Lycanthropy in German Literature

Peter Arnds

• Éditeur: Palgrave Macmillan
• Année: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137541635
• Sujet: Literature
• Sous-sujet: European Literary Criticism

Lycanthropy in German Literature argues that as a symbol of both power and parasitism, the human wolf of the Germanic Middle Ages is iconic to the representation of the persecution of undesirables in the German cultural imagination from the early modern age to the post-war literary scene.

1

The Wolfman between History, Myth and Biopolitics

From the Palaeolithic Age to Greek antiquity

The history of the wolfman begins a long time before he enters myth. Donning animal hides, the hunters of the Palaeolithic Age mimicked predators such as wolves, thus hoping to incorporate the wolf’s faculties which they admired, particularly his stealth and strength.¹ By putting on wolf skins, the hunter underwent a temporary transformation; he was able to imagine what it was like to be a wolf, while at the same time the ritual made him understand better what it means to be human.² In a trance, these ancient hunting groups transported their souls into the bodies of wolves. As a consequence, it was not merely a transformation in physicality but also a change in identity, a metempsychosis, the transmigration of souls.

Let us briefly imagine these early hunters as they were donning wolf skins on full moon nights, a time when, as has been argued by anthropologists like Adam Douglas and cultural critics like Barbara Ehrenreich, the women did not want the men around and sent them forth from the cave in search of food.³ From the very beginning, the wolf is a creature that inspires fear and fascination. Wolves are feared because they are associated with death, having a connection with the other world due to being scavengers and feeding on human corpses. However, Canadian wolf totem stories show that the wolf is also associated with fertility and the plenitude of game, while in European cultures the wolf as corn-spirit is often a threat to the concept of fertility, especially in harvest rituals.⁴ Since primordial man often also scavenged, predators such as wolves, which left half-eaten carcasses behind, were associated with food sources from the earliest days. Since the dawn of humanity, there has been a dichotomy in the perception of the wolf as being linked to both fruition and perdition.⁵ In the Palaeolithic Age, the search for food during the hunt necessitated extensive wanderings, which became even more expansive and urgent if the food sources had dried up and the whole clan was forced to move on in search of new hunting grounds. This nomadic hunting lifestyle finally gave way to a more sedentary one, as the hunters and gatherers settled down and became farmers. It is after this transition period that the admiration for the wolf for its hunting techniques and the necessity to emulate it began to wane. Henceforth, the fear of the wolf overshadowed its former glory so that it became increasingly seen as a threat to the community. Wolves had to be killed, as they started to threaten the clan and the livestock. No longer perceived as nurturers, they became associated primarily with rapaciousness, a binary that has stayed with us in myth over time and has become a biopolitical paradigm that associates wolves with thieves. It is sedentariness that links the wolf to cunning and evil and causes the emergence of heterotopias, the separation between civilization as the space of settlement and nurturing, and wilderness as the space outside of that settlement, literally beyond the pale.⁶ The wolf becomes a symbol of uncontrollable nature outside of the space of dwelling, which had until then mentally incorporated its spirit as a good luck token for the great hunt. And as the wolf came to be considered a parasite, so did other tribes, since with settlement came property and ownership, and with property came theft. It is thus in the transition from hunting clans during the Palaeolithic period (until 10,000 BCE) to sedentary farmers in the Mesolithic period (10,000 to 5,000 BCE) that wolves were associated with human raiders, a phenomenon that the Scandinavian term vargr, in its meaning of both ‘wolf’ and ‘outlaw’, echoes in the distant future. The bigger the settlements grew, the wider the gulf between civil and wild terrain became. Yet a distant memory of the wolf as protector and nurturing spirit, and of man emulating it by donning wolf skins, remained and became the material of myth. For example, the nurturing principle of the wolf survives in the foundation myth of Rome, the story of Romulus and Remus, while we encounter the idea of abandonment and exile associated with the wolf in the myths and rituals of Greek antiquity.⁷

The motif of self-abandonment to lycanthropy that we have observed in the Palaeolithic hunter’s transformation into a wolfman is also prevalent in Greek antiquity, where abandonment is tied to psychosomatic changes outside of the community. To abandon literally means ‘to give over to the ban’. It implies a solitary life beyond the pale of the social contract with its reach of laws and rights. Once abandoned, the homo sacer’s human existence is cast into doubt, since from Greek antiquity onwards, human ‘being’ (Sein) is closely linked to staying in the community, to dwelling inside the polis.⁸ Lycanthropy is both a medical term for people afflicted by rabies and a psychoanalytical phenomenon that produces somatic images in myth and literature. The wolfman’s psychological problems result from the very state of abandonment, in which he is reduced to what Agamben (1995) has called nuda vita (naked or bare life), implying a demotion from life inside the city (polis) to animal life. Such loss of human being may have resulted in the expellee’s increasing resemblance to a wild animal, as a result of not being included in the human community. This shift from human to animal, however, also largely lies in the community’s perception of those who were abandoned, the criminal who is to be expelled being a human wolf in the eyes of the community, which associates the wolf with cunning, trickery, and thievishness. We find this association as early as in the wake of the Homeric poems, after which the wolf, in Greek thinking, ‘became marginalized as an emblem of savagery and, above all, of dolos, trickery’.⁹ Once expelled into the state of nature, the animality of these humans is then perceived to grow in proportion to the length of their exile, as a consequence of their extensive neglect.

As a psychoanalytical term for people imagining themselves as wolves,¹⁰ lycanthropy can either be a consequence or a precursor of abandonment, and in the literary texts discussed in this project, it is densely associated with the heterotopia of the forest, while Greek myth associates it primarily with water. Lycanthropy and the use of water are observable as early as in the myth of Lykaon, the King of Arcadia, whom Zeus changes into a wolf in an Arcadian lake for the crime of cannibalism. His lycanthropy is thus closely linked to the heterotopic space of water, demonstrating that not only the forest is associated with animal ferocity and expulsion, and supporting Foucault’s argument that there is a strong link in the European imagination between madness, abandonment, and water.¹¹ As he described it in his chapter on the stultifera navis, the expulsion of the mentally disabled on the so-called Ship of Fools was the result of similar civic policies as the expulsion of criminals into the forest.¹² In German culture, the heterotopia of abandonment and exile is specifically the forest, while in Greek culture, it is the river, the ameles potamos, or the River Carefree as the Greeks called it.¹³

The Greek Lykaon myth is also interesting to us for a number of other motifs, one of which is the notion of sacrifice intrinsically connected to the sacred violence committed during the hunt and reenacted in war. A custom Lykaon introduces is the sacrifice of a child to the gods. Wolves and wolfmen in folklore have a special connection to the abandonment, abduction, and depredation of children, as we shall see in our discussions of the legend of the Pied Piper, the folk tales, and in literary texts about war and genocide such as Grass’s The Tin Drum. Likewise, the motif of cannibalism offered to us by the Lykaon myth on the transformation of a human into a wolf reappears in later myths and literary texts, especially those equating Romanies/Gypsies and Jews with child-stealing cannibals.

The story of Lykaon is a myth but also a psychoanalytical paradigm which can be linked to Freud’s theory, in his essay, Totem and Taboo (1913), of the primal horde’s murder and cannibalism of their omnipotent father due to Oedipal impulses. The Oedipal structures in the father/son relationship that Freud discusses, with regard to the causes of Western anti-Semitism, are of particular interest in view of some of the texts discussed in the present book: Sinfjotli in The Saga of the Volsunga, Grimmelshausen’s Simplicius, Tieck’s Christian in Rune Mountain, Freud’s Wolf Man, and Kafka’s Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis all display these Oedipal constellations which are inextricably linked to their exiles and loss of peace. This may not be unique to German culture, but it is a motif that keeps reappearing in its literature and is closely tied to the permanence of abandonment so persistent in German culture. In both the Lykaon myth and Freud’s narrative, paternal authority – the alpha male, so to speak – causes the expulsion of the sons, who then become wolves. Lykaon turns into a wolf after committing the crime of cannibalism, while Freud’s ‘expelled brothers joined forces, killed and devoured their father’.¹⁴ This act, ‘the totem meal, perhaps humanity’s first feast’¹⁵ turns them into wolves as outlaws but primarily in the psychological sense of being on the run, propelled by their torment of mourning the loss of their father and having to re-enact this primordial crime obsessively over time. According to Freud, this neurotic compulsion shows itself in the ritual of the Eucharist as a re-enactment of the murder of God’s only son, which in turn was already an act of atonement for the murder of the primordial father.¹⁶ As Marianna Torgovnik has argued: ‘From this imagined scene of primal Oedipal murder in Totem and Taboo would come Freud’s explanation of Western anti-Semitism in Moses and Monotheism (1939).’¹⁷ The cannibalism in Freud’s narrative and the Lykaon myth may be an antagonistic act, but it also shows the strong bond between father and sons as a reflection of the tie between God and humans, in spite of expulsion and murder. This bond is replicated in the intimate tie between the sovereign (whom Derrida (2009) identifies as a wolf in The Beast and the Sovereign) and the wolfman as the victim of abandonment. The bond is solidified through the act of expulsion after a taboo has been broken, which renders those who break it unclean.

The story of expulsion and transformation into a wolf, consequently, does not begin in the Germanic Middle Ages. However, as Richard Buxton informs us, there are substantial differences between the Greek and the medieval Germanic wolfmen:

In both cultures (classical and medieval) to be a wolf signifies that one has forfeited humanity and is obliged to lead an ‘outside’ existence. But the medieval werewolf, perceived as being able to change his shape from the God-given human form with which he started, is typically represented as having that power thanks to demonic assistance. The conceptual background to medieval werewolfism is Christianity.¹⁸

While this may be an obvious difference due to the spread of Christianity across Europe during the Middle Ages, triggering the demonization of the wolf as part of the iconography of Satan, there is at least one other substantial difference between classical Greek and medieval lycanthropy, which has to do with the length of the wolfman’s exile. The state of abandonment in which the wolfman finds himself refers to both space and time, the space usually being a heterotopia such as the forest or a place surrounded by water, either Foucault’s stultifera navis, the Ship of Fools, or an island, and the time of exile being either temporary or permanent. While the exile is permanent in the myth of Lykaon who does not return from it and is thus declared dead to the community, it is temporary in the Arcadian rituals that replicate the mythical ban in the worship of Zeus Lykaios.¹⁹ In contrast to the Greek wolves of the Lykaios rites, men who were sent into exile for seven or nine years, the Germanic vargr tended to be abandoned in permanent exile. The permanent exile in Greek myth thus becomes a historical biopolitical reality in the Germanic Middle Ages.

From the Middle Ages to late modernity: abandonment, impurity, apathy and resistance

The ban tends to be temporary for the warrior and for the youth expelled from the community for the purpose of initiation. To this day such initiation is closely linked to the hunt and to war. One prominent figure between temporary and permanent exile in the Middle Ages was what is called the berserkr, a variant of the vargr, who in pagan times was not the hunted outlaw but the frenzied warrior clothed either in animal skin or naked. The duality of the wolfman as a figure between sovereignty and abjection shows itself in particular in the berserker, an ambivalent figure between great prowess and strength, on the one hand, and immorality, on the other. He was quite literally a wolfman because it was customary among such warriors to clothe themselves in the animals they had slain, especially in wolf or bear hide, to give themselves an air of ferocity and beastliness in order to intimidate their enemies. ‘To go berserk’ is clearly an expression derived from the berserker, one explanation for this term being that the sark was the bear or wolf hide used by these warriors in Scandinavia. Another theory is that the word berserkr could also be derived from ‘bare skin’, that is ‘without fur’, naked.²⁰ The berserker consequently is an early example of the Friedlos, one who is ‘without peace’ as he is the warrior par excellence and literally reduced to nuda vita (bare life) fighting naked in the state of exception.

The berserkr was revered in pre-Christian times but banned from the community the moment he became permanently outlawed. This happened largely with the arrival of Christianity in Scandinavian Europe in the eleventh century, in 1014, for example, when Erik Jarl banished all bandits and berserkers so that there was no longer any clear distinction made between the marauding vikingr, the criminal vargr, and the berserkr.²¹ From a Christian perspective, the reason for outlawing the berserker was his moral corruption that resulted from his privileged position outside the communal agreement of shared laws. The berserker was an early form of oppressor or despot who could invite himself onto the property of any farmer, participate in their feasts, and even avail himself of the farmer’s daughter.²² He was a lycanthrope, and considered mad as he had the ferocity of an animal, and was able to work himself (or herself)²³ into a state of frenzy to the point of appearing to be demonic. As a figure between history and myth, he stands at the threshold of pre-Christian madness and its association by Christianity with the devil.

The day the berserker was outlawed, this revered wolf warrior became a hunted wolfman (vargr). He is...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgment
• Introduction
• 1. The Wolfman between History, Myth and Biopolitics
• 2. Carnivalizing the Ban: The Schelm’s Lycanthropy in the Age of Melancholy
• 3. Sexual Predator or Liberator: Wolves and Witches in Romanticism
• 4. Gypsies and Jews as Wolves in Realist Fiction
• 5. From Wolf Man to Bug Man: Freud, Hesse, Kafka
• 6. Hitler the Wolf and Literary Parodies after 1945
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index