out

within Martin Luther, as he toiled to reconcile the two warring aspects of the divine

as all-merciful or all-just. He arrived finally at a comprehension of the divine and of

the Churchs place as a servant thereof, equally redefining religious and social

thought. He effectively abolished the role of the Church as necessary intermediary

between the people and the divine by claiming that the only link to salvation is by

divine mercy. In so doing, and by getting away with it, Luther undermined the very

foundations of medieval society. A tiny knock to the Churchs tenuous position as a

needed shelter was sufficient to open a thousand channels by which the common

mans life would come awake and flow afresh.

The fact that Luther got away with delivering such a knock was a question both

of timing and politics. Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1519-1556), then the king of

Spain and rulerat least in nameover Germany, Sicily, southern Italy, the

Netherlands, Belgium, and Burgundy, was preoccupied with imperialist matters. In

addition to the problems in Italy, his attention was also directed toward the Turks.

Furthermore, he had never really been overly involved in the affairs of Germany, and

his negligence only allowed the situation to slip out of his control before he chose to

react. For many of the German princes who were not fighting in Italy with King

27
Charles, their pleasure at seeing the Churchthe nobilitys long-time competitor for

supremacyplaced in question only helped Luther. His local elector, Frederick of

Saxony, did everything he could to rescue Luther from papal bulls that effectively

excommunicated him. Frederick in the end ushered him to safety at his Wartburg

Castle where Luther underwent the task of completing his translation of the Biblical

texts into the German language.

At twilight, he clambered down over the wall into the garden of the

enchantress, hastily clutched a handful of rapunzel, and took it to his wife.

Twilight is the moment when day and night hang in a balance. There is enough

light to see by, but not enough to be seen. Nature helps the husband move quickly

and succeeds in getting his wife what she wants. The distribution of information

about Luthers Ninety-Five Theses, likewise, employed a coordination of timely and

bold action that effectively procured a wedge of agency for the peasant class and the

townspeople who sympathized with them. A directive that could only have been

attributed to collective inspiration, put the writings of Luther into the hands of the

people throughout Germany. The dissemination of Luthers theses was sudden,

especially when considering the lack of technology that was available in the Late

Middle Ages. Before four weeks had settled on the theses, presses in Wittenberg,

Nuremberg, Leipzig and Basel were printing and distributing them, and the rest of

Europe soon followed.

28
 According to some historians who offer a different view, the period following

the theses publication was one of stunned and indecisive silence during which no

public display of rebuke was made by the authorities against Luther. In any case,

whisked off by Frederick of Saxony to the safety of his castle, Luther set to work

averaging one tract every fourteen days and hammering out a new translation of the

Bible. A fury of thought, action, and exchange was set in motion. The campaign was

addressed at all sectors of society. Pamphlets, cartoons, illustrated broadsheets

(many of which were created by the painter and his close friend Lucas Cranach the

elder), and more traditional treatises informed the masses about the damages done

by a Church, which saw fit to sell the mercy of God at a high price and send half of the

profits to Rome. By 1524, the output from printing presses in numbers of books

published had increased more than six fold. Thanks to Luther, the sacred texts of the

Christian faith had been rendered into German. He claimed that it was only right that

the Bible be available in the language of the mother in the home, the children in the

street, the common man in the marketplace. His actions grew out of the widespread

loss of faith in the Church. Luther was putting the sacred texts into the hands of those

who needed it, the peasants and common people who craved to understand the

theology that defined their world.

As with any fairy tale, the metaphors are manifold, but this one is too lucid to

overlook. For a people who could not read Latin and who had no welfare, no rights,

no education, and nothing to protect them from their despots and the fickleness of

nature but God Himself, the Bible was a crucial source of information about the

nature of life on every level. Its inaccessibility, its desirability, and its necessity, are

almost tangibly represented in the story by the salad herb that seems to wave at the

expectant mother. The husband, respecting the urgency in his wifes voice,

29
transgresses the bounds that separate them from the rapunzel and brings some home

to her.

She at once made herself a salad of it and ate it greedily. It tasted so good to

her

Once the peasants got their hands on this new information (those who were

literate spread the word, and those who were not received evangelical preaching), the

peoples appetite for a new life began to grow. The husbands brave sojourn into the

enchantress garden while she is apparently away happens only once in the fairy tale

without consequences. But he will dare to do it again because information, like this

rapunzel, spurs a desire for more. Knowledge isnt innocuous, is it? New information

demands a re-evaluation of old norms, from what it means to be an individual (a

question that, as far as we know, would not be asked until after the Reformation and

the rise of a personal, spiritual consciousness) to the way every sector of society is

affected. So what did the people do once they had gotten their first taste of dissent?

It tasted so good to herso very good, that the next day she longed for it

three times as much as before. If he was to have any rest, her husband must

once more descend into the garden.

30
 Theythe peopleasked for more. They organized themselves. Out of fear of

being outnumbered, the nobility that remained in Germany appeased the peasants by

granting many of their requests initially. In this way, the peasants gained some

advantage. Charles V was still away in Italy trying to extend his domain and protect

his possessions from Francis I of France, but the nobility felt sure that when Charles

returned, he would put things back in order. The peasants, however, had survived

their initial uprisings and had gotten away with demonstrating their resistance. This

meant that it was worth the risk of trying again and trying harder. Beginning in 1524

in the southern states of the Black Forest and Lake Constance, the peasants began an

all-out war, with a force that eventually grew to well over a quarter of a million, which

later became known as The Revolution of the Common Man.

The range of reforms they sought sprang from one idea, that of godly law, the

dream of organizing society around the same moral principles that now promised to

shape the interior life of the Christian peasant. All they intended can best be

understood as a social revolution in the context of the times, though without the

privilege of retrospection their needs and demands must have appeared as simple

and basic as field lettuce: the right to use the wood from the trees in the forests, to

hunt the game that ran free there, the right to work not as serfs but simply for their

own survival (a task which alone consumed enormous effort), the right to impartial

courts, freedom of religion, and an end to death duties.

In the gloom of evening, therefore, he let himself down again; but when he

had clambered down the wall he was terribly afraid, for he saw the

enchantress standing before him.

31
 The image of the gardens wall and the garden within resonates on many

levels. It reminds us of when weve had to seek whats right and to grow, to stretch

and challenge ourselves and to expand the territory in which we move and breath.

The garden is paradise lost, harmony remembered, sexual frustration and euphoria,

the perfect circle undisturbed. It is worth the battle raging within and without. The

abundance the peasants sought, and that which the husband seeks, was both basic

and radical. Like the rapunzel itselfa field green that grows freely yet is deniedthe

demands the people made in the Peasants War of 1524-25 were basic and essential.

Sadly, the results of their efforts, and that of the husband in the story, are equally

tragic in the end. But for a shining moment they made their stand.

* * *

In 1525, revolts all over Germany were placing under attack the privileges of

the ruling class of nobles and clergy, demanding Christian egalitarianism. Thomas

Muntzer, in May of 1525, proposed an alternative to the economic and ideological

despair the peasants were locked into serving. He put forward and undertook the

project of forming a citizens alliance to uphold the dream of an egalitarian theocracy

made up of peasants, miners, and villagers. When the Princes gathered their forces,

however, they put a quick end to that danger by capturing and executing Muntzer and

vanquishing the rebels. In the end the peasants dire need for more, three times as

32
much as before, had rendered them unable to foresee that the second time around,

the establishment would be ready and waiting. After having sacked Rome, King

Charles V, along with his legions of Germanic princes, quickly returned to Germany

to re-establish his imperial control over the territories that had been lost to the

peasants, and with some rapid successes he eventually suppressed the revolts.

The entire unfolding of the Peasants War added up to this: a people with no

voteinsignificant and unworthy from the perspective of the nobilityshowed their

minds and their fists. A chiefly uneducated people, who devised an egalitarian and

spiritually renewed society, in the end were either killed or maimed. The peasants

who did survive were forced back into servitude, this time under much harsher

conditions, while the rule of territorial princes grew even more powerful than before.

The final blow to the peasants came when Martin Luther abandoned them by siding

with the establishment. As a result, the Reformation lost some momentum, especially

in terms of its attempt to erode feudal organization.

The gloom of evening refers to the gathering of dreaded forces, which could

not be seen yet but only felt, against the peasants army. In the darkest daylight hours

we think we see, but the outlines of things are too dim to be judged properly. The

peasants and their supporters were standing now in the same trap as the husband

when the enchantress returns to her garden and finds the intruder in flagrante

delicto. Looking to history we find the macrocosmic equivalent of the tragic price she

then demands: not only were the revolts crushed, but much of the peasants property

was categorically destroyedeffectively cutting off whole villages from their

livelihoodand one hundred thousand peasants were slaughtered. Many more were

disfigured and blinded. All of the peasants requests except for limited religious

privilegeswhich were not properly addressed until the Religious Peace of Augsburg

33
in 1555were ultimately denied, and the insurgents were left in worse condition than

before. Villages were left in ruin. Fields, which had struggled to produce, were now

burned to ash. Famine was accompanied by disease. Those charities that had served

orphans, the aged, the crippled and the sick, folded without adequate space,

resources or money to operate.

How can you dare, said she with an angry look, descend into my garden

and steal my rapunzel like a thief? You shall suffer for it!

When, obedient to his wifes now dire state of craving, the husband climbs

down again, he meets the enchantress herself. She will do more than take back her

rapunzel: she will demand absolutely everything to which shes not at all entitled. She

will hoard their pride and joy and take her time in destroying it. The all-powerful

enchantress will demand the unborn child, which cannot be denied.

Who is she? Who oppresses? The enchantress is the oppressor on a collective

scale. Throughout history her persona is diffused among a society whose culture feeds

and reproduces this invisible persuasion of oppression, and justifies and demands it.

In fairy tale tradition, as in narrative culture the world over, the enchantress is an

archetype, an anima projection initiating from the male unconscious. In Seminars on

Dream Analysis, C. G. Jung writes: I arrived at the conclusion that the anima [or

animus in woman] is the counterpart of the persona, and always appears [in dreams

and myths] as a women of a certain quality because she is in connection with the

mans specific shadow. The enchantress, like a witch, is the feminine that man

denies and represses in himself, only to be compensated and projected negatively into

34
the world around him. She represents control and oppression, and unmasks dreaded

power.

The concept of the archetype, Jung writes in Memories, Dreams, and

Reflections, is derived from the repeated observation that, for instance, the myths

and fairy tales of world literature contain definite motifs which crop up everywhere.

These typical images and associations are what Jung calls archetypal ideas. The

more vivid they are, the more they will be colored by particularly strong feeling tones.

They impress, influence, and fascinate us.

The Complete Grimms Fairy Tales is a written record of a rich and varied oral

tradition. Its crucial to keep this fact in mind when learning about the history of

Germanys peasants. Instead of having one, presumably solitary author who shaped

the narrative from her or his personal imagination, we have a collective narrative.

Each teller probably added an inflection here, a detail there, until over time it settled

into a legend whose exact source is impossible to name. When Carl Jung speaks about

the communal imagination, he is speaking about the pressure which forces revolution

to rear its head. Similarly, there was a collective pressure that drove storytellers, over

centuries, to create a cultural myth such as Rapunzel.

With exceptional clarity, the enchantress explains her position: the

interlocking and co-operative systems of the nobility and the Church effectively kept

the peasants from enjoying collective resources, punishing any demands upon the

existing commonwealth. She is employed by Rapunzels storytellers out of a need to

understand why human beings accept and propagate oppressive scenarios, such as

the one the peasants were left with when their war was ended.

35
 Ah, answered he, let mercy take the place of justice, I only made up my

mind to do it out of necessity. My wife saw your rapunzel from the window,

and felt such a longing for it that she would have died if she had not got some

to eat.

The enchantress is a figure that appears so consistently in fables and myths

that her presence represents a core belief. She is a villain, but not merely: she is an

all-powerful and all-possessing one. How else could she demand what she demands?

How else could she respond with such wrath to the husbands presence in her

garden? Through the lens of psychotherapy, the presence of a larger-than-life villain

is a call to the individual and the collective to develop the force needed to stand equal

and opposite the enchantress or evil-doer. The fact that she is female means she has

access to the totality of powerearthly and occult, political and spiritualas the

tradition of fairy tales suggests for female villainous personae. It is also possible that

the image of a womanas oppressed as she was still in the Late Middle Agesexacted

a price for her mistreatment in the quotidian world by transforming into an evil

super-power in the mythic world.

In any case, the force the peasants needed in order to bring down the

hegemony of Late Middle Ages society was indeed enormous. They required not only

spiritual support but also practical supporttechnology, knowledge, arms, and funds

most of which were lacking. So the husbands only recourse, as much as the

German peasantrys, was to ask for mercy by making an honest claim for the necessity

and defensibility of his and their actions. The husbands statement is full of courage

and honesty; he does not claim to be justified in his actions. Rather, he asks for

36
mercy, which is a way of negotiating and a means of strategic approach. By appealing

to the enchantress mercy, he is presenting her with a more positive image of herself

as a potentially understanding figure, thereby hoping to buy time, save his own head,

and obtain more cooperativeeven if subjugatedrelations with her. Capitulation

and obedience are waiting just around the corner.

Then the enchantress allowed her anger to be softened, and said to him: If

the case be as you say, I will allow you to take away with you as much

rapunzel as you will, only I make one condition, you must give me the child

which your wife will bring into the world; it shall be well treated, and I will

care for it like a mother.

The enchantress allowed her anger to be softened. Likewise, the nobility did

give something to the peasants, but only after negotiation. The husband here is a

multilayered symbol; he is from the peasantry, but somewhat removedhe has more

bargaining power. He represents those within German society who could speak with

the nobility. He is the male patriarchal figure. Similarly, in Germany the presence of a

helping class of a slightly higher stature was instrumental during the Peasants War.

Their negotiations obtained minor concessions from the nobility in some

principalities and also led important revolts. This group contained artisans, the

educated townspeople and even in some cases clergymen, who chose to identify with

the peasant movement for a variety of reasons. In the fairy tale, the husband and wife

can see through their little window into the garden of the enchantress. They are

37
close enough to the over class, the privileged within society, as to enable the peasants

and revolutionaries to want what they dont have.

It is also noteworthy that the husband in the fairy tale is moved not only by his

own will but also by the nearly desperate urging of his wife. Echoes of the story of

original sin emanate from that dialogue: it was Eve who caused the fall from grace

into knowledge, first tasting and then urging Adam to taste as well the fruit from the

tree of consciousness. In Rapunzel, however, the slowness and simplicity of Eve and

Adamlost in a silent landscape of originalityis transposed into the key of early

modernity. Class now exists. Naming is important in both tales as well. The unnamed

mother and father in Rapunzel are exactly that: anonymous. Their condition is meant

to appeal not only to the individual listener or reader, but to whole groups of people

whose very lives are represented in exactly that way: as one, nearly exchangeable unit

in an anonymous mass not yet named or no longer named, as is often the case in

history. The mans willingness to serve his spouses wish is a statement about the

nature of the peasants livelihood: perpetual servitude to the nobility on the one hand

and to the laws of nature on the other. When he does his wifes bidding, we are helped

to understand how the mind of the revolution was at work. Mother representing

culture poses as the initiator of forbidden knowledge, and father, representing

society, poses as its willing servant and protector. This means that the revolutions

necessity was articulated first through cultural channels and then carried through to

action with all of its horrendous and heroic consequences.

38
 The man in his terror consented to everything, and when the woman was

brought to bed, the enchantress appeared at once, gave the child the name of

Rapunzel, and took it away with her.

As an archetype, what is difficult to understand about the enchantress is the

combination of allure and domination her title encompasses. It would be too easy to

see her as the simple villain in Rapunzel, just as it seems evident that the peasants

and their sympathizers are innocent and good while the King, the nobles, and the

Church are all evil-doers. Avoiding these simple categories, we arrive at a more

nuanced truth about the very human conditionsobedience and rebellionwhich in

turn support and resist change or transformation.

The figure of Martin Luther, whom we have thus far placed in the margins,

enters the discourse here in a most timely fashion. Who is he? What does he want?

And, who is he actually for? There are no straightforward answers to these questions.

While his actions and lifes work are not entirely expressed in the story of Rapunzel, it

is he who embodies the problematic nature of the agreement between the

enchantress and the husband. Its he who is both human and archetypal, requiring

the reader to embrace this paradox. Luther liberated and oppressed the peasantry at

the same time, frustrating ultimately all political expediencies in his dogged and

lonely pursuit for what he considered an individual truth. He is invoked here

because he helps demonstrate a deeper understanding about the oppressing

conditions disguised as the enchantress who protects the status quo.

As a divisive figure, embraced at least partially for selfish reasons by the

peasantry, common people, and the nobility simply for his rejection of the Churchs

39
secular authority, Luther provides a lucid example of one of the ways in which the

enchantress tends to operate. As an archetype, the enchantress lives in everyone. So

does Rapunzel. The parents and the Kings son, who will later appear, are agents in

the struggle between the two, supporting characters in a drama played out on every

level, from the interior life of the individual to the political theatre of nations. Martin

Luther, who struggled all of his life to interpret scripture for himself, refused to be

dominated by the existing hegemonic structure.

By the same token, Luther refused to be identified with the peasantry, whom

he reviled in a document he published in 1525, titled Against the Murderous and

Thieving Hordes of Peasants. In this appeal he asked the princes to suppress the

revolts so as to reassert their authority, to which the peasants owed their obedience.

It is true that Luther was nearly killed while touring the South on a preaching

mission, a fact that must have diminished his opinion of the peasantry, but it also

reveals that he probably had limited knowledge of them apart from such missions.

Otherwise, he would have been less surprised or known better how to contend with

the situation. In any case, Luthers reaction wasnt simply a matter of racism or

classism, but rather a desperate wish to see the revolts end.

Luther opened one door, the door of hope, which had been closed to the

peasants and to society as a whole. Yet by generating movement, he upset the stasis,

thereby serving each of the discontents at play in the human theatre of desire that

was the Germany of that epoch. The window of opportunity swung open when he

named the hegemony unreal and demanded some kind of re-ordering. The

peasants, however, leaned too fully on him, wishing he could work out a new world

order. But he couldnt. He was no hero. He was just a man who sat down for hours

and days with the hope of answering a question that wouldnt go away with repeated

40
scriptural ablutions. The wound of faith was on him, on the peasantry, and the

nobility as well, while the mighty Church and the King looked on from above. As

usual, the gridlocked socio-economic structure of late medieval Germany kept society

frozen in its step.

Martin Luthers attempts at meditation finally yielded a tiny chasm, which the

peasants and their sympathizers sought to use. So did the nobles, the King, and the

Church. Thats where our story gets really interesting. The enchantress anger softens

to the husbands plea. The husbands terror bends his body, against his very soul, to

her demand and he agrees to take the rapunzel in his hand in exchange for his soon-

to-be child.

The logic of this exchange seems utterly incomprehensible. Rather, it is a

poetics all its own, rife with greed and fear for the wife and the husband, while for the

enchantress, power and obedience. Who abandoned the infant child: the father at

present or the enchantress in the future? Or perhaps it was the mother whose

unrestrained appetite pillaged the garden walls. And nowhow will the agency of

nascent, infant Rapunzel figure into this quagmire?

41
 Chapter II
Birth and the Tower
Court Culture and Absolutism
(1525 -1713)

What does democracy mean? Better yet, what does the prophecy of a

democracy mean? What do we permit a fairy tale to say? In the deep recesses of the

collective unconscious, does there exist an archetypal image of the humane, just

society? It is an incredibly fertile suggestion. If we consider it, we see history in an

entirely new light, as an arduous path toward the Promised Land, rife with setbacks

and betrayals of every kind. Each victory is only provisional, each story a compass

through but one layer of the maze. Rapunzel is barely a few days old, and already

forces are set in motion to make her life difficult. Difficult, and strangely promising.

The peasantry throughout the lands that would be united someday under the

name of Germany had fared poorly in their revolution. Things were worse than

before. The dream of a just and moral leadership was laid waste while the counter-

revolutionary forces found a new sense of solidarity in opposition. The nobles, the

King and the Church were able to find and see the benefits in protecting their

common interest. Rather than eroding feudalisms security as a social and geographic

structure, the concluding of the Peasants Warfollowed by numerous religious wars,

the Counter Reformation and finally by the onset of the Thirty Years Warresulted

in a further bolstering of feudal lords powers and privileges. These are hardly the

42
circumstances out of which one might expect a period of enlightenment to arise, but

thats precisely what occurred, against all odds.

The character of Rapunzel serves as a premonition of great things to come. But

in order to understand the predicament she faces, it is necessary to understand life in

Germany from 1525 to 1648: a period that saw the Peasants War concluded, the

Thirty Years War come and gone, and the aftermath of so much loss and change. The

Thirty Years Warwhat historians call the pan-European conflictraged principally

on German soil without reprieve from 1618 to 1648. It was a time in which every

major European power was engaged in brutal, undisciplined warfare, leaving many

communities all but destroyed.

Surprisingly, in areas untouched by war, the arts continued to flourish yet only

in the hands of fortunate nobles who were not obligated to participate in the warfare

and were thus unaffected. Slowly the arts were gathered into the culture of the

nobility and were nurtured there, developing into the phenomenon of what was later

called court culture. This culture stood in stark contrast to the German peasants way

of life. Villages and farms lost as much as two-thirds of their population, all of their

arable land and much of their livestock, leading to an ever-greater widening of the

gulf that separated the peasants and common people from the lords of the

principalities. The culture of the courts sheltered and protected the emergence of a

new wave of German creativity, but the conditions of this displacement would prove

to be problematic.

The birth of the great courts was a direct result of the ravages of those years

spent at war. The Peace of Westphalia, signed in 1648, ended thirty years of war and

permitted hundreds of local rulers across much of Germany (still at that time

43
considered the Holy Roman Empire) far greater control over their particular region,

as well as the right to determine the religious observance of their principality. It also

encouraged them to permit a degree of liberty in terms of religious worship. Unlike

the Netherlandswhere townships and trade connected the populace with relatively

free economic and cultural exchangein Germany, whose center became the court,

there was no such thing happening. The gap between life inside and life outside the

court widened rapidly once the Peace of Westphalia had been signed.

The couple in the fairy tale, like the townspeople and peasantry themselves, no

longer inhabit the significant space in the story, because the center, the power itself,

has been placed in the hands of the ruler and of the enchantress. The ruler now

decides, albeit graciously, not only the fate of his subjects but their faith as well, while

the enchantress sets the very limits of Rapunzels young existence.

The loss of confidence in German culture, which spread throughout the

provinces and especially those areas most damaged by the Thirty Years War, is a

consequence of the enormous transformation that was taking place. An already

weakened populace looked on as the national resources shifted to so many

principalities in which, unlike the bustling life of a village or town, they could never

hope to play a part, however small. That is, unless one were an artist. Artists were

adopted, raised, protected, patronized, and used to further the nations archive of

creative output. The protagonist of this scenario is King Frederick I of Prussia, who,

by the end of his reign in 1713, had established a throne in his land, cultivated a rich

artistic and intellectual environment, and instituted an aristocracy which oversaw

social and political life.

44
 There was a very real divide between the ruling class and the people.

The nobility all across Germany were taking from the folk culture its best and finest.

Promising young artists were raised inside court walls and in some areas, artwork

was confiscated from village churches. This gulf yawned wider in the land of

Rapunzels broken family. The child has been named and taken away from her

mother and father. Where will she go? Who will she become? What kind of parent

will the enchantress turn out to be? And most of all, what will the implications be for

the German people?

Rapunzel grew into the most beautiful child under the sun.

Rapunzel will shine with resplendent virtue and the promise of a

brighter day, despite her surrogate mother being a witch, her parents being

completely unknown to her, and her having a name which means, literally, field

lettuce. Beauty, in fairy tales, is the mark of blessing and goodness, which means

that there is cause for relief, for all is not lost. The beauty of Rapunzel is an embodied

metaphor: a bursting forth of an unpredicted capaciousness. What is art if not the

flower of creative desire, fertilized by the irritants of an imperfect world? Rapunzels

beauty is a promise that beauty can and will flourish, even in the most hostile of

environments. The birth of Rapunzel in the fairy tale symbolizes the birth and

development of what was to become Germanys uniquely magnificent artistic and

cultural heritage: architecture, music, philosophy, literature, and eventually science

that began to blossom, paradoxically, after the Peasants War.

45
 So there was still hope for the peasants, despite the detrimental turn of events.

During the time of Luther, the seed of a social revolution was born, arguably the very

first social revolution in history. It should come as no surprise that it was met with

powerful resistance and was squelched to all intents and purposes. How do we

explain the fact that following the peasants defeat in 1525, and their subjugation once

again in 1648 under the rule of nearly 2,000 princes, the foundations were being laid

for the kind of society they had dreamed of? The quality of life in Germany reached

an all-time low and the aristocracy flourished. But somehow, amidst of all of this, the

foundation for a better way of life was slowly being laid: a better way of life for

everyone. This was the fruit of the creative process: art.

When she was twelve years old, the enchantress shut her into a tower, which

lay in a forest, and had neither stairs nor door, but quite at the top was a little

window.

While the populace lost much of its artistic heritage to them, the courts played

their role in pushing many art forms to unprecedented heights. An expression of

emotion and creativity was born in Germany that flourished from the early 1500s to

the end of the Weimar Republic in 1933. By the late 1700s, Germany became known

as Das Land der Dichter und Denker, which means the land of poets and

philosophers, and had it not been for Hitlers rise to power, Weimar Culture of the

1920s and early 1930s would no doubt have blossomed into a second renaissance.

The energy with which the powerful classes both exploited and nurtured creativity

was a consequential force which shaped a legacy to the world.

46
 Rapunzel is that legacy. While she was born outside the palace walls to humble

parents, she was destined to shape her identity by the light from a tower window. She

is a symbol, promising thatdespite everythingthere is cause for hope and space for

creative inspiration.

One result of Rapunzels surrogate upbringing can be seen in the geography of

Germany today, where there is a proliferation of a variety of local identities within

each individual state. Travelling in Germany, each region bears an architectural

stamp in which a particular principality caused a unique character and culture to

flower in its vicinity.

Rapunzels placement in the tower was a way of keeping her individuality

intact. Likewise, courts were able to preserve and develop the unique characteristics

of the art they produced, rather than selling out to a more homogenous brand of

beauty propagated from a distant capital. This fact is evidenced by the organization of

society in Germany around numerous courts and small cities rather than around one

central seat. The citizens of Germany were never far from a center, even if it was a

much smaller center than the great capitals of Europe, and one that reflected local

identity. The effect was an increase of the relative power of principalities over the

peasants and common people by proximity and protection. This subtle difference has,

over time, shaped many aspects of the German cultural character, and it is reflected

in the narrative of our fairy tale by the landscape in which the story unfolds.

Rapunzels place of isolation is a tower that the enchantress can easily reach,

even if it is in a deep forest. In this way, she can provide for her while keeping her

subjugated at the same time. Further echoes of this proximity-isolation dynamic and

its ambivalent effects can be heard in the remainder of the story, but it is at this

47
moment in Rapunzel that the fairy tales authors have introduced the next essential

problem which the story communicates. It is a problem the whole of Germany would

take over 300 years to address: what are the necessary conditions for freedom? What

sort of environment is needed for freedom to flourish? And, what is the cost? When

the most beautiful child under the sun is placed high in a tower with no stairs or door

and only a window to look out of, left orphaned and alone in the middle of a dark

forest, we are to understand that the human being is unconsciously waiting for an

event of psychic proportions.

When the enchantress wanted to go in, she placed herself beneath it and

cried, Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair to me. Rapunzel had magnificent

hair, fine as spun gold

Innocence has no business idly letting her hair grow into a ladder for the

oppressor, although this is what she is forced to do. A spiteful imbalance is setting

itself up, which means a critical event is just around the corner. Examined through

the lens of Jungian analysis, we would say that consciousness is knocking on the

unconscious door, wondering who or what will answer.

The magnificent long hair of Rapunzel is a way of saying that the force, energy

and beauty of the commoners childart itselfwas enlisted in the service of the

climbing oppressor, the aristocracy. Hair is emblematic of vitality; Rapunzels hair is

as long as the tower is high and strong enough to climb upon, indicating a great deal

about the surge in creative work in the German courts. The length of her hair is a

48
mark of its cultivation, much like courtly gardens in which nature was bent to serve a

human aesthetic. Like her golden hair, the criterion of aesthetics was predominant in

many fields, especially in music. The genius of Bach, likewise, was drawn out and

extended by the protected environment in which it was elevated.

One of the strengths of court culture was that it permitted many more artists

to prosper. But with this development, the loss to society was to have far reaching

consequences: by appropriating and cultivating the arts and artists, the nobility also

robbed the people of the very source thatin a time of great duress such as the Thirty

Years War and its aftermathpromised most to heal the community. By the end of

the war and the signing of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 (one of the main reasons

for its success of which was greater autonomy for the numerous princes) high art

was firmly in the control of the nobility. Germany had taken a turn in a more clearly

defined direction, which not only delayed its chances of becoming unified, but also of

becoming a center of cultural and economic activity in Europe. The power of the

princeswho in many regions were despoticgrew in proportion to the shrinkage of

the Holy Roman Empires political centrality. Along with this change came a feeling

of alienation for Germans, as well as a loss of confidence in the very things that made

them culturally unique.

In fairy tale symbolism, much as in the interpretation of dreams, the birth of a

female child alerts the reader to important activity in the realms of relationship,

emotion, and inspiration, as opposed to signifying pragmatic or institutional

development. The enchantress and Rapunzel both being female, point to a vast array

of emotional and creative expression harnessed to different ends not yet fully

revealed in our story. They illustrate, when taken together, that the anima, is both

49
above and below, both obstacle and prize. The potential energy latent in their

relationship reflects the problem of their respective positions.

Rapunzel, who represents the creative soul, belongs in the high place, and the

enchantress, who represents her perfect opposition as oppressoror as Carl Jung

would say the shadowbelongs below. But fairy tales remind us that there is always

something to be fought for in this world. Rapunzel is going to grow as the enchantress

ages and nature indifferently assists in rebalancing the scales in favor of the child.

There are centuries to traverse, however, before the high princess of the soul can

come down and contend with the world for her place in the affairs of human beings.

As Rapunzel grows in the fairy tale, so grew an ever-increasing body of artwork in

Germany.

The enchantress, still unnamed, remains for the time being obscure, serving to

indicate that oppression of the lowest classes by the nobility occurred in the Late

Middle Ages not only in Germany, but all across greater Europe. When the

enchantress gains a distinctly German name in the fairy tale, there will be good

reason for it: the naming of the characters ties their identities to specific experiences,

geographies, and periods. It is the enchantress who names the child Rapunzel, a

lettuce that grew abundantly in the fields and forests of the Germanic regions in the

16th century. Her name mocks her; why else would the enchantress pick it?

Rapunzels parents only wanted an herb, rapunzel. So, the enchantress punishes the

child and family with this name, as if to express her enormous power over them and

the hopelessness of their desire.

* * *

50
 Absolutismwhere total authority emanated from the kingwas first

implemented in 1660 at the court of Louis XIV of France. It was put into practice in

Germany shortly after. Lasting into the early 1800s, its fundamental principle was

based on a widely held theory known as the divine right of kings. As a result, the

standing of the German princes increased considerably. With their new status came

the desire as well as the need to emulate the great courts, which helped to accelerate

the development of numerous court centers that were appearing throughout

Germany. These cultural centers became richer and more ensconced in the society of

privilege, and in some cases court culture developed into enormous, wealthy, and

influential hubs of creative enterpriseKing Frederick Is court being the best

example.

Germany had never experienced such an extraordinary emersion of cultural

expression. This blossomingbaroque, rococo, and later classicaloffered an

imaginative oasis in a climate of obedience to an absolute power. An intractable

difference was evolving between the feminine culture of creative expression and the

masculine nature of vying for pre-eminent positions among the societys most

powerful players. The rise of the arts stood in contrast to a culture of obedience that

would be increasingly determinate in Germanys history. As territorial rulers held

greater sway over their constituents than the Empire had ever done previously, the

citizen was replaced by the subject, and artistic development was kept safely out of

the populations hands.

This poses a problem for Rapunzel. The story itself reflects a societal

perspective on whats happening. Rapunzels removal at birth is not a neutral one

51
from one household to another, or even a relocation. It is an imprisonment and an

abduction. The symbol of the tower is used as a metaphor, distancing the artist and

their creativity from the public domain on one level, and from the individuals grasp

on another. For centuries, the developments underway were isolated within the

confines of the court system while outside the palace walls, little progress was made.

Without the free circulation of cultural ideaswithout the natural inter-mingling of

fine art with folk artadvances in Germanys culture development was minimal,

barely reaching the society as a whole.

The tower where Rapunzel is placed, starting from the age of twelve,

symbolizes that a region of great vitality and potential lay virtually untapped in a

vastly unknown and unrequited space. Indeed, the tower permits access of only an

extremely limited kind: the enchantress alone can call for Rapunzel, no one else, and

certainly not the other way around.

If Rapunzel is to be cared for by the enchantress, then it seems evident that she

will never be given the freedom to develop naturally under the guidance of her

parents. On the other hand, had she remained solely with her parents, she would

have surely grown up impoverished. Her removal from a natural family environment

to one in which her development will be groomed and guided severely in a specific

direction by an external force, is expressive of the difficulty with which exquisite

beauty found its path into the modern world. It is a reflection of the sacrifices that

were needed in order to produce great bodies of work in a social climate that was not

conducive to creativity.

* * *

52
 The richness and diversity of creativity taking place especially in the 17th and

18th centuries was certainly made possible by the protection and wealthy patronage

of the court system. That isnt to say that without these, German art would never have

developed, but folk artists and artisans of the time have mainly been lost to history,

whereas the work of artists produced under the auspices of the courts remains with

us intact today. When the enchantress claims that she will care for Rapunzel like her

own child, she expresses this predicament. On the one hand, Rapunzels parents

were to lose their baby; on the other hand, the child would now be destined for a

noble upbringing. The artist who was offered the mixed blessing of courtly patronage

had to exchange his familiar world for the glories and pressures of court life.

The considerable rise in artistic development during this period was also

accompanied by the states declining concerneconomically, socially, and religiously

for the well-being of the people. This was in part due to the reduction of the

Churchs overall presence and influence. The Holy Roman Empire was being replaced

by numerous principalities, whose powers were now absolute and whose religious

identities were no longer of official concern. Bureaucracies established a link between

the aristocracy and wealthiest citizens to the king or prince with a network of

compartmentalized relations. At the same time, heavier burdens and higher taxes

were placed on the peasants and common people. This may contribute to an

understanding of the ways in which power was maintained in the hands of the elite.

As less attention was being paid to the decline and decay of society throughout

Germany, and the Church was no longer able to retain spiritual authority over the

fate of its subjects, the princes, now with their semi-divine status, focused more on

53
reining in this precious, invisible life force and harvesting it for the greater glory of

individual kingdoms.

One kind of numen, or spirit, was replaced by another. Religion, according to

Carl Jung, is a careful and scrupulous observation of what Rudolf Otto aptly termed

the numinosum, that is, a dynamic agency or effect not caused by an arbitrary act of

will. Indeed creativity, too, is an ordering of effects not caused by an arbitrary act of

will. The similarities between religious and creative inspiration rest in this

hypothesis: both are produced by a call from within, a channeling of something

greater than oneself. By granting artists opportunities, such as court composer, the

nobility secured their relationship with this divine source of ongoing vitality and

harnessed it towards legitimatizing their importance. As a result, the artwork

benefited, developed, expanded, and grew more profound.

The artist and his creation, however, were certainly not treated with equal

respect. Historically, artists were used for the beauty they supplied and then

frequently discarded when no longer of service. In our fairy tale, something similar is

happening. Rapunzel grew into the most beautiful child under the sun, but she was

evidently not the happiest or the most loved child, held captive as she was and

deprived of playmates and room to roam. Artists benefited from court patronage in

terms of their work, but they frequently suffered from a lack of respect and freedom

to develop as they wished.

The life of Mozart was one such case. Unwilling to conform and after having a

number of bad experiences, he chose to leave the court environment. Unfortunately,

the hardship of trying to make it on his own only brought on his early death in 1791,

54
at the age of 35. The system simply abandoned him, tossing his body into a mass

grave. To this day his burial site remains unknown.

Dependency was created all around the court and made firm by a social

hierarchy. Artists were servants, merely part of the court staff. In this manner, the

princes and aristocracy were able to cement their access to the movement in the arts

and prevent it from spilling into the hands the revolutionariesthe German people at

large, the peasants and common people. Inside court walls, art could be observed

and as the French physicist Jean Bernard Foucault noted, observation is the key to

manipulationand cultivated and controlled. Outside those walls it might have run

free, have changed, and more dangerous still, have blended with society. Raising and

informing the consciousness of all different kinds of people was certainly beneath

such a divine, such a numinous presence as a work of beauty, a work of art. Here

again was the same problem the people were up against just before the Reformation:

because of the Church, they were denied access to the sacred text.

When she was twelve years old, the enchantress shut her into a tower...

At the age of twelve, the human being arrives at a watershedemotionally,

physiologically, and biologicallythe passing of which denotes irreversible changes

on many levels. With the beginning of the reproductive period in a girls life and all

the emotions and growth accompanying it, there is a clear reason why Rapunzel is

locked away at this age. Her ability to create new life is on the brink of flourishing, a

just metaphor for Germany in the 17th century with the onset of courtly life, the

55
German Enlightenment and, of course, all of the flowering in the arts. Creativity and

sexual, regenerative power serve as metaphors here because the dangers inherent in

the unleashing of a misunderstood potency were felt and dealt with by the

burgeoning court aristocracy as much as by the enchantress in the role of surrogate

mother.

At the age of twelve Rapunzel has reached the beginning of adolescence and

will now learn that she is an individual; to suppress or to pursue her new role will

come at a cost to her, no matter her decision. To lock her away is to prevent an

increasing self-awareness from developing and interfering with the enchantress

plans. The height of the tower, we learn, is 20 ellsor roughly 75 feetis a tribute to

Rapunzels potential, as much as is the absence of a door or stairs. How great, how

awesome, must have been the aura of Rapunzel to necessitate such extreme

measures.

This imprisonment worked in two ways. It prevented Rapunzels escape, but it

also denied anyone access to her, and this fact is equally important when we look at

the events that were taking place in Germany at the time. By keeping the population

ignorant of important artistic developments, the nobility could safeguard its control

over the access to those developments. Furthermore, dependence and isolation

ensured the artists loyalty. To be permissive, prolific, and accessibleto grow ones

hair long enough to be used by the keeper for a ladderwas the artists job. Contact

with the masses was discouraged. Passion and discontent were not to be aroused.

This curtailed the very thing that gives birth to positive social change: reciprocity and

exchange between differing viewpoints.

56
 The number twelve carries a mystic and occult significance, which weaves in

and out of different cultures and societies throughout our history. There are twelve

signs in the Zodiac wheel, the method by which ancient Babylonians measured the

heavens. In Greek mythology, there are Twelve Olympians, the gods who hold court

in the sky. The Norse god of wisdom, Odin has twelve sons. In the Old Testament we

learn about the Twelve Tribes of Jacob; in the New Testament Jesus has twelve

apostles. Hercules performed twelve physical feats; after his crucifixion, the

resurrected Jesus was spotted twelve times.

Historically, twelve is a number that has embodied a kind of divine balance, a

link between our world and the heavens. Up until the 19th century, the origins of

creative knowledge were assumed to be divine. Martin Luther believed music was

divinely designed, and should be used to glorify God. Luther wrote numerous

chorales, or vocal arrangements, which demonstrated his spiritual and philosophical

engagement with this concept. The enchantress taking Rapunzel at the age of twelve

is an extension of this phenomenon. At this age, Rapunzel is now beautiful and

mystically harmonized to conduct either spiritual or creative energy into the world.

As such, she is coveted by the enchantress and must be secured, far from any

influence that could taint her. Likewise, the growing secularized culture of

aristocratic principalities was seeking its own claim to divine grace and securing its

access to great works of art.

Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Let down your hair to me.

57
 The enchantress call initiates the complicit, obedient relationship which

defines Rapunzel in the fairy tale. What may haunt the reader about this cry is how

close to a lovers call it is. Certainly, in the age of courtly love, romance was defined by

moments in which the lover sought access to their beloveds inner most heart. In

contrast, we have here a dangerous rapport in that the sought-after Rapunzel does

not long to be found but obliges the enchantress because she must. It isnt natural;

nature is propelled by desire, never by obedience. Or is it? In any case, court culture

was arranged so that under any circumstances the artist was available to satisfy the

nobilitys whims. The structure of the social hierarchy was mechanized, and because

of this the flows of desire were either constrained or overwhelmed.

Rapunzel had magnificent long hair, fine as spun gold, and when she heard

the voice of the enchantress she unfastened her braided tresses, wound them round

one of the hooks of the window above, and then the hair fell twenty ells down, and

the enchantress climbed up by it.

After Rapunzel takes her hair down and wraps her braids around the hook,

they then become nothing more than rope. This metaphorical conversion of natural

radiance into climbing rope introduces the idea of exploitation. By putting beauty to

use in a secondary function as a means of climbing up a doorless tower, the figure of

the enchantress enslaves the numen inherent in Rapunzels gorgeous hair.

58
 * * *

Looking back, the betrayal the German people faced in the era of absolutism

becomes clearer. After the humiliating defeat in the Peasants War, the peasants from

the 17th and 18th century stood, nonetheless, in a much better position than if their

ancestors had not taken up arms between 1524 and 1525.

History will later show that it was better a regional prince laying down the law

than a distant institution in Rome posing as the divine presence on earth. Although

the hope of ending the exploitation of the poor wouldnt be realized still for some

time, the progressive loss of faith in an almighty Church across much of the Holy

Roman Empirewhat would later become Germanyresulted in a shift in the

balance of power. That promising and grand body of completeness, which the Empire

had for centuries represented, was increasingly to be interpreted by a range of kings

and princes, who were now the sovereign power throughout Germany. And during

this same periodwhich produced Bachs glorious fugues and the Goldberg

Variationsthe nobility set about usurping the arts solely for their own use and

pleasure and used them as a means to secure their contact with numinous knowledge.

No longer able to purchase entrance into heaven by way of the Church, court

aristocrats sought salvation by purchasing the lives and works of promising artists

and thinkers, thus unwittingly setting the wheels in motion for change.

59
The poem, the song, the picture, is only water drawn from the well of the people,

and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty, so that in drinking they

know themselves.

Federico Garcia Lorca

60
 Chapter III
The Listener
and the
German Enlightenment
(1650 -1814)

Imagine, for a moment, a girl of seventeen. Her heart does not yet know the

feeling of love. She stands at her window in her robes, practically buried in them. She

stands there, staring out and sings. This is our heroine, Rapunzel.

What does she sing? We can guess that its a simple song, but also a true one.

Thus far shes lived her entire life in captivity. Shes never been to a school dance,

never heard any of the Top 40 hits, her mother never lulled her to sleep with children

songs. With no material to work with, and no one to listen, she has no choice but

with the little freedom she hasto pull sound from deep within, un-encoded, and

pure, to voice her longing the only way she knows how. Just exactly as it is. And it

comes to her, a song. This being the only thing in her dreary cycle of days that seems

to makes any sense.

We should also remember: shes never even seen a man! What is a man?

Seventeen, buried in her robes and singing by the window.

For a year or two.

61
After a year or two, it came to pass that the Kings son rode through the forest and

passed by the tower.

Come back! Enter the Kings son.

Then he heard a song, which was so charming

...just exactly as it is.

so charming that he stood still and listened.

Before hearing Rapunzels voice the forest was mysterious, filled with a raw

potentiala mystery undefined. With this new melody, something takes shape.

Charm plays its magic lute, and natureas if under a spellobeys. The Kings son

and his surroundings are forever transformed by the presence of Rapunzels delicate,

sensual, and somehow holy, song.

This was Rapunzel, who in her solitude passed her time in letting her sweet

voice resound.

Fear and tender recognition are the primal extremes between which charm is

delicately poised. Captured by this charm, the Kings son will return again and again.

He will seek out Rapunzel, with the hope of understanding the nature of this

impossible, yet wonderful singing voice: drawn and guided by her melody, by the

promise of something beautiful and new. And just as the forest was being tamed by a

song, likewise, without the development of the arts in court society, the course of

62
feudalism may never have veered toward a government of reason, a government free

of superstition.

* * *

Nearing the end of the 18th century, feudalism in Germany was moving

towards a transformation. Although the serfs, peasant and common people were still

locked in a cycle of helplessness of varying degrees, culturethe arts and philosophy

as it evolved, would bring a sense of identity to the German people with hope for a

future.

In the end, it took Napoleons invasion into Germany in 1797 to finally bring

down the many feudal principalitiesalong with their grip on society, their resistance

being no match against the far superior French armies. Once secured, Napoleon set

about establishing administrative and legal systems. Although the Germans grew to

hate the imposition of Napoleon, they nonetheless clung to the numerous changes his

regime brought about when he departed. These systems, once in place, operated with

much greater efficiency, and by 1814 serfdom (in a number of regions), the restriction

on mobility of laborers and guild privileges were abolished. The foundation was laid

for what would become a modern German infrastructure, setting the stage for

Germanys late entry into the industrial revolution.

The Kings son wanted to climb up to her, and looked for the door to the

tower, but none was to be found.

63
 Stepping back, it was the Aufklarungthe German Enlightenment of the 18th

centurythat readied the German mind for this era of changes to the bureaucratic

system Napoleon was to bring. As the states organization improved, ideas such as the

philosophy of Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804) and later Georg Hegel (1770-1831) found

fertile ground in which to take root.

What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational, was Hegels way of

affirming the link between the minds of citizens and the social forms they erect or

support. Kant, on his side, claimed that it was necessary to have strong rulers who

could guarantee political stability and the ordered circumstances in which alone

thinking could take place.

The German Enlightenment (1650-1800) differed from the French and English

Enlightenment. Its principles were based on metaphysics as well as a desire to unify

German culture. Writers, philosophers and artistsengaged with new ideas

imagined a new kind of leadership, one that had the responsibility of protecting, and

indeed reflecting, the mind.

As the Kings son is being shaped by his journeys towards the tower, the

German people were moving towards something new, something liberating: the

possibility of a social, democratic awakening. The Kings son makes his way through

the forest to Rapunzel and with repetition masters the way to the enchanting,

beautiful voice. What will happen when they meet?

* * *

What kind of man this Kings son is has a good deal to do with his upbringing,

but equally, as much to do with how he diverges from that upbringing. Being the son

64
of the King, the latest in the line of monarchs, he has a strong tie to the values of the

old order: feudalism and absolutism. However, the road open before him could hold

something quite new, his destiny has yet to be determined.

He rode home, but the singing had so deeply touched his heart, that every

day he went out into the forest and listened to it.

Clues in the history of Germany during the mid to late 1700s indicate that

Frederick II, also called Frederick the Great, the first German sovereign to issue an

edict supporting freedom of religion, was a kind of Kings sonthe kind of man our

17-year-old imprisoned princess might adore. Reigning from 1740-1786during what

was later called the enlightened period of absolutismFrederick was a military

king, transforming Prussia (what is today most of northern Germany) into a major

European power during his term. But he was also reputed to be kind. He would stop

and greet peasants he passed on his arduous voyages across his now far-reaching

territory. He did his best to oversee personally the affairs of state in diverse regions at

a dangerous time for a monarch, almost losing everything during The Seven Years

War (1756-1763).

Even before becoming king, Fredericks insistence on religious freedom for his

subjects attracted the attention of Voltaire, who sent Frederick something like

platonic love poemsletters expressing admiration and philosophical brotherhood.

One from August 26th, 1736, reads:

Paris,

Monseigneur,

65
 I should indeed be insensitive were I not infinitely touched by the letter with
which your Royal Highness has been graciously pleased to honor me. My self-
love was but too flattered; but that love of the human race which has always
existed in my heart and which I dare to say determines my character, gave me
a pleasure a thousand times purer when I saw that the world holds a prince
who thinks like a man, a philosophical prince who will make men happy.
Suffer me to tell you that there is no man on the earth who should not return
thanks for the care you take in cultivating by sane philosophy a soul born to
command. Be certain there have been no truly good kings except those who
began like you, by educating themselves, by learning to know men, by loving
the truth, by detesting persecution and superstition. Any prince who thinks in
this way can bring back the golden age to his dominions. Why do so few kings
seek out this advantage? You perceive the reason, Monseigneur; it is because
almost all of them think more of royalty than of humanity: you do precisely the
opposite. If the tumult of affairs and the malignancy of men do not in time
alter so divine a character, you will be adored by your people and admired by
the whole world. Philosophers worthy of that name will fly to your dominions;
and, as celebrated artists crowd to that country where their art is most favored,
men who think will press forward to surround your throne.
The illustrious Queen Christina left her kingdom to seek the arts; reign,
Monseigneur, and let the arts come to seek you.

The letters from Voltaire suggest that before Frederick II became the King of

Prussia, he lived and breathed as a prince in the landscape of Germanys evolving

history. His vision was one, perhaps, that had the power to transform the direction of

the countrys history. Fredericklike the fables princeis a listener. He hears the

cries of his people, the mysterious song echoing throughout the forest. And he seeks

out its source.

Voltaire believed Frederick to be something rare, that paradox of civic life, the

philosopher-king, a just, benevolent ruler. The Kings son in Rapunzel is someone

very special. He is both here and there: next in line to the throne but his own man.

66
 * * *

When the Kings son enters our story, Rapunzel has already begun singing her

song. After a year or two, the Grimm brothers record, it came to pass that the

Kings son rode through the forest.

This year or two in the story symbolizes the period of time it took for the

oppressive regimes of tyrannical princes to yield to the ideals of the Enlightenment,

which illuminated Frederick II and allowed for a growing sense of national unity.

However, with the beginning of the 19th century, something more sinister was

to appear on the horizon. There was a deep anxiety in Germanys burgeoning

nationalism, as may occur in any nationalism. In defining who we are as a people, we

also define who we are not. We create the other. Looking back, the German

Enlightenment may have been the most productive period the arts had ever seen. It

was also the most frustrating for societys marginalized: the serfs and the Jews.

The Jews settled the German territories-to-be long before the establishment of

Christianity, and in some areas their settlements predated the Celts, Slavs, and Balts,

all of whom would later help to make up the Germanic people. In the Middle Ages,

Jewish communities were literate even at their poorest, largely due to a cultural

emphasis on the study of religious text. In contrast the surrounding peasants lived

much more uneducated, downtrodden lives. Jews played a crucial role in Germanys

cultural development, secularizing and promoting its spread in ways that

circumnavigated the court systems reach, yet maintaining their own religious and

cultural identity.

The years from 1745 to 1806 saw shifts, both dramatic and subtle, at almost

every level of civic and personal life. In the first two chapters, the existence of a

67
transitional class between peasants and nobles was only tangentially depicted, chiefly

in its role as go-between for the peasant revolutionaries and the upper classes.

Throughout the rise of absolutism, however, this intermediate class grew as well,

ushered along by developments in Germanys territorial infrastructure. Jews,

regardless of the degree to which they were permitted to live, succeeded in playing a

dynamic role in this class during the German Enlightenment, while at the same time

securing their cultural identity from forces that preyed heavily upon it. Moses

Mendelssohn, for example, one of the greatest and most respected philosophers of

the Enlightenment period and the father of Reform Judaism dedicated the later part

of his life to the emancipation of his people.

In 1781, in the southern German territoriesunder Austrias controlthe

Habsburg king Joseph IIs Edict of Toleration permitted most non-Catholics the

freedom to practice their religion in privacy. In the following years, several provinces

created edicts relieving Jews from prejudicial laws that limited their dwelling to

ordained areas. This was definitely a result of the Enlightenments effects, and came

in sharp contrast to the Habsburgs ruling which evicted an estimated 70,000 Jews

from Prague to placate anti-Semitic unrest just thirty years earlier.

During the Enlightenment the idea of Bildung, or education, had seized hold of

the German imagination in certain quarters, and there was great interest in artwork,

philosophy, poetry, and civic thought. Salons that prominent Jewish women hosted,

appeared in the imperial free cities that befriended them. These eclectic gatherings

gave prominence to new ideas where social dividing lines seemed to melt. Salons also

played an important role for intellectuals at a time when publishing houses were few

and court patronage on the wane. At salons, writers found patronage, stimulation,

and distribution. Men, women, Christians, Jews, poor and rich, crossed paths in the

parlors of upper-class intellectuals.

68
 One of the most famed gatherings was presided over by Rahel Varnhagen, an

independent Jewish woman living in Berlin. Varnahagens love for the arts and

philosophical conversation inspired her to bring together people who shared her

passions, reaching across social boundaries. A host of salons presided over by Jewish

women appeared between 1745 and 1806, at which point they abruptly came to an

end with the invasion of Napoleon.

During this same period throughout Germany, deep-seated racial prejudices

and blatantly violent racist imagery (the image of Jews in obscene contact with a sow,

the Judensau, adorned many city gates) combined with religious intolerance and

cultural chauvinism, were institutionalized aspects of urban and rural life. A tense

relationship was set up between the Jewish middle class and the ruling Christian one.

Some rulers required Jews to wear armbands and barred them from working in

certain professions. Jews were also subject to heavy, debilitating taxes and had to pay

a special fee in order to marry. Jewish lenders worked behind the scenes to promote

the development of many courts all across Germany, assisting with their management

as well as their economic affairs. Paradoxically, the plight of the Jews was further

aggravated by this growth that some had helped to nourish.

Berlin was no exception and had always been a crossroads for these divergent

tendencies, on the one hand tyrannically xenophobic, and on the other, a bastion for

pluralism. Berlin symbolized the crux of this problem the German people were to face

in the 19th and 20th centuries, now that philosophy had opened the door to deep,

thoughtful reflection and political pressures from other parts of Europe that had

begun to force quick change and expansion.

A sense of German unity was growing. As

in the past, Jews were excluded from this experience. Napoleons invasion, along with

his tolerance and acceptance of the Jews, perversely aggravated the nationalistic

69
impulses. With his retreat, in 1812, the tendency toward intolerance and persecution

once again became the norm. This raises the question of howin the upcoming

Romantic period in Germanycan an individual, and a people, examine their own

soul while also meeting their own, basic needs for growth and survival?

* * *

In the fairy tale the Kings son hears a beautiful melody in the wood. By this

fact alone, he feels different. Optimism somehow lingers in the air. The possibility

that an old patriarchy is making way for a newer, more conscientious one, is here

perceived. What joy it is to sing, but what greater joy will eventually come to

Rapunzel when she is heard and understood.

It is here, from the enchantress tower that the first songs of democracy ring

out: calling from young Rapunzel to the Kings son. An attraction between these two

people may well be the fruit of an inexplicable love not yet realized, only perceived

democracy, in Germany, and the culture that will shape it. An inborn happiness

glimmers across the image of Rapunzel singing and finally being heard, a flitting

glimpse of extraordinary things to come on the other side of hell-to-pay.

70
 Chapter IV
Frankenstein
and
The New World Outlook
(18141919)

London, February 21, 1888:

In an old notebook of [Karl] Marxs I have found the eleven theses on

Feuerbach which are printed here as an appendix. These are notes hurriedly
scribbled down for later elaboration, absolutely not intended for publication,
but invaluable as the first document in which the brilliant germ of the new
world outlook is deposited.

Fredrick Engels

Karl Marxs views were utopian and humanitarian and favored a sense of

community and shared identity with a return to the roots of local culture; these ideas

strengthened the nascent politics of nationalism.

The 1800s generally bolstered the creative intellects of German philosophers

who sought to redefine historical and ideal reality in their own terms. The brilliant

germ to which Engels referred was nothing less than a transformation in the way

society would see itself. Marxist thought was the first post-feudal cosmology. Once

developed, his new world outlook gave birth to new responsibilities and demands.

71
 The Kings son wanted to climb up to her, and looked for the door of the

tower, but none was to be found.

The Kings son cannot find a way to reach Rapunzel by any conventional

means. His situation will require a bit of imagination. The Kings sons frustration

expresses the difficulties intellectuals of the early 1800s faced in bringing their

newfound perspective to bear on the consensual reality of politics. Theirs was not a

straight path. The very people who took the time to work out, however roughly, the

shape of a better society were continually and categorically denied access to the law-

making machinery. Only in a secret underworld could the door to truth be found and

the wish for democracy nurtured.

The artists of Germanys Romantic Period, Goethes children in one way or

another ,responded to a rapidly changing society. In this new European industrial

age, modes of production and lines of communication became more uniform, geared

for an exploding population. Yet at the same time, thinkers, composers, writers, and

intellectuals began to imagine the world from a specifically German viewpoints.

German Romanticism honored the authority of the individual and of emotional

experience; it preferred song to reason. And since it appeared alongside the dawning

of the industrial revolution and a surge in the populationwith a rising class of ex-

serfs expanding an ever growing pauper class that suffered under great economic

pressuresit gave birth to a peculiarly German dilemma, one that Hegels work

addresses as much as Marxs: how shall we live together, and can we learn from our

history?

72
 During the Napoleonic period, feudal structures had been all but destroyed

the final blow coming at the Congress of Vienna in 1814. With them the supports that

had nurtured artists and kept them in place also disappeared. Artists, like the

composer Franz Schubert (1797-1828), who attempted to make it on their own

without a patron, frequently failed with no safety net to catch them when they fell.

In the field of philosophy however, new developments in thinking made the

future look much brighter. The web of exchanged ideas cultivated by and originating

from Hegels dialectic put forward the notion of a world spirit, held tentatively in the

form of history-material-idea. This belief provided much-needed fuel to a growing

middle class which would eventually revolt against the widening social disparities,

responding to the cognitive dissonances of the time.

Injustice, and the revolution that grew out of it, were in a cyclical exchange.

Social upheavals reflected a coming to consciousness, a collective grappling with the

injustices of 19th century Germany. There was a communal yearning on the peoples

part, a striving towards something better. As so often happened, throughout history

the quest to create a better society lead, tragically, to further injustice.

Although the revolutionary era in Germany was decisively driven by the new

middle class, it was fed with concerns also central to the average Germans heart:

visions inspired by the hope and beauty artists like Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-

1827) had depicted in their work. The message the artwork contained was this:

human beings, each and every one, provide a unique access to the soul of the

universe. This is a fundamentally empowering idea; each person can make history

come alive to be discovered anew every day. This message, once understood and

73
interpreted, gave birth to new responsibilities and demands: namely, the pressure to

bring together the life of the inner self with that of society as a whole.

He rode home, but the singing had so deeply touched his heart, that every

day he went out into the forest and listened to it.

Here as before, the listening itself is an important process and a kind of

apprenticeship, a humbling of oneself before something greater. Karl Marxs writings

were a potent record of such a deep listening. His attempt to articulate a vision for a

humane community without exploitationa rational and non-volatile economy

expressed in material terms, was a specifically German endeavor and desire. In

practice, its failure was equally important.

An immense identity struggle was under way in the 19th century as

represented by the Kings son riding home again and again, only to return the next

day unsatisfied and ready to hear more. The new generation of German romantics,

liberal, middle class intellectuals collided with the existing establishment, and

because the latter had an army and the former had not even a military sense,

confusion and ineffectuality were the result, well into the 20th century.

* * *

74
 The enchantress has seen to it that no one can reach Rapunzel without

knowing the secret words. The Kings sons repeated visits to the tower, during which

he attempts to assess the situation, represent the revolutionary period of the 1840s.

The Insurgents requests were satisfied just enough to take the sting out of their

attacks but nowhere near sufficiently to satisfy their actual demands.

On the one hand, feudalism had been abolished, education improved and

welfare measures created, but on the other hand, censorship and reactionary

conservatism estranged the powers-that-be even further from the harsh reality of the

people, especially that of the peasants and growing industrial lower class.

Those artists who had worked, as Romantics, to bring beauty and hope to the

populace, often suffered from misunderstanding and indifference. Art alone, at that

time, could not override the lack of education and the cultural gulf which separated

art forms previously cultivated at court from a people toiling in the fields and

factories to make ends meet. Marx wrote about the essence of human civic life, which

he believed was abundance, not the scarcity the economics of his time relied upon.

Plenty for all was, he believed, the destiny of society. Marx was articulating a desire

that was larger, older than himself, something at the heart of every man and woman.

With this evolution in thought came a new sense of responsibility to fellow

human beings. The idea of God lost its primacy. Humans themselves, rather than a

divine force, were now responsible for their own actions. The existence of an afterlife

was no longer a justification for a life lived unconsciously. This realization was due to

the considerable energy spent examining the correlation between political forms and

the human needs that these forms did or did not address.

75
 Many artists and intellectuals longed to lead the way towards a collective

enlightenment in whatever personal way they could. Beethovens first four notes of

his Fifth Symphony became a manifesto of sorts for the early German Romantics.

Later, the composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883) became a critical example of this

movement towards social responsiveness, creating an ethics of aesthetics. He

championed the cause of a uniquely German art form, creating entire worlds for the

stage, writing his own lyrics for compositions that united all the performing arts into

one vision, often inspired by Germanic mythology.

The hundred years that followed the Congress of Vienna in 1814 till World War

I in 1914 was a period of considerable fluctuation in Germany. The push among

intellectuals for political reforms, and the determination by those in the bureaucracy

to maintain the status quo, triggered an ever-shrewder strategy by the government to

substantiate their power.

Almost no concessions were made to popular demands. Amongst rulers such

as Prince Metternich of Austria-Bavaria, and Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia from

the earlier part of the 19th century, Friedrich Wilhelm IV in 1840, and Otto von

Bismarck who came to power in 1860, and Emperor Wilhelm II near the end of the

19thcenturyto the final days of the First World War in 1918,the clearest political trend

was decisively conservative: it was bolstered and assured by interlocking systems of

censorship, economic strain, European imperialist tensions, and the rising tide of

nationalism and anti-Semitism.

* * *

76
 The image of Rapunzels towerthe widening rift between the Young

Hegelians, like Marx, and the ruling classis particularly resonant. Hegel was a kind

of Rapunzel, free to articulate a personal vision and recognized by the establishment

of his time. On the ground below, Hegels vision took on new forms. Hegel could not

have imagined the magnitude of his legacy, which took on a life of its own.

His dialectic philosophy was interpreted in different ways, depending on who

was reading it. Nineteenth century revolutionaries examined Hegels work closely

and found it subversive and refreshing, a logic of the third stream. On the other

hand, kings found in it a most rewarding philosophical endorsement of the way that

they ruled.

Friedrich Wilhelm IVs ascent to power in 1840 changed the nature of

Hegelian discourse by mobilizing extremist tendencies, positioning himself into a

decidedly reactionary stance. This meant that Hegelian thought could no longer

pursue its purely philosophical aim, but turned now to the more basic problems of

survival under archconservative rule and intellectual oppression. Ironically, in this

capacity it provided a critical seed, a brilliant germ, for the not-so-distant golden age

of Weimar culture.

The interplay in Germany between artists and thinkers was to be of particular

significance regarding their ability to communicate a clear direction that the

imminent revolution of 1848 should have taken. But in the end the revolution faltered

because there was no real communication between the middle class and the common

people. Revolution came not only from the disenfranchised rabble but also from the

77
ranks of the intelligentsia and middle class, a factor which defined its outcome as well

as its origins.

The revolution of 1848, or the March Revolution, was spurred by Frances own

February Revolution, which brought down King Louis Philippe. In Germany, the

March Revolution was a contest between the powers-that-be who wanted to maintain

the status quo and the revolutionaries who were seeking democracy, and rejecting the

autocratic political structure that was in place.

What ensued was a squaring off of sorts of these two groups that could have

launched real change, but failed because they were unable to reach a consensus in the

newly formed Frankfurt Parliament. A constitution was eventually drafted but never

implemented with the old rulers regaining power and the parliament dissolving a

year later, forcing delegates as well as revolutionaries into exile .Known as the Forty -

Eighters, large numbers chose to emigrate to America, eventually assisting in

bolstering the democratic process in many parts of that country.

In 1860 Otto von Bismarck introduced palliative measures to satisfy the people

without addressing the root causes of social unrest. He introduced sickness

insurance, accident insurance, old age and disability insurance; but when scrutinized

closely, all of these turned out to be policies and nothing moreinsignificant

compared to the revolutionaries dream of social equity. These concessions where just

an adroit means of silencing the working class revolts, appeasing the populace with

the minimum amount of relief.

* * *

78
 What is the culture of democracy? It is a habitude. That is the only way we can

explain the continuing growth of democracy through the airtight conditions Bismarck

put into place to satisfy his national agenda. A brilliant germ indeed. By the middle to

end of the nineteenth century, with greater class struggle and the industrial

revolution in full swing, Germany began to experience the reemergence of the

nationalistic archetype, this time with an overtly masculine character toting the

banner of allegiance to unquestioned authority.

Nationalism generally champions a kind of certainty, national unity,

something solid. However, the negative elements of this archetype gained

considerable ground perhaps because many people found modern life to be

increasingly uncertain in myriad respects. Those who strove for democracy found

themselves continuously battling against this overtly masculine tendency to be ruled

undemocratically. The resulting conflict produced extreme cases of political crisis

that multiplied as the 20th century dawned.

Nevertheless, the richness of culture in the mid to late 19th century was

astonishing, especially when considering the enormous societal pressures to quit

dreaming, conform and press ones shoulder to the wheel of an ailing political

economy. Marx was eventually forced into exile for overestimating his intellectual

freedom by pointing out the disconnection between official culture and its actual

aims. Then later Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)with his book Thus Spake

Zarathustraprovided testimony to a deeply original poetic experience, only to have

it misunderstood by his innermost circle of friends, who abandoned him in 1880

when it was published.

79
 The relationship between Nietzsche and Wagner revisits one of historys great

unanswered questionswhat is art? The Birth of Tragedy and On the Genealogy of

Morals, written by a young, idealistic Nietzsche, broke ground, articulating the

ancient dynamics at play in contemporary art. The works remain deeply revelatory

today, and influenced art in America in crucial ways through the 20th century. In The

Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche illuminates aspects of the creative, archetypal soul.

This soul, he writes, yearns for fulfillment in two divergent modes, namely the

ways of Apollo and of Dionysus. With the Apollonian aesthetic comes the search for

balance, symmetry, and harmony, the eternal principle. The timeless arts belong to

Apollo: painting, sculpture, architecture. To Dionysus go the timely arts of music,

dance, and performance, for they are the right containers of emotional range,

mortality, evanescence, passion, the arts of loss and regaining. Where the former is

transcendent, the latter is deeply submerged.

Wagner was Nietzsches beloved comrade, until their falling out. For

Nietzsche, Wagners operatic works represented a euphoric synthesis between the

two extremes of Dionysus and Apollo. Wagners work engaged places in the human

soul which, according to Nietzsche and the novelist Thomas Mann, neither music nor

tragedy had ever touched, namely the fleshly and temporal embodiment of myth.

To link art and religion this way, Mann writes, reviewing Wagners opera,

Tristan, through a bold operatic treatment of sex, and to offer such a holy piece of

unholy artistry as a Lourdes-theatre and miracle grotto, catering to the hankering for

belief of a jaded, fin de sicle public: this is sheer romanticism; something absolutely

unthinkable in the classically humanistic, properly respectable sphere of art.

80
 Mann goes on, Romanticism is linked to all those mythical mother and lunar

cults that have flourished since the earlier periods of the human race in opposition to

solar worship, the religion of fatherly, masculine light: and it is under the spell of this

general lunar worldview that Wagners Tristan stands.

This helps to explain the duplicity of Wagner that ultimately broke Nietzsches

heart: precisely in this romanticism lay both the potential to lift the individual soul to

the heights of ecstatic communion with all life, as well as the capacity for an abusive

nationalism through the deification of cultural myths.

* * *

Which brings us back to the art of the song. How is it that Rapunzel can sing so

sweetly from her prison cell? The strength of Germanys culture is a tribute to its

evolution through many firmly structured phases before being released to find its

own way. In other words, the courts nurtured artists in such isolation and seclusion

that their art developed a great strength early on, an unflappable nerve that both in

politics and social change the Germans lacked. Therefore, the sweetness of

Rapunzels song is ambivalent. As the arts entered the era of industrialism, they had a

lot of catching up to do in order to speak from or to the heart of the people. But

indeed, why should art serve a social cause? The conundrum is that during the tumult

of restoration and the lead-up to World War I, art itself made a somewhat worrying

about-face, from being art for arts sake to art for the good of the nation. It didnt last

81
long, but its effect would be enduring: this whiplash was part and parcel of the times,

when the very definition of civic life was undergoing traumatic change.

The late 1870s and early 1880s first saw this sharp turn evidenced in the decay

of Nietzsches and Wagners friendship. More than a mere parting of ways, the two

men came to stand at opposite poles. Nietzsche railed against Wagners anti-

Semitism and now-debased art form, tainted by nationalisms virulence and

hardened against all but the so-called purely German mystique as recounted in local

folklore and myth. But oh! how Rapunzel sings, tucked away up there in that tower.

Supposedly, the idea was that artists like Wagner had finally come down from the

tower. But in fact, they were now contained in a new kind of enclosure, called the

state.

What is the meaning of the word decadence? To fall from, to fall down. When

Nietzsche called Richard Wagner the artist of decadence, he presaged, ironically,

the language of Hitlers circle. By decadent, Nietzsche meant sickening: He makes

sick whatever he toucheshe makes music sick. Nietzsche was heart-broken as he

watched a rising trend: the institutionalization of the arts, the servitude of the

creative numen to the states agenda: the Second Reich, the Great German Empire, to

which all should be subsumed. That the people in Germany should deceive

themselves about Wagner does not surprise me, Nietzsche wrote. The Germans

have constructed a Wagner for themselves whom they can revere.

But arent they fooling themselves by revering him? So the question becomes

this: was Rapunzels song truly her own, or some kind of compromise? Does it even

matter, as long as it brings the Kings son to her, and in the end her freedom?

82
 Part II

Otto von Bismarck saw to it that the Kings sons destiny would have to wait.

With victory in 1871 over France in the Franco-Prussian War, Bismarck militarized

the state against all eventualities to an unprecedented scale; as its first chancellor he

successfully united Germany. Considering war reparations from France as

insufficient, he exacted an even greater toll by taking the regions of Alsace and the

Loraine Valley. These were to be used as a buffer for any future encroachments,

creating more mistrust between the two nations that would only fester over time.

The Second Reich was now a reality. So strong were the misgivings among its

neighbors that the tensions that were to arise were in a way already anticipated back

in 1816. When the Congress of Vienna, in 1814, redrew Germanys principalities and

gathered them into a confederation of states, the desire to postpone the making of a

German nation was fraught, in some circles, with frustration and powerlessness.

With the end of the Wars of Liberation (1813-1814)as they were referred to in

Germany, when the Germans pushed the French out of their territoriesa movement

was created by young radicals to press for a German nation. But because of rivalries

between Prussia and Austria, and the conflicting interests amongst the numerous

princes, a piecing together of the disparate regions into a German confederation was

to be created instead, which would postpone Germany from becoming a nation for

another 55 years. Joining the community of European powers relatively late would

only generate mistrust and envy. As many Germans watched England in particular

83
grow into a world power, there evolved, over time, a feeling of frustration and

inferiority.

* * *

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelleya wholly unusual English novel that appeared

in 1818may have been a premonition, in literary form, of Germanys delayed birth

as a nation, and also a foreboding, imagining the potential consequences that were to

result from this delay.

Born in 1797, Shelley grew up with a father who was a radical thinker; she was

surrounded by scientists and politically conscious people of her time. In 1816, at the

age of 18, she began writing Frankenstein; it was inspired by a nightmarish vision,

brought on by the telling of German ghost stories during a vacation in Switzerland

with her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Gordon Byron. This is an event she

cites in her own introduction to the book. Her novel, when seen as an allegory, raises

a number of questions, some of which can readily be applied to Germany becoming a

nation, which strongly resembled the being Dr. Frankenstein pieced together and

brought to life.

Following the dramatic news in June of 1815 of Napoleons defeat at Waterloo

along with the new developments at the Congress of Vienna, one could argue that

Shelleys own statements about the ghost stories were a justification for some kind of

link between the story of Frankenstein and her awareness of the political situation in

Germany. This is not surprising considering the many references to Germany in her

84
book. For example the title, which includes the word Franken which is the German

region around Ingolstadt, Bavaria where the monster is created.

Germany became a nation in 1871, far behind its neighbors and eager to catch

up. Shelley, through her vision, may have intuitively sensed, already in 1816, the

mythical interplay of power dynamicswith England well on its way to becoming the

new superpower in Europethat would eventually lead to the horrific conflict a

century later between her own country and the land of ghost stories from which she

drew her inspiration. What were these frightening tales that influenced her and

inspired her to write Frankenstein? She writes:

There was the tale of the sinful founder of his race, whose miserable doom it
was to bestow the kiss of death on all the younger sons of his fated house, just
when they reached the age of promise. His gigantic, shadowy form, clothed like
the ghost of Hamlet, in complete armor, but with the beaver up, was seen at
midnight, by the moons fitful beams, to advance slowly along the gloomy
avenue. The shape was lost beneath the shadow of the castle walls; but soon a
gate swung back, a step was heard, the door of the chamber opened, and he
advanced to the couch of the blooming youths, cradled in healthy sleep.
Eternal sorrow sat upon his face as he bent down and kissed the forehead of
the boys, who from that hour withered like flowers snapped upon the stalk.

* * *

In 1871 the feeling of pride and relief in Germany must have been enormous,

even intoxicating, after so many centuries without a leader to unify the disparate

principalities. Nietzsche spoke eloquently of the need to be intoxicated, and events in

85
Germany, from 1871 to 1914, would certainly prove the existence of an all-

encompassing emotional delirium that would eventually lead them to war.

In Twilight of the Idols, 1888, Nietzsche wrote that for art to exist, there is a

physiological prerequisite that is not to be avoided: intoxication. Intoxication must

first have heightened the sensibility of the whole machine, before it can come to any

art. Intoxication takes a range of forms: sexual, political, chemical. These were

among Nietzsches last published thoughts, and they reinforce our assertion: artwork

in Germany emerged within the sanctity of the tower and under the auspices of a

strong paternal authority figure. Was it then the towerand all that it stands for

that urged Rapunzel to sing? Or was it the intoxication of loneliness? In Germany, a

particularly strong case can be made for the co-existence of both pressures, one

imposed from without, by those in power, and another more formidable by far:

resistance and experience emerging from within.

The work and lives of Hegel, Nietzsche, Beethoven, Schopenhauer, Wagner,

and many others, strengthen the claim thatmore than in any other nationthere

existed in Germany the acutely fertile conditions for enormous creativity as well as its

antitheses. Is it a coincidence that Germany held also the potential for fascism and its

opposite, democracy? The unification of Germany under Bismarck symbolized a

concentration in Germany of political, religious, cultural, economic, and social

intentionsready now to fly high or crash and burn.

The Prussian victory in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 had enormous

consequences for Germany; it enabled Bismarck to use that victory to gain Southern

Germanys dependence and to push forward, with a newly united state, a distinctly

German agenda. Naturally it was a problematic one. The new economy started to

86
suffer: it was rapidly infiltrated with the printing of new paper money causing

inflation, followed by the cessation of Frances war reparation payments in 1873. As a

result, the power of the state became more concentrated. Free trade was replaced by

protectionism, which fed a nascent ethnocentrism. This would only exacerbate the

jealousy non-Semitic Germans already felt against the Jews, who were usually

perceived as staying financially afloat in the midst of each successive ordeal.

Incumbent upon art itself was the task of now filling in the gaps left by the

hasty race toward progressgrowth in the economy, industry, the military and a

rapidly changing civic life. Due to the harsh conditions this created for many,

thousands of Germans emigrated to America to seek a better life: the Catholic Church

and Socialism came under harsh attack, and fear of invasion and being engulfed by

France prompted the chancellor to crack down on freedoms.

The poor got ever poorer, and the Reichstag, the only parliamentary body

whose counsel was elected by universal male suffrage, continued to lose what power it

had, answering only to the chancellor. People were alienated from one another by

new urban environments and oppressed by the policy-making machine of Junker

landlords, industrialists and nationalists, while the working class became vulnerable

to Bismarcks control. Art was expected to valorize expedient values, most notably the

mythology of power when linked to a perceptibly German cultural identity.

The role of the arts in placating societys ills was therefore much like

Rapunzels role in giving entrance to the enchantress: without Rapunzels strong

braids willingly thrown down to her, the enchantress could never have enlisted

Rapunzel in the two-step of domination they were to perform for such a long time

together. Earlier in the fairy tale, we read that whenever the enchantress wanted to

87
go in she placed herself beneath it and cried. Much like the principalities did before,

it was now the new German government that manipulated the arts to suit its national

agenda.

With the death of Bismarck in 1900 and the descent into world conflict, a

culture of war was developing, and pursuing its own nationalist logic. A military

build-up, particularly between the navys of Germany and England, was one of the

first signs of an ensuing conflict. England, which at that time considered itself the real

superpower in the world, resented being challenged in any way. Negotiations between

the two countries that did occur were only half-earnest attempts at resolving

conflicting alliances without recourse to war. Strategy and maneuvering between all

the nations only resulted in a loss of trust and a communication breakdown.

A collective belief that war was unavoidable became a certainty not only for the

Germans but also for the rest of the European community. To make matters worse,

the Reichstag, which could have acted as a counterweight against this rising

sentimentwith the social democrats now in the majoritywas so bitterly divided

that it became increasingly weaker over time. By 1912, frustrated by the inability to

consolidate its agenda, the governing body of Germany let itself be taken over by the

military. Kaiser Wilhelm II gave his complete support for the move, accepting that

war was inescapable, a collective necessity.

Once when he was thus standing behind a tree, he saw that the enchantress

came there, and he heard how she cried...

88
 As indicated by events in the German parliament and society at large, the

Kings son was, in a sense, hiding in strategic readiness, and in another sense,

cowardly. Liberal parties other than the Social Democratic Party of Germany had

become too many and too fractious to garner the strength theyd need to bring about

changes in policy in the hostile and conformist context of pre-war Germany.

Democracy, equality and social reforms were regarded by the Emperor with outright

distrust, while imperialism, nationalism and anti-Semitism would work together in

new ways, fermenting a reverence for the state that focused public attention on a new

collective feeling of German superiority. Such feelings were inspired by authors like

Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who became part of Wagners family by marring his

daughter.

Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Let down your hair.

Then Rapunzel let down the braids of her hair, and the enchantress climbed

up to her.

The atmosphere between the years of 1913-1914 in Germany is exemplified by

this scene in the fairytale. The Kings Son is observing the enchantress and

Rapunzels ritual and learning it. With the assassination of Arch-duke Francis

Ferdinand of Austria the masses were more than ready to go to war and fight for the

state, as opposed to scheming their own revolution as they had done four hundred

years earlier. Nonetheless, more than a few watched and learned how this game of

89
power could be won. In any case, they, like the Kings son, were preparing to follow

the enchantress lead.

If that is the ladder by which one mounts, I too will try my fortune, said he,

and the next day when it began to grow dark he went to the tower and cried,

Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.

The first of many things going on in this passage is an allusion to a future

revolution with democratic principles at its core. Again, the passage in which the

Kings son hides and learns how to climb up to Rapunzel can also be seen as hopeful

and adventurous. For at this moment in German history, just before the onset of

modernity and its crises, the spirit of democracy would soon show a glimmer of its

face in the burgeoning of early Weimar culture.

The chaotic coexistence of diverse influences, of official and rebellious cultures

side by sidedemonstrated in the work and life of turn of the century thinkers and

writers like Thomas Mann, composers like Arnold Schoenberg, playwrights, and

painters like Kandinsky and Franz Marcformed the ideal preconditions in which

society could evolve without the need for an all-out revolution.

When the arts are used in the service of the revival of the human spirit, a great

potential can be unleashed, a kind of soft revolution. So, while the Kings son

observes the enchantress, he is cunningly procuring access to the forbidden pleasure

of meeting the singer in the door-less tower, a thing that he must do, no matter what.

But just as in the case of history, so too, in the example of mythology: to predict a

90
better day doesnt mean that the path ahead is straight or without incredible pitfalls,

nor even that that day is certain to arriveonly that it can.

Why does the Kings son wait a further day to go up to Rapunzel after learning

the enchantress trick? Why did the Germans enter World War I with such

enthusiasm? And why did they create such an enormous ego, one the size of a nation

and more, behind which to hide?

Perhaps the Kings son needed to work up his courage, or to have a nights rest

before opening disasters door. And so did all of Germany need to feel possessed by

the dark spirit of a winged, heavy, and tremendous national body heading full speed

towards its own calamitous destiny. They needed a story that explained the

predicament they were in.

When we read the reference in this passage of the fairy tale to the next day, it

calls to mind an earlier passage, when the young expecting mother had just tasted the

forbidden herb, rapunzel: It tasted so good to herso very good, that the next day

she longed for it three times as much as before. In both cases the next day means

forces are gathering for an even greater surge. Whereas previously, the

overzealousness of the peasantsfour hundred years earlierto take things further

after their initial victories is what is indicated, here it is the excess of nationalism and

the price the Germans would have to pay for their eagerness to march off to war.

Also the phrase, when it began to grow dark, which is similar to in the

gloom of evening from the earlier passage, draws a picture of ominous things to

come. The atmosphere at the start of the World War I was one of great optimism and

spirit. Soldiers joined the front lines, certain theyd be home by Christmas. But as the

war wore on, year after year, and the victories were seldom measurable by more than

91
a few yards, so also the sun would rise on what the Kings son had done. And to be

sure, the enchantress will seek retribution once more. The soldiers on the front were

starving and depressed by 1918, and all of society was transformed by

disillusionment. C.G. Jung spoke of his own premonition in the days before the war

began:

Toward the autumn of 1913, the pressure which I had felt was in me seemed to
be moving outward, as though there were something in the air. The
atmosphere actually seemed to me darker than it had been. It was as though
the sense of oppression no longer sprang exclusively from a psychic situation,
but from concrete reality. This feeling grew more and more intense. In October
while I was alone on a journey, I was suddenly seized by an overpowering
vision.

Jung had seen a flood engulfing the lands north of Switzerland, only blocked by

mountains stretching high to protect his country. He saw yellow waves swallowing

thousands of bodies, then turning to blood. This vision lasted an hour.

Immediately the hair fell down and the Kings son climbed up.

Five million Germans dead, two million orphans, a million invalids, a million

widows. The war came to a halt in November 1918: Austrias unconditional surrender

to the Italians and defeat seemingly on the horizon, Germany sought an armistice in

92
exchange for which President Woodrow Wilson demanded a democratic government.

With mutiny and revolution in Munich, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated the throne on

November 9th. The Weimar Revolution broke out like wildfire shortly after; it was a

spectacularly spontaneous and disorganized rejection of the war and the proposed

adoption of a constitutional monarchy. The Weimar Revolution ended when the first-

ever democratic Republic was proclaimed, a parliamentary republic based on a

welfare state. Marxs brilliant germ of the new world outlook was echoed in the

Weimar Revolution, but with unique consequences. The catharsis so much needed,

which had accompanied Germans into battle, had not only been a failure but had

been abused, distorted.

A glimmer of hope emerged, however, despite everything. There was a

willingness to try something unique, something different: The Weimar Republic and

the invention of a sui generis democracy. No historical failure had been as pregnant

with possibility as theirs.

93
 Bio
Sarah Ledbetter is a graduate of North Western University in Chicago and The
Academy of Photogenic Arts in Sydney Australia She is a filmmaker, dance-maker,
and writer. Her films, dances, and writings have been presented at sites such as
Earthdance, National Dance Week, the Capital Fringe Festival, the Memphis Writers
Ensemble, the International Poetry Review, La Peripherique Literary Review of
Lisbon, and film festivals in the USA, Africa, Italy, India, France, and Memphis,
Tennessee. Ledbetter wrote and co-edited DAMMI IL LA, a short film which won 12
awards and screened worldwide, with collaborator Matteo Servente in 2006. THE
ROMANCE OF LONELINESS, which Ledbetter wrote and co-directed with (Matteo)
Servente, is their first feature film, which premiered at Nashville Film Festival in
April of 2012. Shes currently teaching a dance and photography workshop for Bridge
Builders, a national organization that develops youth leadership and promotes social
justice through nonviolent means, and completing post-production on SKETCHES
OF SOULSVILLE, a series of short films about Memphis' rich music history. Sarah
currently resides in Memphis Tenn.

Timotheus Mellage being of German origin, grew up in North America. He has a

degree in Music Theory and Analysis, Composition and History from Appalachian
State University. Along with a profound interest in psychology and mythology, this
book is a result of his personal research into Carl Jungs writings combined with his
reflections upon the development of western mythology contained in fairy tales and
fables - and the effects this mythology exerts on the development of society. Tim
presently resides in Paris France. Contact: tim.mellage@live.fr

Forthcoming titles:

The Frog King or Iron Henry: The Emancipation of Women in Western Society

The Positive Role of the Mother in Cinderella

The Nixie of the Mill Pond: The Damaging Effects of an Absentee Father

Our Ladys Child and Christian Mythology

The Wizard of Oz and the Rising Influence of Women in America

94