TIMERIDEBlog

A side blow from Berlin

The year was 1836 when the painter and poet August Kopisch, a true Prussian in Berlin, heard a legend from the Rhineland. In Cologne, it was said that gnomes, dwarves or house ghosts, known as “Heinzelmännchen”, did people’s work at night. He must have had a great time. The story fits in too well with the image that Protestant Berlin has of the Catholic Rhineland. A region in which people celebrate the festivals as they fall, like to keep a low profile and generally don’t set the work ethic too high. This is evidenced not least by the eternal cathedral construction site in Cologne, which has been lying idle for three hundred years. And then such a saga – Kopisch doesn’t miss this opportunity. And he writes a poem that packs a punch! Even in the first verse of his poem, he leaves no doubt about his image of Cologne:

“How comfortable it was in Cologne before,
with brownies!
Because, if you were lazy: … you lay down
on the bench and took care of yourself […]
And before a lazy person even woke up,
all his daily work … was already done!”

So far so comfortable. But Kopisch already has an idea of how the people of Cologne themselves will put an end to their comfortable work-life balance: Their penchant for gossip and their excessive curiosity will be their undoing. He tricks the tailor’s wife into catching a glimpse of the brownies, but annoys them so much that they disappear forever. Now the people have to do their own hard work again.

The real “Heinzel men”

But Kopisch’s poem is not just a story. There is probably a real background to it, dating back to the 15th and 16th centuries. At this time, former miners from the Bergisches Land and the Siebengebirge flocked to the city in search of work. They had often been in the mines since childhood and, due to poor nutrition and damp, dusty air, were still small and slender as adults – “little men” in other words. Their work clothes included pointed hats filled with straw to protect them from bumping their heads in the low tunnels and shafts. Many had lost their job – siphoning off groundwater, which was called “Heinzen” at the time – due to technical innovations. It was these “Heinzen men” who eventually came to Cologne.

However, migrating there to work was not easy: you had to belong to a guild to obtain an official work permit. This was often an insurmountable bureaucratic hurdle for the immigrant “brownies”. They usually had no choice but to work at night, secretly and literally “illegally”. If the guild craftsmen got up in the morning, their clandestine employees had done most of the work overnight.

An unexpected legacy

When Kopisch publishes his poem, he probably does without the self-irony of the people of Cologne. They were celebrating his poem, and thus somehow also themselves. On his 100th birthday in 1899, the “Cölner Verschönerungsverein” (Cologne Beautification Association) posthumously dedicated a fountain to the poet, who was actually a pest, thus immortalizing the poem in the cityscape. To this day, the Heinzelmännchenbrunnen fountain at the Brauhaus Früh am Dom is a fixed stop on every sight-seeing tour and city tour. And year after year, thousands of people visit the “Heinzel’s Winter Fairytale” Christmas market, where this year there is a unique opportunity to catch a glimpse of the Heinzelmännchen for the first time since the Schneidersfrau – because in the “Heinzelexpress” you can experience their goings-on in VR before they disappear again forever.