Krampus

Austria
The Salzburg region, Tyrol and East Tyrol, Styria, Upper Carinthia and eastern Bavaria (the Berchtesgadener Land); a recent offshoot in South Tyrol, where the older local name survives as Klaubauf in the Vinschgau

Krampus — St Nicholas's horned, hairy companion in the Eastern Alps, who on the evening of 5 December enters the houses and punishes children with a switch

Variants and names

Krampus, plural Krampusse; diminutives Kramperl, Krampal. In the oldest printed texts the form is Grampus or Grampes. Local names: Klaubauf or Kleibeif in East Tyrol, Upper Carinthia and the Vinschgau, Bartl in Tyrol, Strohbart in Bavaria; outside the German-speaking area Krampusz in Hungary and Croatia, parkelj in Slovenia. The DWDS, the digital dictionary of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy, derives Krampus «wohl zu Krampe(n) bair. ‹gekrümmter Zacken, Kralle, Spitzhacke›», that is from Bavarian-Austrian Krampen, «curved prong, claw, pickaxe»; Krampe itself it traces to Old Saxon krampo «hook», attested in Early Modern Upper German as early as the fifteenth century. Roman Sandgruber adds that in colloquial Austrian Krampen and krampat also mean «a coarse person». The Oxford English Dictionary says only «the Germanic base of cramp». Perchta and the Perchten are a different name and a different feast: they are not variants of the Krampus.

What is told

A horned, hairy male figure who accompanies St Nicholas on his round of the houses on the evening of 5 December and on the 6th. Archival and nineteenth-century descriptions give him goatskins, a horned wooden mask, a protruding tongue, cowbells on his back, a chain, a birch switch and a pannier or sack in which he threatens to carry children off. In the St Nicholas plays of Styria and the Salzburg region he does not come alone: he enters led by Lucifer, with the huntsman, the smith, Death and the Habergeiß, and his job is to attack the audience until the bishop calls him back. In East Tyrol, under the name Klaubauf, he tries to knock passers-by over and to drag the table out of the house, the «Tisch zoichn». From the later twentieth century he leaves the parlour and the script and becomes a street parade: dozens of masked troupes, crowd barriers, fires, a soundtrack.

What it was forthe author’s reading

He was the punitive arm of a pedagogy of fear administered once a year: St Nicholas questioned the children on the catechism and rewarded them, the Krampus carried out the threat, and the punishment came from outside rather than from the parents. In the St Nicholas plays the assault on the audience was written into the script and stopped on command: licensed, not disorderly. From the end of the nineteenth century the figure had a second life among adults, on the «Gruss vom Krampus» greetings cards, often flirtatious or openly erotic: it was in that merchandise, printed in millions, that the iconography settled and became uniform. Today the Pass, the Krampus troupe, is an association of young men with an internal hierarchy and no access for women, and the parade is a rite of local and male belonging before it is a message to children.

Where it is attested

The earliest dated attestation of the name I have been able to trace is the form Grampus in Joseph Valentin Eybel, Die Heiligen nach den Volksbegriffen, four volumes, Leipzig 1791: in the tale «Die Lebkuchen oder der vernünftige Knab» a child explains that «der Nikola sowohl, als der Grampus» are usually farmhands in disguise. The play at Öblarn, in Styria, is attested in 1816, when Archduke Johann saw part of it at Schloss Gstatt; its text remained oral until the survey carried out for the Schloss Trautenfels museum in 1989, and it has been on the Austrian intangible heritage register since 2014. For Vienna the Wien Museum documents the Krampus in the satirical paper «Die Bombe» in 1875, in the «Morgen-Post» in 1881 and in Gustav Gugitz in 1907. The «Gruss vom Krampus» cards follow the authorisation of the picture postcard in 1897 and the postal peak of 1902-1910; the Wien Museum records series by Ernst Juch around 1900 and a card by Mela Köhler for the Wiener Werkstätte in 1911. The standard study of the St Nicholas plays is Hans Schuhladen, Die Nikolausspiele des Alpenraumes, Innsbruck 1984; on the contemporary boom, Matthäus Rest and Gertraud Seiser in «EthnoScripts» 20 (2018) and Molly Carter's doctoral thesis, Sheffield 2016. The Toblach parade, the oldest in South Tyrol, was in its twenty-fifth edition in 2022; the Philadelphia Krampuslauf began in 2011 (Cory Thomas Hutcheson, in Contemporary Legend, series 3, 6, 2016).

Caution

Grade B rather than A because I have not closed the documentary chain myself. I know the 1791 passage in Eybel from the citation in the Online Etymology Dictionary, which gives both text and place, but I have not opened the third volume; nor have I opened «Die Bombe» of 1875 or the «Morgen-Post» of 1881, which I take from the Wien Museum, nor Schuhladen 1984, nor John J. Honigmann's article «The Masked Face» (Ethos 5, 1977), of which I have seen only the publisher's record. I have not found the first printed occurrence of the form Krampus with a K.

On the «pre-Christian pagan origin» and the link with Alpine deities: no document attests it. The thesis comes out of a chain of scholars — Jacob Grimm in 1835, Wilhelm Mannhardt between 1875 and 1877, Otto Höfler in 1934 with his thesis on Germanic male societies, Viktor von Geramb and Richard Wolfram between the wars — and today's Volkskunde treats it as a document on the history of its own discipline, not on the origin of the custom. Molly Carter calls Rücklauf the return of those discarded academic ideas into the common sense of the people who perform the rite.

Two widespread falsehoods. The 1582 payment at Dießen am Ammersee and the Salzburg orders of 1741 and 1773 concern the Berchten, that is the January Perchtenlauf: they never name the Krampus, and using them to date him is an error. The «ban by the Dollfuss regime» rests on a single article in the «New York Times» of 23 December 1934, whose own headline says the Krampus was «disliked» and «frowned upon», not prohibited; and the leaflet «Krampus ist ein böser Mann» of December 1953 did not come from the Austrian government but from Ernst Kotbauer, head of Vienna's municipal kindergartens («Time», 7 December 1953).

The grade says how well the entry is documented, not how interesting it is. How the grades are assigned.