3
Through the Land of Foolish Culture
From Laleburg to Schildburg
When the wise men of Chelm build their town, they start by felling trees on top of a hill and carrying the trunks down below. Then a Litvak (Lithuanian) comes and points out that they could have let the trunks roll down. Impressed, they carry them up the hill again in order to take full advantage of his advice.
The Chelmites, however, are by no means the world’s only community of fools, nor are they the first. It was not, however, until the sixteenth century that collected tales of localized folly emerged as a feature and fixture of European literature. The first example to appear in print was the chapbook-length collection of twenty such tales published in England in the mid-sixteenth century as the Merie Tales of the Mad Men of Gotam by “A.B. of Phisike Doctour.” The author is identified as Andrew Boorde, an English Carthusian hermit, who, having left his cell, turned perpetual European traveler and celebrated medical practitioner and wit.1 Similar collections were published on the European continent soon after, among them “Die Lappenhewser bawren” (The peasants of Foolstown, 1558) by the Nuremberg poet and playwright Hans Sachs.2 But the classic of the genre is another German collection, which made its print debut in 1597 under the title Lalebuch.
The Lalebuch, one of the most influential works of Early New High German folly literature, describes the antics of the wise men of Laleburg, a fictitious city “in the mighty kingdom of Utopia.”3 The book was a huge and instant success; between the end of the sixteenth century and the end of the eighteenth century, more than thirty German and four or five Yiddish editions are believed to have been published. The book’s popularity continued into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it inspired more than seventy German adaptations and imitations, most of them intended for children. The work also served as the major inspiration for the nineteenth- and twentieth-century tales of the wise men of Chelm.
The first edition of the Lalebuch was published in 1597, and the second in 1598, when it was retitled the Schildbürgerbuch. In the late 1690s, a substantially modernized new edition became the source for the first Old Yiddish translation. The Lalebuch and its derivatives are part of early modern foolish culture, with its foolish rituals and performances at one end of the spectrum and serious debates about the nature of wisdom and folly at the other.
The Lalebuch begins with an elaborate preamble, creating a backstory for the episodes to follow, claiming that the people called Lalen were descended from an elite group of philosophers of ancient Greece, famous for their “superior reason and excellent wisdom.”4 The author’s skepticism toward these classical arbiters of wisdom is evident in the fact that this group is named Lalen; lalein in Greek, lallen in modern German, means “to babble or prattle.” According to the preamble, these sages ended up being expelled from their native land by their compatriots, who ultimately found their wisdom insufferable.
These men, having deposited their wives and children in a town that became known as Laleburg, departed to take up positions as government advisers around the world. But discontent mounted again, this time among the abandoned wives, who insisted that their husbands come home and attend to their “grosse Haußhaltung” and “kleine Haußhaltung”: the greater and lesser obligations of being the head of a household—in other words, their domestic and conjugal responsibilities.5 The wise men returned and promised not to go back to their jobs, coming up instead with a plan to dissuade their employers from insisting on their return: all the sages would feign sudden madness. So well do they act crazy that before long they are no longer acting. Playing the fool has become second nature, and these intellectual titans have degenerated into blockheads.
It was mentioned at the start of this chapter that the builders of Chelm first carried their logs down the hill and then up again in order, more efficiently, to let them roll down. In this they are anticipated in the Lalen’s effort to build a city hall. Here, too, they laboriously carry the logs that they need down the hill before realizing that it would have been much easier to have rolled them. In line with this insight, they, too, heave the logs back up to the top of the hill and let them roll down.
Carrying the sunlight into the town hall, woodcut from the German Filtzhut edition of the Schildbürgerbuch, British Library
More foolishness follows. Once they finish building the exterior of the city hall, they realize that the interior is darker than it would have been if the design had included windows. The sages eventually resolve to shovel sunlight into sacks. When they bring their sacks indoors but see no improvement, they decide to follow the advice of a malicious stranger and remove the roof of the town hall, which works beautifully in summer but less beautifully once winter arrives.
Winter also alerts the men to the absence of an oven, which they decide to build on the outside of the building, planning to keep the heat in with a dragnet, such as a hunter might use to prevent small game from escaping. Subsequent chapters describe how the wise men try to maximize the profit to be extracted from their fields by sowing them with salt, the precious “white gold” of the Late Middle Ages. A watchman is hired to protect the anticipated seedlings by keeping wild beasts at bay, but then the men worry that this guard might do more harm than good by trampling the soon-to-sprout grains of salt as he goes about his task. To make sure that the watchman’s feet never touch the ground, the sages recruit four more men to carry him around on a litter.
Next it is time for the Lalen to experiment with democracy. There follows a mayoral election, in which victory goes to the swineherd, the least educated and least qualified member of Laleburg society. This swineherd is not just any swineherd but more ominously one who lets his wife wears the pants. Chaos ensues, especially when the emperor of Utopia decides to visit. The mayor inquires of his staff whether it would be more correct to receive the sovereign on foot or on horseback, and a compromise is recommended to them. Thus, the sages go out to meet His Majesty astride hobbyhorses, contraptions richly symbolic of foolishness, childishness, and parodied knighthood, along with coarsely sexual connotations.6 Moreover, their official gift is a jar of run-of-the-mill mustard, and the banquet consists of workaday bread and cheese. Worse is yet to come. As after-dinner entertainment, the emperor’s hosts treat him to a string of rude riddles. When asked by the Lalen to grant them an imperial privilege, the emperor responds by issuing the entire town a professional fool’s license.
In the book’s final chapters, additional examples of foolishness are presented. Some of the Lalen, who had been sitting in a group, are unable to disperse because they cannot figure out which legs belong to whom until a stranger comes along and beats each of the jumbled limbs with a stick. Subsequently, the Lalen decide not to waste the grass growing out of the top of a wall; so they place a rope around the neck of the mayor’s cow, heaving her up and wondering why her tongue is sticking out so strangely by the time they get her up to the top. When a sow is convicted of stealing from the municipal stockpile of oats and the death sentence has been carried out, the townspeople start debating who should get which parts of the pig and conclude that the most equitable option is to turn the whole carcass into one enormous community sausage. In another tale, the Lalen recall their previous experience with the logs just as they finish carrying a new millstone down into town. Accordingly, they carry the stone up again so that they can do the smart thing and roll it down. Before they release it, however, they decide that one of them should stick his head into the hole in the center of the stone so as to travel with it and report back on its final location. The designated driver, however, still attached to the millstone, meets his end at the bottom of a fishpond, leaving his fellow fools supposing that he has absconded with the stone.
A further mishap occurs when one of the Lalen is decapitated, or so it appears, except that no one can remember whether the man had anything on his shoulders before the apparent accident took place. Subsequently, another of the Lalen becomes so obsessed with trying to teach a cuckoo to cuckoo better that he climbs up a tree and remains there, oblivious to everything else, even when a wolf comes along and eats the horse he left at the foot of the tree.7
When the din of war draws near, the Lalen decide to save the town bell from pillage by hiding it at the bottom of their lake. They load the bell onto a boat, take it out into deep water, and drop it over the side. Then, before heading back to the shore, they make a mark on the deck of the vessel to record the precise point to which they will need to return when danger has passed and they are ready to retrieve their cherished possession. In another tale, mistaking a crab with its claws for a tailor with his scissors, the Lalen decide to place an order and hand over a fine piece of London cloth that inevitably gets ruined. The “tailor” is tried, convicted, and sentenced, luckily for it, to death by drowning. Finally, the Lalen, ever credulous, let someone sell them a dog of an extremely rare breed called the mousehound. It never occurs to anyone that they have acquired a common or garden cat. Increasingly distressed by the creature’s uncanine behavior, they panic and, in a misjudged attempt to rid themselves of this by-now-terrifying creature, burn their city to the ground and flee to the ends of the earth. This is the reason that fools are everywhere, the Lalebuch explains, ending the book with a message that explains a lot about the world: wherever the refugees from Laleburg “settled, there they begat fools as foolish as themselves.”8
All the silliness of these protagonists does not, however, exhaust the Lalebuch’s foolish content. The choicest part of the book is the manner of the telling more than what is being told, the antics of the narrator more than those of the Lalen. The Lalebuch distinguishes itself in terms of foolish culture by the extent to which it manages to contradict or subvert the evidence it presents. Even the title page is filled with a mix of overt nonsense and covert nonsense, such as statements that will have been discredited by the time the reader has finished. The imprint “Laleburg,” for example, is not only a fictitious location but one that, according to the narrative itself, was burned to the ground and abandoned forever before this account of its history was compiled.
The book provides many more conflicting arguments. The narrator repeatedly disguises his own identity as well as the source of his text. He also makes a point of blurring the boundaries between wisdom and folly, sanity and insanity.
The story is told by a thoroughly “unreliable narrator,” which adds to the riddle of the author’s, and his narrator’s, identity.9 This riddle is highlighted on the title page by the author’s statement that, rather than supplying his name in the conventional manner, he is, as a service to his readers, providing them with a complete alphabet and the assurance that his identity may be found by rearranging some of its letters. Throughout the text, the narrator keeps playing with his readers by providing different accounts of the sources on which he claims to rely. Thus, in the preface, he says that the story was told to him by the skipper of a boat on which he was traveling during a break from a session of the Utopian parliament (Reichstag) that he was attending in the year 753. Later, however, he complains of the partial illegibility of his manuscript source on account of its extensive worm damage.10
The narrator also constantly switches narrative levels.11 He often appears as an outside observer, and not even an omniscient one, placing himself with the readers in not being in full possession of the facts. So, for example, when a log that the Lalen are rolling breaks loose and runs amok, he says, “I do not know whether they omitted to do something and did not chain and tie it correctly, or whether the cords and ropes were too weak and so snapped, but the tree got away from them.”12
Sometimes the narrator chooses to associate himself so closely with his audience that he addresses the reader as if he were talking to an intimate friend, as where he describes the feast hosted by the mayor and his wife and comments, “If I had been there, I would certainly have tucked in, and you, you fool, would certainly have done so, too. You would have stuffed your cheeks to get your money’s worth.”13
On other occasions, the narrator presents himself as if he were a character in his own story, witnessing the events he describes. He says, for example, “I knew perfectly well that what the Lalen thought were salt plants were really stinging nettles, for they stung ferociously. I did not wish to tell them, however, but preferred to let them carry on with their folly.”14 The alternation between detached narrator and involved narrator adds to the complexity of the book, sometimes blurring the contrast between the Lalen as fools and the narrator as the embodiment of reason.
Not only are the content of the stories and the manner of their presentation full of folly, but so, at times, is the language itself, with its insanely convoluted neologisms, such as wunderbarnarrseltzamabenthewrlichsten, a word that incorporates three adjectives and a noun: wonderful, curious, most adventurous, and fool.15
Research on the Schildbürgerbuch began uncommonly early—in the first half of the eighteenth century—thanks to the historian and educator Johann Christian Schöttgen (1687–1751). In 1747, using the pseudonym Johann Christian Langner, he published a “defense of the town of Schilda,” in which he compared different editions of the Schildbürgerbuch and criticized the editors and publishers of the revised versions as intruders and mercenaries.16 Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scholarship on the subject was preoccupied with the relationship between the book’s first edition, titled the Lalebuch, and the second edition, retitled the Schildbürgerbuch. This culminated in a long-running debate on which of the two actually came first, with the Lalebuch prevailing.17 Regarding Laleburg, the jocular place of printing of the Lalebuch, it is unclear if either Strasbourg, and the press maintained by the heirs of Bernard Jobin, or Montbeliard, and the press maintained by Jacob Foillet, is where the book was published.18 The question of where the fictitious Laleburg or Schildburg is located has also been an obsession for literary historians.19
As far back as the early nineteenth century, Wilhelm Grimm and Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen, among others, observed that the Lalebuch quoted, merged, and combined earlier literary texts, such as the tales collected in Heinrich Bebel’s Facetiae (1508–1512) and Jakob Frey’s Gartengesellschaft (1556), as well as Hans Sachs’s “Lappenhewser bawren.”20 The anonymous author of the Lalebuch assembles well-known stories about fools or stereotypically foolish types such as peasants, and he reassigns their foolish behavior to the people of Laleburg, incorporating these existing tales into his original story line, which starts with the creation of Laleburg and ends with its destruction.
It is also clear that the author was familiar with contemporary humanistic debates on such questions as the nature of happiness, the role of wise men in politics, and whether the cooperation of wise men can bring about eudaimonia, a true welfare state or great society. As Hans Rudolf Velten has shown, the text borrows ideas from Poggio Bracciolini, developed in his treatise De miseria humanae conditionis (On the misery of the human condition, 1455), which circulated widely in Latin and was also available in German translation.21
Among the many textual inspirations for the Lalebuch, however, one stands out: Thomas More’s Utopia, first printed in Basel in 1516—hence the location of the action, be it in Laleburg or Schildburg, with both of them situated “in the mighty kingdom of Utopia.”22 Needless to say, every endeavor on the part of the Lalen or Schildburgers to build an ideal society goes ridiculously wrong, even though or, rather, because they abolish class distinctions, establish free elections, and hold all property in common. The Lalebuch, therefore, is an anti-utopian satire, with obvious references to More’s classic that range from allusions in names to topics discussed to rhetorical strategies.
Other scholarly attention to the Lalebuch concentrated on the question of its genre. Influenced by Romanticism, Joseph Görres included the Lalebuch on his list of Volksbücher (chapbooks). This categorization is troublesome because it assumed that reading matter was intended either exclusively for the masses (or middling sorts) or exclusively for the intelligentsia.23 The Lalebuch is a perfect example of how this distinction cannot be applied in the early modern context; playful, funny, and rude, the Lalebuch is also a highly sophisticated book, containing many allusions to humanistic debates and knowledge.
The book’s sequential anecdotes (Schwänke in German) may make the work seem like a novel.24 Other critics categorize the Lalebuch primarily as satire: Andreas Bässler, for example, concluded that the work stands in the tradition of the Menippean satire.25 His arguments, based on formalistic features, include the characteristic fluctuation between prose and verse, a “willed lack of unity and decorum,” an ironic narrator, and metaphoric inversion, by which he means that the protagonists are often shown acting out figurative expressions literally.26
The Lalebuch has also been related to contemporary political rhetoric, with critics noting that when the wise men of Laleburg are faced with any predicament, they always get together to consider their options. This process, with its emphasis on unhurried consultation and a careful balancing of competing arguments, has been described as exemplifying “deliberation,” understood as an ideal form of democratic decision-making. But the Lalebuch demonstrates how deliberation, if it is fools doing the deliberating, can lead a community into total insanity.27
The richness and diversity of interpretations reflect the fact that the Lalebuch is considered among the most outstanding examples of folly literature of the early modern period. The figure of the fool and the various depictions and meanings of folly that emerged in the late fifteenth century had a major impact on the Lalebuch’s conception and execution. The fool can take on various roles, which is why the Lalen have been seen as representatives of debates on models of society, regulatory policies, or gender relations. Scholars have applied different concepts of folly to the text. So it was, for example, that the book was linked with early modern discourses on mental afflictions and humoral pathology.28
While scholarship has concentrated on narrative strategies, conspicuously absent from the debate has been discussion of the connection between the Lalebuch and the foolish culture of the early modern period. There are, however, striking parallels between the fool societies and the Lalen, who, trying to establish a community for themselves, become something very much like a fool society. An awareness of the relationship between the text and foolish culture helps explain both certain features of the Lalebuch and the book’s enthusiastic reception. The Lalebuch reflects the practices of foolish culture and reworks them into literature. Thus, it is valuable to explore the connection between the Lalebuch, foolish culture, and, in particular, fool societies.
Groups of men, especially young men, organized in societies with names alluding to folly, such as Abbaye de Conards (Abbey of Fools), are, as we have seen, an embodiment of the foolish culture of the late medieval and early modern period.29 The purpose of these societies was to practice maleness by highlighting misconduct, especially in matters of marriage and sexual relations.
As Katja Gvozdeva has shown, folly as practiced in these male societies has two aspects. Members of the societies employ foolish symbols and dress up as fools, using the figure of the fool to represent and celebrate their maleness. At the same time, they expose other men as fools for failing to live by the social norms of the community. When members of these societies present themselves as fools, their behavior evokes a positive perception of folly. But the victims of the foolish performances of such societies are cast as fools in a negative sense of the term.30
The point at which the sages of Laleburg take the decision to simulate folly so as to be released from their contracts represents the book’s most conspicuous shifting of gears, as it moves from backstory to story, from setup to performance. “Performance” is very apropos here, because the rest of the text, that is, the stories that constitute the action of the book, are repeatedly evocative of the foolish performances of the fool societies that were such an important feature of early modern European social life.
It is not only the antics of the Lalen that evoke those of the members of the fool societies but also the way the narrative presents them, as if to underscore the point that the Lalen, despite their good intentions, are the ultimate fool society—not just in the broad sense but in a narrow, technical sense. They are not just the mocked fools but the foolish mockers as well.
Thus it is that the preamble to the Lalebuch concludes by casting the town’s absentee wise men as prospective cuckolds, that favorite target of fool society pranks. The women of Laleburg summon their men home with the explicit threat that, if they do not return, they may find frembde Vögel (strange birds, i.e., strangers) in their nests.31 This threat brings the men back and leads them to come up with the idea of staging an elaborate foolish performance to avoid returning to their jobs. Their resolution to act the fool brings their wives’ campaign to a successful conclusion.
The main section of the book, describing the sages’ all-too-successful endeavors to behave like Narren (fools), which follows the introduction and is punningly demarcated with the heading “Narration,” continues the evocation of foolish performances in the most explicit possible way.32 There follows a passage in verse whose whole purpose is to present the impending prose narrative as if it were a theater piece, which it calls the Lalespil (Lale play). This elaborate metaphor once again draws attention to the parallel between what the wise men of Laleburg decide to do and the whole purpose of the fool societies, which is to play the fool. This theatrical metaphor has another function and an important one: it draws in the readers by casting them as extras, the spectators who were indispensable to the performances—the processions, the plays, the charivaris—of the fool societies. Significantly, the Lalebuch’s metaphorical little poem further reinforces the foolish performance analogy by addressing itself not to everyone but to liebe Knaben (dear lads), as one might address fellow members, or prospective fellow members, of one’s fraternity or other young males, the demographic most involved in the foolish-performance scene:
Now come here, dear lads
Who want a place,
To watch the Lale play, about to start;
To each of you I will give a spot.33
The paradoxical purpose of the fool societies, promoting social cohesion through ritualized social disruption, seems reflected in the directive given to each of the “dear lads” in the rest of this poem to behave “according to the customs of the country,” that is, to adhere to conventions or face being “turned into a Lale” (i.e., a fool) himself.34
Stage plays form one kind of foolish performance. The series of events relating to the appointment of fool society leaders, including abbots or princes of misrule, form another. These appointments, culminating in burlesqued quasi-ecclesiastical investiture ceremonies, often involved competitive speech making, a pattern into which the Laleburg mayoral election, decided by poetry slam, fits easily. The various offices within the fool societies were usually filled by candidates from the corresponding social strata in the wider society; however, in the spirit of topsy-turvy, leading officers might also come from the lower ranks. Thus, the victory in the mayoral ballot of the swineherd, the lowest of the low, is not incompatible with the spirit of the fool societies. And it seems plausible that his election is meant to parallel the appointment of officers of these societies, whose titles were so often mock-religious in character. Correspondingly, the swineherd’s desire to improve his social standing by becoming mayor is depicted as a matter of exchanging his Propstei (priory, a lesser monastery) for an Abtei (abbey, a greater monastery).35
The emperor’s visit is accompanied by further foolish performances, including his initial reception at the entrance to the town. The Lalen go out to meet him riding on hobbyhorses, as the members of fool societies often did in their processions.36 Just as fool societies sought and received charters from their city council confirming their privileges, so the emperor is petitioned by the Lalen and agrees to grant them his protection in pursuing their foolish “new way of life.”37 By his decree, they are all appointed as his “amusing advisers,” a synonym for court fools or jesters.38
The presentation of this remarkable charter has been seen as marking a break from a narrative point of view. In what precedes the emperor’s visit, chapters are arranged sequentially to tell an unfolding story. In what follows, the chapters are loosely arranged in no particular order, simply offering illustrations of how the Lalen behave once they have made the switch from intentionally acting the fool to their new unselfconscious state of just being fools.39
At the start of the narration, the sages, setting out to be perceived as fools, seem to have deliberately built their town hall without windows to get their project off to “a laudable, notable beginning” so that their changed behavior might “become obvious and well-known very soon.”40 At what point they slipped into unconsciousness of their folly is never made clear. All that is clear is that they were bona fide fools by the time the emperor visited and certified them as “amusing advisers.”41
Where the Lalen differ most conspicuously from the fool societies is in their focus. Their antics reflect less a preoccupation with sex, marriage, and maleness than with reason and wisdom, but lacking reason or insight will make a fool of you as easily as lacking male honor or male virtue. In the nonsequential later chapters of the book, the folly of individual Lalen is ridiculed rather like the folly of the individual men chosen as victims by the fool societies—the father, for example, who expects his son to receive a complete schooling in the time it takes him to get his horse shod.
Since the Lalen no longer remember their original plan to feign folly, they cannot serve as their own audience but depend on the reader to appreciate their foolishness. This transformation is handled in the imperial privilege, which addresses not only the Lalen and their decision to live a new life but also anyone who interacts with them, since “no one, be he from the higher or lower ranks, shall question, ridicule, condemn, boo, deride, lampoon, or vex them with regard to whatever they may begin or set out to do or may already have done, neither backwards nor forwards, in word or in deed, in one way or another.”42
The punishment to which anyone who hears or reads the stories will almost inevitably become liable is clearly spelled out. Such a person will have to wear a fool’s cap; the number of bells on it will be determined by the extent of the derision in which he holds the Lalen. When folly becomes second nature to the Lalen, or, as the Lalebuch puts it, their “new way of life,” the reader becomes more than ever a protagonist.43 Folly can only exist in relation to its opposite, or, as Foucault concluded, folly and reason enter a “perpetually reversible relationship which implies that all madness [French: folie] has its own reason by which it is judged and mastered, and all reason has its madness in which it finds its own derisory truth.”44
In that the Lalebuch plays on the reciprocity of reason and folly, it muddies the boundaries between them, making a fool of anyone who laughs at the fools. Thus the book’s conclusion: “The name and tribe of the Lalen of Laleburg perished and was extinguished but their silliness [Thorheit] and folly [Narrey], their most valuable legacy, remained, and it is possible that you and I share a fair amount of it. Who knows if that is not true?”45
The Lalebuch was an immediate success, and a pirated second edition appeared just a year later, in 1598, printed by Paul Brachfeld in Frankfurt am Main. Still anonymous, the book had undergone two significant changes. First, the name of the locale had changed from Laleburg to Schiltburg (Shieldtown), which it remained in nearly all subsequent editions, although it was increasingly spelled “Schildburg,” which was the norm by the eighteenth century. If the replacement name, “Shieldtown,” had humorous intent, the butt of the joke would seem to have been the foolish pretension, amounting to a craze, of the burgher class of the time, for adopting coats of arms, precisely the hallmark that had formerly distinguished the nobility and landed gentry from their urban compatriots.46 The second big change was the substitution of a completely new preface, one far less steeped in classical learning, which opened the book to a much wider potential audience.
“Pomponius Filtzhut” and His Modernized Schildbürgerbuch
The Lalebuch (1597) and its second edition, the Schildbürgerbuch (1598), were met with great success. At least three reprints of the Schildbürgerbuch appeared in 1598 alone, and Schildburg even more than Laleburg became instantly ensconced in the German imagination as synonymous with an imaginary place of collective folly. Between the late sixteenth century and the late eighteenth century, more than thirty editions of the Lalebuch or Schildbürgerbuch were published, generally with only minute differences to distinguish one from another—with two exceptions.47
An edition of 1603 introduced a second alternative title, the ironically intended Grillenvertreiber (The banisher of crickets). The German expression “crickets in the head” is roughly equivalent to “bats in the belfry.” This version, and the few subsequent editions also appearing under the name Grillenvertreiber, changed the name of the locale once again, this time to the more obvious Witzenburg (Witz: wit, joke). Modifications of the Schildbürgerbuch in Grillenvertreiber are less linguistic or stylistic than they are related to the narrative. Chiefly, this means adding a sequel or second cycle of adventures that befall the protagonists after the events described in the Schildbürgerbuch have run their course, and an expanded Grillenvertreiber of 1605 adds a third set of tales.
The other markedly independent version of the Schildbürgerbuch to appear during the book’s long run of great popularity dates from the late seventeenth century and serves as the basis for all the Old Yiddish editions. Its editor calls himself Pomponius Filtzhut (i.e., Pomponius Felt-Hat), a ridiculous-sounding combination, evoking first humanist and then hick. As a Latinate nom de plume of the kind beloved by scholarly authors from the Middle Ages through the eighteenth century, Pomponius, a name borne by such intellectual luminaries of ancient Rome as Titus Pomponius and Pomponius Mela, is an impeccable choice and closely connected to the content of the book.
This pen name suggests how much the Schildbürgerbuch reflects the foolish culture of the early modern period and particularly the rituals celebrated by fool societies, since the name evokes the Latin pompa, a parade, a key venue where the young men of the fool societies acted foolishly. As for the name Filtzhut, it is not an arbitrary choice but an allusion to the emperor’s arrival in Schildburg, which must be one of the Schildbürgerbuch’s more memorable moments. The city fathers have gone out in procession on hobbyhorses and awaited him patiently, but finally the mayor feels compelled to relieve himself. No sooner has he prepared to do so than the imperial party arrives. With no time to adjust his clothing, he makes do by holding up his pants with one hand and doffing his felt hat with the other, until the emperor extends a hand and he is obliged to shake it, a predicament that he resolves by placing his Filtzhut between his teeth.
Virtually nothing is known about the person behind the name Filtzhut beyond what he says of his fictional identity in his Schildbürgerbuch edition: that he is less solvent and less respectable than one might wish to be; that he is “half-noble” (a nonsense category; you are a member of the nobility or you are not); and that he was formerly employed as town clerk and night watchman of Schildburg. He is presumably the Pomponius Filtzhut credited with the authorship of a spoof almanac, known in two versions, one for “the year of the herring 1662” and the other for “the year of the herring 1694.”48
The Filtzhut edition is, in a sense, the opposite of the Grillenvertreiber. While it alters almost every sentence of the original Schildbürgerbuch, the changes to the narrative are negligible.49 The novelty of his version is all about language and style. Filtzhut gives the sixteenth-century Early New High German original a comprehensive makeover. His text is sometimes less wordy and has shorter sentences and an updated vocabulary. He selectively supplements the text with passages from the Grillenvertreiber and other sources, and from time to time, he underscores punch lines and increases the impact of certain descriptions by giving sobriquets to some of the book’s unnamed characters, for example, calling one of them the “Pied Piper of Schildburg.”50
Occasionally, however, the editor inserts some jocular ornamentation that may compromise details of the original narrative. Thus, when the women write to their husbands calling them back from their service at foreign courts, Filtzhut has the letter signed on their behalf by a certain “Urban Querlequitzsch, associate judge and church steeple rubber.”51 A man’s signature, even if it is signed “in the name of all women,” somewhat undermines the story line here.52
Another novelty of the Filtzhut version is the suite of thirteen woodcuts that it features. For a long time, it was believed that these made Filtzhut’s the first illustrated edition in the Lalebuch-Schildbürgerbuch tradition, but it is very likely that the undated edition titled Lalen-Buch, printed sometime after 1678 with the pre-Filtzhut text and the “Filtzhut woodcuts,” really precedes Filtzhut, so that its illustrations serve as the models for those in his and many subsequent versions, including all the known Yiddish editions.53 The older supposition, that Filtzhut came first, was due to the misdating of Filtzhut’s undated first edition, on the basis of the mistaken belief that what was thought to be the Yiddish first edition was printed in 1637; therefore, its German source must have appeared before then.54
The post-1678 Lalen-Buch draws special attention on the title page to the fact that it is “enhanced with illustrations.” These are bigger and more meticulously executed than are their counterparts in the Filtzhut edition, most of which are smaller and rougher than those in the Lalen-Buch and mirror images of them. All of this strongly suggests that the Lalen-Buch’s images were the originals.
The extremely rare first known edition of the Filtzhut Schildbürgerbuch features neither date nor place of publication. The catalogue of the British Library, basing itself on the uncertain evidence offered by a separate work dated 1698 with which its Schildbürgerbuch is preserved in a period binding, supposes 1698 to be the likely year of printing of both of the books bound together.55 The German version of Filtzhut appeared in at least four additional editions.56 One of the earlier Pomponius Filtzhut editions must have served as the source text for what is evidently a lost first Yiddish edition, from which the extant Yiddish editions derive. And so we are ready to examine how and why the text made its way into Old Yiddish literature, as well as the nature and contents of the Yiddish versions.