Christmas in Germany: A Cultural History

CHAPTER ONE: Scripting a National Holiday

13 1 ScriptingaNationalHoliday Und der Engel sprach zu ihnen: Fürchtet euch nicht! Siehe, ich verkündige euch große Freude, die allem Volk widerfahren wird; denn euch ist heute der Heiland geboren, welcher ist Christus, der HERR, in der Stadt Davids. Und das habt zum Zeichen: ihr werdet finden das Kind in Windeln gewickelt und in einer Krippe liegen. Und alsbald war da bei dem Engel die Menge der himmlischen Heerscharen, die lobten Gott und sprachen: Ehre sei Gott in der Höhe und Frieden auf Erden und den Menschen ein Wohlgefallen. St. Luke, chapter 2, verses 10–14, Luther Bible (1912 edition) Dear, sweet heart! Christmas Eve is certainly an ideé fixe among the Berliners, because not just children but everyone in the family and close friends as well exchange a jumble of gifts. There is always something sweet in this desire to give each other so much joy. Caroline von Humboldt to Wilhelm von Humboldt, 23 December 1815 In 1815 Caroline von Humboldt, wife of Wilhelm von Humboldt, the enlightened educator, philosopher, and Prussian diplomat, set up Christmas trees in her parlor on Unter den Linden, the main thoroughfare in the Prussian capital of Berlin. Caroline described the scene and the family’s Christmas Eve celebration in letters to Wilhelm, who was in Frankfurt to negotiate territorial realignments in the aftermath of Napoleon’s defeat. “On both ends of a long table, two small Christmas trees burn brightly with lit candles,” Caroline wrote, trying to include her husband in the festivities, however far away he might be. “The Countess Dübin surrounded one with 14 Scripting a National Holiday all types of presents for her little ones, I used the other for Hermann.” The children, who the day before had been “beside themselves with impatience,” now found satisfaction. Hermann’s “main gifts” included “a theater, a very nice construction set, a squadron of Cossacks, and so on,” and “there was hardly room” for the many presents for Caroline, Adelheid, Gabriella, August , and the rest of the company. The mood was set by the glow of the “many candles and small lights” and the illuminated chandelier, which “made the atmosphere unusually pleasant.” The holiday was a success, Caroline assured her husband. Despite his absence, the family and friends found “so much joy” in the holiday experience.1 Later claims that Caroline’s was “the first Christmas tree in Berlin” call attention to the origin myths of what would become a set of very German holiday traditions.2 The remade Christmas celebrated by the Humboldts and other members of the German Bildungsbürgertum, the upper strata of bourgeois society who valued cultivation and education as the key indicator of self-identity, reflected a broader transformation of the Early Modern festival cycle. Across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Baroque celebration became increasingly bourgeois, enlightened, and politicized.3 Like other modern festivals, the German Christmas we know today is a hybrid, a blend of distinct but interrelated celebrations once observed in church, popular culture, and court society. The 25th of December was the high point of a series of religious holidays, including Advent Sundays, a number of saint’s days, and “Holy Eve,” when observant Christians attended midnight or earlymorning mass. Religious traditions coexisted, sometimes uneasily, with diverse superstitions and customs. From 30 November, St. Andrew’s Day, to Epiphany on 6 January, popular celebration was shot through with what British ethnographer Clement Miles in 1912 called “pagan survivals.” In rural areas, elves and spirits visited village farmyards on Christmas Eve, animals spoke, and young girls dropped molten lead into water to predict their future marriage partners.4 In towns and cities, burghers and artisans celebrated with carnivalesque parades, mumming, and charivaris, fueled by profligate drinking and feasting. At court, New Year’s Eve dominated the cycle of earlywinter feasts and parties; aristocrats and courtiers exchanged small presents as tokens of admiration and friendship. Though local practices persisted well into the twentieth century, particularly in rural areas, the diversity of popular celebration slowly gave way before a great wave of cultural innovation. “German Christmas” became more singular , standardized, domesticated, and sentimental, as its now-familiar features Scripting a National Holiday 15 spread out from the households of the Bildungsbürgertum in a complicated process of cultural transmission. During the long nineteenth century, the modern holiday moved indoors and adopted a tamer set of rituals, embodied in the new symbols...