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Background, The pied piper
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THE
PIED PIPER - is the common English translation of the title of the German
folk tale THE RAT CATCHER OF HAMELIN.
The word "pied" means "a lot of different colours"
and so the title calls attention to the difficulty of valuating and categorizing
the Stranger, coming to the town. Certainly his clothes are no normal
clothes, one might say, he is wearing "camouflage", and he is
playing his pipe for people to listen.
But why has he come to town, who is he, and what does he want?
The younger versions of the story tells us, that Hamelin was attacked by a great amount of rats, and that The Pied Piper played his pipe and lured the rats away to drown in the river of Weser. As the Magistrate was too stingy to pay the asked price, The Pied Piper punished the town by luring the children away, never to be seen again.
The older versions of the story have no rats, and so The Pied Piper has no "legitimate reason" to take the children away. He is just a Stranger in pied clothes, playing for people what they want to hear, and following his own secret plans.
The oldest picture of Pied Piper (watercolour) copied from the glass
window of Marktkirche in Hamelin by Freiherr Augustin von Moersperg.
The story differs from most of the many European folk tales
by being relatively young, and might have a historical background:
Czech king Premysl Otokar (1253-1278) wanted to colonize his vast region
Morava, and sent out his envoys, called "locators", to persuade
people from the West - as in Hamelin in the northern parts of Germany
- to go east and settle down, enjoying a 10 year long freedom of taxes.
As Premysl Otokars archbishop Bruno came from Hamelin, exactly this town
might have been chosen as a special target. And on the 26th of July 1284
(and so under Otokar's son Wenceslas II 1271-1305) a locator, perhaps
named Body, probably took about 130 young people of Hamelin with him and
brought them on a long travel to the mountains of Morava, where they settled
down in "Hamlinkov", now called Podomi: Their parents in Hamelin
were left with no heirs to there trade and their belongings, and it is
very likely, that they never heard a word from their offspring again.
Historians count the number of such colonisators to be more than 25.000
people. But these German settlements disappeared in the wars and the plague
epidemics in 15-1600.
(Source: Politiken, 3. August 2002, Dana Schmidt, Prag. Named historians:
Wolfgang Wann, Germany, Ervin Cerny-Kretinsky, Czech)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pied_Piper_of_Hamelin
We have chosen a younger version of the story as
a concept for the CubeX-project, but certainly want to keep the cloudy
picture of the man in the pied clothes: Is he taking the children away
to live happily ever after, or is his goal to exploit and abuse?
In that aspect, the historical facts are not speaking against us - and
"the rats" might be seen as a metaphor for a society, not giving
its young descendants proper opportunities, and therefore being "punished"
by their emigration.