Christmas in Germany: A Cultural History

Conclusion: The Nation around the Christmas Tree

283 Conclusion The Nation around the Christmas Tree The Germans have quite a religious feeling for their Weihnachtsbaum, coming down, one may fancy, from some dim ancestral worship of the trees of the wood. Clement Miles, Christmas in Ritual and Tradition (1912) In December 1996, when I was doing the initial research for this book, I took a job as one of the 500 Father Christmases working for the “Weihnachtsmann Campaign” organized by the Technical University in Berlin. On Christmas Eve, I paid “surprise” visits to five different families who had preordered the services of this secular saint. In full costume—red cloak, fake beard, black boots, and burlap sack—I bicycled through the district of Kreuzberg, filled my sack with presents left outside apartment doors by enthusiastic parents, announced my presence with a loud knock, and joined in the festivities. During this experience as participant-observer, I handed out presents, sang carols, and praised young children, who nervously recited Christmas poetry. I wondered at the extraordinary persistence of these family rituals, which seemed virtually unchanged since E. T. A. Hoffmann described them in The Nutcracker in 1816. The collections of familiar Christmas stories, poetry, and songs that turn up each year in German bookstores reinforce this highly burnished patina of stability. “How-to” books describe the origins of holiday customs in minute detail and explain the art of making old-fashioned decorations at home, so readers can experience a holiday “as beautiful as before.”1 Christmas Eve services continue to draw record attendance in German churches, and outdoor Christmas markets enliven German cities large and small. Television and radio specials, concerts, public decorations , the purchase of 26 million Christmas trees in 2006, which broke all previous records—all are symptoms of an enduring national tradition.2 284 Conclusion The family rituals I observed on Christmas Eve appeared timeless, rooted perhaps, as British folklorist Clement Miles wrote in 1912, in some “dim ancestral worship” of the German forest.3 The research I undertook for this book suggested otherwise. Historically speaking, Christmas is a relatively new invention, closely linked to the emergence of the modern sense of self. Over the past 200 years, its symbols and rituals have been sites of conflict and struggle, its observance pulled in sometimes radically different directions . Just as the idea of the nation is best understood as an imaginary or rhetorical formation that resists any single definition, available for mobilization by a variety of actors, so Christmas is a surprisingly open construct, used by Germans to support competing articulations of Volk and fatherland.4 As the intimate ties between Christmas and German patriotism suggest, German identity is not just a product of manly militarism, parades and monuments, or political ideology. Feelings of cultural cohesion and national belonging are closely connected to the domestic cultures of everyday life, produced and reproduced in celebrations of Germany’s favorite holiday. Though always mutable, family festivity had significant continuities. Across the nineteenth century, the German bourgeoisie reshaped existing religious , aristocratic, and popular customs and invented the modern holiday. Its symbols, rituals, and moods—“made in Germany”—became an export product,soldtoandshared withtheWesternandeventuallythenon-Western world as the definitive version of the holiday. Christmas ritualized middleclass identities and lifestyles, and Germans spoke with pride about the tender interioremotionsgeneratedbywhattheycalledtheChristmasmood.Indeed, they were deeply invested in the holiday’s image of timeless permanence, the better to construct alternate if parallel versions: the very stability of family customs encouraged repeated revision. By 1900 the mainstream middle-class Christmas celebrated a sentimentalized Prussian-Protestant German nationalism , linked to the pleasures of an emergent capitalist consumer society. Competing groups remade the holiday to meet their own social and political needs. War and political confrontation inspired highly charged variations on the basic theme. Yet even political radicals succumbed to the vision of social harmony and emotional depth at the core of the conventional holiday. Traditions endured but were surprisingly permeable and productive, in large part because Christmas crossed boundaries and blurred experiences that are usually kept at least nominally separate: the sacred and the secular, the modern and the traditional, the commercial and the authentic, the public and the private. Put another way, Christmas was defined and delimited Conclusion 285 by changing articulations of politics, materialism, religion, and domesticity. All came together in the holiday season in creative, syncretic, and sometimes contradictory ways. Romantic author Ludwig Tieck’s concern with the decay of the holiday...