The Kiepenkerl of Münster

A Kiepenkerl was no hero out of a fairy tale. He was a trade. In the Low German speaking country between the Sauerland and Hamburg, travelling pedlars walked far into the nineteenth century from farm to farm and from village to town market. On their backs they carried the Kiepe, a tall pannier of wood and basketwork. That is where the name comes from: Kiepe plus Kerl, basket plus fellow, and nothing more.

What lay in the basket depended on the direction he was walking. Towards the town: eggs, butter, poultry, whatever the farmsteads of the Münsterland produced. Back to the countryside: salt, yarn, needles, ribbon, tobacco and whatever else the pedlar could sell. His clothing was as recognisable as his load: a white shirt, a black tie or a coloured neckerchief, a waistcoat, over it the blue linen smock, linen trousers, clogs or leather shoes with stockings and high gaiters, a cap, a pipe and a walking stick.

And he brought more than goods. He brought news. Anyone living on a remote farm in an age without newspaper and without post learned exactly as much of the world as the man with the basket could tell. That is why the table was laid for him, why he was allowed to sleep in the barn, and why he got in everywhere.

An honest word belongs here. The Kiepenkerl is not a person out of one story. There is no name, no year of birth, no legend in which he outwits the devil. He is an occupational type that slowly became a folk figure, and the anecdotes told about him are later colouring, largely from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the trade itself was already vanishing.

The colouring is understandable enough. A man who gets in everywhere and talks to everyone acquires by himself the features of a cunning talker: the fellow who knows which story belongs at which door, who haggles a price down with a joke and keeps the last word. On the Low German stage and in the local heritage societies of the Münsterland he lives on in just that shape, in smock and clogs, the talkative fellow who earns his bread by talking.

When the real trade died out, the figure was given a plinth. The Münster beautification society commissioned the sculptor August Schmiemann (1846–1927), a native of the city. His figure was 175 centimetres tall, of plaster with a galvanic metal coating, and cost 2960 marks. It was solemnly dedicated on 16 October 1896, on the square then still called Neuer Fischmarkt and known today as the Spiekerhof.

The monument came through the heavy air raid on Münster of 10 October 1943 while the city around it fell into rubble. For that very reason the undamaged fellow was used during the war years as an emblem of Westphalian steadfastness. It did not last long: during the entry of the American army in 1945 the plaster figure was destroyed after all, struck by a tank.

Münster did not leave him lying there. After the war the sculptors Albert Mazzotti and Heinrich Ostlinnig made a new version, this time cast in bronze after Schmiemann’s model. It was unveiled on the same spot on 20 September 1953, and the man who drew away the cloth was Federal President Theodor Heuss. Since then the Kiepenkerl has stood there without interruption. Right beside him two inns named after him serve their guests, the Great and the Little Kiepenkerl; the whole quarter carries his name as the Kiepenkerlviertel.

Whoever stands beside him stands in the middle of Münster. Two minutes away runs the Prinzipalmarkt, the street of gabled houses and arcades, rebuilt stone by stone after 1945. Behind it rises St Paul’s Cathedral, where work on the astronomical clock began in 1540; around midday the Three Kings come out and bow before Mary with the Child. Around the old town lies the Promenade, a good four kilometres of lime avenue on the levelled fortification rampart, laid out from 1770 and closed today to cars. Münster is a cycling city, and the Kiepenkerl watches them all ride past, the basket on his back, as if he were about to set off again.