Hamelin — the 130 children who left in 1284

OVERVIEW

Hamelin (Hameln) is a town on the Weser in Lower Saxony, best known for the tale of the Pied Piper (der Rattenfänger von Hameln). In the familiar version, a piper in pied clothing rids the town of rats, is refused his pay, and returns on Saints John and Paul's day to lead away 130 children into a mountain cave, leaving behind only a lame, a deaf and a blind child.

HISTORY

The earliest mention seems to be a stained-glass window placed in the church about 1300, described in accounts from the 14th to the 17th century and destroyed in 1660; the historian Hans Dobbertin reconstructed it. A town record of 1384 reportedly reads: 'It is 100 years since our children left.' The Lüneburg manuscript (c. 1440–1450), found in the city archives in 1936 by Heinrich Spanuth, gives the date as 1284 and says a well-dressed young man of thirty played a silver pipe through the town, and all the children who heard it, 130 of them, followed him out of the East Gate to the execution place, the Calvary, 'and vanished, so that no trace of them could be found'; it adds that the mother of Dean Johann von Lüde saw them go. The rats are absent from the early accounts and first appear in a version of about 1559 (the Zimmerische Chronik).

REPORTED ACTIVITY

No explanation is universally accepted. Theories include death by disease, drowning or a landslide, with the Piper as a figure of Death; dancing mania (in 1237 a crowd of children danced and jumped the 20 km from Erfurt to Arnstadt); a pilgrimage, campaign or children's crusade; and emigration — the town's own preferred reading — in which the 'children of the town' were settlers recruited by 'locators' for the east. The linguist Jürgen Udolph found Hamelin surnames of the period recurring in Prignitz and Uckermark and in former Pomerania, and placed the settlement near Starogard in north-western Poland. Bungelosenstraße, the 'street without drums', is supposedly where the children were last seen; music and dancing have not been allowed in it since.

VISITING

The pin marks the Rattenfängerhaus on Osterstraße, beside Bungelosenstraße; the house was built in 1602–1603 and is linked to the story only by the inscription on its facade. The town marks 26 June as Rat Catcher's Day.