In times of great stress and privation, rumors and stories may arise about desperate or opportunistic people resorting to cannibalism. Some of these accounts are certainly true, but as such tales are repeated and elaborated, various legendary forms incorporating traditional themes may develop and the narratives may become part of the folklore of the times. A typical example of such legends from post WWII Europe appeared in a “Letter from Berlin” published in The New Yorker of July 20, 1946. In this account a young woman walking in a badly bombed area encounters an old man, apparently blind, who asks for directions to a place he wishes to deliver a letter. The woman offers to deliver it for him, but she looks back and sees the man walking briskly without the aid of his cane; she reports the incident to the police, who investigate and find an apartment where people have been processing “a quantity of meat” that proves to be human flesh. The letter in the envelope contains only one line: “This is the last one I am sending you today.” The New Yorker correspondent concluded: “This story is pure myth. Yet all the Germans I know in Berlin, as well as a number of others I have questioned, have heard it, and ninety-five per cent of them have believed it.”
When Estonian folklorist Eda Kalmre was interviewed in 2001 for two local newspaper articles concerning similar stories remembered from post-war Tartu, she pointed out the folkloric nature of these “Human Sausage Factory” accounts. Many readers of the articles objected that the stories were true—they claimed to know people who had witnessed such horrors or had even seen them personally. Others, however, agreed with Kalmre and declared the stories to be nothing but rumor and legend. The experience led the folklorist to collect numerous accounts of such claims via interviews, letters, emails, and archival sources, even discovering an account of the story in a 1947 KGB document written in Russian and marked “Top Secret.” Her study of this material is the subject of this compact but very comprehensive book.
In her introduction, after summarizing the essential features of the horror tale in the post-war period in Tartu, Kalmre reviews major scholarly approaches to rumor and legend analysis which she applied to her corpus of texts. Five chapters focus these theories and methods on the material, with emphasis on traditions about cannibalism (chapter 1), post-war images of violence and evil (chapter 2), folklore about the “split society” of Estonians of different backgrounds, and of Jews (chapter 3), the stories as “criticism of the Soviet economic system” (chapter 4), and the reception of these old stories in the present (chapter 5). This latter chapter presents verbatim sausage factory stories from four contemporary narrators. A final chapter considers the stories as “a metaphor for social truth,” concluding that “the world described in these stories was so powerful and influential that it created a social environment that continues to function and to influence people’s memories, emotions and values even today.”
Complementing this thorough study of the rumor/legend complex are photographs from the neighborhoods in Tartu where the stories were set, in their pristine pre-war condition, after the destructions of the conflict, and in their reconstructed state. The areas around such Tartu landmarks as The Stone Bridge and Town Hall Square became part of the sausage factory tradition.
Kalmre published an Estonian edition of this book in 2007, and it is a great service to international folklore studies to have it available in English. On the whole, the translation is clear and readable, with the exception of a few instances of technical jargon that seem unnecessary, such as the words “agiotage” (14), “chrestomathic” (25), and “egomorphic” (57). I spotted only one small proofreading error—one often made even by native speakers of English—the spelling of the past tense of “to lead” as “lead” rather than “led” (53). Computer spell-checking is of little help here! Possibly as a result of having combined earlier shorter articles about the same complex of stories, the basic facts of Estonian pre- and post-war history are given three times, once in detail in the introduction (10-11), and again in summary form in footnotes (139,142). But these are minor details in a fine study that should be read by every scholar concerned with rumor and legend studies.
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[Review length: 726 words • Review posted on June 20, 2014]