The trickster is a narrative archetype that adorns the myths and tales of many a culture. It can be found in Loki’s shapeshifting in Norse mythology, in the cunning trickery of African-America’s Br’er Rabbit and even in the antics of Warner Brothers’ Tom and Jerry cartoons. Tying together these diverse tricksters is the subversion of unfair power structures and the triumph of the underdog, who uses cunning and wit to prevail, often told through a comedic anecdote. Unsurprising then that trickster stories often stem from marginalised communities and can be understood as a means of deriving strength and comfort in an unfair world. 

How might we relate this to the trickster stories told by Germans in East Prussia?  While most of the population had fled westwards in the wake of the Red Army’s invasion, between 1944-48 around 140,000 Germans still remained in northern East Prussia under Soviet rule , and would do so until their deportation in 1947-8. In their years under Soviet government, Germans in northern East Prussia experienced physical and sexual violence and were used as unpaid labour, while the region also suffered acutely from the post-war food shortages that blighted much of continental Europe. The Germans had few rights and were at the mercy of the Soviet administration. This treatment of Germans of course did not occur in a vacuum: it was directly related to the crimes committed by the Third Reich during its expansionist war, the brutal occupation of Eastern Europe and the Holocaust. 

Despite the direct relationship between these events, East Prussians and other German ‘expellees’ have been criticised for focussing on their own suffering and failing to acknowledge the crimes of the regime in their memory culture. Such critiques are valid. Numerous memoirs have been published by ‘expellees’ since the late 1940s and they are dominated by unreflective representations of German suffering. There is little space for Jews or other victims of National Socialism. Instead, the primary portrayal is of passive victimhood and a loss of agency, where Germans were victims of both Nazism and then the Soviets. 

However, scratching beneath the surface reveals a broader range of representations, including the trickster narrative. For this population that, on its own terms, had suffered greatly, these represent an attempt to claim retrospective agency through patterns of storytelling. Trickster stories provided German memoirists with a tool to claim agency over events where they felt they had little to none, aiding them in processing and making sense of their individual traumatic experiences through narrative.

 The trickster stories covered a number of common themes - escaping sexual violence, barter and theft of goods - and here, we will focus on stories concerned with food and its acquisition. East Prussia between 1945-48 was a dangerous and difficult place to live. Food was scarce, the bitter winter of 1947 was notorious, and many died of starvation and its related diseases. Mythic tales of cannibals stalk the narratives. Powerlessness, misery and struggle for survival are central to German recollections of this period. Yet among these stories are a clear subset which highlight inventiveness, resourcefulness and the use of wit and cunning by an underdog to undermine Soviet authority and power.

Inge Wolski, at that point a young girl, remembered how she and her sister Edelgard saved the family’s stores of wheat from confiscation by the Soviet authorities by hiding their contraband under some rags in a chest in their living quarters. In her narrative, just as she had reached inside the chest to retrieve some wheat, the apartment door was flung open and Soviet soldiers burst in to conduct a customary search. She wrote:

Although we were scared to death, lightening quick we switched: Edelgard and I pretended as if we were simply messing around. I shouted out of the chest, ‘Peekaboo, look for me!’ She ran around the room. Our deception actually worked: the Russians could only laugh about the activities and withdrew. We were certainly relieved!

As in the classic trickster narrative, the underdog German children outwitted the adult Soviet soldiers, saving the day and securing their access to valuable resources. It can be read as example of individuals with very little agency at the time reclaiming some, by telling a story in which they triumphed. There are many post-war German accounts of Soviet soldiers’ kindness toward German children and, in this instance, they used the soldiers’ kindness against them to undermine Soviet authority. 

However, we can dig deeper again by reading the story critically, as it also contains traces of wider stereotypes of German cultural superiority over Eastern Europeans. East Prussian trickster narratives tend to characterise Germans as the intellectually superior actor in interactions where Soviets, regardless of status, are tricked and outsmarted. We can interpret these trickster tales as a means of conveying German cultural superiority in the context of utter defeat following the second world war. These ideas were also central to Nazi ideology, suggesting that traces of Nazism intermingled with older nationalist beliefs still lingered in the culture of East Prussians.  This small and apparently trivial anecdote, when analysed as a narrative, can therefore provide a surprising amount of detail about the experiences of the individual telling it and the culture in which they exist. 

This is but one small example of a trickster narrative; there are many more in the memoirs of East Prussians. When considered collectively and as a narrative device, trickster stories can be understood as a way for individual to assert themselves and to process the trauma of powerlessness through storytelling. They are also engrained with cultural prejudices that reveal clues as to the prevailing attitudes of the society that produces them. Trickster narratives are particularly useful in exploring the complexities of refugee histories. Refugees are often marginalised and portrayed as either one-dimensional ‘innocent’ victims or as a threatening ‘other’. Analysing such narratives allows for more nuanced understandings of how refugees negotiate power relations and enact agency. Refugee trickster narratives communicate difficult and exceptional experiences through stories that are commonly recognised, thus highlighting their shared humanity and helping to break down stereotypes. Most interesting is the prevalence of the trickster narrative through time and across cultures, as it reveals a deep human impulse to tell stories of triumph in the face of physical and social marginalisation.

Further reading

Trickster narratives:

• Chema Salinas, ‘Ambiguous Trickster Liminality: Two Anti-Mythological Ideas’ Review of Communication 13/2 (2013), 143-159

• Emily Zobel Marshall, American Trickster: Trauma Tradition and Brer Rabbit. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019

• Ioan-Alexandru Grădinaru, ‘The Ways of the Trickster. Meaning, Discourse and Cultural Blasphemy’ Argumentum: Journal the Seminar of Discursive Logic, Argumentation Theory & Rhetoric 10 (2012), 85-96

• William J. Hynes and William G. Doty (eds.), Mythical Trickster Figures: Contours, Contexts, and Criticisms. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993

German ‘expellees’ and East Prussia:

• Arddun Arwyn. ‘“With a Spirited East Prussian Thirst for Action”: Constructs of an East Prussian Identity and Narratives of Forced Migrants’ Everyday Lives in Expellee Heimat Periodicals’. History. the Journal of the Historical Association105/368. 825-850

• Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East: Forced Migration and the Politics of Memory, 1945-1970. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012

• Andreas Kossert, Ostpreußen: Geschichte und Mythos, 3rd edn. Munich: Pantheon, 2009

• Christopher Spatz, Ostpreußische Wolfskinder: Erfahrungsräume und Identitäten in der deutschen Nachkriegsgesellschaft. Osnabrück, Fibre Verlag, 2016

• R. M. Douglas. Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012

• Albrecht Lehmann. Im Fremden ungewollt zuhause. Munich: C.H. Beck, 1991

Memoir:

• Inge Wolski, Kälte, Hunger, Vertreibung, überlebt, wiedergefunden, vereint. Ein Teil meiner kindheit in Ostpreußen 1945-48 [Cold, Hunger, Expulsion, Survived, Found Again, United. A Part of My Childhood in East Prussia 1945-58] Grevenbroich: 2009

German culture and Eastern Europe:

• Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, The German Myth of the East: 1800 to the Present Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010

The header image is a black and white photograph showing a horse-drawn cart carrying over a dozen people, with a woman walking alongside. In the background are trees and ruined buildings; in the foreground is another cart, overturned on its side. Source: Bundesarchiv (https://www.bild.bundesarchiv.de/dba/de/search/?query=B+285+Bild-S00-00326)