

Rapunzel's Children

The making of democracy in Germany

Part 1

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY

Sam Kestenbaum

Timotheus Maria Mellage

Sarah Ledbetter

.

Cover by: Sara Mariani

Drawing by: Karim Madjer

Edited By: Sam Kestenbaum
Book Bite

Occasionally we come across a book that widens our horizons, offering new ways of seeing and interpreting the world. It is a magical experience to discover unexpected meaning and true significance, not only in some remote and unknown resource, but also in a familiar and well-known work – such as a fairy tale.

Tim Mellage's and Sarah Ledbetter's interpretation of the fairy tale Rapunzel is such a work of true originality. It provides a fascinating method to understanding the social developments of Germany over the past five hundred years – starting with the Reformation of 1517, through the dark years of two World Wars, to the modern democratic state that we know today – based on the premonitions and symbols contained within the fairy tale. As such it is a timely work for those seeking a wider appreciation of the social and historical context and events that have conspired to produce this vibrant modern democracy in Germany, so vital to the stability of Europe today. But just as important, it is a handbook to all those of us interested in uncovering the fascinating parallels and common themes between the myths created and retold by our ancestors and those that inform our own lives.

This is that very unusual book – a gripping story with an immediate pertinence to our personal experience of the world, that also allows us to readjust our thoughts and ideas about German history in the light of a new understanding.

Roger Wilson

Sorbonne, Paris 2007

The first three chapters of this book have been registered with the C. G. Jung Library, Kusnacht Switzerland.

To Patricia Morales and Nanette VanWright

#  Preface

Knowing that this is an unusual book, we are asking the reader to entertain a rather novel approach in looking at history, in this case German history. Reviewing history from a perspective that considers it as something living rather than the usual - dry, mundane and generally boring – approach, Sarah and I are hoping through this fairy tale and the interpretation of its mythology to bring to you history that's alive: to engage your imagination by showing how mythology and history are intricately intertwined, and even anticipated, as certain books and films have already shown. For some this approach will come across as somewhat arbitrary, but for others, we are sure it will strike a chord. Mythology lives in all of us, and likewise we live it, whether it is our own personal myth or the collective ones we are shaped by. For those who are sensitive to these ongoing currents this interpretation should have some resonance, and for others who just want to experience history through a cultural lens, this book, we hope, offers both.

In 2007 when Sarah and I first set out on the 'long road of rejection', like so many first time authors (we mean rejection by the publishers we sought out), little did we know that the eBook revolution was just around the corner! After regaining confidence and a second editing by Sam Kestenbaum, we can now hope to reach a much broader audience with this new platform, which was always our intended goal.

(Please note that although the historical material in the book is all factual, it is being presented as narrative non-fiction and not as an academic work. Also, this is a work in progress, and all quotes in the first part will be referenced in the following second part.)

The Authors

Contents

Part I: The Enchantress' Gain

#

Preface 5

INTRODUCTION 7

RAPUNZEL* 10

(The fairy tale) 10

Chapter I 17

The Reformation and 17

 "The Revolution of the Common Man" 17

(1517-1525) 17

Chapter II 42

Birth and the Tower 42

Court Culture and Absolutism 42

(1525 -1713) 42

Chapter III 61

The Listener 61

and the 61

German Enlightenment 61

(1650 -1814) 61

Chapter IV 71

Frankenstein 71

and 71

 "The New World Outlook" 71

(1814—1919) 71

Bio 94

#  INTRODUCTION

#

Storytelling is one of our most basic human instincts. As members of families, religions, societies and nations, we seek to explain the world around us and find our place in it. Through myth-making we do this, extracting significance from experience. We tell stories about heroes and villains, about gods, monsters and miracles. Stories teach — they can be instructive and enlightening. Stories also represent our subconscious longing — our desire to change, perhaps improve, the world.

The tale of Rapunzel, from the brothers Grimm collection, is one of these stories. While this old legend has broad European roots (similar tales were told and written in Italy, France and England), there is something distinctly German about it, too. That is what this book is concerned with: exploring the distinctively German character of the story.

Rapunzel would have been told in towns and villages, in traditional settings, around a fire or at a dinner table. In Germany — where historic changes were underway — this narrative had, and today still has, a particular resonance.

The story itself is full of archetypes: the sorceress, the king's son, the peasant family and the beautiful, imprisoned would-be princess. It's a classic tale. And it deals with some of our most universal challenges and impulses: temptation, bondage and yearning.

Is it possible that our stories empower us, giving us spiritual tools via the unconscious to change our world? This, the authors believe, is exactly what the story of Rapunzel gave to the German people. It would have been a source of entertainment—as all myths are—but it would also have resonated deeper in the cultural psyche. No one could have known it, but this tale was readying the way for a great transformation: the making of a modern democracy. Understood this way, the tale becomes both allegory and premonition.

The following chapters are a collaborative work between Tim Mellage and Sarah Ledbetter. What they have written is not an academic work, but a reflective investigation into a fable. Drawing from historical, academic and literary sources, this book offers a reading of Rapunzel that is both analytic and intuitive. It takes us to a place where history, art and the unconscious intermingle.

From Martin Luther in the early 16th century to the establishment of Germany's present day democracy, the authors trace the legacy of Rapunzel, demonstrating how the text both preceded and envisioned great social change. Each narrative development in the legend — the birth of the heroine, her imprisonment at the hands of the sorceress, her meeting the king's son, their escape — is symbolic.

The symbols of the story represent distinct historical events in Germany over the last, tumultuous 500 years. How can Rapunzel help us to understand German history, through reformation, revolution, two world wars, the Holocaust, and democracy? The following chapters carefully and methodically unpack the story, revealing what is underneath the surface.

Our folk tales lie close to our hearts and within our collective unconscious. Taken as a whole, they act as a kind of spiritual compass, helping us find our way through the great transformations and upheavals which shape the world, and us with it.

Certain myths drive us — as individuals and as societies — and in our actions we fashion ourselves after our archetypal heroes and villains. As societies and peoples in the past lived their lives using legends as guides — however unconsciously — their lives would have naturally reflected their mythology. We do the same today. Understanding this, the story of Rapunzel becomes a premonition and a self-fulfilling vision of German society.

Rapunzel is allegorical, but it is also visionary. The myth can be understood both backwards and forwards — that is, it both propelled a people through history and is also the lens through which we can look back on those human developments. It is a tale of German society, which foretold what was to come.

The title of this book is Rapunzel's Children. Who are her children? They are the artists and intellectual, spiritual descendents of her story. Rapunzel's children are those people who have brought her fable into the present, who inherited this myth and through their lives and work carried her legacy.

Rapunzel offers a framework through which the German people could imagine a restructuring of human values, one that would ultimately give more rights to individuals. It is a revolutionary text that touches on dictatorship, oppression, class struggle, but most importantly, Germany's artistic heritage. Rapunzel offers through the development of culture an outlet for that very human yearning for freedom. If we overlook this fairy tale, and don't see it as a rich social text, we would miss out on something significant: insight into the evolution of Germany's democracy today.

Rapunzel may be a fairy tale, but what is even more miraculous than this otherworldly story is how it demonstrates through its symbolism our human capacity to bring about revolutionary, democratic change — to rethink how we govern ourselves and treat each other.

Because this, I believe, is what the story of Rapunzel—and the analysis that you are about to read—can teach us: that we are a part of the myths we tell. Our lives are intertwined with the larger sagas we are living out as societies. These myths fuel us and we, in turn reify them in our world. The legend represents our subconscious fears and hopes, anxieties and aspirations. What Rapunzel's Children hopes to show is that we are actors in a larger, ever-evolving myth — our own history.

Sam Kestenbaum

#  RAPUNZEL*

#  (The fairy tale)

There were once a man and a woman who had long in vain wished for a child. At length the woman hoped that God was about to grant her desire. These people had a little window at the back of their house from which a splendid garden could be seen, which was full of the most beautiful flowers and herbs. It was, however, surrounded by a high wall, and no one dared to go into it because it belonged to an enchantress, who had great power and was dreaded by all the world. One day the woman was standing by this window and looking down into the garden, when she saw a bed, which was planted with the most beautiful rampion (rapunzel), and it looked so fresh and green that she longed for it, and had the greatest desire to eat some. This desire increased every day, and as she knew that she could not get any of it, she quite pined away, and began to look pale and miserable. Then her husband was alarmed, and asked: "What ails you, dear wife?" "Ah," she replied, "if I can't eat some of the rapunzel, which is in the garden behind our house, I shall die." The man, who loved her, thought: "Sooner than let your wife die, bring her some of the rapunzel yourself, let it cost what it will." At twilight, he clambered down over the wall into the garden of the enchantress, hastily clutched a handful of rapunzel, and took it to his wife. She at once made herself a salad of it, and ate it greedily. It tasted so good to her, so very good, that the next day she longed for it three times as much as before. If he was to have any rest, her husband must once more descend into the garden. In the gloom of the evening, therefore, he let himself down again; but when he had clambered down the wall he was terribly afraid, for he saw the enchantress standing before him. "How can you dare," said she with angry look, "descend into my garden and steal my rapunzel like a thief? You shall suffer for it!" "Ah," answered he, "let mercy take the place of justice, I only made up my mind to do it out of necessity. My wife saw your rapunzel from the window, and felt such a longing for it that she would have died if she had not got some to eat." Then the enchantress allowed her anger to be softened, and said to him: "If the case be as you say, I will allow you to take away with you as much rapunzel as you will, only I make one condition, you must give me the child which your wife will bring into the world; it shall be well treated, and I will care for it like a mother." The man in his terror consented to everything, and when the woman was brought to bed, the enchantress appeared at once, gave the child the name of Rapunzel, and took it away with her.

Rapunzel grew into the most beautiful child under the sun. When she was twelve years old, the enchantress shut her into a tower, which lay in a forest, and had neither stairs nor door, but quite at the top was a little window. When the enchantress wanted to go in, she placed herself beneath it and cried:

"Rapunzel, Rapunzel,

Let down your hair to me."

Rapunzel had magnificent long hair, fine as spun gold, and when she heard the voice of the enchantress she unfastened her braided tresses, wound them round one of the hooks of the window above, and then the hair fell twenty ells down, and the enchantress climbed up by it.

After a year or two, it came to pass that the King's son rode through the forest and passed by the tower. Then he heard a song, which was so charming that he stood still and listened. This was Rapunzel, who in her solitude passed her time in letting her sweet voice resound. The King's son wanted to climb up to her, and looked for the door of the tower, but none was to be found. He rode home, but the singing had so deeply touched his heart, that every day he went out into the forest and listened to it. Once when he was thus standing behind a tree, he saw that the enchantress came there, and he heard how she cried:

"Rapunzel, Rapunzel,

Let down your hair."

Then Rapunzel let down the braids of her hair, and the enchantress climbed up to her. "If that is the ladder by which one mounts, I too will try my fortune," said he, and the next day when it began to grow dark, he went to the tower and cried:

"Rapunzel, Rapunzel,

Let down your hair."

Immediately the hair fell down and the King's son climbed up.

At first Rapunzel was terribly frightened when a man, such as her eyes had never yet beheld, came to her; but the King's son began to talk to her quite like a friend, and told her that his heart had been so stirred that it had let him have no rest, and he had been forced to see her. Then Rapunzel lost her fear, and when he asked her if she would take him for her husband, and she saw that he was young and handsome, she thought: "He will love me more than old Dame Gothel does"; and she said yes, and laid her hand in his. She said: "I will willingly go away with you, but I do not know how to get down. Bring with you a skein of silk every time that you come, and I will weave a ladder with it, and when that is ready I will descend, and you will take me on your horse." They agreed that until that time he should come to her every evening, for the old woman came by day. The enchantress remarked nothing of this, until once Rapunzel said to her: "Tell me, Dame Gothel, how it happens that you are so much heavier for me to draw up than the young King's son, he is with me in a moment." "Ah! You wicked child," cried the enchantress. "What do I hear you say! I thought I had separated you from the world, and yet you have deceived me!" In her anger she clutched Rapunzel's beautiful tresses, wrapped them twice round her left hand, seized a pair of scissors with the right, and snip, snap, they were cut off, and the lovely braids lay on the ground. And she was so pitiless that she took Rapunzel into a desert where she had to live in great grief and misery.

On the same day that she cast out Rapunzel, however, the enchantress fastened the braids of her hair, which she had cut off, to the hook of the window, and when the King's son came and cried:

"Rapunzel, Rapunzel,

Let down your hair,"

she let the hair down. The King's son ascended, but instead of finding his dearest Rapunzel, he found the enchantress, who gazed at him with wicked and venomous looks. "Aha!" she cried mockingly, "you would fetch your dearest, but the beautiful bird sits no longer singing in the nest; the cat has got it, and will scratch out your eyes as well. Rapunzel is lost to you; you will never see her again." The King's son was beside himself in pain, and in his despair he leapt down from the tower. He escaped with his life, but the thorns into which he fell pierced his eyes. Then he wandered quite blind about the forest, ate nothing but roots and berries, and did naught but lament and weep over the loss of his dearest wife. Thus he roamed about in misery for some years, and at length came to the desert where Rapunzel, with the twins to which she had given birth, a boy and a girl, lived in wretchedness. He heard a voice, and it seemed so familiar to him that he went toward it, and when he approached, Rapunzel knew him and fell on his neck and wept. Two of her tears wetted his eyes and they grew clear again, and he could see with them as before. He led her to his kingdom where he was joyfully received, and they lived for a long time afterwards, happy and contented.

*The Complete Grimm's FairyTales, Pantheon Books, Random House, Inc. Copyright 1972 p. 73-76 (Please note that in this translated version, the herb rapunzel is called rampion. The authors have chosen to stay with the original German, rapunzel, to avoid any confusion.)

"There are individuals who have an amazing knowledge of themselves, of the things that go on in themselves. But even those people wouldn't be capable of knowing what is going on in their unconscious.

"For instance, they are not conscious of the fact that while they live in a conscious life, all the time a myth is being played out in the unconscious, a myth that extends over centuries, a stream of archetypal ideas that goes on through the centuries through the individual. Really it is like a continuous stream, and it comes to light in the great movements, say in political or spiritual movements. For instance, in the time before the Reformation people dreamt of the great change. That is the reason why such great transformations could be predicted."

C. G. Jung Speaking 1957

#  Chapter I

#  The Reformation and

#  "The Revolution of the Common Man"

#  (1517-1525)

#

What is the function of desire in fairy tales? What is the function of desire in history and in the German Reformation of 1517 in particular? In the years before, and especially in the years after Martin Luther's protest against the corruption of the all-powerful Church, a spirit of the times had begun to stir in the countryside of Germany far from and close to Wittenberg. For the German peasant the omnipotent political and religious structures of the Late Middle Ages systematically kept them tied down on every front. In an era ruled by poverty, oppression, pestilence and constant feudal warring, the range of personal agency for the peasants was limited. While feudalism denied them basic human and economic rights, the Catholic Church denied them access to ideological freedom, the sacred texts, and the right to have an unmediated relationship with the divine. If change were to come, and come it did, it would have to start from a place that neither the Church nor the feudal lords could reach: the belly of folk wisdom—the transformative power of storytelling.

Desire goes in search of its outlet, and when the winds of time are at its back, it will find it. During the Late Middle Ages in the land that would someday be known as Germany, a fairy tale was born, the story of Rapunzel, the same one that children today still listen to. At this same time in Germany a movement was born, the Reformation. It reached such unparalleled force and scope that John Adams, the second president of the United States and a framer of the Constitution, would call it the first precedent in history for "resistance to despotism and the sanctity of the individual."

This chapter will trace the correspondence between these two phenomena, going in search of the serpentine roots of a story through the evolution of social, philosophical, and religious thought. In the towns and woods of 16th century Germany, we meet a people torn by feudalism's terrors and clinging to a savoir-faire—the art and language of storytelling—that will be their only prayer and, indeed, a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It is desire that animates and forces political change, desire that teaches—that initiates heroism and suffering—in fairy tales. Both history and fable can teach the way to cope with change as individuals and as keepers of cultural wisdom. It is this way that we too will take, in order to learn how, once upon a time, fairy tale and history collaborated in the name of the individual's freedom. Here's where our story begins.

"There were once a man and woman who had long in vain wished for a child."

So starts the first line of Margaret Hunter's translation of Rapunzel in The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales, one of the German people's most distinct myths. The peasant society of Germany in the early 1500s was itself standing in the same shoes as our mythical couple. The quality of their lives was hard, unstable, and extremely base, hemmed in as it was by the interlocking systems of the Church, the Nobility, and economic oppression. Having lived for centuries under feudalism's sway, the serfs had watched their hope for a new life come and go with each passing generation. But then, a stirring of a more significant kind began to appear.

"At length the woman hoped that God was about to grant her desire."

Indeed, what began to take shape all around Germany was the ferment of religious reform. To understand the German peasant's worldview, first we must understand the role the divine played not only for the individual but also in the political arena. God was considered to be a participant in the affairs of mankind, a keeper of order when order suited His will, and a force for change when change was necessary. When word began to spread of Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses, it appeared finally to the peasants that God Himself had begun to take sides with them against the status quo, though in what respect they did not know. All they knew was that change was afoot, and for those at the bottom of the hierarchy, change could only be good.

The couple in the fairy tale, who have been wishing to have a child for a seeming eternity, symbolize the peasantry. The husband and wife are moved by hope to believe that the good thing is on its way, and ready to interpret events along those lines. To believe that God will someday grant one's wish is certainly a different matter than to hope that God is "about to grant" one's desire. The woman seems to be urging God to step into action now. Likewise, the peasantry began to hear the news from Wittenberg and dared to imagine the possibilities and consequences that a reformed Church could bring to every aspect of life.

* * *

In the language of fairy tales, the mother figures as an archetype, representing the larger collective culture. The mother is "the mysterious root of all growth and change," Carl Jung writes in Four Archetypes, "the love that means homecoming, shelter, and the long silence from which everything begins and in which everything ends." In Rapunzel, she's easily recognizable as well. The mother-as-culture is especially significant here because not only does the tale of Rapunzel begin with a pregnant mother, but the Reformation also gained its teeth from the "mother culture," from movement in the folk culture of Germany. Certainly Luther, the Church, and the nobility could have had their Reformation without the peasants. But the Reformation that did take place owes its legacy to those peasants who would rise up against feudalism and the corruption of the Church, setting a new precedent in European history.

It is a potent utterance: mother gives teeth to the revolution. And it's true that out of the nexus to which the soul belongs before and after life, a person is born into society. The institutions, rituals, traditions—and most of all, narrative—that human beings create, are mediated responses by a mother-mind to the world which is its necessary opposite and testing ground. The world in which the Late Middle Ages German peasant lived was an especially testing one, and therefore gave rise to an historical story of epic proportions, the Reformation of 1517. Just as the mother-to-be wished for her child, so to were the people longing for change.

The father's role in the fairy tale, as much as the mother's, speaks to specific qualities at play in the German peasant culture in the early 1500s. Symbolically, the father represents the knowledge and capacities necessary to fulfill a task, accomplish wider territories, as well as effectuate ideas voiced by the mother. The father puts himself in danger for the mother's wishes; the tale of Rapunzel is an ideal example of this collaborative dynamic. In the German peasant culture of the Late Middle Ages, father represents a society that is still predominantly led by men but which had sufficient concern for the well-being of its culture ("mother culture," the mother's craving for the forbidden herb, rapunzel), to eventually take up arms in her defense.

"These people had a little window at the back of their house from which a splendid garden could be seen, which was full of the most beautiful flowers and herbs."

The problem confronting the expectant couple and the peasant society is here introduced. Not only is a new life needed, as represented by the unborn child, but also a better quality of life: beauty, health, and well-being. Through the window they gaze at a forbidden state of natural abundance and provision. Looking through the window can be understood as an act of self-will towards consciousness. When the subject seeks, she finds the object of her desire.

"It was, however, surrounded by a high wall, and no one dared to go into it because it belonged to an enchantress, who had great power and was dreaded by all the world."

The high wall can be read as the impregnable fortress of the feudal structure, designed to prevent the citizen from going where he or she most desires to go: beyond the garden wall, into a place of provenance and the end of all desiring. Because human society is not yet perfect, this gorgeous and fertile space is not available but coveted and guarded by the malicious presence of an enchantress, whom we will come to know as the collective force of the nobility and the Church.

"One day the woman was standing by this window and looking down into the garden, when she saw a bed which was planted with the most beautiful rapunzel, and it looked so fresh and green that she longed for it, and had the greatest desire to eat some. This desire increased every day, and as she knew that she could not get any of it, she quite pined away, and began to look pale and miserable."

How curious is the craving for something one has never tasted? It is just as curious as the concept that the human spirit is not derivative but creative in the most fertile and functional sense of the word. The human spirit can see things that do not yet exist and initiate the necessary work of making them so. The synchronicity that occurred with the appearance of the tale of Rapunzel concurrently with the events that led to the Reformation of 1517 gives an especially vivid example of this faculty.

Martin Luther published in 1517 a third edition of his rebuke of the institution of the Catholic Church, entitled the Ninety-Five Theses. This document catalogued ninety-five ways in which the Church offended against God's word. These offenses included the selling of pardons to nobles, the attribution of salvation by earthly deeds, and the use of money for its own end, instead of the "holy love and divine need of the soul." As a result of Martin Luther's protest, the peasant population's dissatisfaction with the status quo began to change shape. While there had been political unrest—peasant rebellions had become frequent since 1476—now, the atmosphere was revolutionary. Change was coming. There was no turning back for the peasant class once a clear enough image of the desired object had formed in their consciousness. The same goes for the fairy tale's young couple. Once the woman sees the herb, she will be sick if she does not get the desired rapunzel.

The high wall surrounding the garden was meant to keep the young couple out, just as the ideological, social, and political structures of the Late Middle Ages were meant to exclude the peasants. The idea of representative government had not yet dawned on the human mind, nor had welfare for the disabled, wounded, and elderly—human rights and the individual are merely anachronistic concepts when applied to this moment in time. But this will no longer be the case after the peasants have risen against the forces at large. In the end, whether they win or lose will make little difference.

Who is this enchantress in the fairy tale? The common definition of an enchantress is one with an unusual allure or fascination. In this story, she symbolizes an archetypal figure. She is not only herself, but also part of a whole body of meaning, what Carl Jung refers to as "archetypal ideas" in Memories, Dreams, and Reflections. As such, she signifies the presence of a dominant force that stands between the protagonist and self-realization. In terms of the Reformation, she represents the establishment, which the German peasants were beginning to recognize and abhor as the enemy of their well being.

The story of Rapunzel, tells the story of the German people from the inside; all of the elements which were in play at this crucial moment are present in fairy tale fashion. After Luther's theses were posted on the Cathedral's doors, the people over time became avid for change, and as their desire filled them, just as it did the expectant mother in the tale, so the fulfillment of that desire at whatever cost became inevitable. Yet as in tales, so in history, each victory is only provisional.

"This desire increased every day, and as she knew that she could not get any of it, she quite pined away, and began to look pale and miserable. Then her husband was alarmed, and asked: 'What ails you, dear wife?' 'Ah,' she replied, 'if I can't eat some of the rapunzel, which is in the garden behind our house, I shall die.' "

The expectant mother has arrived at a point of no return: either she obtains the rapunzel, or she dies. In true fairy tale manner, we are asked to trust the storyteller. We must believe in the veracity of what the woman says. This is what her husband does. The soon-to-be mother and father here represent the interplay between the feminine and masculine principles together at work in the individual—in this case the ordinary citizen—along with all of her or his cultural and social fabric. The couple has conceived the long-awaited child. Still it's not enough; just as dreams launch responsibilities, fecundity requires the right conditions in order to produce its fruit. Now the couple will have to tell the world, permitting those outside their family to be touched by this good news: a boundary awaits to be crossed. Were this an ideal situation, which it could easily be mistaken for in fairy tales, the world of wish fulfillment would match reality. Instead, the world outside of this tiny family will become a place of unforeseeable challenges—and an allegory for political change.

"The man, who loved her, thought: 'Sooner than let your wife die, bring her some of the rapunzel yourself, let it cost what it will.' "

What we risk reveals what we value. This is the kind of predicament—love's challenge, desire's cost—that motivates a wide array of the stories that have shaped Western and Eastern narrative thought, from films to sagas to urban legends. It isn't difficult to imagine, either, how thoroughly entrenched, how serious, must have been the longing of the third class in German society at this moment. In order to force the clergy to change, they would have had to abandon the world as they knew it. But the imagination and heart can do it when the conditions demand.

The years between 1517 and 1524 saw the infusion of a great deal of excitement and hope into the lifeblood of Germany's formerly sleepy towns, as the word of Luther's protests spread through every channel possible and walked across the barriers of illiteracy and Church indoctrination. All at once, everyone was demanding reform of the clergy and evangelical preaching, in many cases adding demands for even wider reforms of social and religious life. The Reformation began to become itself: a ferment of concerns of a religious, political, economic, and social nature emanating out to all parts of society. The gradual realization that the Church was an institution standing in for a spiritual presence—therefore fallible and amendable—was a breakthrough of continuously greater proportions from 1517 onwards. God became a concept worth considering for oneself, on an individual basis.

These years were especially formative because of the interaction between culture and society that was now permitted to take place, a fact which is supported and suggested by the interaction of mother and father in the Rapunzel tale. "The man, who loved her, thought..." is a decidedly effectual phrase. It refers to the assimilation by the folk-mind of all the possibilities latent in the literature of the Reformation. These creative possibilities, when brought forward by the society, can be consequential at long last.

Because the mother in the story is pregnant when she gazes out of her window, she gives the "beautiful rapunzel" in the enchantress' garden serious thought. Pregnancy and fermenting are apt concepts for a moment when hope and the possibility of fighting the good fight are present. The people were therefore able to, with curiosity and desire, look beyond their four walls, full of energy and activity. The peasants had led six distinct revolts and numerous rebellions in forty-one years prior to the Reformation. This illustrates their readiness to act.

Luther's Ninety-Five Theses, in the fullness of its address against the real nature of the contemporary Church, testifies to the deep predicament in which the whole of German society, all classes included, found itself at that moment in time. The Humanist Movement of the Renaissance on the one hand promised an end to what would become known as the Dark Ages by proposing a return to the ethics and philosophy of the Classical Era; on the other hand, in the environment of late medieval Germany, there still lay deeply entrenched habits of superstition, where the role of the Devil was taken seriously in everyday life. This tension played itself out within Martin Luther, as he toiled to reconcile the two warring aspects of the divine as all-merciful or all-just. He arrived finally at a comprehension of the divine and of the Church's place as a servant thereof, equally redefining religious and social thought. He effectively abolished the role of the Church as necessary intermediary between the people and the divine by claiming that the only link to salvation is by divine mercy. In so doing, and by getting away with it, Luther undermined the very foundations of medieval society. A tiny knock to the Church's tenuous position as a needed shelter was sufficient to open a thousand channels by which the common man's life would come awake and flow afresh.

The fact that Luther got away with delivering such a knock was a question both of timing and politics. Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1519-1556), then the king of Spain and ruler—at least in name—over Germany, Sicily, southern Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Burgundy, was preoccupied with imperialist matters. In addition to the problems in Italy, his attention was also directed toward the Turks. Furthermore, he had never really been overly involved in the affairs of Germany, and his negligence only allowed the situation to slip out of his control before he chose to react. For many of the German princes who were not fighting in Italy with King Charles, their pleasure at seeing the Church—the nobility's long-time competitor for supremacy—placed in question only helped Luther. His local elector, Frederick of Saxony, did everything he could to rescue Luther from papal bulls that effectively excommunicated him. Frederick in the end ushered him to safety at his Wartburg Castle where Luther underwent the task of completing his translation of the Biblical texts into the German language.

"At twilight, he clambered down over the wall into the garden of the enchantress, hastily clutched a handful of rapunzel, and took it to his wife."

Twilight is the moment when day and night hang in a balance. There is enough light to see by, but not enough to be seen. Nature helps the husband move quickly and succeeds in getting his wife what she wants. The distribution of information about Luther's Ninety-Five Theses, likewise, employed a coordination of timely and bold action that effectively procured a wedge of agency for the peasant class and the townspeople who sympathized with them. A directive that could only have been attributed to collective inspiration, put the writings of Luther into the hands of the people throughout Germany. The dissemination of Luther's theses was sudden, especially when considering the lack of technology that was available in the Late Middle Ages. Before four weeks had settled on the theses, presses in Wittenberg, Nuremberg, Leipzig and Basel were printing and distributing them, and the rest of Europe soon followed.

According to some historians who offer a different view, the period following the theses' publication was one of stunned and indecisive silence during which no public display of rebuke was made by the authorities against Luther. In any case, whisked off by Frederick of Saxony to the safety of his castle, Luther set to work averaging one tract every fourteen days and hammering out a new translation of the Bible. A fury of thought, action, and exchange was set in motion. The campaign was addressed at all sectors of society. Pamphlets, cartoons, illustrated broadsheets (many of which were created by the painter and his close friend Lucas Cranach the elder), and more traditional treatises informed the masses about the damages done by a Church, which saw fit to sell the mercy of God at a high price and send half of the profits to Rome. By 1524, the output from printing presses in numbers of books published had increased more than six fold. Thanks to Luther, the sacred texts of the Christian faith had been rendered into German. He claimed that it was only right that the Bible be available in the language of "the mother in the home, the children in the street, the common man in the marketplace." His actions grew out of the widespread loss of faith in the Church. Luther was putting the sacred texts into the hands of those who needed it, the peasants and common people who craved to understand the theology that defined their world.

As with any fairy tale, the metaphors are manifold, but this one is too lucid to overlook. For a people who could not read Latin and who had no welfare, no rights, no education, and nothing to protect them from their despots and the fickleness of nature but God Himself, the Bible was a crucial source of information about the nature of life on every level. Its inaccessibility, its desirability, and its necessity, are almost tangibly represented in the story by the salad herb that seems to wave at the expectant mother. The husband, respecting the urgency in his wife's voice, transgresses the bounds that separate them from the rapunzel and brings some home to her.

#

"She at once made herself a salad of it and ate it greedily. It tasted so good to her..."

Once the peasants got their hands on this new information (those who were literate spread the word, and those who were not received evangelical preaching), the people's appetite for a new life began to grow. The husband's brave sojourn into the enchantress' garden while she is apparently away happens only once in the fairy tale without consequences. But he will dare to do it again because information, like this rapunzel, spurs a desire for more. Knowledge isn't innocuous, is it? New information demands a re-evaluation of old norms, from what it means to be an individual (a question that, as far as we know, would not be asked until after the Reformation and the rise of a personal, spiritual consciousness) to the way every sector of society is affected. So what did the people do once they had gotten their first taste of dissent?

"It tasted so good to her—so very good, that the next day she longed for it three times as much as before. If he was to have any rest, her husband must once more descend into the garden."

They—the people—asked for more. They organized themselves. Out of fear of being outnumbered, the nobility that remained in Germany appeased the peasants by granting many of their requests initially. In this way, the peasants gained some advantage. Charles V was still away in Italy trying to extend his domain and protect his possessions from Francis I of France, but the nobility felt sure that when Charles returned, he would put things back in order. The peasants, however, had survived their initial uprisings and had gotten away with demonstrating their resistance. This meant that it was worth the risk of trying again and trying harder. Beginning in 1524 in the southern states of the Black Forest and Lake Constance, the peasants began an all-out war, with a force that eventually grew to well over a quarter of a million, which later became known as "The Revolution of the Common Man."

The range of reforms they sought sprang from one idea, that of godly law, the dream of organizing society around the same moral principles that now promised to shape the interior life of the Christian peasant. All they intended can best be understood as a social revolution in the context of the times, though without the privilege of retrospection their needs and demands must have appeared as simple and basic as field lettuce: the right to use the wood from the trees in the forests, to hunt the game that ran free there, the right to work not as serfs but simply for their own survival (a task which alone consumed enormous effort), the right to impartial courts, freedom of religion, and an end to death duties.

"In the gloom of evening, therefore, he let himself down again; but when he had clambered down the wall he was terribly afraid, for he saw the enchantress standing before him."

The image of the garden's wall and the garden within resonates on many levels. It reminds us of when we've had to seek what's right and to grow, to stretch and challenge ourselves and to expand the territory in which we move and breath. The garden is paradise lost, harmony remembered, sexual frustration and euphoria, the perfect circle undisturbed. It is worth the battle raging within and without. The abundance the peasants sought, and that which the husband seeks, was both basic and radical. Like the rapunzel itself—a field green that grows freely yet is denied—the demands the people made in the Peasants' War of 1524-25 were basic and essential. Sadly, the results of their efforts, and that of the husband in the story, are equally tragic in the end. But for a shining moment they made their stand.

* * *

In 1525, revolts all over Germany were placing under attack the privileges of the ruling class of nobles and clergy, demanding "Christian egalitarianism." Thomas Muntzer, in May of 1525, proposed an alternative to the economic and ideological despair the peasants were locked into serving. He put forward and undertook the project of forming a citizen's alliance to uphold the dream of an egalitarian theocracy made up of peasants, miners, and villagers. When the Princes gathered their forces, however, they put a quick end to that danger by capturing and executing Muntzer and vanquishing the rebels. In the end the peasants' dire need for more, "three times as much as before," had rendered them unable to foresee that the second time around, the establishment would be ready and waiting. After having sacked Rome, King Charles V, along with his legions of Germanic princes, quickly returned to Germany to re-establish his imperial control over the territories that had been lost to the peasants, and with some rapid successes he eventually suppressed the revolts.

The entire unfolding of the Peasants' War added up to this: a people with no vote—insignificant and unworthy from the perspective of the nobility—showed their minds and their fists. A chiefly uneducated people, who devised an egalitarian and spiritually renewed society, in the end were either killed or maimed. The peasants who did survive were forced back into servitude, this time under much harsher conditions, while the rule of territorial princes grew even more powerful than before. The final blow to the peasants came when Martin Luther abandoned them by siding with the establishment. As a result, the Reformation lost some momentum, especially in terms of its attempt to erode feudal organization.

"The gloom of evening" refers to the gathering of dreaded forces, which could not be seen yet but only felt, against the peasants' army. In the darkest daylight hours we think we see, but the outlines of things are too dim to be judged properly. The peasants and their supporters were standing now in the same trap as the husband when the enchantress returns to her garden and finds the intruder in flagrante delicto. Looking to history we find the macrocosmic equivalent of the tragic price she then demands: not only were the revolts crushed, but much of the peasants' property was categorically destroyed—effectively cutting off whole villages from their livelihood—and one hundred thousand peasants were slaughtered. Many more were disfigured and blinded. All of the peasants' requests except for limited religious privileges—which were not properly addressed until the Religious Peace of Augsburg in 1555—were ultimately denied, and the insurgents were left in worse condition than before. Villages were left in ruin. Fields, which had struggled to produce, were now burned to ash. Famine was accompanied by disease. Those charities that had served orphans, the aged, the crippled and the sick, folded without adequate space, resources or money to operate.

"'How can you dare,' said she with an angry look, 'descend into my garden and steal my rapunzel like a thief? You shall suffer for it!' "

When, obedient to his wife's now dire state of craving, the husband climbs down again, he meets the enchantress herself. She will do more than take back her rapunzel: she will demand absolutely everything to which she's not at all entitled. She will hoard their pride and joy and take her time in destroying it. The all-powerful enchantress will demand the unborn child, which cannot be denied.

Who is she? Who oppresses? The enchantress is the oppressor on a collective scale. Throughout history her persona is diffused among a society whose culture feeds and reproduces this invisible persuasion of oppression, and justifies and demands it. In fairy tale tradition, as in narrative culture the world over, the enchantress is an archetype, an anima projection initiating from the male unconscious. In Seminars on Dream Analysis, C. G. Jung writes: "I arrived at the conclusion that the anima [or animus in woman] is the counterpart of the persona, and always appears [in dreams and myths] as a women of a certain quality because she is in connection with the man's specific shadow." The enchantress, like a witch, is the feminine that man denies and represses in himself, only to be compensated and projected negatively into the world around him. She represents control and oppression, and unmasks dreaded power.

"The concept of the archetype," Jung writes in Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, "is derived from the repeated observation that, for instance, the myths and fairy tales of world literature contain definite motifs which crop up everywhere." These typical images and associations are what Jung calls archetypal ideas. "The more vivid they are, the more they will be colored by particularly strong feeling tones. They impress, influence, and fascinate us."

The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales is a written record of a rich and varied oral tradition. It's crucial to keep this fact in mind when learning about the history of Germany's peasants. Instead of having one, presumably solitary author who shaped the narrative from her or his personal imagination, we have a collective narrative. Each teller probably added an inflection here, a detail there, until over time it settled into a legend whose exact source is impossible to name. When Carl Jung speaks about the communal imagination, he is speaking about the pressure which forces revolution to rear its head. Similarly, there was a collective pressure that drove storytellers, over centuries, to create a cultural myth such as Rapunzel.

With exceptional clarity, the enchantress explains her position: the interlocking and co-operative systems of the nobility and the Church effectively kept the peasants from enjoying collective resources, punishing any demands upon the existing commonwealth. She is employed by Rapunzel's storytellers out of a need to understand why human beings accept and propagate oppressive scenarios, such as the one the peasants were left with when their war was ended.

"'Ah,' answered he, 'let mercy take the place of justice, I only made up my mind to do it out of necessity. My wife saw your rapunzel from the window, and felt such a longing for it that she would have died if she had not got some to eat.' "

The enchantress is a figure that appears so consistently in fables and myths that her presence represents a core belief. She is a villain, but not merely: she is an all-powerful and all-possessing one. How else could she demand what she demands? How else could she respond with such wrath to the husband's presence in her garden? Through the lens of psychotherapy, the presence of a larger-than-life villain is a call to the individual and the collective to develop the force needed to stand equal and opposite the enchantress or evil-doer. The fact that she is female means she has access to the totality of power—earthly and occult, political and spiritual—as the tradition of fairy tales suggests for female villainous personae. It is also possible that the image of a woman—as oppressed as she was still in the Late Middle Ages—exacted a price for her mistreatment in the quotidian world by transforming into an evil super-power in the mythic world.

In any case, the force the peasants needed in order to bring down the hegemony of Late Middle Ages society was indeed enormous. They required not only spiritual support but also practical support—technology, knowledge, arms, and funds—most of which were lacking. So the husband's only recourse, as much as the German peasantry's, was to ask for mercy by making an honest claim for the necessity and defensibility of his and their actions. The husband's statement is full of courage and honesty; he does not claim to be justified in his actions. Rather, he asks for mercy, which is a way of negotiating and a means of strategic approach. By appealing to the enchantress' mercy, he is presenting her with a more positive image of herself as a potentially understanding figure, thereby hoping to buy time, save his own head, and obtain more cooperative—even if subjugated—relations with her. Capitulation and obedience are waiting just around the corner.

"Then the enchantress allowed her anger to be softened, and said to him: 'If the case be as you say, I will allow you to take away with you as much rapunzel as you will, only I make one condition, you must give me the child which your wife will bring into the world; it shall be well treated, and I will care for it like a mother.' "

The enchantress "allowed her anger to be softened". Likewise, the nobility did give something to the peasants, but only after negotiation. The husband here is a multilayered symbol; he is from the peasantry, but somewhat removed—he has more bargaining power. He represents those within German society who could speak with the nobility. He is the male patriarchal figure. Similarly, in Germany the presence of a helping class of a slightly higher stature was instrumental during the Peasants' War. Their negotiations obtained minor concessions from the nobility in some principalities and also led important revolts. This group contained artisans, the educated townspeople and even in some cases clergymen, who chose to identify with the peasant movement for a variety of reasons. In the fairy tale, the husband and wife can see "through their little window" into the garden of the enchantress. They are close enough to the over class, the privileged within society, as to enable the peasants and revolutionaries to want what they don't have.

It is also noteworthy that the husband in the fairy tale is moved not only by his own will but also by the nearly desperate urging of his wife. Echoes of the story of original sin emanate from that dialogue: it was Eve who caused the fall from grace into knowledge, first tasting and then urging Adam to taste as well the fruit from the tree of consciousness. In Rapunzel, however, the slowness and simplicity of Eve and Adam—lost in a silent landscape of originality—is transposed into the key of early modernity. Class now exists. Naming is important in both tales as well. The unnamed mother and father in Rapunzel are exactly that: anonymous. Their condition is meant to appeal not only to the individual listener or reader, but to whole groups of people whose very lives are represented in exactly that way: as one, nearly exchangeable unit in an anonymous mass not yet named or no longer named, as is often the case in history. The man's willingness to serve his spouse's wish is a statement about the nature of the peasants' livelihood: perpetual servitude to the nobility on the one hand and to the laws of nature on the other. When he does his wife's bidding, we are helped to understand how the mind of the revolution was at work. Mother representing culture poses as the initiator of forbidden knowledge, and father, representing society, poses as its willing servant and protector. This means that the revolution's necessity was articulated first through cultural channels and then carried through to action with all of its horrendous and heroic consequences.

"The man in his terror consented to everything, and when the woman was brought to bed, the enchantress appeared at once, gave the child the name of Rapunzel, and took it away with her."

As an archetype, what is difficult to understand about the enchantress is the combination of allure and domination her title encompasses. It would be too easy to see her as the simple villain in Rapunzel, just as it seems evident that the peasants and their sympathizers are innocent and good while the King, the nobles, and the Church are all evil-doers. Avoiding these simple categories, we arrive at a more nuanced truth about the very human conditions—obedience and rebellion—which in turn support and resist change or transformation.

The figure of Martin Luther, whom we have thus far placed in the margins, enters the discourse here in a most timely fashion. Who is he? What does he want? And, who is he actually for? There are no straightforward answers to these questions. While his actions and life's work are not entirely expressed in the story of Rapunzel, it is he who embodies the problematic nature of the agreement between the enchantress and the husband. It's he who is both human and archetypal, requiring the reader to embrace this paradox. Luther liberated and oppressed the peasantry at the same time, frustrating ultimately all political expediencies in his dogged and lonely pursuit for what he considered an "individual truth." He is invoked here because he helps demonstrate a deeper understanding about the oppressing conditions disguised as the enchantress who protects the status quo.

As a divisive figure, embraced at least partially for selfish reasons by the peasantry, common people, and the nobility simply for his rejection of the Church's secular authority, Luther provides a lucid example of one of the ways in which the enchantress tends to operate. As an archetype, the enchantress lives in everyone. So does Rapunzel. The parents and the King's son, who will later appear, are agents in the struggle between the two, supporting characters in a drama played out on every level, from the interior life of the individual to the political theatre of nations. Martin Luther, who struggled all of his life to interpret scripture for himself, refused to be dominated by the existing hegemonic structure.

By the same token, Luther refused to be identified with the peasantry, whom he reviled in a document he published in 1525, titled Against the Murderous and Thieving Hordes of Peasants. In this appeal he asked the princes to suppress the revolts so as to reassert their authority, to which the peasants owed their obedience. It is true that Luther was nearly killed while touring the South on a preaching mission, a fact that must have diminished his opinion of the peasantry, but it also reveals that he probably had limited knowledge of them apart from such missions. Otherwise, he would have been less surprised or known better how to contend with the situation. In any case, Luther's reaction wasn't simply a matter of racism or classism, but rather a desperate wish to see the revolts end.

Luther opened one door, the door of hope, which had been closed to the peasants and to society as a whole. Yet by generating movement, he upset the stasis, thereby serving each of the discontents at play in the human theatre of desire that was the Germany of that epoch. The window of opportunity swung open when he named the hegemony "unreal" and demanded some kind of re-ordering. The peasants, however, leaned too fully on him, wishing he could work out a new world order. But he couldn't. He was no hero. He was just a man who sat down for hours and days with the hope of answering a question that wouldn't go away with repeated scriptural ablutions. The wound of faith was on him, on the peasantry, and the nobility as well, while the mighty Church and the King looked on from above. As usual, the gridlocked socio-economic structure of late medieval Germany kept society frozen in its step.

Martin Luther's attempts at meditation finally yielded a tiny chasm, which the peasants and their sympathizers sought to use. So did the nobles, the King, and the Church. That's where our story gets really interesting. The enchantress' anger softens to the husband's plea. The husband's terror bends his body, against his very soul, to her demand and he agrees to take the rapunzel in his hand in exchange for his soon-to-be child.

The logic of this exchange seems utterly incomprehensible. Rather, it is a poetics all its own, rife with greed and fear for the wife and the husband, while for the enchantress, power and obedience. Who abandoned the infant child: the father at present or the enchantress in the future? Or perhaps it was the mother whose unrestrained appetite pillaged the garden walls. And now—how will the agency of nascent, infant Rapunzel figure into this quagmire?

#  Chapter II

#  Birth and the Tower

#  Court Culture and Absolutism

#  (1525 -1713)

What does democracy mean? Better yet, what does the prophecy of a democracy mean? What do we permit a fairy tale to say? In the deep recesses of the collective unconscious, does there exist an archetypal image of the humane, just society? It is an incredibly fertile suggestion. If we consider it, we see history in an entirely new light, as an arduous path toward the Promised Land, rife with setbacks and betrayals of every kind. Each victory is only provisional, each story a compass through but one layer of the maze. Rapunzel is barely a few days old, and already forces are set in motion to make her life difficult. Difficult, and strangely promising.

The peasantry throughout the lands that would be united someday under the name of Germany had fared poorly in their revolution. Things were worse than before. The dream of a just and moral leadership was laid waste while the counter-revolutionary forces found a new sense of solidarity in opposition. The nobles, the King and the Church were able to find and see the benefits in protecting their common interest. Rather than eroding feudalism's security as a social and geographic structure, the concluding of the Peasants' War—followed by numerous religious wars, the Counter Reformation and finally by the onset of the Thirty Years' War—resulted in a further bolstering of feudal lords' powers and privileges. These are hardly the circumstances out of which one might expect a period of enlightenment to arise, but that's precisely what occurred, against all odds.

The character of Rapunzel serves as a premonition of great things to come. But in order to understand the predicament she faces, it is necessary to understand life in Germany from 1525 to 1648: a period that saw the Peasants' War concluded, the Thirty Years' War come and gone, and the aftermath of so much loss and change. The Thirty Years' War—what historians call the pan-European conflict—raged principally on German soil without reprieve from 1618 to 1648. It was a time in which every major European power was engaged in brutal, undisciplined warfare, leaving many communities all but destroyed.

Surprisingly, in areas untouched by war, the arts continued to flourish yet only in the hands of fortunate nobles who were not obligated to participate in the warfare and were thus unaffected. Slowly the arts were gathered into the culture of the nobility and were nurtured there, developing into the phenomenon of what was later called court culture. This culture stood in stark contrast to the German peasant's way of life. Villages and farms lost as much as two-thirds of their population, all of their arable land and much of their livestock, leading to an ever-greater widening of the gulf that separated the peasants and common people from the lords of the principalities. The culture of the courts sheltered and protected the emergence of a new wave of German creativity, but the conditions of this displacement would prove to be problematic.

The birth of the great courts was a direct result of the ravages of those years spent at war. The Peace of Westphalia, signed in 1648, ended thirty years of war and permitted hundreds of local rulers across much of Germany (still at that time considered the Holy Roman Empire) far greater control over their particular region, as well as the right to determine the religious observance of their principality. It also encouraged them to permit a degree of liberty in terms of religious worship. Unlike the Netherlands—where townships and trade connected the populace with relatively free economic and cultural exchange—in Germany, whose center became the court, there was no such thing happening. The gap between life inside and life outside the court widened rapidly once the Peace of Westphalia had been signed.

The couple in the fairy tale, like the townspeople and peasantry themselves, no longer inhabit the significant space in the story, because the center, the power itself, has been placed in the hands of the ruler and of the enchantress. The ruler now decides, albeit graciously, not only the fate of his subjects but their faith as well, while the enchantress sets the very limits of Rapunzel's young existence.

The loss of confidence in German culture, which spread throughout the provinces and especially those areas most damaged by the Thirty Years War, is a consequence of the enormous transformation that was taking place. An already weakened populace looked on as the national resources shifted to so many principalities in which, unlike the bustling life of a village or town, they could never hope to play a part, however small. That is, unless one were an artist. Artists were adopted, raised, protected, patronized, and used to further the nation's archive of creative output. The protagonist of this scenario is King Frederick I of Prussia, who, by the end of his reign in 1713, had established a throne in his land, cultivated a rich artistic and intellectual environment, and instituted an aristocracy which oversaw social and political life.

There was a very real divide between the ruling class and the people. The nobility all across Germany were taking from the folk culture its best and finest. Promising young artists were raised inside court walls and in some areas, artwork was confiscated from village churches. This gulf yawned wider in the land of Rapunzel's broken family. The child has been named and taken away from her mother and father. Where will she go? Who will she become? What kind of parent will the enchantress turn out to be? And most of all, what will the implications be for the German people?

"Rapunzel grew into the most beautiful child under the sun."

Rapunzel will shine with resplendent virtue and the promise of a brighter day, despite her surrogate mother being a witch, her parents being completely unknown to her, and her having a name which means, literally, "field lettuce." Beauty, in fairy tales, is the mark of blessing and goodness, which means that there is cause for relief, for all is not lost. The beauty of Rapunzel is an embodied metaphor: a bursting forth of an unpredicted capaciousness. What is art if not the flower of creative desire, fertilized by the irritants of an imperfect world? Rapunzel's beauty is a promise that beauty can and will flourish, even in the most hostile of environments. The birth of Rapunzel in the fairy tale symbolizes the birth and development of what was to become Germany's uniquely magnificent artistic and cultural heritage: architecture, music, philosophy, literature, and eventually science that began to blossom, paradoxically, after the Peasants' War.

So there was still hope for the peasants, despite the detrimental turn of events. During the time of Luther, the seed of a social revolution was born, arguably the very first social revolution in history. It should come as no surprise that it was met with powerful resistance and was squelched to all intents and purposes. How do we explain the fact that following the peasants' defeat in 1525, and their subjugation once again in 1648 under the rule of nearly 2,000 princes, the foundations were being laid for the kind of society they had dreamed of? The quality of life in Germany reached an all-time low and the aristocracy flourished. But somehow, amidst of all of this, the foundation for a better way of life was slowly being laid: a better way of life for everyone. This was the fruit of the creative process: art.

"When she was twelve years old, the enchantress shut her into a tower, which lay in a forest, and had neither stairs nor door, but quite at the top was a little window."

While the populace lost much of its artistic heritage to them, the courts played their role in pushing many art forms to unprecedented heights. An expression of emotion and creativity was born in Germany that flourished from the early 1500s to the end of the Weimar Republic in 1933. By the late 1700s, Germany became known as Das Land der Dichter und Denker, which means "the land of poets and philosophers," and had it not been for Hitler's rise to power, Weimar Culture of the 1920s and early 1930s would no doubt have blossomed into a second renaissance. The energy with which the powerful classes both exploited and nurtured creativity was a consequential force which shaped a legacy to the world.

Rapunzel is that legacy. While she was born outside the palace walls to humble parents, she was destined to shape her identity by the light from a tower window. She is a symbol, promising that—despite everything—there is cause for hope and space for creative inspiration.

One result of Rapunzel's surrogate upbringing can be seen in the geography of Germany today, where there is a proliferation of a variety of local identities within each individual state. Travelling in Germany, each region bears an architectural stamp in which a particular principality caused a unique character and culture to flower in its vicinity.

Rapunzel's placement in the tower was a way of keeping her individuality intact. Likewise, courts were able to preserve and develop the unique characteristics of the art they produced, rather than selling out to a more homogenous brand of beauty propagated from a distant capital. This fact is evidenced by the organization of society in Germany around numerous courts and small cities rather than around one central seat. The citizens of Germany were never far from a center, even if it was a much smaller center than the great capitals of Europe, and one that reflected local identity. The effect was an increase of the relative power of principalities over the peasants and common people by proximity and protection. This subtle difference has, over time, shaped many aspects of the German cultural character, and it is reflected in the narrative of our fairy tale by the landscape in which the story unfolds.

Rapunzel's place of isolation is a tower that the enchantress can easily reach, even if it is in a deep forest. In this way, she can provide for her while keeping her subjugated at the same time. Further echoes of this proximity-isolation dynamic and its ambivalent effects can be heard in the remainder of the story, but it is at this moment in Rapunzel that the fairy tale's authors have introduced the next essential problem which the story communicates. It is a problem the whole of Germany would take over 300 years to address: what are the necessary conditions for freedom? What sort of environment is needed for freedom to flourish? And, what is the cost? When the most beautiful child under the sun is placed high in a tower with no stairs or door and only a window to look out of, left orphaned and alone in the middle of a dark forest, we are to understand that the human being is unconsciously waiting for an event of psychic proportions.

"When the enchantress wanted to go in, she placed herself beneath it and cried, 'Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair to me.' Rapunzel had magnificent hair, fine as spun gold..."

Innocence has no business idly letting her hair grow into a ladder for the oppressor, although this is what she is forced to do. A spiteful imbalance is setting itself up, which means a critical event is just around the corner. Examined through the lens of Jungian analysis, we would say that consciousness is knocking on the unconscious' door, wondering who or what will answer.

The magnificent long hair of Rapunzel is a way of saying that the force, energy and beauty of the commoners' child—art itself—was enlisted in the service of the climbing oppressor, the aristocracy. Hair is emblematic of vitality; Rapunzel's hair is as long as the tower is high and strong enough to climb upon, indicating a great deal about the surge in creative work in the German courts. The length of her hair is a mark of its cultivation, much like courtly gardens in which nature was bent to serve a human aesthetic. Like her golden hair, the criterion of aesthetics was predominant in many fields, especially in music. The genius of Bach, likewise, was drawn out and extended by the protected environment in which it was elevated.

One of the strengths of court culture was that it permitted many more artists to prosper. But with this development, the loss to society was to have far reaching consequences: by appropriating and cultivating the arts and artists, the nobility also robbed the people of the very source that—in a time of great duress such as the Thirty Years' War and its aftermath—promised most to heal the community. By the end of the war and the signing of the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 (one of the main reasons for its success of which was greater autonomy for the numerous princes) "high art" was firmly in the control of the nobility. Germany had taken a turn in a more clearly defined direction, which not only delayed its chances of becoming unified, but also of becoming a center of cultural and economic activity in Europe. The power of the princes—who in many regions were despotic—grew in proportion to the shrinkage of the Holy Roman Empire's political centrality. Along with this change came a feeling of alienation for Germans, as well as a loss of confidence in the very things that made them culturally unique.

In fairy tale symbolism, much as in the interpretation of dreams, the birth of a female child alerts the reader to important activity in the realms of relationship, emotion, and inspiration, as opposed to signifying pragmatic or institutional development. The enchantress and Rapunzel both being female, point to a vast array of emotional and creative expression harnessed to different ends not yet fully revealed in our story. They illustrate, when taken together, that the anima, is both above and below, both obstacle and prize. The potential energy latent in their relationship reflects the problem of their respective positions.

Rapunzel, who represents the creative soul, belongs in the high place, and the enchantress, who represents her perfect opposition as oppressor—or as Carl Jung would say the shadow—belongs below. But fairy tales remind us that there is always something to be fought for in this world. Rapunzel is going to grow as the enchantress ages and nature indifferently assists in rebalancing the scales in favor of the child. There are centuries to traverse, however, before the high princess of the soul can come down and contend with the world for her place in the affairs of human beings. As Rapunzel grows in the fairy tale, so grew an ever-increasing body of artwork in Germany.

The enchantress, still unnamed, remains for the time being obscure, serving to indicate that oppression of the lowest classes by the nobility occurred in the Late Middle Ages not only in Germany, but all across greater Europe. When the enchantress gains a distinctly German name in the fairy tale, there will be good reason for it: the naming of the characters ties their identities to specific experiences, geographies, and periods. It is the enchantress who names the child Rapunzel, a lettuce that grew abundantly in the fields and forests of the Germanic regions in the 16th century. Her name mocks her; why else would the enchantress pick it? Rapunzel's parents only wanted an herb, rapunzel. So, the enchantress punishes the child and family with this name, as if to express her enormous power over them and the hopelessness of their desire.

* * *

Absolutism—where total authority emanated from the king—was first implemented in 1660 at the court of Louis XIV of France. It was put into practice in Germany shortly after. Lasting into the early 1800s, its fundamental principle was based on a widely held theory known as "the divine right of kings." As a result, the standing of the German princes increased considerably. With their new status came the desire as well as the need to emulate the great courts, which helped to accelerate the development of numerous court centers that were appearing throughout Germany. These cultural centers became richer and more ensconced in the society of privilege, and in some cases court culture developed into enormous, wealthy, and influential hubs of creative enterprise—King Frederick I's court being the best example.

Germany had never experienced such an extraordinary emersion of cultural expression. This blossoming—baroque, rococo, and later classical—offered an imaginative oasis in a climate of obedience to an absolute power. An intractable difference was evolving between the feminine culture of creative expression and the masculine nature of vying for pre-eminent positions among the society's most powerful players. The rise of the arts stood in contrast to a culture of obedience that would be increasingly determinate in Germany's history. As territorial rulers held greater sway over their constituents than the Empire had ever done previously, the citizen was replaced by the subject, and artistic development was kept safely out of the population's hands.

This poses a problem for Rapunzel. The story itself reflects a societal perspective on what's happening. Rapunzel's removal at birth is not a neutral one from one household to another, or even a relocation. It is an imprisonment and an abduction. The symbol of the tower is used as a metaphor, distancing the artist and their creativity from the public domain on one level, and from the individual's grasp on another. For centuries, the developments underway were isolated within the confines of the court system while outside the palace walls, little progress was made. Without the free circulation of cultural ideas—without the natural inter-mingling of fine art with folk art—advances in Germany's culture development was minimal, barely reaching the society as a whole.

The tower where Rapunzel is placed, starting from the age of twelve, symbolizes that a region of great vitality and potential lay virtually untapped in a vastly unknown and unrequited space. Indeed, the tower permits access of only an extremely limited kind: the enchantress alone can call for Rapunzel, no one else, and certainly not the other way around.

If Rapunzel is to be cared for by the enchantress, then it seems evident that she will never be given the freedom to develop naturally under the guidance of her parents. On the other hand, had she remained solely with her parents, she would have surely grown up impoverished. Her removal from a natural family environment to one in which her development will be groomed and guided severely in a specific direction by an external force, is expressive of the difficulty with which exquisite beauty found its path into the modern world. It is a reflection of the sacrifices that were needed in order to produce great bodies of work in a social climate that was not conducive to creativity.

* * *

The richness and diversity of creativity taking place especially in the 17th and 18th centuries was certainly made possible by the protection and wealthy patronage of the court system. That isn't to say that without these, German art would never have developed, but folk artists and artisans of the time have mainly been lost to history, whereas the work of artists produced under the auspices of the courts remains with us intact today. When the enchantress claims that she will care for Rapunzel "like her own child," she expresses this predicament. On the one hand, Rapunzel's parents were to lose their baby; on the other hand, the child would now be destined for a noble upbringing. The artist who was offered the mixed blessing of courtly patronage had to exchange his familiar world for the glories and pressures of court life.

The considerable rise in artistic development during this period was also accompanied by the state's declining concern—economically, socially, and religiously—for the well-being of the people. This was in part due to the reduction of the Church's overall presence and influence. The Holy Roman Empire was being replaced by numerous principalities, whose powers were now absolute and whose religious identities were no longer of official concern. Bureaucracies established a link between the aristocracy and wealthiest citizens to the king or prince with a network of compartmentalized relations. At the same time, heavier burdens and higher taxes were placed on the peasants and common people. This may contribute to an understanding of the ways in which power was maintained in the hands of the elite.

As less attention was being paid to the decline and decay of society throughout Germany, and the Church was no longer able to retain spiritual authority over the fate of its subjects, the princes, now with their "semi-divine" status, focused more on reining in this precious, invisible life force and harvesting it for the greater glory of individual kingdoms.

One kind of numen, or spirit, was replaced by another. Religion, according to Carl Jung, is "a careful and scrupulous observation of what Rudolf Otto aptly termed the numinosum, that is, a dynamic agency or effect not caused by an arbitrary act of will." Indeed creativity, too, is an ordering of effects not caused by an arbitrary act of will. The similarities between religious and creative inspiration rest in this hypothesis: both are produced by a call from within, a channeling of something greater than oneself. By granting artists opportunities, such as court composer, the nobility secured their relationship with this "divine" source of ongoing vitality and harnessed it towards legitimatizing their importance. As a result, the artwork benefited, developed, expanded, and grew more profound.

The artist and his creation, however, were certainly not treated with equal respect. Historically, artists were used for the beauty they supplied and then frequently discarded when no longer of service. In our fairy tale, something similar is happening. "Rapunzel grew into the most beautiful child under the sun," but she was evidently not the happiest or the most loved child, held captive as she was and deprived of playmates and room to roam. Artists benefited from court patronage in terms of their work, but they frequently suffered from a lack of respect and freedom to develop as they wished.

The life of Mozart was one such case. Unwilling to conform and after having a number of bad experiences, he chose to leave the court environment. Unfortunately, the hardship of trying to make it on his own only brought on his early death in 1791, at the age of 35. The system simply abandoned him, tossing his body into a mass grave. To this day his burial site remains unknown.

Dependency was created all around the court and made firm by a social hierarchy. Artists were servants, merely part of the court staff. In this manner, the princes and aristocracy were able to cement their access to the movement in the arts and prevent it from spilling into the hands the revolutionaries—the German people at large, the peasants and common people. Inside court walls, art could be observed—and as the French physicist Jean Bernard Foucault noted, "observation is the key to manipulation"—and cultivated and controlled. Outside those walls it might have run free, have changed, and more dangerous still, have blended with society. Raising and informing the consciousness of all different kinds of people was certainly beneath such a divine, such a numinous presence as a work of beauty, a work of art. Here again was the same problem the people were up against just before the Reformation: because of the Church, they were denied access to the sacred text.

"When she was twelve years old, the enchantress shut her into a tower..."

At the age of twelve, the human being arrives at a watershed—emotionally, physiologically, and biologically—the passing of which denotes irreversible changes on many levels. With the beginning of the reproductive period in a girl's life and all the emotions and growth accompanying it, there is a clear reason why Rapunzel is locked away at this age. Her ability to create new life is on the brink of flourishing, a just metaphor for Germany in the 17th century with the onset of courtly life, the German Enlightenment and, of course, all of the flowering in the arts. Creativity and sexual, regenerative power serve as metaphors here because the dangers inherent in the unleashing of a misunderstood potency were felt and dealt with by the burgeoning court aristocracy as much as by the enchantress in the role of surrogate mother.

At the age of twelve Rapunzel has reached the beginning of adolescence and will now learn that she is an individual; to suppress or to pursue her new role will come at a cost to her, no matter her decision. To lock her away is to prevent an increasing self-awareness from developing and interfering with the enchantress' plans. The height of the tower, we learn, is 20 ells—or roughly 75 feet—is a tribute to Rapunzel's potential, as much as is the absence of a door or stairs. How great, how awesome, must have been the aura of Rapunzel to necessitate such extreme measures.

This imprisonment worked in two ways. It prevented Rapunzel's escape, but it also denied anyone access to her, and this fact is equally important when we look at the events that were taking place in Germany at the time. By keeping the population ignorant of important artistic developments, the nobility could safeguard its control over the access to those developments. Furthermore, dependence and isolation ensured the artist's loyalty. To be permissive, prolific, and accessible—to grow one's hair long enough to be used by the keeper for a ladder—was the artist's job. Contact with the masses was discouraged. Passion and discontent were not to be aroused. This curtailed the very thing that gives birth to positive social change: reciprocity and exchange between differing viewpoints.

The number twelve carries a mystic and occult significance, which weaves in and out of different cultures and societies throughout our history. There are twelve signs in the Zodiac wheel, the method by which ancient Babylonians measured the heavens. In Greek mythology, there are Twelve Olympians, the gods who hold court in the sky. The Norse god of wisdom, Odin has twelve sons. In the Old Testament we learn about the Twelve Tribes of Jacob; in the New Testament Jesus has twelve apostles. Hercules performed twelve physical feats; after his crucifixion, the resurrected Jesus was spotted twelve times.

Historically, twelve is a number that has embodied a kind of divine balance, a link between our world and the heavens. Up until the 19th century, the origins of creative knowledge were assumed to be divine. Martin Luther believed music was divinely designed, and should be used to glorify God. Luther wrote numerous chorales, or vocal arrangements, which demonstrated his spiritual and philosophical engagement with this concept. The enchantress' taking Rapunzel at the age of twelve is an extension of this phenomenon. At this age, Rapunzel is now beautiful and mystically harmonized to conduct either spiritual or creative energy into the world. As such, she is coveted by the enchantress and must be secured, far from any influence that could taint her. Likewise, the growing secularized culture of aristocratic principalities was seeking its own claim to divine grace and securing its access to great works of art.

"Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Let down your hair to me."

The enchantress' call initiates the complicit, obedient relationship which defines Rapunzel in the fairy tale. What may haunt the reader about this cry is how close to a lover's call it is. Certainly, in the age of courtly love, romance was defined by moments in which the lover sought access to their beloved's inner most heart. In contrast, we have here a dangerous rapport in that the sought-after Rapunzel does not long to be found but obliges the enchantress because she must. It isn't natural; nature is propelled by desire, never by obedience. Or is it? In any case, court culture was arranged so that under any circumstances the artist was available to satisfy the nobility's whims. The structure of the social hierarchy was mechanized, and because of this the flows of desire were either constrained or overwhelmed.

"Rapunzel had magnificent long hair, fine as spun gold, and when she heard the voice of the enchantress she unfastened her braided tresses, wound them round one of the hooks of the window above, and then the hair fell twenty ells down, and the enchantress climbed up by it."

After Rapunzel takes her hair down and wraps her braids around the hook, they then become nothing more than rope. This metaphorical conversion of natural radiance into climbing rope introduces the idea of exploitation. By putting beauty to use in a secondary function as a means of climbing up a doorless tower, the figure of the enchantress enslaves the numen inherent in Rapunzel's gorgeous hair.

* * *

Looking back, the betrayal the German people faced in the era of absolutism becomes clearer. After the humiliating defeat in the Peasants' War, the peasants from the 17th and 18th century stood, nonetheless, in a much better position than if their ancestors had not taken up arms between 1524 and 1525.

History will later show that it was better a regional prince laying down the law than a distant institution in Rome posing as the divine presence on earth. Although the hope of ending the exploitation of the poor wouldn't be realized still for some time, the progressive loss of faith in an almighty Church across much of the Holy Roman Empire—what would later become Germany—resulted in a shift in the balance of power. That promising and grand body of completeness, which the Empire had for centuries represented, was increasingly to be interpreted by a range of kings and princes, who were now the sovereign power throughout Germany. And during this same period—which produced Bach's glorious fugues and the Goldberg Variations—the nobility set about usurping the arts solely for their own use and pleasure and used them as a means to secure their contact with numinous knowledge.

No longer able to purchase entrance into heaven by way of the Church, court aristocrats sought salvation by purchasing the lives and works of promising artists and thinkers, thus unwittingly setting the wheels in motion for change.

"The poem, the song, the picture, is only water drawn from the well of the people, and it should be given back to them in a cup of beauty, so that in drinking they know themselves."

Federico Garcia Lorca

#  Chapter III

#  The Listener

#  and the

#  German Enlightenment

#  (1650 -1814)

Imagine, for a moment, a girl of seventeen. Her heart does not yet know the feeling of love. She stands at her window in her robes, practically buried in them. She stands there, staring out... and sings. This is our heroine, Rapunzel.

What does she sing? We can guess that it's a simple song, but also a true one. Thus far she's lived her entire life in captivity. She's never been to a school dance, never heard any of the Top 40 hits, her mother never lulled her to sleep with children songs. With no material to work with, and no one to listen, she has no choice but—with the little freedom she has—to pull sound from deep within, un-encoded, and pure, to voice her longing the only way she knows how. Just exactly as it is. And it comes to her, a song. This being the only thing in her dreary cycle of days that seems to makes any sense.

We should also remember: she's never even seen a man! What is a man? Seventeen, buried in her robes and singing by the window.

For a year or two.

"After a year or two, it came to pass that the King's son rode through the forest and passed by the tower."

Come back! Enter the King's son.

"Then he heard a song, which was so charming..."

...just exactly as it is.

"...so charming that he stood still and listened."

Before hearing Rapunzel's voice the forest was mysterious, filled with a raw potential—a mystery undefined. With this new melody, something takes shape. Charm plays its magic lute, and nature—as if under a spell—obeys. The King's son and his surroundings are forever transformed by the presence of Rapunzel's delicate, sensual, and somehow holy, song.

"This was Rapunzel, who in her solitude passed her time in letting her sweet voice resound."

Fear and tender recognition are the primal extremes between which charm is delicately poised. Captured by this charm, the King's son will return again and again. He will seek out Rapunzel, with the hope of understanding the nature of this impossible, yet wonderful singing voice: drawn and guided by her melody, by the promise of something beautiful and new. And just as the forest was being tamed by a song, likewise, without the development of the arts in court society, the course of feudalism may never have veered toward a government of reason, a government free of superstition.

* * *

Nearing the end of the 18th century, feudalism in Germany was moving towards a transformation. Although the serfs, peasant and common people were still locked in a cycle of helplessness of varying degrees, culture—the arts and philosophy—as it evolved, would bring a sense of identity to the German people with hope for a future.

In the end, it took Napoleon's invasion into Germany in 1797 to finally bring down the many feudal principalities—along with their grip on society, their resistance being no match against the far superior French armies. Once secured, Napoleon set about establishing administrative and legal systems. Although the Germans grew to hate the imposition of Napoleon, they nonetheless clung to the numerous changes his regime brought about when he departed. These systems, once in place, operated with much greater efficiency, and by 1814 serfdom (in a number of regions), the restriction on mobility of laborers and guild privileges were abolished. The foundation was laid for what would become a modern German infrastructure, setting the stage for Germany's late entry into the industrial revolution.

"The King's son wanted to climb up to her, and looked for the door to the tower, but none was to be found."

Stepping back, it was the Aufklarung—the German Enlightenment of the 18th century—that readied the German mind for this era of changes to the bureaucratic system Napoleon was to bring. As the state's organization improved, ideas such as the philosophy of Emmanuel Kant (1724-1804) and later Georg Hegel (1770-1831) found fertile ground in which to take root.

"What is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational," was Hegel's way of affirming the link between the minds of citizens and the social forms they erect or support. Kant, on his side, claimed that it was "necessary to have strong rulers who could guarantee political stability and the ordered circumstances in which alone thinking could take place."

The German Enlightenment (1650-1800) differed from the French and English Enlightenment. Its principles were based on metaphysics as well as a desire to unify German culture. Writers, philosophers and artists—engaged with new ideas—imagined a new kind of leadership, one that had the responsibility of protecting, and indeed reflecting, the mind.

As the King's son is being shaped by his journeys towards the tower, the German people were moving towards something new, something liberating: the possibility of a social, democratic awakening. The King's son makes his way through the forest to Rapunzel and with repetition masters the way to the enchanting, beautiful voice. What will happen when they meet?

* * *

What kind of man this King's son is has a good deal to do with his upbringing, but equally, as much to do with how he diverges from that upbringing. Being the son of the King, the latest in the line of monarchs, he has a strong tie to the values of the old order: feudalism and absolutism. However, the road open before him could hold something quite new, his destiny has yet to be determined.

"He rode home, but the singing had so deeply touched his heart, that every day he went out into the forest and listened to it."

Clues in the history of Germany during the mid to late 1700s indicate that Frederick II, also called Frederick the Great, the first German sovereign to issue an edict supporting freedom of religion, was a kind of King's son—the kind of man our 17-year-old imprisoned princess might adore. Reigning from 1740-1786—during what was later called the "enlightened" period of absolutism—Frederick was a military king, transforming Prussia (what is today most of northern Germany) into a major European power during his term. But he was also reputed to be kind. He would stop and greet peasants he passed on his arduous voyages across his now far-reaching territory. He did his best to oversee personally the affairs of state in diverse regions at a dangerous time for a monarch, almost losing everything during The Seven Years War (1756-1763).

Even before becoming king, Frederick's insistence on religious freedom for his subjects attracted the attention of Voltaire, who sent Frederick something like platonic love poems—letters expressing admiration and philosophical brotherhood. One from August 26th, 1736, reads: Paris,

Monseigneur,

I should indeed be insensitive were I not infinitely touched by the letter with which your Royal Highness has been graciously pleased to honor me. My self-love was but too flattered; but that love of the human race which has always existed in my heart and which I dare to say determines my character, gave me a pleasure a thousand times purer when I saw that the world holds a prince who thinks like a man, a philosophical prince who will make men happy.

Suffer me to tell you that there is no man on the earth who should not return thanks for the care you take in cultivating by sane philosophy a soul born to command. Be certain there have been no truly good kings except those who began like you, by educating themselves, by learning to know men, by loving the truth, by detesting persecution and superstition. Any prince who thinks in this way can bring back the golden age to his dominions. Why do so few kings seek out this advantage? You perceive the reason, Monseigneur; it is because almost all of them think more of royalty than of humanity: you do precisely the opposite. If the tumult of affairs and the malignancy of men do not in time alter so divine a character, you will be adored by your people and admired by the whole world. Philosophers worthy of that name will fly to your dominions; and, as celebrated artists crowd to that country where their art is most favored, men who think will press forward to surround your throne.

The illustrious Queen Christina left her kingdom to seek the arts; reign, Monseigneur, and let the arts come to seek you.

The letters from Voltaire suggest that before Frederick II became the King of Prussia, he lived and breathed as a prince in the landscape of Germany's evolving history. His vision was one, perhaps, that had the power to transform the direction of the country's history. Frederick—like the fable's prince—is a listener. He hears the cries of his people, the mysterious song echoing throughout the forest. And he seeks out its source.

Voltaire believed Frederick to be something rare, that paradox of civic life, the philosopher-king, a just, benevolent ruler. The King's son in Rapunzel is someone very special. He is both here and there: next in line to the throne but his own man.

* * *

When the King's son enters our story, Rapunzel has already begun singing her song. "After a year or two," the Grimm brothers record, "it came to pass that the King's son rode through the forest."

This year or two in the story symbolizes the period of time it took for the oppressive regimes of tyrannical princes to yield to the ideals of the Enlightenment, which illuminated Frederick II and allowed for a growing sense of national unity.

However, with the beginning of the 19th century, something more sinister was to appear on the horizon. There was a deep anxiety in Germany's burgeoning nationalism, as may occur in any nationalism. In defining who we are as a people, we also define who we are not. We create "the other." Looking back, the German Enlightenment may have been the most productive period the arts had ever seen. It was also the most frustrating for society's marginalized: the serfs and the Jews.

The Jews settled the German territories-to-be long before the establishment of Christianity, and in some areas their settlements predated the Celts, Slavs, and Balts, all of whom would later help to make up the Germanic people. In the Middle Ages, Jewish communities were literate even at their poorest, largely due to a cultural emphasis on the study of religious text. In contrast the surrounding peasants lived much more uneducated, downtrodden lives. Jews played a crucial role in Germany's cultural development, secularizing and promoting its spread in ways that circumnavigated the court system's reach, yet maintaining their own religious and cultural identity.

The years from 1745 to 1806 saw shifts, both dramatic and subtle, at almost every level of civic and personal life. In the first two chapters, the existence of a transitional class between peasants and nobles was only tangentially depicted, chiefly in its role as go-between for the peasant revolutionaries and the upper classes. Throughout the rise of absolutism, however, this intermediate class grew as well, ushered along by developments in Germany's territorial infrastructure. Jews, regardless of the degree to which they were permitted to live, succeeded in playing a dynamic role in this class during the German Enlightenment, while at the same time securing their cultural identity from forces that preyed heavily upon it. Moses Mendelssohn, for example, one of the greatest and most respected philosophers of the Enlightenment period and the father of Reform Judaism dedicated the later part of his life to the emancipation of his people.

In 1781, in the southern German territories—under Austria's control—the Habsburg king Joseph II's Edict of Toleration permitted most non-Catholics the freedom to practice their religion in privacy. In the following years, several provinces created edicts relieving Jews from prejudicial laws that limited their dwelling to ordained areas. This was definitely a result of the Enlightenment's effects, and came in sharp contrast to the Habsburg's ruling which evicted an estimated 70,000 Jews from Prague to placate anti-Semitic unrest just thirty years earlier.

During the Enlightenment the idea of Bildung, or education, had seized hold of the German imagination in certain quarters, and there was great interest in artwork, philosophy, poetry, and civic thought. Salons that prominent Jewish women hosted, appeared in the imperial free cities that befriended them. These eclectic gatherings gave prominence to new ideas where social dividing lines seemed to melt. Salons also played an important role for intellectuals at a time when publishing houses were few and court patronage on the wane. At salons, writers found patronage, stimulation, and distribution. Men, women, Christians, Jews, poor and rich, crossed paths in the parlors of upper-class intellectuals.

One of the most famed gatherings was presided over by Rahel Varnhagen, an independent Jewish woman living in Berlin. Varnahagen's love for the arts and philosophical conversation inspired her to bring together people who shared her passions, reaching across social boundaries. A host of salons presided over by Jewish women appeared between 1745 and 1806, at which point they abruptly came to an end with the invasion of Napoleon.

During this same period throughout Germany, deep-seated racial prejudices and blatantly violent racist imagery (the image of Jews in obscene contact with a sow, the Judensau, adorned many city gates) combined with religious intolerance and cultural chauvinism, were institutionalized aspects of urban and rural life. A tense relationship was set up between the Jewish middle class and the ruling Christian one. Some rulers required Jews to wear armbands and barred them from working in certain professions. Jews were also subject to heavy, debilitating taxes and had to pay a special fee in order to marry. Jewish lenders worked behind the scenes to promote the development of many courts all across Germany, assisting with their management as well as their economic affairs. Paradoxically, the plight of the Jews was further aggravated by this growth that some had helped to nourish.

Berlin was no exception and had always been a crossroads for these divergent tendencies, on the one hand tyrannically xenophobic, and on the other, a bastion for pluralism. Berlin symbolized the crux of this problem the German people were to face in the 19th and 20th centuries, now that philosophy had opened the door to deep, thoughtful reflection and political pressures from other parts of Europe that had begun to force quick change and expansion.

A sense of German unity was growing. As in the past, Jews were excluded from this experience. Napoleon's invasion, along with his tolerance and acceptance of the Jews, perversely aggravated the nationalistic impulses. With his retreat, in 1812, the tendency toward intolerance and persecution once again became the norm. This raises the question of how—in the upcoming Romantic period in Germany—can an individual, and a people, examine their own soul while also meeting their own, basic needs for growth and survival?

* * *

In the fairy tale the King's son hears a beautiful melody in the wood. By this fact alone, he feels different. Optimism somehow lingers in the air. The possibility that an old patriarchy is making way for a newer, more conscientious one, is here perceived. What joy it is to sing, but what greater joy will eventually come to Rapunzel when she is heard and understood.

It is here, from the enchantress' tower that the first songs of democracy ring out: calling from young Rapunzel to the King's son. An attraction between these two people may well be the fruit of an inexplicable love not yet realized, only perceived—democracy, in Germany, and the culture that will shape it. An inborn happiness glimmers across the image of Rapunzel singing and finally being heard, a flitting glimpse of extraordinary things to come on the other side of 'hell-to-pay'.

#

#  Chapter IV

#  Frankenstein

#  and

#  "The New World Outlook"

#  (1814—1919)

London, February 21, 1888:

In an old notebook of [Karl] Marx's I have found the eleven theses on Feuerbach which are printed here as an appendix. These are notes hurriedly scribbled down for later elaboration, absolutely not intended for publication, but invaluable as the first document in which the brilliant germ of the new world outlook is deposited.

Fredrick Engels

Karl Marx's views were utopian and humanitarian and favored a sense of community and shared identity with a return to the roots of local culture; these ideas strengthened the nascent politics of nationalism.

The 1800s generally bolstered the creative intellects of German philosophers who sought to redefine historical and ideal reality in their own terms. The "brilliant germ" to which Engels referred was nothing less than a transformation in the way society would see itself. Marxist thought was the first post-feudal 'cosmology'. Once developed, his "new world outlook" gave birth to new responsibilities and demands.

"The King's son wanted to climb up to her, and looked for the door of the tower, but none was to be found."

The King's son cannot find a way to reach Rapunzel by any conventional means. His situation will require a bit of imagination. The King's son's frustration expresses the difficulties intellectuals of the early 1800s faced in bringing their newfound perspective to bear on the consensual reality of politics. Theirs was not a straight path. The very people who took the time to work out, however roughly, the shape of a better society were continually and categorically denied access to the law-making machinery. Only in a secret underworld could the door to truth be found and the wish for democracy nurtured.

The artists of Germany's Romantic Period, Goethe's "children" in one way or another ,responded to a rapidly changing society. In this new European industrial age, modes of production and lines of communication became more uniform, geared for an exploding population. Yet at the same time, thinkers, composers, writers, and intellectuals began to imagine the world from a specifically German viewpoints. German Romanticism honored the authority of the individual and of emotional experience; it preferred song to reason. And since it appeared alongside the dawning of the industrial revolution and a surge in the population—with a rising class of ex-serfs expanding an ever growing pauper class that suffered under great economic pressures—it gave birth to a peculiarly German dilemma, one that Hegel's work addresses as much as Marx's: how shall we live together, and can we learn from our history?

During the Napoleonic period, feudal structures had been all but destroyed—the final blow coming at the Congress of Vienna in 1814. With them the supports that had nurtured artists and kept them in place also disappeared. Artists, like the composer Franz Schubert (1797-1828), who attempted to make it on their own without a patron, frequently failed with no safety net to catch them when they fell.

In the field of philosophy however, new developments in thinking made the future look much brighter. The web of exchanged ideas cultivated by and originating from Hegel's dialectic put forward the notion of a world spirit, held tentatively in the form of history-material-idea. This belief provided much-needed fuel to a growing middle class which would eventually revolt against the widening social disparities, responding to the cognitive dissonances of the time.

Injustice, and the revolution that grew out of it, were in a cyclical exchange. Social upheavals reflected a coming to consciousness, a collective grappling with the injustices of 19th century Germany. There was a communal yearning on the people's part, a striving towards something better. As so often happened, throughout history the quest to create a better society lead, tragically, to further injustice.

Although the revolutionary era in Germany was decisively driven by the new middle class, it was fed with concerns also central to the average German's heart: visions inspired by the hope and beauty artists like Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) had depicted in their work. The message the artwork contained was this: human beings, each and every one, provide a unique access to the soul of the universe. This is a fundamentally empowering idea; each person can make history come alive to be discovered anew every day. This message, once understood and interpreted, gave birth to new responsibilities and demands: namely, the pressure to bring together the life of the inner self with that of society as a whole.

"He rode home, but the singing had so deeply touched his heart, that every day he went out into the forest and listened to it."

Here as before, the listening itself is an important process and a kind of apprenticeship, a humbling of oneself before something greater. Karl Marx's writings were a potent record of such a deep listening. His attempt to articulate a vision for a humane community without exploitation—a rational and non-volatile economy—expressed in material terms, was a specifically German endeavor and desire. In practice, its failure was equally important.

An immense identity struggle was under way in the 19th century as represented by the King's son "riding home" again and again, only to return the next day unsatisfied and ready to hear more. The new generation of German romantics, liberal, middle class intellectuals collided with the existing establishment, and because the latter had an army and the former had not even a military sense, confusion and ineffectuality were the result, well into the 20th century.

* * *

The enchantress has seen to it that no one can reach Rapunzel without knowing the secret words. The King's son's repeated visits to the tower, during which he attempts to assess the situation, represent the revolutionary period of the 1840's. The Insurgents' requests were satisfied just enough to take the sting out of their attacks but nowhere near sufficiently to satisfy their actual demands.

On the one hand, feudalism had been abolished, education improved and welfare measures created, but on the other hand, censorship and reactionary conservatism estranged the powers-that-be even further from the harsh reality of the people, especially that of the peasants and growing industrial lower class.

Those artists who had worked, as Romantics, to bring beauty and hope to the populace, often suffered from misunderstanding and indifference. Art alone, at that time, could not override the lack of education and the cultural gulf which separated art forms previously cultivated at court from a people toiling in the fields and factories to make ends meet. Marx wrote about the essence of human civic life, which he believed was abundance, not the scarcity the economics of his time relied upon. Plenty for all was, he believed, the destiny of society. Marx was articulating a desire that was larger, older than himself, something at the heart of every man and woman.

With this evolution in thought came a new sense of responsibility to fellow human beings. The idea of God lost its primacy. Humans themselves, rather than a divine force, were now responsible for their own actions. The existence of an afterlife was no longer a justification for a life lived unconsciously. This realization was due to the considerable energy spent examining the correlation between political forms and the human needs that these forms did or did not address.

Many artists and intellectuals longed to lead the way towards a collective enlightenment in whatever personal way they could. Beethoven's first four notes of his Fifth Symphony became a manifesto of sorts for the early German Romantics. Later, the composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883) became a critical example of this movement towards social responsiveness, creating an ethics of aesthetics. He championed the cause of a uniquely German art form, creating entire worlds for the stage, writing his own lyrics for compositions that united all the performing arts into one vision, often inspired by Germanic mythology.

The hundred years that followed the Congress of Vienna in 1814 till World War I in 1914 was a period of considerable fluctuation in Germany. The push among intellectuals for political reforms, and the determination by those in the bureaucracy to maintain the status quo, triggered an ever-shrewder strategy by the government to substantiate their power.

Almost no concessions were made to popular demands. Amongst rulers such as Prince Metternich of Austria-Bavaria, and Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia from the earlier part of the 19th century, Friedrich Wilhelm IV in 1840, and Otto von Bismarck who came to power in 1860, and Emperor Wilhelm II near the end of the 19thcenturyto the final days of the First World War in 1918,the clearest political trend was decisively conservative: it was bolstered and assured by interlocking systems of censorship, economic strain, European imperialist tensions, and the rising tide of nationalism and anti-Semitism.

* * *

The image of Rapunzel's tower—the widening rift between the Young Hegelians, like Marx, and the ruling class—is particularly resonant. Hegel was a kind of Rapunzel, free to articulate a personal vision and recognized by the establishment of his time. On the ground below, Hegel's vision took on new forms. Hegel could not have imagined the magnitude of his legacy, which took on a life of its own.

His dialectic philosophy was interpreted in different ways, depending on who was reading it. Nineteenth century revolutionaries' examined Hegel's work closely and found it subversive and refreshing, a logic of the 'third stream'. On the other hand, kings found in it a most rewarding philosophical endorsement of the way that they ruled.

Friedrich Wilhelm IV's ascent to power in 1840 changed the nature of Hegelian discourse by mobilizing extremist tendencies, positioning himself into a decidedly reactionary stance. This meant that Hegelian thought could no longer pursue its purely philosophical aim, but turned now to the more basic problems of survival under archconservative rule and intellectual oppression. Ironically, in this capacity it provided a critical seed, a brilliant germ, for the not-so-distant golden age of Weimar culture.

The interplay in Germany between artists and thinkers was to be of particular significance regarding their ability to communicate a clear direction that the imminent revolution of 1848 should have taken. But in the end the revolution faltered because there was no real communication between the middle class and the common people. Revolution came not only from the disenfranchised rabble but also from the ranks of the intelligentsia and middle class, a factor which defined its outcome as well as its origins.

The revolution of 1848, or the March Revolution, was spurred by France's own February Revolution, which brought down King Louis Philippe. In Germany, the March Revolution was a contest between the powers-that-be who wanted to maintain the status quo and the revolutionaries who were seeking democracy, and rejecting the autocratic political structure that was in place.

What ensued was a 'squaring off' of sorts of these two groups that could have launched real change, but failed because they were unable to reach a consensus in the newly formed Frankfurt Parliament. A constitution was eventually drafted but never implemented with the old rulers regaining power and the parliament dissolving a year later, forcing delegates as well as revolutionaries into exile .Known as the Forty - Eighters, large numbers chose to emigrate to America, eventually assisting in bolstering the democratic process in many parts of that country.

In 1860 Otto von Bismarck introduced palliative measures to satisfy the people without addressing the root causes of social unrest. He introduced sickness insurance, accident insurance, old age and disability insurance; but when scrutinized closely, all of these turned out to be policies and nothing more—insignificant compared to the revolutionaries' dream of social equity. These concessions where just an adroit means of silencing the working class revolts, appeasing the populace with the minimum amount of relief.

* * *

What is the culture of democracy? It is a habitude. That is the only way we can explain the continuing growth of democracy through the airtight conditions Bismarck put into place to satisfy his national agenda. A brilliant germ indeed. By the middle to end of the nineteenth century, with greater class struggle and the industrial revolution in full swing, Germany began to experience the reemergence of the nationalistic archetype, this time with an overtly masculine character toting the banner of allegiance to unquestioned authority.

Nationalism generally champions a kind of certainty, national unity, something solid. However, the negative elements of this archetype gained considerable ground perhaps because many people found modern life to be increasingly uncertain in myriad respects. Those who strove for democracy found themselves continuously battling against this overtly masculine tendency to be ruled undemocratically. The resulting conflict produced extreme cases of political crisis that multiplied as the 20th century dawned.

Nevertheless, the richness of culture in the mid to late 19th century was astonishing, especially when considering the enormous societal pressures to 'quit dreaming, conform and press one's shoulder to the wheel of an ailing political economy'. Marx was eventually forced into exile for overestimating his intellectual freedom by pointing out the disconnection between official culture and its actual aims. Then later Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)—with his book Thus Spake Zarathustra—provided testimony to a deeply original poetic experience, only to have it misunderstood by his innermost circle of friends, who abandoned him in 1880 when it was published.

The relationship between Nietzsche and Wagner revisits one of history's great unanswered questions—what is art? The Birth of Tragedy and On the Genealogy of Morals, written by a young, idealistic Nietzsche, broke ground, articulating the ancient dynamics at play in contemporary art. The works remain deeply revelatory today, and influenced art in America in crucial ways through the 20th century. In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche illuminates aspects of the creative, archetypal soul.

This soul, he writes, yearns for fulfillment in two divergent modes, namely the ways of Apollo and of Dionysus. With the Apollonian aesthetic comes the search for balance, symmetry, and harmony, the eternal principle. The timeless arts belong to Apollo: painting, sculpture, architecture. To Dionysus go the timely arts of music, dance, and performance, for they are the right containers of emotional range, mortality, evanescence, passion, the arts of loss and regaining. Where the former is transcendent, the latter is deeply submerged.

Wagner was Nietzsche's beloved comrade, until their falling out. For Nietzsche, Wagner's operatic works represented a euphoric synthesis between the two extremes of Dionysus and Apollo. Wagner's work engaged places in the human soul which, according to Nietzsche and the novelist Thomas Mann, neither music nor tragedy had ever touched, namely the fleshly and temporal embodiment of myth.

"To link art and religion this way," Mann writes, reviewing Wagner's opera, Tristan, "through a bold operatic treatment of sex, and to offer such a holy piece of unholy artistry as a Lourdes-theatre and miracle grotto, catering to the hankering for belief of a jaded, fin de siècle public: this is sheer romanticism; something absolutely unthinkable in the classically humanistic, properly respectable sphere of art."

Mann goes on, "Romanticism is linked to all those mythical mother and lunar cults that have flourished since the earlier periods of the human race in opposition to solar worship, the religion of fatherly, masculine light: and it is under the spell of this general lunar worldview that Wagner's Tristan stands."

This helps to explain the duplicity of Wagner that ultimately broke Nietzsche's heart: precisely in this romanticism lay both the potential to lift the individual soul to the heights of ecstatic communion with all life, as well as the capacity for an abusive nationalism through the deification of cultural myths.

* * *

Which brings us back to the art of the song. How is it that Rapunzel can sing so sweetly from her prison cell? The strength of Germany's culture is a tribute to its evolution through many firmly structured phases before being released to find its own way. In other words, the courts nurtured artists in such isolation and seclusion that their art developed a great strength early on, an unflappable nerve that both in politics and social change the Germans lacked. Therefore, the sweetness of Rapunzel's song is ambivalent. As the arts entered the era of industrialism, they had a lot of catching up to do in order to speak from or to the heart of the people. But indeed, why should art serve a social cause? The conundrum is that during the tumult of restoration and the lead-up to World War I, art itself made a somewhat worrying about-face, from being art for art's sake to art for the good of the nation. It didn't last long, but its effect would be enduring: this whiplash was part and parcel of the times, when the very definition of civic life was undergoing traumatic change.

The late 1870s and early 1880s first saw this sharp turn evidenced in the decay of Nietzsche's and Wagner's friendship. More than a mere parting of ways, the two men came to stand at opposite poles. Nietzsche railed against Wagner's anti-Semitism and now-debased art form, tainted by nationalism's virulence and hardened against all but the so-called purely German mystique as recounted in local folklore and myth. But oh! how Rapunzel sings, tucked away up there in that tower. Supposedly, the idea was that artists like Wagner had finally come down 'from the tower'. But in fact, they were now contained in a new kind of enclosure, called the state.

What is the meaning of the word decadence? To fall from, to fall down. When Nietzsche called Richard Wagner "the artist of decadence," he presaged, ironically, the language of Hitler's circle. By decadent, Nietzsche meant sickening: "He makes sick whatever he touches—he makes music sick." Nietzsche was heart-broken as he watched a rising trend: the institutionalization of the arts, the servitude of the creative numen to the state's agenda: the Second Reich, the Great German Empire, to which all should be subsumed. "That the people in Germany should deceive themselves about Wagner does not surprise me," Nietzsche wrote. "The Germans have constructed a Wagner for themselves whom they can revere."

But aren't they fooling themselves by revering him? So the question becomes this: was Rapunzel's song truly her own, or some kind of compromise? Does it even matter, as long as it brings the King's son to her, and in the end her freedom?

Part II

Otto von Bismarck saw to it that the King's son's destiny would have to wait. With victory in 1871 over France in the Franco-Prussian War, Bismarck militarized the state against all eventualities to an unprecedented scale; as its first chancellor he successfully united Germany. Considering war reparations from France as insufficient, he exacted an even greater toll by taking the regions of Alsace and the Loraine Valley. These were to be used as a buffer for any future encroachments, creating more mistrust between the two nations that would only fester over time.

The Second Reich was now a reality. So strong were the misgivings among its neighbors that the tensions that were to arise were in a way already anticipated back in 1816. When the Congress of Vienna, in 1814, redrew Germany's principalities and gathered them into a confederation of states, the desire to postpone the making of a German nation was fraught, in some circles, with frustration and powerlessness.

With the end of the Wars of Liberation (1813-1814)—as they were referred to in Germany, when the Germans pushed the French out of their territories—a movement was created by young radicals to press for a German nation. But because of rivalries between Prussia and Austria, and the conflicting interests amongst the numerous princes, a piecing together of the disparate regions into a German confederation was to be created instead, which would postpone Germany from becoming a nation for another 55 years. Joining the community of European powers relatively late would only generate mistrust and envy. As many Germans watched England in particular grow into a world power, there evolved, over time, a feeling of frustration and inferiority.

* * *

Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley—a wholly unusual English novel that appeared in 1818—may have been a premonition, in literary form, of Germany's delayed birth as a nation, and also a foreboding, imagining the potential consequences that were to result from this delay.

Born in 1797, Shelley grew up with a father who was a radical thinker; she was surrounded by scientists and politically conscious people of her time. In 1816, at the age of 18, she began writing Frankenstein; it was inspired by a nightmarish vision, brought on by the telling of German ghost stories during a vacation in Switzerland with her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Gordon Byron. This is an event she cites in her own introduction to the book. Her novel, when seen as an allegory, raises a number of questions, some of which can readily be applied to Germany becoming a nation, which strongly resembled the being Dr. Frankenstein pieced together and brought to life.

Following the dramatic news in June of 1815 of Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo along with the new developments at the Congress of Vienna, one could argue that Shelley's own statements about the ghost stories were a justification for some kind of link between the story of Frankenstein and her awareness of the political situation in Germany. This is not surprising considering the many references to Germany in her book. For example the title, which includes the word Franken which is the German region around Ingolstadt, Bavaria where the monster is created.

Germany became a nation in 1871, far behind its neighbors and eager to catch up. Shelley, through her vision, may have intuitively sensed, already in 1816, the mythical interplay of power dynamics—with England well on its way to becoming the new superpower in Europe—that would eventually lead to the horrific conflict a century later between her own country and the land of ghost stories from which she drew her inspiration. What were these frightening tales that influenced her and inspired her to write Frankenstein? She writes:

There was the tale of the sinful founder of his race, whose miserable doom it was to bestow the kiss of death on all the younger sons of his fated house, just when they reached the age of promise. His gigantic, shadowy form, clothed like the ghost of Hamlet, in complete armor, but with the beaver up, was seen at midnight, by the moon's fitful beams, to advance slowly along the gloomy avenue. The shape was lost beneath the shadow of the castle walls; but soon a gate swung back, a step was heard, the door of the chamber opened, and he advanced to the couch of the blooming youths, cradled in healthy sleep. Eternal sorrow sat upon his face as he bent down and kissed the forehead of the boys, who from that hour withered like flowers snapped upon the stalk.

* * *

In 1871 the feeling of pride and relief in Germany must have been enormous, even intoxicating, after so many centuries without a leader to unify the disparate principalities. Nietzsche spoke eloquently of the need to be intoxicated, and events in Germany, from 1871 to 1914, would certainly prove the existence of an all-encompassing emotional delirium that would eventually lead them to war.

In Twilight of the Idols, 1888, Nietzsche wrote that for art to exist, "there is a physiological prerequisite that is not to be avoided: intoxication. Intoxication must first have heightened the sensibility of the whole machine, before it can come to any art." Intoxication takes a range of forms: sexual, political, chemical. These were among Nietzsche's last published thoughts, and they reinforce our assertion: artwork in Germany emerged within the sanctity of the "tower" and under the auspices of a strong paternal authority figure. Was it then the tower—and all that it stands for—that urged Rapunzel to sing? Or was it the intoxication of loneliness? In Germany, a particularly strong case can be made for the co-existence of both pressures, one imposed from without, by those in power, and another more formidable by far: resistance and experience emerging from within.

The work and lives of Hegel, Nietzsche, Beethoven, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and many others, strengthen the claim that—more than in any other nation—there existed in Germany the acutely fertile conditions for enormous creativity as well as its antitheses. Is it a coincidence that Germany held also the potential for fascism and its opposite, democracy? The unification of Germany under Bismarck symbolized a concentration in Germany of political, religious, cultural, economic, and social intentions—ready now to fly high or crash and burn.

The Prussian victory in the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 had enormous consequences for Germany; it enabled Bismarck to use that victory to gain Southern Germany's dependence and to push forward, with a newly united state, a distinctly German agenda. Naturally it was a problematic one. The new economy started to suffer: it was rapidly infiltrated with the printing of new paper money causing inflation, followed by the cessation of France's war reparation payments in 1873. As a result, the power of the state became more concentrated. Free trade was replaced by protectionism, which fed a nascent ethnocentrism. This would only exacerbate the jealousy non-Semitic Germans already felt against the Jews, who were usually perceived as staying financially afloat in the midst of each successive ordeal.

Incumbent upon art itself was the task of now filling in the gaps left by the hasty race toward "progress"—growth in the economy, industry, the military and a rapidly changing civic life. Due to the harsh conditions this created for many, thousands of Germans emigrated to America to seek a better life: the Catholic Church and Socialism came under harsh attack, and fear of invasion and being engulfed by France prompted the chancellor to crack down on freedoms.

The poor got ever poorer, and the Reichstag, the only parliamentary body whose counsel was elected by universal male suffrage, continued to lose what power it had, answering only to the chancellor. People were alienated from one another by new urban environments and oppressed by the policy-making machine of Junker landlords, industrialists and nationalists, while the working class became vulnerable to Bismarck's control. Art was expected to valorize expedient values, most notably the mythology of power when linked to a perceptibly German cultural identity.

The role of the arts in placating society's ills was therefore much like Rapunzel's role in giving entrance to the enchantress: without Rapunzel's strong braids willingly thrown down to her, the enchantress could never have enlisted Rapunzel in the two-step of domination they were to perform for such a long time together. Earlier in the fairy tale, we read that "whenever the enchantress wanted to go in she placed herself beneath it and cried." Much like the principalities did before, it was now the new German government that manipulated the arts to suit its national agenda.

With the death of Bismarck in 1900 and the descent into world conflict, a culture of war was developing, and pursuing its own nationalist logic. A military build-up, particularly between the navy's of Germany and England, was one of the first signs of an ensuing conflict. England, which at that time considered itself the real superpower in the world, resented being challenged in any way. Negotiations between the two countries that did occur were only half-earnest attempts at resolving conflicting alliances without recourse to war. Strategy and maneuvering between all the nations only resulted in a loss of trust and a communication breakdown.

A collective belief that war was unavoidable became a certainty not only for the Germans but also for the rest of the European community. To make matters worse, the Reichstag, which could have acted as a counterweight against this rising sentiment—with the social democrats now in the majority—was so bitterly divided that it became increasingly weaker over time. By 1912, frustrated by the inability to consolidate its agenda, the governing body of Germany let itself be taken over by the military. Kaiser Wilhelm II gave his complete support for the move, accepting that war was inescapable, a collective necessity.

"Once when he was thus standing behind a tree, he saw that the enchantress came there, and he heard how she cried..."

As indicated by events in the German parliament and society at large, the King's son was, in a sense, hiding in strategic readiness, and in another sense, cowardly. Liberal parties other than the Social Democratic Party of Germany had become too many and too fractious to garner the strength they'd need to bring about changes in policy in the hostile and conformist context of pre-war Germany. Democracy, equality and social reforms were regarded by the Emperor with outright distrust, while imperialism, nationalism and anti-Semitism would work together in new ways, fermenting a reverence for the state that focused public attention on a new collective feeling of German superiority. Such feelings were inspired by authors like Houston Stewart Chamberlain, who became part of Wagner's family by marring his daughter.

"Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Let down your hair.'

Then Rapunzel let down the braids of her hair, and the enchantress climbed up to her."

The atmosphere between the years of 1913-1914 in Germany is exemplified by this scene in the fairytale. The King's Son is observing the enchantress' and Rapunzel's ritual and learning it. With the assassination of Arch-duke Francis Ferdinand of Austria the masses were more than ready to go to war and fight for the state, as opposed to scheming their own revolution as they had done four hundred years earlier. Nonetheless, more than a few watched and learned how this game of power could be won. In any case, they, like the King's son, were preparing to follow the enchantress' lead.

"If that is the ladder by which one mounts, I too will try my fortune,' said he, and the next day when it began to grow dark he went to the tower and cried, 'Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair.' "

The first of many things going on in this passage is an allusion to a future revolution with democratic principles at its core. Again, the passage in which the King's son hides and learns how to climb up to Rapunzel can also be seen as hopeful and adventurous. For at this moment in German history, just before the onset of modernity and its crises, the spirit of democracy would soon show a glimmer of its face in the burgeoning of early Weimar culture.

The chaotic coexistence of diverse influences, of official and rebellious cultures side by side—demonstrated in the work and life of turn of the century thinkers and writers like Thomas Mann, composers like Arnold Schoenberg, playwrights, and painters like Kandinsky and Franz Marc—formed the ideal preconditions in which society could evolve without the need for an all-out revolution.

When the arts are used in the service of the revival of the human spirit, a great potential can be unleashed, a kind of soft revolution. So, while the King's son observes the enchantress, he is cunningly procuring access to the forbidden pleasure of meeting the singer in the door-less tower, a thing that he must do, no matter what. But just as in the case of history, so too, in the example of mythology: to predict a better day doesn't mean that the path ahead is straight or without incredible pitfalls, nor even that that day is certain to arrive—only that it can.

Why does the King's son wait a further day to go up to Rapunzel after learning the enchantress' trick? Why did the Germans enter World War I with such enthusiasm? And why did they create such an enormous ego, one the size of a nation and more, behind which to hide?

Perhaps the King's son needed to work up his courage, or to have a night's rest before opening disaster's door. And so did all of Germany need to feel possessed by the dark spirit of a winged, heavy, and tremendous national body heading full speed towards its own calamitous destiny. They needed a story that explained the predicament they were in.

When we read the reference in this passage of the fairy tale to "the next day," it calls to mind an earlier passage, when the young expecting mother had just tasted the forbidden herb, rapunzel: "It tasted so good to her—so very good, that the next day she longed for it three times as much as before." In both cases "the next day" means forces are gathering for an even greater surge. Whereas previously, the overzealousness of the peasants—four hundred years earlier—to take things further after their initial victories is what is indicated, here it is the excess of nationalism and the price the Germans would have to pay for their eagerness to march off to war.

Also the phrase, "when it began to grow dark," which is similar to "in the gloom of evening" from the earlier passage, draws a picture of ominous things to come. The atmosphere at the start of the World War I was one of great optimism and spirit. Soldiers joined the front lines, certain they'd be home by Christmas. But as the war wore on, year after year, and the victories were seldom measurable by more than a few yards, so also the sun would rise on what the King's son had done. And to be sure, the enchantress will seek retribution once more. The soldiers on the front were starving and depressed by 1918, and all of society was transformed by disillusionment. C.G. Jung spoke of his own premonition in the days before the war began:

Toward the autumn of 1913, the pressure which I had felt was in me seemed to be moving outward, as though there were something in the air. The atmosphere actually seemed to me darker than it had been. It was as though the sense of oppression no longer sprang exclusively from a psychic situation, but from concrete reality. This feeling grew more and more intense. In October while I was alone on a journey, I was suddenly seized by an overpowering vision.

Jung had seen a flood engulfing the lands north of Switzerland, only blocked by mountains stretching high to protect his country. He saw "yellow waves" swallowing thousands of bodies, then turning to blood. This vision lasted an hour.

"Immediately the hair fell down and the King's son climbed up."

Five million Germans dead, two million orphans, a million invalids, a million widows. The war came to a halt in November 1918: Austria's unconditional surrender to the Italians and defeat seemingly on the horizon, Germany sought an armistice in exchange for which President Woodrow Wilson demanded a democratic government. With mutiny and revolution in Munich, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated the throne on November 9th. The Weimar Revolution broke out like wildfire shortly after; it was a spectacularly spontaneous and disorganized rejection of the war and the proposed adoption of a constitutional monarchy. The Weimar Revolution ended when the first-ever democratic Republic was proclaimed, a parliamentary republic based on a welfare state. Marx's "brilliant germ of the new world outlook" was echoed in the Weimar Revolution, but with unique consequences. The catharsis so much needed, which had accompanied Germans into battle, had not only been a failure but had been abused, distorted.

A glimmer of hope emerged, however, despite everything. There was a willingness to try something unique, something different: The Weimar Republic and the invention of a sui generis democracy. No historical failure had been as pregnant with possibility as theirs.

#  Bio

Sarah Ledbetter is a graduate of North Western University in Chicago and The Academy of Photogenic Arts in Sydney Australia She is a filmmaker, dance-maker, and writer. Her films, dances, and writings have been presented at sites such as Earthdance, National Dance Week, the Capital Fringe Festival, the Memphis Writers' Ensemble, the International Poetry Review, La Peripherique Literary Review of Lisbon, and film festivals in the USA, Africa, Italy, India, France, and Memphis, Tennessee. Ledbetter wrote and co-edited DAMMI IL LA, a short film which won 12 awards and screened worldwide, with collaborator Matteo Servente in 2006. THE ROMANCE OF LONELINESS, which Ledbetter wrote and co-directed with (Matteo) Servente, is their first feature film, which premiered at Nashville Film Festival in April of 2012. She's currently teaching a dance and photography workshop for Bridge Builders, a national organization that develops youth leadership and promotes social justice through nonviolent means, and completing post-production on SKETCHES OF SOULSVILLE, a series of short films about Memphis' rich music history. Sarah currently resides in Memphis Tenn.

Timotheus Mellage being of German origin, grew up in North America. He has a degree in Music Theory and Analysis, Composition and History from Appalachian State University. Along with a profound interest in psychology and mythology, this book is a result of his personal research into Carl Jung's writings combined with his reflections upon the development of western mythology contained in fairy tales and fables - and the effects this mythology exerts on the development of society. Tim presently resides in Paris France. Contact: tim.mellage@live.fr

Forthcoming titles:

The Frog King or Iron Henry: The Emancipation of Women in Western Society

The Positive Role of the Mother in Cinderella

The Nixie of the Mill Pond: The Damaging Effects of an Absentee Father

Our Lady's Child and Christian Mythology

The Wizard of Oz and the Rising Influence of Women in America

