As April the first arrives on our calendar, some of us will be concerned about a prankster friend putting out on Facebook, or through conversation, that a well-loved celebrity or family member has died, or that some unexpected or outrageous calamity has befallen another country, or that some politician has done yet another stupid thing. And we read or hear such items and experience our moment of shock or wonder and then get hit with an ‘April Fools’, and feel a bit foolish. But that’s something small, and relatively personal. We certainly wouldn’t expect that our trusted media outlets would do such a thing.
Unless we were German.
Anecdotal evidence supports the idea that Germans seem to enjoy the personal April Fools’ pranks (Aprilscherz) as much as the rest of us, but German newspapers have traditions going back over a century of perpetrating hoax news stories on April 1st both to amuse the wary and play a trick on the unwary. Someone caught by a personal Aprilcherz is both alerted to the fact that they have been duped and ridiculed with a quick “April! April!”. But your newspaper doesn’t let on at all.
The origins of these sorts of activities are difficult to pinpoint, and while some attribute it to the introduction of Christianity and the resultant ‘shaming’ of those who followed pagan Spring rites, other experts on the subject would point to a firm date from 1530. At the Diet of Ausburg in 1530, one of the topics slated to be decided was the regulation of coinage. The coinage topic, however, was never discussed, so a Münztag (money/minting day) was announced for April 1, but nothing was resolved by then, so the date came and went without a change to coinage. Speculators who had invested based on this change found themselves at a loss, and were ridiculed as fools, thus starting the tradition.
Whether either of those are the true origin is all but impossible to say. The first real reference to it in Germany comes from Bavaria in 1618 as “in den April schicken” (to make an April fool of). By 1854, Aprillsnarr is in Grimms Deutschem Wörterbuch, but not the Aprilcherz (April Fool’s Trick), which appears somewhere in the last half of the 19th century.
We can see some of these in things like the Echinocereus dahliaeflorus of 1900, which was a cactus invented by the imagination of the staff of Möllers Deutsche Gärtner Zeitung, a gardening journal. The same journal also brought forth more imaginative things in their next April issue of 1901, such as phosphorescent clematis plants (complete with an illustration of Herr Möller reading by the light of ‘sunflower lamps’ in his garden in the evening), a new popular trend of growing fruit trees in the likeness of the Kaiser, and the discovery of hybrid bottle gourds and grapes that yielded ripe fruit full of Rhine wine.
Others capitalized on current events elsewhere and sought to bring some of that back home, as when, in 1923, a Berlin paper revealed that as the city’s underground railway was being excavated, workers had come upon a large, ancient building that contained many mummies and Egyptian antiquities. Quoting an expert “Dr. Lirpa”, this confirmed that the ancient Egyptians had formed a colony right there in Germany. He also concluded that these finds rivaled the Pharaoh Tutankhamen’s tomb, which had just been opened on February 16th of that year by Howard Carter.
In mentioning Carter, one might remember the ‘Mummy’s Curse’ that affected the team that Carter lead. That was, of course, media fiction. While there was an inscription in Tutankhamen’s tomb on a shrine to Anubis that read “It is I who hinder the sand from choking the secret chamber. I am for the protection of the deceased”, after the death of the expedition’s sponsor, Lord Carnarvon (who had been in poor health and died of pneumonia in Cairo), a reporter quickly added to that inscription in his story “They who enter this sacred tomb shall swift be visited by wings of death”. And thus, a curse was born that would live on in people’s minds.
I bring up that example to talk about another ‘Mummy’s Curse’ that gained precedence in the early 1900’s, and a German newspaper’s Aprilcherz helped it. As recounted in a 1923 New York Times (London Office) article, in 1864, a European traveler was in Egypt and acquired a mummy, that of the Priestess Amen-Ra. The purchaser lost all his money and died, two of his servants who handled the case died and one who hadn’t touched it, but had made disparaging remarks about it lost an arm to a gunshot wound.
The mummy case then caused havoc to a photographer whose developed picture of it was of a beautiful woman overcome by pure evil and, horrified, he tried to sell it. Other stories have it passing through several people’s hands before coming to the British Museum in 1889. The man who contracted to take it there died a week later and one of his helpers broke his leg. At the Museum, after a series of disturbances (visitors touching the case would die or have accidents soon after), the mummy was hidden away in a basement, killing another museum employee.
Finally, in 1912, an American, William Stead offered a large sum of money to take the mummy off the British Museum’s hands. He had her loaded onto the ship that he was travelling home on, the Titanic, but the mummy took her revenge on the whole ship. Stead (who actually went down with the ship) paid a substantial bribe to crewmembers and the mummy was one of the few things saved off the ship when it sank, and made the trip back to America. Once there, the mummy was sold to a Canadian, who was intent on bringing it back to Europe, and it was in the hold of his travelling ship, The Empress of Ireland, which of course sank in the St. Laurence River in 1914. Later news accounts would even say that the mummy was rescued before the ship sank, and was being shipped back to Europe on the Lusitania.
This legendary curse is seen as early as 1914 in The Milwaukee Journal (Malignant Mummy Banished By British Sank With The Titanic). One of the things that lent credence to the Titanic Mummy Curse was an Aprilcherz article from the Berliner Tageblatt that discussed the mummy’s curse as real in 1907. In reality, there has never been such a mummy at the British Museum, though they have a ‘mummy board’ the plastered and painted cover of the wooden case that would be inside a sarcophagus. In 1934, Wallis Budge, Keeper of Egyptian Antiquities, wrote in response to the constant questions about the ‘Unlucky Mummy’: “… no mummy which ever did things of this kind was ever in the British Museum. …. The cover never went on the Titanic. It never went to America.”
Why put some blame on a German newspaper for all this? Because most newspapers of that time (and even some media outlets today) looked to other papers for extra stories, and for validity. Lionel Walsh, a Reuters journalist spoke of his time in Bonn when he picked up a “bright” – a minor news story to pass on. He found a West German story about a sock-darning machine. All one had to do was put one’s stockinged foot into the machine and it would darn it without injury to the wearer. It was only after he was asked by a newspaper in the states for a followup story did he notice the date that it had been printed. April 1. Many such stories have been passed on, as with triple (1926) and quadruple (1931) -decker buses that were Aprilscherz for Echo Continental (the trade publication of the auto and truck parts manufacturer Continental AG). These had people inquiring to newspapers as to how the buses could pass bridges and trolley electrical lines in safety.
But mummies aren’t the only ones that get urban legend status from Aprilcherz, so do little men from space. In April of 1950, both the Wiesbadener Tagblatt and the Cologne Neue Illustrierte ran Aprilcherz about spacemen that had been captured by Americans. The Wiesbadener photo was actually submitted to the FBI in May, who filed it appropriately, apparently not noting the date. It was later released as fact to a UFO researcher 1979 after he filed
a Freedom of Information Act request, and appeared in The Roswell Incident (Moore & Berlitz), an alien-conspiracy book in 1980. The Cologne article didn’t have a government stamp, but was merely seen as legitimate news of Americans shooting down a spacecraft and taking the pilot prisoner. It ended up being included in books such as Flying Saucers from Outer Space (1953:Keyhoe) and The UFO Encyclopedia (1980:Sachs). Once printed these books became the carriers of “factual” UFO information that ‘proved’ governmental cover-ups and perhaps led to even more conspiracy theories.
Even in our modern day, Aprilcherz are a continuing tradition. In 2003, Tageszeitung put out a story on how the Americans were going to move their Berlin Embassy because it was in too close a proximity to the French Embassy. The only way that the government would consider keeping the embassy in place, said the article, was if the name of the square the building was located on was changed from “Pariser” (Parisian). In 2004, Application Systems Heidelberg put out a press release about an ‘iShave’ attachment for iPods, so you could listen to music and shave at the same time, everywhere. And in 2013, Tagesschau (NDR) reported that the U.S. State Department would send his best man in the North Korean conflict: David Hasselhoff. They also reported that “the TV superstar had been ‘warmly welcomed’ to the troubled country by leader Kim Jong-un, who, it said, was a big fan of Baywatch.” And in 2014 the Frankfurter Rundschau published a rumor that Chancellor Andrea Merkel could be pregnant.
So, consider this your fair warning. April 1st 2015 is here, and before you pass along that really amazing news, check the date.
