Gluttony Artists Carnival, Enlightenment and Consumerism in Germany on the Threshold of Modernity

Gluttony artists (’Freßkünstler’) were common in the 19th century–see Hans Scheubl, Showfreaks und Monster. Sammlung Felix Adanos, Köln 1974,145f. and Signor Saltarino (i.e. H.W. Otto), Fahrend Volk. Abnormitäten, Kuriositäten und interessante Vertreter der wandernden Künstlerwelt, Leipzig 1895, 148–150. They are the opposite of the slightly better-known ‘hunger artists’, as in Kafka’s 1922 story Ein Hungerkünstler, which were a major attraction on the European and American variety and exhibition circuit in the 1890s. Locked in a cage or a glass tank, hunger artists or ‘fasting showmen’ would eat nothing for periods of several weeks, subject to constant public scrutiny and frequent medical checks. See Breon Mitchell, “Kafka and the Hunger Artists”, in: Alan Udoff (ed.), Kafka and the Contemporary Critical Performance. Centenary Readings, Bloomington, Indianapolis 1987, 236–255. Peter Stallybrass and Allori White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression, London 1986 and cf. Allon White, “Hysteria and the End of Carnival”, in: Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse (eds.), The Violence of Representation. Literature and the History of Violence, London 1989, 157–170. See Richard Sheppard, “Upstairs-Downstairs. Some Reflections on German Literature in the Light of Bakhtin’s Theory of Carnival”, in idem (ed.), New Ways in Germanistik, Oxford, New York 1990, 278–315, here: 297. Sheppard’s article provides an excellent survey of the longer-term process in which the gluttony vogue was embedded. One example of Hanswurstian gluttony is provided by a Nuremberg, 1769 handbill for a play, Der teutsche Franzos oder der wunderliche Jahrmarkt von Rumpelsdorff (The German Frenchman or the amazing Revelston fair), promising a “Monsieur Appetit”, a “Hanswurst as a modern Robinson” and a number of fairground characters (cited in Max Pirker [ed.], Teutsche Arien, 2 vols., Wien, Prag, Leipzig 1927,1, 389). See Leander Petzoldt, Bänkelsang. Vom historischen Bänkelsang zum literarischen Chanson, Stuttgart 1974 Wolfgang Braungart, Bänkelsang, Stuttgart 1985 and Tom Cheesman, Bänkelsang. Studies in the History of German Street Balladry in the 18th and 19th Centuries (unpublished D.Phil, thesis, Oxford 1989). Eric A. Blackall, The Emergence of German as a Literary Language. 1700-177’5, Cambridge 1957, ch. 1. Lutz Röhrich and R.W. Brednich (eds.), Deutsche Volkslieder, 2 vols., Düsseldorf, I (1965), no. 62. Elias Canetti, Masse und Macht, Fischer Taschenbuch 1480, Frankfurt a.M. 1980, 249–317 (chapter headed “Der Überlebende”). See e.g. Marc Feldman, “Pica: current perspectives”, Psychosomatics 27 (1986), 519–23. A mass outbreak of earth-eating was recently reported from central Africa (May 1991). It was caused by a rumour that this would cure AIDS. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, 2nd ed., London 1965. On the rise of individualism, see eh. 3, esp. 75 ff. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger. An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London 1966. Pigs, cats and Jews all straddle conceptual categories and so feature prominently in traditional transgressive rites. On pigs, see Stallybrass and White (note 4) 1986, ch. 1; and on carnival and Jews, pp. 53-6, 63-4. The various symbolic uses of cats in early modern popular culture (their connotations of witchcraft, violence and sex, and festive traditions of cruelty towards them) are discussed in Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, Harmondsworth 1984, 91–99. Kate Soper, Troubled Pleasures. Writings on Politics, Gender and Hedonism, London 1990 81 and 281, citing Robert Graves, The Greek Myths, 2 vols., Harmondsworth 1955,1, 89.