Der Schwarze Mann: The Black Man Who Haunts German Childhood and Has Never Been Properly Explained

Der Schwarze Mann, the Black Man, is one of the most widely invoked child-threatening figures in German folklore and one of the most resistant to precise definition. Unlike the Nachtkrapp, who has a specific animal form, or the Erlking, who has a specific literary description, the Schwarze Mann is deliberately vague in his characteristics. He is dark. He comes for children who misbehave or who are where they should not be. Beyond that, the tradition leaves the details unspecified, which is part of what makes him effective: the imagination fills in what the description leaves out, and what the imagination of a child fills in tends to be considerably more frightening than any specific description.

His name has been misunderstood and misapplied in ways that require clarification. The Schwarze Mann of German children’s folklore is not a racial figure. The blackness in his name refers to darkness, shadow, and the colour of night rather than to skin colour, in the same way that the Black Dog of English folklore or the Black Man of Scottish witch trial testimony refers to a supernatural dark figure rather than to any human racial category. The figure predates the racial categories that were later imposed on the word black, and interpreting him through those categories is an anachronism that distorts the tradition.

The Hide and Seek Connection

The Schwarze Mann has a specific and somewhat surprising connection to the children’s game of hide and seek, at least in the German-speaking world. One version of the game uses the Schwarze Mann as the figure the hiding children are avoiding: the seeker is the Schwarze Mann, and the children are hiding from him. The game therefore encodes the folk figure as a playful threat, making the frightening supernatural being into the engine of a game that children actually enjoy.

This transformation of the frightening into the playful is characteristic of how child-threatening folklore figures tend to develop over time. The figure that was once used in earnest to frighten children into compliance becomes, as the earnestness fades and the figure becomes more familiar, the subject of games and stories in which the children are the protagonists who hide from, outwit, or escape the threat. The Schwarze Mann’s incorporation into hide and seek represents this kind of domestication of the frightening.

Struwwelpeter and the Literary Dark Figures

The Schwarze Mann appears in Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter of 1845, the German children’s book whose stories of children meeting terrible fates as the direct consequence of their misbehaviour made it one of the most influential and most disturbing children’s books in European literature. In the Struwwelpeter stories, the consequences of bad behaviour are graphically specific: the child who sucks his thumb has it cut off by a man with giant scissors. The child who will not eat his soup wastes away to nothing. The child who plays with matches burns to death.

The Schwarze Mann in this tradition is one of several dark figures who administer consequences, and his function in Struwwelpeter is the same as his function in the broader folk tradition: he represents the consequence that is coming if the child does not correct their behaviour. The difference is that Struwwelpeter makes the consequences visually specific and narratively inevitable in a way that the folk tradition, with its useful vagueness, does not.

For more on the folklore of Germany, the Nachtkrapp article covers the night raven child-taker. The Erlking article covers the forest spirit who targets children through supernatural compulsion. The Germany folklore hub page has every article in the cluster.