Till Eulenspiegel is still winking and smirking at our stupidity and evil
Germany’s “good-natured rogue and insatiable mischief-maker.”
“Es ist keiner so blind, wie der, der nicht sehen will.”
He is “described variously as an ‘avenger of peasants, a representative of the oppressed, a romantic loser, a rebel, a nilhilist, a callous judge of humanity, an embodiment of German motherwit, a critic of language, a good-for-nothing, a cataloguer of Low German humor, a symbol of Satan, a parasite….a traitor to humanity, a cynic, and a representative of a new age’”(Rachael Haring, 2003), but the “good-natured rogue and insatiable mischief-maker” of the Late Middle Ages is also “irresistible” according to Elizabeth Robbins, writing for the Atlantic in the late 19th Century:
“Whether we follow him to the bee-hive where he set two thieves to fighting while he made his escape, undetected; whether we accompany him to the church spire in Magdeburg on that famous occasion when he assembled crowds around the church, only to tell them they were bigger fools than he was himself; or whether we are witness of his imposture upon so august a person as the Pope , we cannot resist laughing heartily with him, while we admire his amazing ingenuity.” — Elizabeth Robbins (1881)
