Is the German Christmas a blend of Teutonic winter solstice, Jesus’ birth, and a sentimental revival of medieval practices? Do Germans, and people everywhere with a German heritage, have some kind of patent on Christmas? As it turns out in Joe Perry’s book, the German Christmas that exists today is a product of early-nineteenth-century Romanticism, and therefore no more ancient or venerable than the American Christmas, the British Christmas, or most other cultures’ Christmases. Commercialization, kitsch, and public ritual are international.
Families are also international, but they take different forms and practice different customs; this book would have benefited from a visit to a German family Christmas in the present day. The author describes his own visits as Santa Claus (Saint Nicolas) to a number of German families in their homes, as part of their German Christmases, but we readers don’t feel we get to know the parents, the children, or the others present. Instead we remain on the outside looking in. It is probably true that there is nothing like a family Christmas and that each family’s celebrations are unique; this book would benefit from anything it could do to help its readers project themselves into such a family celebration. Otherwise the emotional aspects considered so intrinsic by the author remain abstract and cold.
In German-speaking areas of Europe Christmas celebrations migrated from the church to the public square to the home, where they settled, resisting ouster attempts coming from even the most fervent German nationalists, such as those active in the Third Reich or the Soviet-dominated German Democratic Republic, both now defunct.
Joe Perry’s book looks at Catholic and Protestant customs, the phenomenon of the War Christmas, i.e., Christmas in times of war, consumerism, and home and public celebrations as they have shaped German identity and the self-image of individual Germans. He locates early prototypes of today’s German Christmas in two early-nineteenth-century books—philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher’s novella The Christmas Celebration: A Conversation (1806) and E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (1816), the story that furnished the plot of Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Ballet, a Christmas-season staple world-wide. It all began in a highly educated, prosperous, even cosmopolitan upper-middle-class setting. And in the Schleiermacher version there isn’t even a Christmas tree.
Schleiermacher hoped to intertwine the religious festival with family life, for the benefit of both, and with the help of Hoffmann’s book, succeeded quite well at this task. Using a conversation at a home Christmas celebration as his starting and focal point, he conveyed the meaning of the holiday in the discourse, centering on the Christian story of Christ’s birth. This meaning he hoped to merge into a foundation of deep family love, meaning what we now call the nuclear family, but also including extended family and friends. In fact, visits of friends were an integral part of the Christmas he envisioned. Thus other celebrations, in church or in the public square, take a back seat. The poet Hoffmann’s vivid rendering of family Christmas rituals modeled emotional aspects of the get-togethers and inspired countless similar blends of family love and piety in the 200 or so years since that time.
Both of these prototypical Christmas celebrations have a decidedly Protestant hue. In Schleiermacher’s account the lady of the house decorates, conceals presents, and then allows the excited children into the room to find them. Acquaintances drop by to test the children’s grasp of manners and reward them with sweets; Perry calls this a vestige of Christmas mumming. In this kind of Christmas maternal love represents Christ’s love, and Christmas becomes too holy for church, because home is more sacred. It’s a German thing, this home-based holiness. It caught on quickly in other Protestant-dominated cultures, especially in places where Germans settled. Polls in post-WWII West Germany reveal a diminution of the holiday’s religious significance from the 1960s, 18%, to 1995, 8%. As religion diminished in West German Christmases, so did socialism in the East.
The love of Germans for their Christmas, however, has weathered war, politics, and secularization to become part of their national identity. Objective evidence of this same process exists in a number of nations; Christmas is the only unashamedly religious holiday that is also a legal national holiday in the United States.
Readers searching in this book for an in-depth analysis or description of favorite German or German-seeming Christmas handicrafts, music, or foodways will be disappointed. A sequel might provide a detailed account of regional Christmas customs, Christmas music—after all, it is acclaimed all over the world—and more of the material culture side of this many-faceted holiday as German-speaking countries celebrate it today. Nostalgia and folklorization are definitely part of the picture; German-speakers and people with a German heritage cherish and preserve in their daily lives local dialects, legends, pageants, music, and crafts, all of which have a Christmassy side. It would have been interesting to include a visit to a Christmas market, where local crafts, costumes, and foodways come to the fore in all German-speaking countries—not just Germany—as they do at no other time of the year.
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[Review length: 840 words • Review posted on June 16, 2011]