Hanseatic legionaries, playing at Waterloo and at Punch and Judy

Wikipedia implies that the Hanseatics saw no action after their triumphal entry into Bremen, Hamburg und Lübeck on June 30th, 1814, but they seem to have fought again in 1815. Here from Johannes Rabe’s excellent & principally oral history of Hamburg Kasper (Punch and Judy) puppeteers, Kasper Putschenelle: Historisches über die Handpuppen und Althamburgische Kasperszenen (1911) is an anecdote from the life of drum major Georg Heinrich Christoph Küper of Hanover. Küper joined the French in 1810 and may have gone to Russia, but in 1813, along with Napoleon’s other German allies, he smartly deserted them and joined the Legion, with whom he left for the Low Countries and even lower German in 1815. Like Thackeray in Vanity Fair, Rabe doesn’t describe the battle:

In the neighbourhood of Brussels and Antwerp one morning they marched off to the left, so that the 2nd Hamburg Battalion was at the head. Someone gave money to the child-beggars, who, turning somersaults and crying “Vivent les Anséates!”, ran alongside the battalion, and indicated to them that they should cry “Vive le tambourmajor Küper! Vive Leschew!”^[1]A Lieutenant Leschew was killed at Waterloo fighting with British German forces. Did the confusion re the end of the Legion arise because for this last campaign its men were raised outside whatever official channels existed and assigned to British command? to the following battalion. The instruction was promptly followed and elicited from those concerned the astonished utterance, “What the devil, how do the damned boys know our names!”, producing Homeric laughter in the battalion.

I am glad that Georg followed the money and ended up on the right side, because otherwise he probably would not have fathered son Georg in 1826, and Hamburg would have been deprived of a terrific puppeteer and organ-grinder. (And I hope someone makes the necessary changes to the Wikipedia pages about the Hanseatic Legion: to have been present at Napoleon’s final defeat is nothing to be ashamed of.)

Rabe’s life of Georg Junior, his family and dependants, and mid-century Hamburg urbanism is wonderful. Despite the disastrous culmination of romanticism in 1933, pre-C20th German popular culture online is dominated by idealistic fakelore – for example, the principal folksong archive doesn’t include any industrial era Moritaten. Rabe found in the archives of the municipal library 53 songs credited to Küper, and -despite the best efforts of the Allies- there are surely hundreds of barrel-organ songs out there. But the internet is not the place to look for Küper’s patriotic numbers, nor those about the 1858 comet, crinolines, velocipedes, and sex.

Georg Junior sang and worked mainly in Low German, also imitating other regional dialects of which there may still have been traces then in Hamburg districts. Reading of his exploits produces a tremendous nostalgia in me. One gag of his was also beloved of Hans W. when we made the streets musically unsafe 20 years ago in another border district and in a similar dialect: Küper would stand on a busy street and stare obsessively at a certain point. A crowd would gather round and follow his gaze, whereupon he would suddenly shout, “There! there! did you see it?” “No, no!” they would say, “I didn’t see anything!” “Me neither!” and he was off. Had-je-me-maar would also have understood.

So prizes, then, for anyone who can find the Neues Handwerkslied, dedicated presumably to his wife, “Sophie de hett eenen Küper, doch dat is een groten Süper”, or evidence of his mechanical masterwork, a portrayal of the Californian Gold Rush, documented in his pamphlet Beschreibung der Goldgruben Kaliforniens durch ein mechanisches Kunstwerk nach der Natur hergestellt. OK, or for a picture of Sophie, renowned for her cockiness, her figure and her rendition of the leave-taking song, Two friends stand hand in hand, here in a modern version:

Anecnotes[+]

Hanseatic legionaries, playing at Waterloo and at Punch and Judy

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