SCENE XXI – Walpurgisnacht
- Andréa Oldereide
- Apr 29
- 6 min read
Megaphone, Luxembourg’s alternative collectives platform, is organizing a “Take Back the Night” march: a night to take the streets and demand better for people who are not cis men:
“Take Back the Night is a concept that exists all over Europe and the US. Each country celebrates on a different day. In Germany, they choose to do it on the 30th of April, Walpurgis Night, when witches travel back to the Blocksberg. They first held it on that date in the 70s and it just stuck, especially in Berlin.
I have lived in Berlin for 8 years now, and a few years ago I went to the Take Back the Night for the first time. I just loved it. It was such a different experience compared to the JIF, Luxembourg’s only feminist demonstration. It was very loud and radical. I wanted to bring some of this energy back home because Luxembourg is too cutesy, complicit, and not radical at all. So, I thought we need to bring some of that energy back into the country,” says Lynn, one of the main organizers of the demonstration.
The Walpurgis Night demonstrations in Berlin have roots in unannounced night protests, where people spontaneously gathered at sites where women had been attacked, raped, or murdered.
Walpurgis Night, celebrated on the eve of May Day, is deeply connected to legends of witches. Folklore tells of witches gathering on mountaintops—especially Germany’s Brocken Mountain—to celebrate, perform rituals, and welcome spring. Fires, dances, and ancient rites marked a mystical turning point where the veil between worlds felt thin, and magic filled the air.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Die Hexen zu dem Brocken ziehn,
Die Stoppel ist gelb, die Saat ist grün.
Dort sammelt sich der große Hauf,
Herr Urian sitzt oben auf.
So geht es über Stein und Stock,
Es farzt die Hexe, es stinkt der Bock.
Translation:
The witches ride to the Brocken’s top, (= Blocksberg, the witches’ mountain)
The stubble is yellow, and green the crop, (spring has come)
There, the big crowd gathers,
Mister Urian is sitting atop. (Urian is the devil)
So it goes o’er stone and stick, (“over rough and smooth”)
The witch farts, the buck stinks. (buck = male goat, maybe another devil reference)
It is Walpurgis Night! Time for Satan’s spawn to crawl out of their nooks, from the mines in the South to the ancient Ardennes forest, and take back the night! On the eve of May Day, Luxembourg’s FLINTA* community will rise to say enough is enough. The dominant patriarchal culture cannot suppress us. You cannot scare us into Biedermeier boringness. Our siblings across borders are being stripped of rights so new that the ink hasn’t even dried. Fascism is in the air – and it reeks far worse than sulphur.
The Split in Feminism
Luxembourg is not immune against the violent and hateful rhetoric spreading across the UK, the USA, Germany, France and everywhere.
Shoutout to the colleagues at Äppel for doing the Lord’s work in documenting Luxembourgish Facebook fascists and giving them free grammar lessons while they are at it. We saw a couple of months ago that ADR politicians were caught liking posts advocating queer annihilation. But was anyone surprised?
Soon, Luxembourgish feminism will decide: will it be trans-inclusive or not? Will it stand for all of the second sex – those who are not perceived as cis-men? How long until Collectif Némésis spawns Collectif Melusina? Until feminationalistic tactics infiltrate the Luxembourgish establishment? Come out loud and proud for safe streets for all and say NO to TERFs!
What is a witch?
My first point of reference for Walpurgisnacht was Goethe’s Faust. Part of what I think of as the “Luxembourgish canon,” together with Homo Faber by Max Frisch, Zadig by Voltaire, and La Peste by Albert Camus. Anyone who’s completed a classical secondary education in Luxembourg has likely read these books. They might, therefore be one of the most prolific illustrations of Walpurgisnacht in our collective imagination. The scene epitomizes witches as lunatic, devil-serving, infertile, horny, easy, sometimes repulsive and sometimes seductive beings.
Faust’s story is framed as a struggle between God and the Devil, in which the Devil bets he can corrupt Faust - a man deeply obsessed with the quest for absolute knowledge.The witches’ Walpurgisnacht celebration is a distraction from this quest and Faust’s remorse over impregnating and deserting a pure 14-year old girl. It is a night of pure sin; the atmosphere is visualized with naked bodies and sexually suggestive content ad nauseam in the theatre play my German teacher used as an educational resource (Peter Stein, 2000).
It is “only a story,” but this scene is reflective of a stereotype of what we might imagine witches to be like – in a pact with the devil, trying to achieve worldly gains through tricking honest men, and empowered by a “carnal lust.” The Malleus maleficarum (1487) (engl.: The Hammer of Witches) calls this lust the root of witchcraft – a lust that is insatiable in women and therefore the reason behind women’s propensity towards witchcraft. Written by two Dominican friars from Cologne after being granted permission by Pope Innocent VIII to prosecute witches in Germany, the Malleus spread the frenzy of witch hunting far and wide.
Though I do not want to rule out the existence of witches, I have never met one. Yet, tens of thousands were murdered in the early modern European witch hunts. The witch became a classic “enemy-within” trope manufactured by the Catholic Church to gain immense power – creating a fake problem (witches) and brutally "solving" it.
In the process, laypeople are conforming to christo-patriarchical standards out of fear of being accused of witchcraft. Any deviation from the patriarchal imagination of what a man or woman is supposed to be could result in witch hearsay. And though women are the large majority of victims ranging from wealthy widows to town healers and midwives, at least 10% of the executed were men. This is why characterizing this as an issue of patriarchy rather than solely misogyny should be more appropriate.
We can see the witch as a queer comrade; this is not a comment on their sexuality, but on their gender nonconformity. When the state defines what a “good” or “real” man or woman is, everyone suffers. Almost no one fits perfectly into the binary. We know that people assigned male and female at birth have a large variety of combinations of hormone levels, chromosomes, and physical markers, with up to 1 out of 100 people being intersex. Much like the pseudoscience behind the witch hunts, the binary understanding of gender and sex is social fiction. We also know that there is a sizable minority of humans who do not identify with what they were assigned at birth and the social pressures related to that identity.
If you think it can't happen here—remember: Luxembourg was in the heartland of the witchcraze, holding at least 547 trials and 355 executions, according to historian Sonja Kmec. A peculiar old man accused of a whole series of crimes kicked off a wave of witch trials between 1679 and 1680 in Echternach. Notably, the court ruled that he was a witch-hunter using white magic and was therefore not guilty – and decided to prosecute a woman named in his testimony instead. This led to five more trials.
None of the accused were proven witches, but all were women who didn’t fit the mold:
A wealthy widow,
An unpleasant neighbor,
A woman accused of adultery,
A woman who ran her own business,
A woman accused of infanticide
We know for sure that three of them were hanged and later burned.
So…if you could have been deemed a witch and belong under the FLINTA* umbrella, make sure queer people and those accused of being too weird do not end up like Gertrud Schou, Maria Keuffer, Ursula Edinger, Christina Tolfank, Gertrud Zix, and Engel Sturtz! Stand up to fascism and take back the night. To be queer, trans, feminist, defiant—to be weird—is not a crime.
The fire is lit. The night is ours.
Sources:
Comentários