Across the Street

A Halloween in Germany

Advertising for Ronneburg Castle’s Halloween Party describes the holiday as “an originally Celtic celebration that has returned as a party from America to the continent!” which is about as well as you could put it.

While Halloween as celebrated throughout the world today is a witches’ brew of transmogrified traditions brought to America by settlers from the United Kingdom and Ireland, its oldest origins are ancient holidays of the Celts and Romans, both of whom lived in what today is Germany. The Celtic sun festival Samhain (pronounced SOW-win) marked the beginning of the new year; and, as we like to pretend on Halloween these days, on Samhain, the natural and supernatural worlds were believed to mingle. The Romans who camped here on the frontier of their empire, very near to which Ronneburg Castle stands, honored their goddess of orchards, Pomona, on November 1, and cavorted behind masks on Saturnalia, their winter solstice.

Still, Halloween is new to Germany, catching on only within the last twenty years or so. But as I sat nestled in Ronneburg Castle’s courtyard café last Saturday, with golden leaves flitting down from the trees through the afternoon sunlight and onto the table before me, it seemed to me it had found a good home.

Germany wears the Halloween season well, preening in the sights and smells of autumn. Gazing out from Ronneburg Castle’s highest tower you see low rippling hills shrouded in fall foliage the colors of fire, bubbling out of barren brown fields under a bright blue sky. The cool air is piquant with rotting leaves, blanketing still green swaths between the fields, and manure.

Modern Halloween’s grotesqueness abounds in Germany, too. A few years ago in Bochum, not far from Cologne and its almost menacingly-gothic black cathedral, a young Satanist couple sacrificed a friend to the Devil with 66 knife stabs. He was found with a pentagram carved into his chest. Months later in Kassel a 42-year-old computer expert killed and ate a willing man who responded to his online advertisement.

What’s more, some of Halloween’s most popular characters belong to German mythology. Traveling north from Heidelberg to Ronneburg I passed Frankenstein Castle, which today puts on a kind of dinner theater mixer around Halloween. According to local lore, sometime in the late 1600s Lord Johann Konrad Dippel von Frankenstein was found dead in the castle surrounded by corpse parts culled from nearby cemeteries.
Whether the story inspired Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” we’ll never know; but there is compelling evidence that it did. The brothers’ Grimm account of it was translated by her stepmother. And Mary Shelley herself visited Frankenstein Castle in 1814. Her Frankenstein’s monster, or rather Hollywood’s version of it, will try to scare you there – for €18, €8 on Sundays – along with, among freakish others, a werewolf, Freddy Krueger and a gaggle of witches.

Historians say there were never really any witches in Germany, but people thought there were. While Salem was putting theirs on trial, cartographers were sketching Hexen (witches) on broomsticks hovering above the Brocken, the highest peak in Germany’s craggy, storied Harz Mountains. Walpurgisnacht (Witches’ Night) was in May, but Harz dwellers locked up their half-timbered homes on October 31, too - when witches were said to swoop up to the Brocken for an orgy with the Devil - and clutched their blankets until dawn came, and with it, Allerheiligen (All Saints’ Day).



Troubled by lingering pagan festivals, in the ninth century Pope Gregory IV established the Feast of All Saints, on November 1, and on November 2, All Souls’ Day to supplant them. But a few hundred years later Martin Luther again gave October 31 new meaning when on that night in 1517 he nailed his gripes with the Roman Catholic Church to Wittenberg Cathedral’s door, signaling the start of the Protestant Reformation. Much later, as Halloween’s popularity in Germany swelled, eclipsing Reformation Day, Germany’s Evangelical Church wrung their hands and cursed the secular holiday. To remind German trick- or-treaters of that important day in their history, this year church members will hand out Luther Bonbons.

Others here object to Halloween outright. The mayor of Rankweil in German-speaking Austria recently called Halloween a “bad American habit,” and fed up with its accompanying pranks, declared a boycott. At least eight neighboring towns followed. But that’s done little to quell Germany’s growing Halloween enthusiasm. In recent weeks ads for things Halloween were everywhere - Europa Park’s weeklong Halloween-Festival, Halloween pumpkins in Minimal grocery stores, posters for Halloween parties at various bars - pushing in Germany alone, according to an Associated Press report, $170 million in Halloween candy, props and costumes.

A young woman in a black dress and a pointy hat sold us tickets to the Ronneburg Castle museum. Inside preparations were underway for the evening’s party. Plastic glow-in-the-dark skeletons drizzled with red paint hung from the battlements, as did, strangely, a life-size cow model. In a small exhibit of medieval torture implements, cobwebs were draped over a rack. A log fire crackled in an open stove, filling neighboring rooms with an eerie swirling smoke.

Meandering through the castle I saw a number of other Americans; judging by their closely-cropped hair, probably soldiers from the nearby U.S. Army base at Hanau. With several hundred thousand American soldiers, airmen and their families living in their midst, Germans experienced Halloween firsthand. When Darmstadt’s German-American Kontakt Club, formed to encourage interaction between Army families and their German neighbors, first put on the haunted house at Frankenstein Castle in the 1970s, it was unique. Now there are Halloween parties everywhere, even in small towns like St. Leon, where Café Ole was holding a Halloween costume contest. Friday night I went to another party in St. Leon, at an American friend’s home. Sometime before the pumpkin carving contest began one of her German neighbors snuck in, giggling behind a plastic witch mask. When the party wound down and her guests lumbered to their cars they found them strewn with toilet paper. The next morning her neighbor owned up to the good-natured prank, grinning.

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On Halloween I sat with a mug of apple cider on the stoop of an apartment building on a U.S. Army installation in Heidelberg, watching costumed children and their parents march through the twilight from building to building for candy. Fences surround the complex, and only those bearing base identification cards are allowed inside. Huddled around a fire pit, residents chatted about the growing number of German trick-or-treaters sneaking on base. One woman’s parents were visiting. They had been stationed at Heidelberg decades ago, and recalled there were no Germans trick-or-treaters then. The woman was annoyed. She had spotted a group of Turkish teenagers lurking by the side gates, notoriously neglected, and had locked them. But plenty of German families were walking in right through the front gate, guarded by private security officers, usually German.

“They’re not even checking IDs!” another woman complained.

“I think it’s nice,” said another.

Just then a tiny little girl, maybe four years old, wearing a black pointy hat shuffled forward from her beaming mother, plastic pumpkin outstretched, and with a telling accent said, “Trick or treat.”