The rat catcher

On Friday I went to Hameln, known in English as Hamelin, home of the pied piper. In German he is the Rattenfaenger, the rat catcher. I never understood what 'pied' meant, so I of course looked it up on the internet. Pied means multicolored, or having blocks of different colors, as the piper's clothes do in all the pictures.

Hameln is all about the rat catcher. He shows up in paintings on the half-timbered houses, he leads tours of the city, he comes out of the Glockenspiel in center of town three times a day. There are little metal rats that show up in the cobblestones of the old city every so often, and I even spotted rats carved into a pillar at the church. The legend, according to the brothers Grimm, is that the town leaders hired this guy to rid their town of rats by playing his enchanting songs. He got the job done, but when they didn't pay him he lured the children of the town away by playing the pipe. This must be the most romanticized kidnapping ever.

The Glockenspiel

According to what I've read it seems like there was a real pied piper. He could have kidnapped all 130 children. More likely, there could have been a rat-borne disease that killed most of Hameln's kids at that time. In that case, the piper may have been not a real guy but just a symbol for death itself (though we don't usually picture Death as wearing a rainbow outfit and a big long feather in his cap). Another theory is that the piper took Hameln's young people to populate a new colony in Transylvania or somewhere else in the east of Europe. This article has a lot more information if you are interested.


I went to Hameln with my Colombian friend Olga and her new Uzbek friend Slata. I had never met someone from Uzbekistan before, but I liked Slata. Having her along also made me practice speaking German, since Olga and I usually speak Spanish when it's just the two of us.

This is a really fantastic thing about living in Germany - I can travel to a tourist destination and come back in the same day. Ok, it's not a major tourist destination, but they have a medieval city that was never destroyed in WWII, cobblestone streets and half-timbered houses. I suppose when you grow up in Europe, those things get old. But I still feel like I've stumbled into a storybook.

Olga and me

The highlight was climbing the tower in St Bonifacius Church. We climbed narrow spiral stairs, crossed the attic of the church on a wooden gangway, went through some creaky doors, climbed more stairs, (feeling around for a light switch) went up a ladder and opened a trap door to the lookout tower and a view of the town and river below.

Accross the church attic

Olga and Slata

View of Hameln from the church tower

So to any Hamline University Pipers out there, you have a cool mascot.  I'm not sure whether the rat catcher was a good buy or a bad guy, or why he did it. It does seem odd that the people of Hameln really like to celebrate the guy who took all their children away. But who am I to judge? I come from the land of corn palaces and giant balls of twine. Give me some winding cobblestone streets and a creaking church tower, and I am impressed.