Innocence Abducted: Youth, War, and the Wolf in Literary Adaptations of the Pied Piper Legend from Robert Browning to Michel Tournier

Innocence Abducted:Youth, War, and the Wolf in Literary Adaptations of the Pied Piper Legend from Robert Browning to Michel Tournier Peter Arnds (bio) With the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century comes a shift in how adults see children. The child is no longer viewed just as a social phenomenon but also as a psychological one. The rising bourgeoisie sees childhood and childness as phenomena that are essentially fraught with deficits for both children and adults. For children, the deficit is primarily one of education, as the child is understood to lack all virtues the rising bourgeoisie expects from itself (Liebs 63). The appearance of theories of education such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Émile reflects this stage in the cultural evolution of childhood in which children are seen as lacking something that an education can provide. The deficit associated with childhood and childness, however, also directly concerns the adult bourgeois world, which, in understanding the child's mind increasingly as a psychological phenomenon, sees itself removed from it and no longer partaking of it. The bourgeois class is increasingly concerned with feelings of regret and desire for the loss of the child's purported innocence. Increasingly, therefore, childhood and childness become imaginary topoi determined by the projections of adults. The irretrievable loss that childhood represents receives metaphorical attention in literature throughout the ages. As a psychological phenomenon of adult regret and desire, it appears especially in literary adaptations of the Pied Piper legend, in which children literally disappear from their community. In her seminal study of the Pied Piper, Elke Liebs successfully tracks this central motif from the earliest iterations of the legend to the literary history of Pied Piper adaptions in Germany and beyond. She argues that in post-Enlightenment literatures, these [End Page 61] adaptations display adult aggression toward children by attempting to civilize, punish, or eliminate them, an aggression that is rooted in the deficit associated with adult estrangement from childhood innocence. It is safe to say that many modern literary adaptations of the Piper legend debunk the myth of childhood innocence, suggesting, along with Jacqueline Rose, that childhood innocence is a product of adult desire and fear (xii). Modern and postmodern texts that build their narratives around the Piper legend often end up parodying the ideal of childhood innocence. The legend of the Piper of Hamelin first arises in the fifteenth century and, from the beginning, its textual adaptations display an acute tension between mythological material fed by subconscious fear and desire on the one hand, and by historical fact on the other. Heinrich Spanuth describes the development of this tension in some detail. Initially, the story of the mysterious Piper appears in chronicles such as the "Lüneburger Handschrift" and the "Bamberger Chronik," dating the event of the disappearance of about 130 children or youngsters from the town of Hamelin on 26 June 1284. The material then loses its historical authenticity, especially in the seventeenth century when it is strongly demonized and mythologized: the Pied Piper came to be seen as an incarnation of the devil, and for the first time the children disappear inside the fictitious Koppelberg. In more rational-minded England, however, the theory arises that Hamelin's youth are recruited for the purpose of colonizing Siebenbürgen, an area in central Romania (Spanuth 43-44). During the eighteenth century, the Age of Reason, there are further attempts to explain the legend historically, as one may expect, thus de-demonizing and de-mythologizing it. The legend is either discarded as mere superstition or interpreted as a remaining fragment of a historical event (Spanuth 58). During the Romantic period, especially in the fairy-tale adaptation by the Brothers Grimm, the legend is then once again clad in an aura of demonic mystery and is understood as folk myth due to the Piper's relationship with such figures as the Nordic spirit of the Erlking, who also abducts children. The motifs of abduction, corruption, and exploitation of childhood and youth in the context of war are central to some of the literary adaptations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially in Wilhelm Raabe's novella Die Hämelschen Kinder [The Children of Hamelin], Bertold...

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