Spring Man: A Belief Legend between Folklore and Popular Culture [1 ed.] 9781666913750, 9781666913767

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Spring Man

STUDIES IN FOLKLORE AND ETHNOLOGY: TRADITIONS, PRACTICES, AND IDENTITIES

Series Editors: Simon J. Bronner, University of Wisconsin Milwaukee and Elo-Hanna Seljamaa, University of Tartu Advisory Board: Pertti Anttonen, University of Eastern Finland; Julia Bishop, University of Sheffield, England; Ian Brodie, Cape Breton University, Nova Scotia, Canada; Lei Cai, Wuhan University, China; Norma Elia Cantú, Trinity University, San Antonio, USA; Valdimar Tr. Hafstein, University of Iceland; Petr Janeček, Charles University, Czechia; Hideyo Konagaya, Waseda University, Japan; Peter Jan Margry, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands; Ulrich Marzolph, Georg-August University, Göttingen, Germany; Thomas A. McKean, University of Aberdeen, Scotland; Rūta Muktupāvela, Latvian Academy of Culture, Riga; M.D. Muthukumaraswamy, National Folklore Support Centre, Chennai, India; Francisco Firmino Sales Neto, Universidade Federal de Campina Grande, Brazil; Anand Prahlad, University of Missouri, USA; Süheyla Saritas, Balikesir University, Turkey; Dani Schrire, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel; Pravina Shukla, Indiana University, USA; Diane Tye, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada; Ülo Valk, University of Tartu, Estonia Studies in Folklore and Ethnology: Traditions, Practices, and Identities features projects that examine cultural traditions around the world and the persons and communities who enact them. Including monographs and edited collections, the series emphasizes studies of living folk practices, artists, and groups toward a broad understanding of the dynamics of tradition and identity in the modern world. Recent Titles Spring Man: A Belief Legend between Folklore and Popular Culture By Petr Janeček Perspectives on East and Southeast Asian Folktales Edited by Allyssa McCabe and MinJeong Kim

Black Folklorists in Pursuit of Equality: African American Identity and Cultural Politics, 1893–1943 ​​​​​​​By Ronald Lamarr Sharp Oral Traditions in Contemporary China: Healing a Nation By Juwen Zhang Humor and Rumor in the Post-Soviet Authoritarian State By Anastasiya Astapova Prenuptial Rituals in Scotland: Blackening the Bride and Decorating the Hen ​​​​​​​By Sheila Young

Spring Man A Belief Legend between Folklore and Popular Culture Petr Janeček

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London, EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2022 The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Janeček, Petr, 1978- author.   Title: Spring man : a belief legend between folklore and popular culture /     Petr Janeček.   Description: Lanham, Maryland : Lexington Books, [2022] | Series: Studies     in Folklore and Ethnology: Traditions, Practices, and Identities |     Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: "This book     traces the creation and circulation of the heroic myth of Spring Man,     legendary Czech phantom of the Second World War often described as a     superhero who fights against the Nazis, through national and     international popular culture from the late nineteenth-century through     the late twentieth-century"-- Provided by publisher.   Identifiers: LCCN 2022035731 (print) | LCCN 2022035732 (ebook) | ISBN     9781666913750 (Cloth : acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781666913767 (eBook)   Subjects: LCSH: Folklore--Czechoslovakia. | Folklore and     nationalism--Czechoslovakia.  Classification: LCC GR157 .J34 2022  (print) | LCC GR157  (ebook) | DDC     398.209437--dc23/eng/20220810  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022035731 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022035732 ​​​​​​​The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

I dedicate this book to my grandmother, Madame Marie Ničová, who first introduced me to spring man thanks to her memories from the time she spent in East Bohemia during World War II.

Contents

List of Figures

xi

Acknowledgments xiii Introduction: Urban Phantom between Comparative Folkloristics and Ethnology

1

Chapter One: The Birth of a Legend: Spring Man in Czech Folklore and Oral History

11

Chapter Two: Phantoms of the Industrial Age: The Cultural Evolution of Spring Man

63

Chapter Three: The Social and Cultural Functions of Urban Demonology

101

Chapter Four: A Superhero for Every Regime: Spring Man in Visual Culture and Literature

151

​​​​​​​Conclusion



183

Appendices



189

Bibliography Index



193



About the Author

207

213

ix

List of Figures

Figure 0.1. Nationalistic comic-book Spring Man by Jiří Grus, Projekt Pérák, 2003. Figure 1.1. Incidence of the motif of spring man in the Czech lands, 1919–1938. Map by Tomáš Rataj, 2021. Figure 1.2. Occurrence of motif of spring man in Protectorate-era Prague, 1939–1945. Map by Tomáš Rataj, 2021. Figure 1.3. Occurrence of the motif of spring man in the Czech lands, 1939–1945. Map by Tomáš Rataj, 2021. Figure 1.4. The Bratislava phantom: Phosphorous Man. Illustration from the magazine Kocúr, 1943. Figure 2.1. The St. Petersburg gang Zhivye pokoyniki (Living Corpses), known to the residents of St. Petersburg as poprygunchiki (leapers), 1920. Museum of the History of Militia, Cultural Center of the General Headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation, 2017. Photo by Nadyezdha Atanesyanova, 2017. Figure 2.2. Reconstruction of the disguises used by the St. Petersburg gang “Living Corpses,” 1920. Museum of the History of Militia, Cultural Center of the General Headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation. Photo by Nadyezhda Atanesyanova, 2017. Figure 2.3. Incidence of the motif of Hüpfemännchen in Germany, 1948–1953. Map by Tomáš Rataj, 2021. Figure 2.4. Incidence of the motif of Spring-heeled Jack in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Map by Tomáš Rataj, 2021. xi

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List of Figures

Figure 3.1. The narrow area of the former street V důlkách in Jihlava, where spring man allegedly caused havoc during World War II, is in many ways an ideal archetypical environment for spring man activities in general. Archive of Martin Herzán, 1960. Figure 3.2. Bronislav Matulík, the “phosphorous man” of wartime Zlín, 1944. Family archives of Rostislav Matulík. Figure 3.3. Josef Šnajdr, who was called “Spring Man” in the Zlín uniform, early 1940s (second from the left, on the bottom). Archive of Pavel Hochman, Pilsen. Table 3.1. Liminal characteristics of spring man: Binary oppositions. By author. Figure 4.1. Heroized pop-cultural Spring Man in the role of a resistance fighter in Jiří Trnka and Jiří Brdečka’s film Pérák a SS [Spring Man and the SS], 1946. Národní filmový archiv, Prague. Figure 4.2. The legendary motorcycle Jawa 250 Type 11, which was manufactured illegally during World War II, is put into factory production in 1946. Private archive, 2017. Figure 4.3. Unpublished comic book Spring Man by Adolf Lachman, Projekt Pérák, 2002. Figure 4.4. Spring Man on a poster for the film Pérák. Stín nad Prahou by Marek Berger, 2016. Figure 4.5. Spring Man. Mural art by Toy_Box, Husitská street in Prague, 2022. Figure 4.6. “Antifacism has a strong tradition here!” Antifa sticker using the motif of Jiří Trnka’s spring man, ca. 2011. Figure 4.7. Guerrilla paste-up posters signed with the name of spring man in Prague, 2015.

Acknowledgments

This book could never have come into being with a great many people and institutions whose assistance often took on, as it were, legendary dimensions. In the first place, I have to name all the narrators, informers, and consultants who decided to share their memories of spring man. Special thanks are due to the writer and collector of legends Rainer Hohberg from  Hummelshain, who provided me with a wealth of valuable information about the German versions of the spring man stories; my colleague Anastasiya Astapova from Tartu, who helped me when I was searching for Russian versions of spring man; my colleague Zuzana Panczová, who helped me with search of the written sources on the Bratislava version of his tale; and the historian of comics Tomáš Prokůpek, who helped me acquire a significant part of the contemporary visual renderings of this figure. The greatest share of thanks, however, is due to the folklorist Pavel Kracík, whose tireless fieldwork has borne interest with an analysis of the best-documented Czech versions of the spring man legend in the Jičín district. I must also extend special thanks to all the museums and archives that allowed me to reproduce visual and written documents from their collections in this book, starting with the Museum of the History of Militia, Cultural Center of the General Headquarters of the Russian Federation’s Ministry of the Interior, and The National Film Archives in Prague. For patient consultations I give thanks to all the reviewers. Great big thanks are also due to the editor and the graphic editor of the book, and especially Melinda Reidinger, who translated the text from Czech to English with financial support from the Charles University.

xiii

Introduction Urban Phantom between Comparative Folkloristics and Ethnology

THREE ENCOUNTERS WITH SPRING MAN: 1945, 1965, 2015 1945 Prague. Nazi-controlled Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Winter. Late January evening. A lonely street in Holešovičky, only a few dozen meters from the place where the assassination of the tyrannical Nazi overlord, Acting Reichs-Protector Reinhard Heydrich, had been committed two years before. A twelve-year-old boy is returning home from downtown. He glances back at the tram, clanging uphill toward Kobylisy. He feels for his keys in his pocket and then carefully crosses the street, which is kept blacked out because of the threat of Allied aerial bombardment. In almost complete darkness he looks for the keyhole in the garden gate outside the villa where he lives with his parents, when suddenly he hears strange clicking sounds. They are coming from somewhere above. He looks up toward the hill and stiffens. A dark figure is bounding down from the hill’s crest with unnaturally high leaps. When it gets within several meters, the boy realizes who this is. “That’s spring man!” flashes through the terrified lad’s mind. “Spring man, who attacks passersby near the Rokoska palace, just a short way from here, robbing and beating them! A few days ago, they say that he choked a German shepherd to death when it barked at him in one of the gardens. . . . Spring man, who attacked conductors from the empty Number 6 tram at the deserted Exhibition Grounds terminal station next to Stromovka Park! They say that with his superhuman strength he crushed a thermos full of hot tea in his iron hands! If a quick-thinking driver had not stepped in and chased the attacker away, God knows how the incident could have ended! Spring man, whose 1

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existence was definitively proven to all the disbelievers from the graffiti on the wooden fence at the end station of the Number 3 line in nearby Kobylisy! Spring man.” It’s too late to escape. They boy attempts to open the garden gate with a trembling hand, but the threat is too close. Terrified, he presses up against the gatepost, hoping that spring man won’t see him. The phantom—in the form of a figure dressed in black—is bounding down the street alongside the sidewalk. The panic-stricken boy can thus get a good look at him. He is a tall man dressed in black, and he is wearing a kind of mask with eyeholes. But it was his shoes, which had bizarrely high soles, perhaps thirty centimeters thick, that most captured his attention. “He has those jumping springs of his inside them” the boy thinks and he presses the key from the gate deep into his palm. Spring man leaps up with his legs together. Each time he lands on the ground he bends his legs into a deep squat so that he can then then again bounce upward in an unbelievably high jump. He jumps so high that at the highest point in his arcs he nearly touches the electric trams’ overhead wires with the crown of his head. At the same time, he has his arms spread wide; this is how he keeps his balance while in flight. Each time he rebounds his shoes give off the strange smacking, sucking sound that had caught the boy’s attention a few moments ago. A sound like when you throw a big brick into deep mud. The boy’s effort to escape spring man’s attention is in vain. The jumping phantom notices the helpless little figure cowering by the gate, but he does not stop. He keeps bounding down the street. When he passes by the terrified boy—only a few meters away—he turns his face toward him, bares white teeth in a horrible grimace, and emits a terrible sound, like the bark of a rutting deer. He doesn’t wait to see how the boy reacts to this bloodcurdling salutation, and leisurely bounces down the street heading toward the Vltava River. 1965 Prague. Liberal socialist Czechoslovakia. Summertime. Early June afternoon. A screening of the animated film Spring Man and the SS, directed by the popular Czechoslovak artist Jiří Trnka, known as the “Walt Disney of the East,” is taking place just now at Cinema Oko in Holešovice. In the darkened auditorium, brash music plays, and the opening titles that initiate the viewers into the plot appear on the screen: “During the German occupation, stories were told in Prague about a mysterious man who jumped on bouncing springs and terrified the German invaders with his leaps. Our film is dedicated to this good phantom.” The teenaged crowd in the auditorium sitting in awed silence are observed by a man sitting in the projection booth who had personally encountered

Introduction

3

spring man twenty years ago not far from there. The young viewers enthusiastically devour the tale of the kindly chimney sweep, who, with a stocking over his head and sofa springs on his feet, bravely fought against the overwhelming force of the SS men. For many weeks to come, spring man then becomes the favorite hero of children’s games in the Prague neighborhoods of Holešovice, Bubeneč, and Libeň. The popularity of this cinematic resistance worker temporarily overshadows cowboys, partisans, and the real World War II fighters from the barricades. The Prague teens try to imitate their hero by attaching springs ripped out of old sofas and beds found at junkyards to their feet and trying to jump. Besides a few cuts and scrapes and twisted ankles, the entire business, similarly to the fateful meeting with spring man twenty years ago, does not have much of a lasting effect. 2015 Prague. Contemporary Czech Republic. Winter. Early January evening. At the crest of Letná Plain, overlooking the Vltava River and underneath the oscillating metronome, stands a lone, dark figure. It silently gazes down toward the river, Čech Bridge, and the illuminated Pařížská Street along the same axis. Up on the stone wall, one of few reminders of the former Stalin monument, a large piece of black fabric displays a message in clear white lettering: “I’m returning like your bad conscience. Spring Man.” The figure dressed in black lights up two flares, which he holds onto for a moment in his outstretched hands. He looks out over the dark city below, and then melts into the dusk. All that remains from his visit are a few dozen posters with Czech and English lettering pasted up in the streets of Czech cities. The following day, they are backed up by e-mail messages received by the Czech News Agency and certain Czech media outlets. They read: Commemoration of Auschwitz, Czech style? A pig farm! The horrors of Auschwitz still stink to this day in Lety, former concentration camp for Czech Roma—and quite literally: there is a pig farm standing on the site now. Would you be dumping manure in Theresienstadt or excrement in Lidice? I’m coming back to crack down on you—like when I first woke up and opened my eyes up in Letná. I’m coming back, and I know that you know it. Spring Man.

This trio of grotesque idylls presents brief sketches of the three basic dispositions of the most famous mythical figure in twentieth-century Czech history—the legendary pérák, or the spring man.1 This folkloric phantom is

4

Introductio

one of the most interesting and heretofore unexamined phenomena in modern Czech culture, whose significance—as the three tales above attempt to illustrate—remains relevant in the twenty-first century. Spring man’s main peculiarity that carries through across the decades is willfully overstepping (or in his case, rather, jumping over) the boundaries between fiction and reality. This ability is connected with an equally flexible reaction to transformations in the social context of the times. The author has taken similar license—in this book for the first and last time—in the trio of briefly sketched “encounters with spring man” related above, which are, naturally, based on extant period documents.2 The first encounter in 1945 introduces the original, distinctively active role spring man played in the daily life of the Czech lands in the 1940s. The second one presents spring man’s gradual shift into the more passive position of a mere theme or motif that was promulgated to the masses in popular culture (although it still had certain extensions into daily life through children’s games) in the second half of the twentieth century. The third encounter portrays spring man as a definitively established fictitious figure of the twenty-first century, an ideologized Czech “national hero” who attempts to storm into the public space once again. Spring man features in the general imaginings of today’s younger generations as a mysterious masked avenger from the period of World War II who leaped around the nighttime rooftops of Prague with the help of steel springs attached to his feet and fought against Nazis and their minions.3 This romanticizing take on spring man as a mythical figure of the anti-Nazi resistance, a sort of “first Czech superhero,” is reminiscent of the comic-book characters of Superman or Spiderman (who enjoy superhuman powers of locomotion), Batman (a nocturnal avenger who punishes crime and injustice), and Captain America (a nationalistic freedom fighter battling the Nazis), and it can be found in nearly all the pop-culture adaptations of this figure. However, as tends to be the case with legendary figures birthed by the collective imagination and afterward picked up and transformed into the work of specific authors, the ur-spring man; that is, the original form of this folkloric entity who rose up into his greatest glory out of the darkness of antiaircraft blackouts, constant fear of aerial bombardment, and the overall insecurity of the wartime situation, was much more complicated.

Introduction

5

Figure 0.1. Nationalistic comic-book Spring Man by Jiří Grus, Projekt Pérák, 2003.

THEORETICAL AND DISCIPLINARY FOUNDATIONS OF THE BOOK: FOLKLORE, MEMORY, AND CULTURAL STUDIES The goal of this book is to comprehensively interpret the phenomenon of the Czech spring man in its broader historical, geographic, and also social and cultural contexts, while at the same time devoting particular attention to the folkloric and pop-culture contexts. Its main aim is a reconstruction of

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Introductio

the history, or rather the cultural evolution, of this phenomenon.4 However, this book is not a text only about spring man. Its more general ambition is to use the example of the issues connected with this imaginary urban phantom to represent several social and cultural processes associated with the diffusion of collective and individual texts in the Czech lands within the broader geographical context of Central and Eastern Europe. It does so mainly on the basis of the analysis of the dynamic existing between the duo of basic discourses associated with this phantasmal figure: the original narrations about spring man, preserved in transcribed oral texts collected from period eyewitnesses and their descendants, and the later-arising literary and visual myth of Spring Man, created secondarily with the help of pop-culture texts. We can understand these two discourses (as suggested by Jan and Aleida Assmann) as two separate modes of Czech collective memory.5 Narratives about spring man are (or rather, were) part of “communicative memory”; that is, a type of collective memory imparted through spoken words and shared time and space between a narrator and audience (and often also between succeeding generations—in this case, we are talking about personal experience narratives, ghost stories, and, especially, legends and rumors). The myth of Spring Man is then part of what these scholars term “cultural memory”: a form of cultural objectification and symbolic coding of the meanings of these originally oral narratives facilitated through artistic and pop-culture texts. However, both of these discourses can also be conceptualized another way—and this book also makes an attempt at this—as dichotomies to be distinguished between oral and literary culture, folklore and popular culture, or collective work and the creation of individual authors.6 The dynamic between both of the above-mentioned modes of collective memory then functions, and has functioned, on a great many levels—from the deliberate selection of ideologically appropriate aspects of communicative memory from the side of the cultural and their subsequent flattening and homogenization all the way to the opposite process of an inverse influence of communicative memory through selectively chosen and recombined elements of the cultural one. The book also attempts to point out the reality that both of these discourses, whatever we want to name them, cannot be understood as clearly bounded, as they tend to blend into one another in many of their aspects as well as their functions. The most distinctive and most precise criterion that distinguishes them thus probably remains time. The first discourse dominated the Czech collective memory approximately until the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century, while the second ascended to dominance later, in the second half of the last century, but it has come to the fore most powerfully since the first decade of the twenty-first century. In the past few decades, studies that deal with folkloric ghosts have appeared with increasing frequency in cultural and social history, where it

Introduction

7

is possible to consider it as practically “traditional” today. As the folklorist and social historian Owen Davies tells us, one of the main historical arguments for the unreality of spirits and specters was always the fact that they were almost never sighted by more than one person at a time. However, we could also turn the same argument around and use it to emphasize the significance of historical research into these imaginary visions—because a great many people in various historical periods and cultures have seen spirits and specters, so there are therefore a social phenomenon worthy of research interest.7 According to the historian Jacob Middleton, ghost stories reflect the important cultural themes of their periods, primarily class and religious conflicts, as well as a mythologized fear of criminality—subjects whose reflections we only find with difficulty in other kinds of sources.8 Research into the phenomenon of spring man is additionally of great interest today due to the reality of the dangerously approaching margin of the “floating gap”: the moment of collective memory that continuously shifts forward in time along with the present. This gap separates the living memories of the last witnesses to stories told about spring man; that is, orally transmitted biographical memories passed from one generation to the next, from the mythologized cultural memory of historical texts and mass media. In European culture, it generally has a length of about forty to eighty years, or two or three generations.9 And it is precisely this length of time that now separates us from the greatest flourishing of stories about spring man in the 1940s and 1950s; periods, whose direct witnesses are often no longer living among us. Although this book—through its thorough description, analysis, and interpretation of texts about spring man—refutes a great many “myths” (in the sense of inaccurate stereotypes) associated with spring man, it does not in any way attempt to describe Wie es eigentlich gewesen in a Rankian and positivist manner—that is, what was really going on with spring man, who he “really” was and where he came from, or to define the relationship of texts about him with other historical events. This is, with regard to the primarily conceptual nature of social memory, which is the main source of data for this book, moreover irrelevant to a significant extent. To wit, social memory, as research conducted by historians and anthropologists has shown, generally classifies memories of fictitious and “real” events at the same level of truthfulness.10 The goal of this book is rather to cautiously investigate the two above-mentioned intertwined memory discourses within which spring man moves. Its leitmotif is then description, analysis, and interpretation of the transfer (or migration) of cultural contents on the basis of texts about spring man; a migration whose movement is not only across space (between the Czech lands and other parts of the world) but also through time (from the nineteenth century to the present). It researches the dynamic of migrations, or more generally of perpetual motion, associated of course with temporary

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Introductio

attenuations of the phenomenon, not only at the diachronic level of shifts across time and space, but also in three additional dimensions: on the level of the production and reception of cultural contents among different types of media and their publics, on the level of relationships between oral and popular culture, and finally on the related level of transformations in the functions of these cultural (meta)texts. At the same time, the author constantly bears in mind that although his book, just like every production of reflexive modern scholarship, refutes many “myths” associated with spring man, it is possibly creating entirely new “myths” at the same time. NOTES 1. In the scholarly literature that deals with the figure of spring man, there are two orthographic styles for writing the name of this mythical phantom: either with a small “s” (spring man, pérák in Czech) or a capital “S” (Spring Man, Pérák). Taking into account the inherent essence of the phenomenon, this book deliberately uses the first style because it is not just the moniker of one specific figure, but a generic designation of a general type of demonic being that has appeared in various times and places (similar to “ghosts,” “devils,” or “fairies”). The plural folkloric “spring man” later, under the influence of popular culture, changed into a singular superhero, pop-cultural “Spring Man”; and this linguistic shift is also reflected in this book. 2. The first “encounter” literarily combines a trio of narrations told by narrator D. Ř., a male born in 1932, who has a high school education, is retired, and resides in Göteborg which was first published in a volume published in a series on contemporary Czech prosaic folklore with commentary by the editor (Petr Janeček, Černá sanitka: Druhá žeň. Pérák, ukradená ledvina a jiné pověsti (Prague: Plot, 2007), 135–140) with the motif of the inscription on the wall, which was borrowed from a short story by the writer Jan Weiss (Jan Weiss, “Pérový muž,” in Bianka Braselli, dáma s dvěma hlavami, Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1961, 250–57), which is also mentioned in the study by folklorist Miloš J. Pulec (Miloš J. Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” Český lid 52 no. 3 [1965]: 161). The second encounter literarily combines motifs from the film by Jiří Trnka (Pérák a SS. Jiří Trnka, Jiří Brdečka, Eduard Hoffman, and Otakar Šafránek. 13 min., Czechoslovakia, 1946) and a short story by Jiří Slavíček (Jiří Slavíček, “Pérák,” in Povídky z Letné. Prague: Nakladatelství Isla, Ing. Michal Slavíček, 2006, 72–76) with testimonies by other narrators about children’s games with spring man in Prague in the 1960s. The third encounter refers to the media coverage of events that took place on the night of January 25–26, 2015, when someone using the name of spring man infiltrated the space of a pig farm in Lety, which is standing where a World War II Czech concentration camp for Roma used to be (see, for example, Jan Kopřiva, “Na vepříně v Letech se objevily kresby připomínající oběti války. A podpis Pérák” [“Pictures that commemorate the war victims appeared on the pig barn along with the signature Spring Man”]. iRozhlas.cz, January 27, 2015,

Introduction

9

accessed August 16, 2017, www​.rozhlas​.cz​/zpravy​/regiony​/​_zprava​/na​-veprine​-v​ -letech​-se​-objevily​-kresby​-pripominajici​-obeti​-valky​-a​-podpis​-perak​--​ 1448397. 3. Petr Janeček, “Spring Man of Prague: Czech Versions of Spring-heeled Jack Narratives between Folklore and Popular Culture,“ Fabula 61, no. 3–4 (2020): 223–39. 4. For the purposes of this book, altogether 168 narrations, interviews and reports of various types and lengths from altogether 159 narrators, informants, and consultants have been analyzed, and most of them were documented in the course of folkloristic field research conducted by the author himself. The author’s long-term field research experience, which took place (with several interludes) between 2004 and 2017, was then supplemented by searching out, analyzing, and interpreting written and visual sources in various types of institutional and private archives and extensive communication with a great many narrators, informants, and consultants through e-mails and telephone calls. Another significant source of data and interpretation is Kracík, Pavel: Vyprávění o pérákovi na Jičínsku: Komentované přepisy terénních rozhovorů a jejich folkloristická analýza [Narratives about spring man in Jičín region: Annotated transcripts of field interviews with folkloristic analysis]. Unpublished manuscript, 2017. 5. Jan Assmann, “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity,” New German Critique 65 (1995): 125–33; Aleida Assmann, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit. Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2006); Aleida Assmann, Erinnerungsräume: Formen und Wandlungen des kulturelles Gedächtnisses. 5th Edition. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2010); Aleida Assmann, Das neue Unbehagen an der Erinnerungskultur (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2013). 6. On the differences between literary and oral culture see Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy. The Technologizing of the Word. 30th Anniversary Edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2012). 7. Owen Davies, The Haunted. A Social History of Ghosts (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 13. 8. Jacob Middleton, Spirits of an Industrial Age: Ghost Impersonation, Spring-heeled Jack, and Victorian Society (London: Jacob Middleton, 2014), xii. 9. Jan Assmann, Culture Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 46–53. 10. James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory: New Perspectives on the Past (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992): 48–49.

Chapter One

The Birth of a Legend Spring Man in Czech Folklore and Oral History

The figure of spring man is stereotypically associated in contemporary Czech popular culture with the period of World War II. This association is partly justified, because the greatest proliferation in Czech oral narratives about this phantom really did take place in the first half of the 1940s. Especially in the final phase of the war, these stories became so popular that for a short time they formed a fairly compact narrative complex among the Czech-speaking population, focused mainly in the large cities and industrial zones. However, the stories about spring man still continued to be told even after the war in the form of quite a number of mutually unrelated local and regional narratives that were tied to specific local incidents and which only very infrequently extended beyond the boundaries of the given location, or sometimes a region. “IT JUMPED LIKE IT WAS ON SPRINGS”: THE FIRST MENTIONS OF SPRING MAN IN THE 1920S The oldest recorded narratives about spring man in the Czech lands come from the period just after World War I. They appear for the first time in 1919 in the industrialized area of northwest Bohemia, in both Czech- and German-speaking rural communities of laborers and miners near the towns of Most, Ústí, and Labem and Louny, parts of central Bohemia (near towns of Roudnice and Labem) and parts of west Bohemia, near the towns of Karlovy Vary (Karlsbad), Mariánské Lázně (Marienbad) and Kadaň. In retrospect, the region where these stories appear to have been the most significant in this period is northwest Bohemia.1 During this period, the stories about spring 11

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man already represented a relatively compact narrative complex, and even the physical form of the phantom was already defined: In Most, the miners were coming home from work, and an apparition jumped out in front of them. Some holy man from Hněvín switched on the magic lantern, and the [projected] figure hopped around in front of the miners. That was after World War I. Our dad brought this story home from the mine shafts. None of the guys wanted to walk alone. It jumped like it was on springs. [And did you ever see spring man yourself?] You know, once my daughter once accidentally left the keys here. A lady then came for them, and she was wearing a white scarf on her head. That’s what spring man wore too. The figure could be seen through the glass in the upper part of the door: “Mommy, I’m not going to open the door, it’s spring man!”2

The first images of spring man were significantly variable. Besides the above-mentioned jumping phantom shrouded in white garments (sometimes reminiscent of winding-sheets), a phantom who had shining eyes or whose clothing was decorated with a shining cross were also described. This visual variability thus indirectly illustrates both the relatively advanced state of development of the period repertoire, which managed to generate discrete versions for the form of the phantom via the variational process, as well as its primarily folkloric nature. Changes in spring man’s appearance cannot only be explained as the products of individual imagination in a large number of narrators, but rather mainly through his inherent nature as a demonic being. The amorphousness and continual transformation in spring man’s appearance is fully in conformity with descriptions of other Czech demonic beings known from “traditional” demonological legends, which were primarily defined in communicative memory in the oral culture through continual metamorphoses of their aspects. One of spring man’s predecessors, the most famous Czech mythical being of the nineteenth century (that is, the water fairy called vodník, or water sprite) can serve as a typical example. Despite his stereotypical anthropomorphic depictions in artistic and popular culture, his appearance in oral culture was extremely variable—it ranged from a human figure to a demonic being resembling a horse, hare, or sheep, to even a saddle, a log, or burdock leaf.3 Similar to spring man’s appearance, the explanations by storytellers about his origins, including explanations that he is a mere optical illusion projected by a magic lantern (an early type of projector) also emerged via “traditional” folklore. This has a parallel in, for example, Prague legends that were influenced both by the popular literature of the end of the nineteenth century and

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by the period “folk” anticlericalism, but most of all by the reception of period performances of this light show: Father told me how someone projected a huge picture of a headless horseman on the wall at Vyšehrad castle using a magic lantern. That is, until the sentries staked him out and a soldier shot at the wall in the Emmaus Monastery where the light was coming from. But when they searched the tower there, they only found a hat and a bloody footprint.4

In the second half of the 1930s, stories about spring man were occasionally told even outside of northwestern Bohemia. However, in central Bohemia (in town of Kladno around 1936) and in Czech-Moravian Highlands (between towns Humpolec and Německý Brod in 1936–1937), they were also being shared in the context of an industrializing environment.5 In their memories, period observers describe this mysterious being as he jumps over moving trains, or sometimes engaging in voyeuristic or criminal activities in laborers’ and miners’ communities. However, he remains most active in this period in northwestern Bohemia, as is illustrated through the following narration from region of Chomutov (Komotau): They say that before World War II he was a voyeur and a thief. But he didn’t rob the poor. He allegedly had huge springs on his feet, on his shoes, and that’s why they never caught him. They say it was a republic-wide phenomenon, and allegedly there were eyewitnesses. Our parents used to frighten us—spring man’s going to catch you! When we were children, we played games pretending to be him; for example, we might have jumped over a fence to steal strawberries.6

These varied period outlooks on the prewar spring man, spanning from a mere optical illusion projected with a magic lantern all the way to Robin Hood’s figure of a “peeping Tom and thief” who only robs the rich, reflect not only the relatively significant diffusion of these narrations, but also their primary nature as collectively shared legends. This type of text is, according to the folklorist Linda Dégh, mainly defined by its plurality and its dialogic character. She says that any kind of narrative, without regard to its form, content, length, performance, or the degree of is social diffusion, becomes a legend only when various outlooks develop among its narrators and audience about its veracity and interpretation.7 This plurality of interpretations of who (or sometimes what) the mysterious jumping phantom actually is, and what his real intentions are, and how to explain his unsettling presence in the ordinary everyday life of the period—where he was radically incongruous— practically exploded during World War II.

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Figure 1.1. Incidence of the motif of spring man in the Czech lands, 1919–1938.   Map by Tomáš Rataj, 2021.

“GIRLS, IT’S BETTER NOT TO TALK ABOUT THAT”: SPRING MAN DURING WORLD WAR II, 1939–1945 World War II marked a pronounced quantitative expansion in the development of the Czech narrative complex about spring man. Due to the exceptional wartime situation and the lack of faith in the official mass communications media at the time, the famous Protectorate-era rumor mill, or “whisper propaganda” (šeptanda, Flüsterpropaganda) arose. This type of hearsay was later called “JPP” (which was sometimes spelled out as “jepepe” or sometimes lengthened to “the JPP Agency,” in which JPP stood for jedna paní povídala—“one woman was saying”). And it was precisely this rumor mill—the most typical medium for the famous Protectorate-era anecdotes— that afforded the oral tradition of spring man the ideal conditions to flourish.8 A wider mass diffusion of stories about spring man took place between 1941 and 1943. More precise dating is fairly difficult because of the nearly exclusively oral nature of the preserved sources. Czech writer Jan Weiss finished writing his short story “Pérový muž” [Spring-Man], on 23 July 1943, and it was published in the nationwide newspaper Národní politika on 3 October 1943. This tale, which describes the mass boom in stories about spring man in the capital city, dates the beginning of its broader diffusion to

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the first months of 1943.9 A short feature essay with the same title by journalist Štěpán Engel, published in Svobodný zítřek on 27 September 1945, which is similar in many of its details as well as in its overall “pseudoreportage” poetics to Weiss’s text, claims that spring man appeared in Prague  “at the end of 1941 and the following spring.”10 The memoir literature places a more significant spread of these narratives in Prague in the summer of 1942; that is, the period after the assassination of the Acting Reichs-Protector Reinhard Heydrich. This connection is supported by, for example, the reminiscences of the resistance worker Ludmila Sinkulová: Spring man was born, and daily he made more and more mischief for the occupiers. There were even different jokes circulating, but not so many, the hot summer was not fruitful for them, they need a special climate like the mycelium for edible boletus mushrooms.11

A more significant popularization of these narratives at the nationwide level began in the second half of 1943 (while their greatest degree of mass saturation can be dated to autumn in 1943), and this was in connection with growing fatigue from the overall insecurity of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, and later also the growing threat of Allied bombing and the expectation of the expeditious end to the military conflict. Rumors and legends about spring man were primarily spread in Prague, which was one of the main epicenters of promulgation of these narratives within the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. In the capital city this phantom allegedly usually appeared at twilight in the areas of parks, cemeteries, and suburban wooded areas (such as Charles Square, the Olšany cemeteries, Židovské pece park, Vyšehrad, the old Braník quarry, the Šárka natural park), and sometimes also at abandoned places on the metropolitan periphery. Other places where spring man allegedly appeared included train stations, bridges, and railway viaducts. However, he was most often talked of in connection with industrial districts such as Holešovice, Libeň, Vysočany, Kobylisy, Karlín, Žižkov, Strašnice, Michle, Nusle, Smíchov and Košíře. The first phase of circulation of these narratives in Prague is described— with a certain aloofness and the exaggeration that was indispensable during that period—in a short story by Jan Weiss titled “Pérový muž” (Spring-Man), published in 1943: Each period has its excitements and sensations. It has been about a half year— since the report about a spring-man spread around Prague. There was nothing in the newspapers—perhaps only because the tale sounded so unbelievable.12

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Figure 1.2. Occurrence of motif of spring man in Protectorate-era Prague, 1939–1945. Map by Tomáš Rataj, 2021.

Weiss’s “Sunday story,” which after the war was to go through two revised editions, represents the oldest printed report of this phenomenon. Through comparing it with later publications it becomes possible to reconstruct events that slipped through the censorship of that period, which was mainly attempting to take the edge off the description of the period panic. Thus, for example, the introductory paragraph omits the interpretation of spring man as an Allied parachutist or a murderer (which had been preserved in later editions): A spring-man has appeared! According to one version, he is a serial robber; according to another, he is an ingenious inventor, while others tell that he’s a madman who has escaped from the asylum. For several days he eluded capture with his enormous bounds. They are already on his heels; the hands of his pursuers are already out to grab him—when suddenly—jump!—and the spring-man is gone like smoke. He vanishes like a green grasshopper into a greensward, and the hand that wants to grasp him seizes only air.13

However, narratives about spring man were just as abundantly documented in central Bohemia (even if they arrived a little later) as in Prague during the wartime. Besides in Prague and central Bohemia, tales of spring man

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were also very widespread in west Bohemia (near industrial towns of Pilsen, Rokycany, and Louny) and mainly in eastern Bohemia, especially in the large cities of Hradec Králové and Pardubice: In Hradec Králové whole groups got together in the street to listen to a woman who, told the story, terrified, and with all the details, how she had seen spring man somewhere in Pardubice. No one doubted this, not even she herself.14

After Prague, the “Pardubice epicenter” of these narrations was another location for the spring man panic, which had enjoyed some reflections in press during the war, specifically in the important nationwide newspaper Lidové noviny. On 10 December 1943 they printed a feature essay by journalist František Krpata titled “Pérový muž” (Spring-Man), which remains an isolated—and very valuable—written document on the period perspective on spring man in eastern Bohemia: You rack your brain in vain over how all of this could have come about. Simply one fine November day Pardubice awakened and discovered that there is a spring man, popularly called springer, playing havoc in the parks. At first, his eyes just shone in a ghastly manner, and, to his credit, let it be noted that he never did anything wicked; he just haunted areas. But because he had to be chased by brave people, suddenly it turned out that he could jump. When the circle of pursuers closed in dangerously around him, all of a sudden something rattled in him like in an old buzz saw, shot upward, and here the street with its busy traffic didn’t bother him at all. With one jump he cleared it, right over a passing bus, and he disappeared on the other side. While doing this, he was rolling his eyes and the creaking of his springs gave off iron sounds that made even the bravest were frightened. (. . .) Wherever you went, on the streets, in the factories, in offices and in schools, they talked of nothing else besides spring man. Serious people concerned themselves with the contrivance of the springs on his feet, schoolchildren were practicing their handwriting on the walls. In the morning you could always read spring man’s upcoming agenda, such as: “Today, I’m not going haunting, I’m going to the cinema.” Always in the morning there was such a swarm of stories that all at once not only children, but also women were afraid to walk in the streets in the evening. If someone was shining a pocket flashlight in the street in the evening and if he had a slightly taller figure, he was the object of well-founded suspicious and some woman would cry out in the street: “Jesus and Mary, it’s spring man!” and the whole street then swore that they had seen him.15

Spring man allegedly also appeared in eastern Bohemia in smaller cities and towns. The following narration can serve as an example:

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As a tax collector I walked a lot between villages. At that time, spring man was most active between Golčův Jeníkov and Habry, on the road to Leština. No one knew what it is. Some kind of rumor, a person it was. That a tall person walked along the road, a kind of aerial one that always disappeared. He robbed people, but not good people, he only acted against the bad ones who harm others. It was a widespread rumor. It couldn’t be caught.16

The wide diffusion of eastern Bohemian narrations about spring man in this period also caused them to change genres from ephemeral rumors to narratives with a plot (syuzhet); that is, legends: Where we lived near town of Hradec Králové they said about spring man that he used his springs mainly to jump to inaccessible places and he would write some anti-Nazi slogans there. But they say that when he wanted to jump up on Kunětice Mountain, he got himself all bashed up. Although the doctor in the Pardubice hospital saved his life, he decided to throw his springs into the Elbe River, so that he wouldn’t be discovered.17

Another written testimony of this phenomenon in eastern Bohemia is an entry from May 1943 in Deníku čtyř septimánských chlapců [Diary of Four High School Junior Boys], a manuscript “chronicle” by high school students from small town of Chotěboř: 27 May, Thursday. Chotěboř is full of the legend that an electric man is walking about the surrounding villages. They say he can jump 8 m[eters] high and 6 m across the ground. He jumped over an express train, a search party, etc. 28 May, Friday. We began with drawing. The flag was finished and we began making lettering on a piece of drawing paper. In math class, which came next, we wanted to talk about this specter, but Šíma preferred to draw us into the depths of mathematics instead. . . . We found out that the specter can already jump 25 meters across and that there are two of them already. The first one had to have been training hard!18

In eastern Bohemia, clearly because of the considerable diffusion of these narratives, a significant degree of variation in the representation of this jumping phantom took place. Besides the above-mentioned electric man, spring man was also called jumper (skákavej) and described with the use of a motif from the period (originally Allied and later Nazi) propaganda campaign V/ Victoria from 1941: I heard a story about how during the war jumper (skákavej) jumped over a moving locomotive here in Vysočina. He was dressed in green, and he had a big white letter V on his cloak.19

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Stories about spring man were also widespread in northern Bohemia and in western and southern Moravia (mainly in the second-largest city of Brno) and parts of Silesia (including some of the German-speaking areas). In the Moravian capital of Brno, spring man was allegedly observed on rooftops in the vicinity of today’s Francouzská Street, where fairly large crowds of people watched for him in vain.20 During the war, spring man was spoken of relatively infrequently in southern Bohemia. A region that seemed to be almost entirely lacking in stories about spring man during the war is southeast Moravia. Storytelling about spring man was generally the liveliest in the large cities, such as Prague, Brno, Pilsen, Hradec Králové, and Pardubice, which lent an unusual period flavor to the antiaircraft blackouts and occasional curfews: A complete blackout was decreed. Blackouts naturally influenced the life of residents. Trams were darkened. Street lights didn’t shine, or only shone minimally and flashlights had to be darkened. When the cinema and theaters closed in the evenings, all the life on the street ceased. The streets were empty, and no one went out unless they had to.21

Figure 1.3. Occurrence of the motif of spring man in the Czech lands, 1939–1945.   Map by Tomáš Rataj, 2021.

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Alleged encounters with spring man thus generally took place in the temporarily abandoned, lonely places with minimal lighting, often in the industrial periphery of a metropolis: During the war one of my acquaintances who worked as a maître d’ in Mánes told a story about spring man, and that was something at that time—he knew everything that people talked about in society, this fellow wouldn’t have just told lies! He said he went out with his wife during twilight around some boarded enclosure in Nusle, when suddenly a man on springs jumped over the fence and cried out in his direction: “Hitler won’t get through, Nazism will die!” and poof! He was gone.22

The mysterious jumping phantom was the subject of conversations in many diverse milieu—besides the schools, homes, and factories that represented the main localities of storytelling about spring man, there were also public spaces such as streets, cafés, and pubs: Yes, I heard a lot about spring man. They told stories about him in practically all kinds of company, especially in the circle of my high school friends, but also in my family circle (. . .) In his time, he was very popular and I think that they talked about him in every kind of company.23

The unusual living situations imposed by the horrifying reality of the war made for odd and highly suggestive settings for the telling of these tales: We lived not far from the Vinohrady transmitter, and at the end of the war we were living in cellars where people cooked, slept, and so on, so I had lived through a few things by the time I was nine. There, they often talked about spring man.24

Besides cities, the tales also appeared in smaller towns, though while their connection with the industrial setting was still clear. However, in the countryside the alleged appearances of spring man were mainly localized on the boundaries between the built-up and undeveloped parts of the town, in the vicinity of railway tracks, bridges, highway viaducts connecting the country with the city, and sometimes in the environments of mines, quarries or other “cultural spaces.”25 His alleged appearance was only infrequently associated with spaces in nature that were more or less untouched and free of human presence and influence, such as forests, meadows, and fields. Just like before the war, during the Protectorate spring man was most often described as a mysterious jumping figure of uncertain or, on the contrary, very fantastical appearance, and people usually caught a glimpse of him in the early evening or at night. The overwhelming majority of tales merely alluded to what a

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witness had seen, as well as where and when and it was usually in an urban or industrial setting (and generally somewhere else than where the story was told). Similar to before and after the war, stories told about spring man during the war had a dominant character of short-term local eruptions of rumors based on supposed sightings of the mysterious phantom, which sometimes developed into more complex narratives such as legends and personal experience narratives. In the moment of narrative saturation of the local repertoire, then the topic would be quickly exhausted and it began to degrade into the forms of parodic legends or even humorous anecdotes until it either disappeared from this location or moved on elsewhere. This process is illustrated by the feature article by František Krpata about spring man’s rampaging in Pardubice, which lasted from November until the beginning of December 1943; thus, only few weeks, or rather days: But nothing on Earth lasts forever; not even spring man in Pardubice. When, according to one piece of graffiti “Today, I crunch on crickets, tomorrow it will be blondes,” no blonde became his victim and when people sort of began to feel ashamed a popular joke made an end of spring man. Spring man killed himself! He was chased underneath a railway underpass and when the pursuers tightly surrounded him, he bounced up and forgot that the ceiling of the overpass was above him, so he broke his head open with his reckless crash into the track. And so spring man wasn’t haunting anymore, but many jokes remained as a kind of assuagement of bad consciences not only of children and women, but also many men who had sworn by him. When a ghostly white lady or apparition had been in Podskalí, why couldn’t there be some kind of demon, naturally a modernized one, in Pardubice. Spring man had clearly relocated and it’s not out of the question that he could appear somewhere else, where the rumors about him reach.26

Both adults and children told stories about spring man. However, in their “serious” form of realistic narrations considered to be descriptions of true events this phenomenon was considered to be children’s folklore to a significant extent during the war. The liveliest interest in the stories was—owing to their theme of “adventure”—among young boys, even though girls, too, sometimes kept up with the trend: We talked a lot about spring man when I was a little girl, in school, when I was in the second grade, that was in 1942, during the break with my friend Máňa. Her daddy and brother worked at the train station in Strašnice and she said that her daddy once saw him at night, how he jumped over a train and from one wagon to another. It was kind of a mysterious figure. Someone then told our teacher about how we had been talking about him, she had a husband who was

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a Jew, and therefore she couldn’t teach any more, and she said to us: “Girls, it’s better not to talk about that.”27

The figure of spring man was also fairly often used as a Kinderschreck, a pedagogical bogeyman for children: Grandmother lived in Strašnice in Saratovská Street during the war. She always frightened us by saying that we mustn’t look out of an open window after nightfall, or else spring man could take us away. It was said that he had special springs from Pilsen and that he shoots fascists and criminals at night.28

With the exception of the capital city, where the rumors and legends about spring man had appeared even earlier, the second half of 1943, more precisely the autumn and beginning of the winter of this year, were the turning point for the spreading of the narrative complex about spring man at the nationwide level. This is because in this period local spring man panics in several places in the Czech lands—besides Pardubice, also, for instance, in Rokycany, and chiefly in Pilsen—broke out independently of one another. Here, stories about spring man were not only spread in laborers’ quarters in Lochotín, but also in the center of the city. The short story “Pérový přízrak” [A Springed Apparition] by the Pilsen dramatist, writer, and poet Josef Königsmark was published in Český deník on 21 November 1943, and refers to him in a lighthearted sprit: He’s here now! Spring man! Spring man, who afflicted Nusle, Smíchov and their rustical surroundings in a horrible way. Spring man, who jumps over a tram like it’s a piece of cake, and then even more handily jumped up into an apartment on the third floor (right from the street), so that he could rock a baby in his arms, and then with one supple bound he was back on the street again. Spring man, the jumping genius, the Icarus of our time and the outskirts of our towns, terrorizing pedestrians out for late walks, cats, and blondes. Spring man, after having tormented the tranquil inhabitants of Prague XIV and XVI enough, has taken a moment’s pause, during which he is presumably deliberating over the perfection of the miraculous springs in his boots, and then with a mile-long bound he set out for our genial Czech countryside! He’s here now! Spring man.29

Königsmark (an author who, like Weiss, was preoccupied with fantastic subject matter) conceived of his piece as a certain reflection on Weiss’s story, which had already been published. However, instead of the capital

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city it focused on west Bohemian cities, first Rokycany where “the air-raid of spring man on our former county seat was a crushing blow to the nerves of our citizenry.”30 He then presented his readers with a series of comical encounters that introduced spring man. The character first appears in a leap onto the building of the district hospital insurance company in Rokycany and the cathedral of St. Bartholomew in Pilsen. The author then presents his confrontation with the comic stock figures of the market seller, who is pursued by spring man on her bicycle, the mushroom-picker, who spring man assaults in the forest, cross-country runners who cannot keep up with spring man, and finally the inhabitants of an anonymous hamlet in the Brdy mountain area who organize an unsuccessful hunt for spring man. Here, spring man ends his west Bohemian odyssey ingloriously after a local cobbler accidentally destroys the jumping mechanism hidden in his soles while repairing his boots.31 Besides this, Königsmark also describes the impact of these narratives on the local citizens in a comically exaggerated manner: Several well-traveled individuals knew the legend about the spring man from Prague, but most people followed the news about him in the newspapers, with bated breath. And then there was an end of our former small-town idyll. Spring man overwhelmed souls with a distressing weight. Children, as long as they didn’t fall into febrile seizures, were afraid to go in the early morning half-light to school and they had to be led there by their no-less-fearful mommies. News about spring man proliferated apace. The tale, written down at its time in “Národní politika” by the chronicler J. Weiss, became the basis for further reflections on spring man, who, however, did not care for theories and began to torment the population to an unprecedented extent.32

In the same period as in Rokycany and Pilsen the narratives about spring man also reappeared with a heightened intensity in the working-class Prague neighborhood of Holešovice, as illustrated by one of many local narrations: I was attending the primary school in Prague-Holešovice on Jablonská Street between 1940 and 1945. Maybe it was in 1943 that talk about “spring man” began to trickle in. We talked about him every time we had a break, about how he can jump over even a multistory building on his spring-loaded boots and that no one can catch him. Every day, someone came in saying that their acquaintance had seen him here or there, and all of us wanted to see him too and at the same time we were also afraid of it happening. At home, they whispered that he was going to harm the occupiers and frighten them into leaving. When the war ended, the legends about “spring man” also dried up. To this day, I don’t know how much of it was true.33

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At the same time, this narration offers a three-dimensional portrayal of the inherently ambivalent perception of spring man—on the one hand, he was admired for his superhuman abilities, and on the other he was feared for his ambivalent, spectral nature. This nature is further amplified in the following retrospectively obtained narration, which is probably a late echo of the Prague Holešovice panic: I heard about another confrontation, dramatically described, brimming over with details and local color, in 1945 or 1946, if I remember well, in the dairy store at what was then Heřmanovo (now Řezáčovo) Square, where one female connoisseur of local affairs told about an incident that was supposed to have happened to two tram drivers: more precisely a driver and a conductor, who arrived after nightfall at the end station for Tram No. 6 in Stromovka public park. This line was going there at that time. The tram wagon turned around in the balloon loop at the end of the track. The conductor remained at the end station so that she could have a snack and drink some tea, and the driver drove the tram around the loop. When he arrived at the station, he heard the conductor’s helpless cry. She had been scuffling with some man who was beating her with her own thermos. The driver braked quickly, jumped out of the tram, pulled a heavy lever that was used for manually switching the tracks out of its holder and rushed toward the screaming woman. When the attacker saw that heavily armed help was hurtling toward him, he furiously shouted some curses, crushed the thermos in his hand as though it were made from paper, flung it to the ground, and turned to flee. With typical spring man jumps he fled under the railway viaduct toward what was then Bělská Street. The driver raced after him and shouted: “Catch him, catch him!” Some passersby joined in the chase after spring man, who jumped over the wall of the local cemetery, where the pursuers couldn’t go because the gate was closed and they were afraid to climb over the wall. Thus, they had to return home without their prey. They say that the ruined thermos with the imprints of spring man’s iron hand was displayed for some time in the tram depot, so even doubting Thomases could see it with their own eyes there.34

The attitude of considering stories about spring man to be a record of real events was fairly rare and it was mainly limited to children and youths from the working-class environments of large cities. As a whole, these narrations were typically urban: their frequency and intensity evidently rose with the number of inhabitants of the location and the significance of their industrial base, or perhaps their connection with railways. Some period observers were also aware of their gradual diffusion from large cities into smaller towns: Spring man, that was a bogeyman. During the Protectorate. Someone on springs who made giant leaps. You know that it wasn’t a ghost. We explained it at home that he was some lunatic who escaped, but probably a circus acrobat. That’s

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what enabled him to do those landings. So, no one did it from as a desperado deed. We lived at that time in Klánovice, and so I know how deliciously afraid I was as a young lassie to go out alone. . . . It was said that it was already advancing from Prague to Klánovice.35

In smaller and more remote towns the tales about spring man were typically perceived as a reflection of events that were playing out in the larger agglomerations such as Prague and Pardubice, but also Kladno and Ledeč nad Sázavou. This is illustrated by an informer from the village of Bojiště, located near this central Bohemian town: In Ledeč it was passed around that it had come to our village from the city.36

Even the village informers who mention spring man’s postwar influence on the daily life of the period were aware of the linkage of narrations about this figure with the urban environment: I think they were spreading the story that the spring man mainly moves around in the urban environment. . . . Spring man got around by jumping very high—to the height of a second or third story. And he did it with the help of spiral springs (probably suspension springs from a car), which he had attached to his feet. At that time, it was a great curiosity, because most cars had leaf spring suspensions. Spring man mainly moved around city streets and looked into apartments, frightened people, and I think that he was involved in some kind of activity against the German occupiers. Certainly, he was very popular in his time; so much so that the first postwar motorcycle model, the Jawa 250, was nicknamed “Spring Man” after him because of its type of suspension—it had shock springs on the front, and the back suspension forks that were similar to those that spring man used.37

Spring man’s connection with urban experiences was also evaluated in an interesting way by this period observer: It was mostly townspeople who talked about that. Therefore, I think that there was nothing to it. A city person has more time for chitchat. A villager is down to earth.38

In the last months of the war, the tales about spring man were disseminated nearly across the entire territory of the Czech lands, including parts of south Bohemia. Even here, spring man mainly appeared in the large cities: I remember the myth that was spread around České Budějovice, where I was living at that time with my parents, quite specifically. It was before the end of World War II—maybe 1944 or 1945? Supernatural powers and abilities were

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ascribed to him—however, details and connections have already escaped my memory. Of course, it was an inspiration for a great deal of “folk” creativity, which absolutely flourished. .  .  .  Probably all the people in my circles talked about him, and most likely the others in the town where I lived did too.39

“MY GRANDMOTHER WAS AWFULLY AFRAID OF SPRING MAN AND THE COMMUNISTS”: SPRING MAN AFTER WORLD WAR II, 1946–1985 The narrative complex about spring man in the Czech lands quantitatively culminates in 1945. After the end of World War II, at the moment when the šeptanda [rumor mill] disappeared and society-wide trust in the mass communications media that were freed of Nazi and Protectorate propaganda was won back, these tales lose their functions as updates of information and they quickly begin to stagnate into the form of mere (and usually quickly forgotten) reminiscences of the wartime years. Such was the case, for example, in postwar Jihlava: After the war we moved to Znojemská Street No. 20, where an old widowed lady named Julie Janoušová lived on the ground floor. She was visited by friends in her age-group and I used to sit and chat with them. She was from a mixed marriage, and debates were taking place in Czech and German, something that I was clearly not supposed to hear as a boy. That is where I probably first heard about spring man.40

These tales gained a great deal of vitality after the war in the children’s culture, where spring man retrospectively became a favorite subject not only of children’s conversation but also of their games: When I entered the first grade at the Jan Amos Komenský elementary school in 1946 on Fibichova Street in Jihlava the boys were talking about the figure of spring man. When they started discussing this figure, I no longer remember. It was pretty much coincidence that the school was located near Zahradní [Garden] Street where there had been a garden store belonging to Mr. Čeněk or Hynek Hanus until the end of the war. Right near this garden store were the streets U Koželuhů, Na sádkách, Pod příkopem, and Fibichova, which until the end of the war was called Příkopy. That’s where that spring man was supposed to have appeared during the Protectorate and where we had looked for him in vain as boys. Just a little way from these streets I named, there was a hill called Na křížku, a former Jihlava execution ground, and underneath it there were many small ponds where we used to play year-round till twilight fell and here and there we would frighten each other with spring man. I remember that we had gotten ahold of some springs from an armchair or sofa somewhere and we

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tied them onto our boots (at that time people went around in high boots), and we tried to jump like spring man. Of course, we couldn’t do without getting some bumps and bruises, then at home we got a tongue-lashing or a few slaps. Often, as a group of boys, we went into the city to Ráj [Paradise], which used to be a recreational place for Jihlavans with a little pub by the Jihlávka River, where we ran around the forests and pole-vaulted over the stream. In the early evening, when we were going home along the road, this was a road from Jihlava to Znojmo, the location of the pub V Ráji was about 2 km outside the city, we walked around the city buildings standing on what was then Malinovského Street, now called Znojemská, which the people called Na slunci. Spring man probably moved around there, but we looked for him in vain. The boys who lived in the street U Koželuhů knew more about him, and they say he climbed or jumped over fences, but no one knew what he was searching for.41

Another favorite postwar use of spring man was the role of a children’s bogeyman: Spring man, he was a kind of bogeyman for us children from villages in Vysočina, still at the end of the 1950s. He was a kind of mechanical man, entirely made from springs and wires.42

The use of spring man for disciplinary purposes was sometimes more effective on children in the second half of the 1950s than the traditional “pedagogical bogeymen.” The following narration can serve as an example: Yeah, that was what they used to say! [Laughter]. We were afraid of spring man as children because they frightened us by saying that he had springs on his boots and he was jumping around here all over the place. He could do big jumps and easily clear a fence, and he attacks, kidnaps, and carries away victims and he might take us away with him. That’s what the children told each other back then in Kamenice. I went to school in Konecchlumí and we children used to walk through the chateau park. At that time, it was still open to the public, so this was the shortest way to get there. And we basically just always ran through the park because we were afraid that spring man might appear there. He was a kind of children’s bogeyman. I think that maybe even adults believed in him, and that they were afraid of him, but it was mainly a children’s bogeyman.43

The pedagogical use of tales about spring man mainly occurred in areas where narratives about spring man had arrived later, after the war; for example, in parts of northern or central Bohemia, in southeast Moravia, and especially in southern Bohemia:

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I remember spring man. Understandably. That was when we lived in Hluboká, when I was little—about ten years old. Right after the war or so it was. He was a person who gobbles up people, whatever he finds, he gobbles up. It was a kind of supernatural being in the form of a human. As soon as it had appeared in one place it would then be somewhere else. We children were afraid of it. Not that we firmly believed in him, but we weren’t sure. What if, just in case, he was real? And so we no longer went out in the evenings when our parents didn’t want us to.44

In these areas, the narratives about spring man usually appear in the form of isolated, often local stories without a significant relationship to the period of World War II. In them, when spring man wasn’t a bogeyman he most frequently played the role of a voyeur, sexual aggressor, madman, or robber. The following narration from Všetaty can serve as an example: Spring man, that was a thief who made big jumps and raised hell sometime after the war. It was a kind of spook, and I didn’t believe in it much, but it’s possible that someone was deliberately taking advantage of others. When something occurred that was unexplained, spring man was immediately blamed for it. It was also said that it’s a madman who frightens people. I was afraid of him, but I didn’t believe that he really exists. It was after the war; he surely didn’t do any damage to the Germans; he certainly wouldn’t have because they would have shot him!45

Tales about spring man were very commonplace in the Czech lands all the way into the 1970s and, sporadically, even into the first half of the 1980s. The degree of nationwide appeal of this narrative complex in communicative memory this late in the century is no longer at all comparable with the period during World War II. However, its vitality at the local level endured: tales about spring man, mainly in the 1950s and 1960s, appear with an almost unexpected frequency. In certain places, especially smaller towns and in the country, their occurrence is even more frequent than during the war. This postwar manifestation is interesting for at least two reasons. First, because in some places it appeared in specific local narrative cycles that were even more prolific than the national tales had been during the war in these places. These often had the nature of a cluster of realistic narrations about a single person, who was sometimes even absolutely specific, who, in a given locality (usually a specific, clearly defined place) for a short period (in the span of several days, weeks, or at most, months) “rampaged” in the form of spring man. Second, the surprisingly large number of witnesses do not in any way connect these “local spring men” with the events of World War II, even with cases that may have been similar, let alone then with the pop-cultural reworkings of these subjects. The postwar spring man is typically perceived

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as a short-term, isolated local incident, and often remains firmly anchored in the local memory of the given communities to this day. This fact thus refutes the idea put forward in older research about the lesser importance of the postwar “spring man tradition,” as well as its necessary dependence on the allegedly dominant models of mass-distributed popular culture.46 The best-documented example of this phenomenon that has been clearly localized in time and space is the narrative complex about spring man in Jičín at the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s which was even twice mentioned in the official city chronicle.47 Local manifestations of the spring man panic were at their greatest intensity at the beginning of the 1950s; later, their occurrence begins to wane. A typical example of this was spring man in Louny region, where these tales had already been told before the war: I remembered a variation of the legend of spring man that I had listened to in 2011, when I worked as a social worker in the senior home in Podbořany. One of my clients (born in 1934) told me that as a young girl (perhaps in 1952, 1953) she lived in Zeměchy u Loun and worked in Černčice. She rode to Louny by train and then walked the rest of the way to Černčice. She said she was terribly afraid because at that time there was talk about spring man rampaging in the Louny area. They said he was jumping on the bridge between Louny and Černčice.48

Similar tales also appeared after the war in Mělnicko region, which is an area where they had been popular even before: That was told like a rumor people shared in Mělnicko approximately in the year 1958. Spring man had springs on his boots and he jumped over the catwalk over the road up to a height of maybe fifteen meters, and it was said that he can even jump over buildings.49

Spring man’s postwar appearances were even more frequent in Nymbursko: Where we lived, spring man showed up in the fields in the daytime. All of a sudden, he was there. If he harmed people, I don’t know, I don’t remember any more. But it wasn’t so long ago. A few years ago, everyone was afraid to go into the field because spring man was there. Even today they still say that.50

Many of these postwar appearances of local panics, which were only minimally related with the popularity of spring man during the war, significantly influenced the everyday cultural practices of people who feared the rampaging of the jumping phantom. In many places he was most frequently

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considered to be a voyeur or another kind of sexual aggressor. The following narration from northeast Bohemia can serve as an example: I heard about spring man in Stará Paka, because we came from Stará Paka, and I heard about this here, yeah, that’s for sure! And that at night he peeks into windows, I sure remember that! And it was, I can tell you, at the beginning of the 1950s, about 1952–1953, when I heard about that in Paka. I was little at that time. I was born in Stará Paka and when I was about three years old my parents moved the family to Jičín, where Dad had a body shop. And I then traveled to Stará Paka to visit my grandmother during the summer holidays. I remember like it was yesterday, in the back of the kitchen there was a woodstove with a vessel for heating water, and next to it I had a big bed and I slept there when I was little. And I know that Grandmother hung a sheet on the windows because at that time there were no Venetian blinds or roller shades. She had loops attached to the sheet and she hung it on hooks so it covered the lace curtains. And I asked her why she’s doing that and she answered: “Spring man is here and he peeps into people’s homes!”

[Who was spring man?] He was a human being and he had something on his feet that made him able to grow taller. Like springs that expanded, and he could see all the way into the windows. Those were upper stories, so how could he have otherwise gotten there? People were afraid of him, truly afraid. And I even have the impression that they may have said that he was some kind of German, I don’t know exactly anymore, I’d be telling a lie. So, my dear boy, I cannot tell you any more, I only know that they were afraid of it! My grandmother was awfully afraid of spring man and the communists, because they confiscated her business. And they also confiscated my Dad’s body shop in fifty-three.51

The above-mentioned narration anticipates the politicization of narratives about spring man that developed during the turbulent changes in the postwar political situation, which radically influenced the everyday life of the inhabitants of Czechoslovakia. At this time, spring man was not just a terrifying phantom—he acquired a great number of ideological interpretations for his activities. Some of the postwar narrations were increasingly focused on finding spring man’s motivation, and these evinced an ever-closer connection with period ideology and political discourse. So, for instance, in the autumn of 1953, rumors updated the “spring man tradition” in reacting to the anti-communist resistance group organized by the Mašín brothers:

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“Do you know what’s happening? They were partisans. They shoot flammable rounds into stacks of straw!” “Partisans are traipsing in from Russia; they’re passing through Czechoslovakia on their way to the West!” “The partisans have special boots that let them leap over high fences with a single jump!”52

On the west Bohemian border in the 1950s the phenomenon of spring man was connected with the period hysteria over former Nazi Werwolf operatives and alleged saboteurs among the displaced Sudeten Germans. One informer from the area of Sadská in central Bohemia retrospectively reflects on one of these rumors she had heard from her parents and older siblings: Spring men; they say they were in the borderlands after the war. . . . German spring men, they intimidated the new settlers.53

In southern Moravia, even in the period of collectivization, spring men were interpreted as domestic saboteurs, or perhaps CIA agents fighting against the establishment of state collective farms (JZD): Where we lived in southern Moravia they said that spring men were people who deliberately harmed those who wanted to enter, or had already entered JZDs [collective farms]. They were the kind of saboteurs, and some said that might even be American agents.54

The postwar spring man gained a specific function according to this period version of the tales in Brno in the area around Francouzská Street; that is, mainly in locations where he had also allegedly been seen during the war: They told stories about a mysterious figure called spring man that had appeared in the postwar period in Brno in the area of Francouzská Street, and his appearance was associated with intimidation of the Gypsy population with the goal of forcing them to leave this location. The figure had springs that were somehow fixed onto his footwear and it was able to jump to the height of a two-story building.55

However, these interpretations gradually become more marginal in connection with how stories about spring man began to become rarer in the second half of the 1960s. Today, some of the later ones are retrospectively now only a vague and hazy memory of several decades of distant events: One of my acquaintances remembers that his parents scared him in the 1960s with a story about a man on springs who was allegedly sometimes appearing in the village of Růžená u Hodic, where he once jumped all the way up on the tower of the Růžená church, which is about ten to twelve meters high. Some people chased him and he escaped from them by jumping from the tower.56

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However, even among later narrations about spring man we sometimes discover lively and dramatic presentations. We find an example of one of these fairly late—and vital—“local spring men” from the beginning of the 1970s in southern Bohemia, which is a region where in the previous period was affected relatively little by this “tradition”: Spring man? Yes, that was sometime in 1970 or 1971 near Ševětín, at the place where there is the bend in the road by the cemetery, kind of an S-shaped curve, and traffic accidents often happened there. At least four motorcyclists died there. Yeah, and one of the guys who crashed on his motorcycle there survived a short time after the crash, and when the ambulance came to him and he was still alive, before he breathed out his last, he managed to tell them that it ran after him from that cemetery. And it jumped on him. And that’s why he crashed. That was spring man. The cops then investigated whether someone had escaped from a mental hospital, but I don’t think they found anything.57

An identical motif of spring man jumping on a motorcyclist had appeared nearly twenty years earlier at the other end of Bohemia, between Jičín and Nová Paka. This time it had been a specifically migratory motif, which, thanks to its drastic nature, is retained in the memory of many storytellers to this day: I heard about spring man sometime between 1953 and 1956, because I was still going to elementary school. It had to have been in the summer, when I was spending the summer vacation with my grandmother Karolína Mádlová, whose maiden name was Prachatická, in Kacákova Lhota. Spring man was supposed to jump out of the forest on Babák hill onto some motorcyclist. They say that he didn’t harm the man and then he jumped back into the forest. And now, they say that people are afraid to ride around Babák. They say he had some kind of springs on his feet, but I wasn’t able to imagine it then. My cousin Radomír Mádle, who worked in Jičín in ČSAD [Czechoslovak Automobile Transportation] and lived in Kacákova Lhota, told me this story. At that time he was a little more than twenty years old, and he already had a motorcycle and he was afraid to ride it through Babák. He was all freaking out over this, and he described it with his eyes as big as saucers, which was kind of typical for him. I then had a panicky fear of driving through Babák, and for a long time afterward, maybe five or six years, I was still afraid when I drove to Nová Paka to the dentist MUDr. Franc, I remembered what had happened at Babák hill.58

The above-mentioned south Bohemian local version of spring man also gave rise, similarly to its precursors from the period of World War II, more developed, and relatively complicated—and dramatic—stories that took the form of legends:

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I heard it told, and this also happened in maybe 1970 or 1971, that the director of the hospital in České Budějovice was traveling along the road in the evening, heading toward the Ševětín curve. His driver was in the car with him as well as someone else from the hospital staff, I think a doctor. They were in a good mood and singing a popular song called “K Budějicům cesta.” When they were driving through the dangerous bend in the road near Ševětín, suddenly a white figure ran out to the street from the cemetery, and it jumped onto the hood of their car. They broke off their singing immediately. But the hospital director shouted resolutely at the driver: “Keep driving!” The driver stepped on the gas, the figure fell off, and they kept going . . . that was this spring man.59

In the 1970s these local “returns” of spring man into Czech communicative memory become ever more infrequent. From the 1980s we then know spring man only as a phenomenon in the isolated local cultures of children, a character in scary tales on the boundary of children’s horrors and contemporary legends, which recycle outmoded and nonfunctional motifs taken from the adult culture. However, in the culture of children and culture for children spring man lives to this day: for example, skávavej (jumper) a local “incarnation” of spring man, a name that witnesses of spring man’s alleged antics were still using in the Prague neighborhood of Žižkov at the beginning of this millennium.60 Jumper here functions as a typical Kinderschreck; that is, a pedagogical bogeyman used by grandparents and parents to discipline small children. And naturally, an awareness of him had secondarily spread into the local children’s community. Tales about spring man thus display the main characteristic of orally disseminated legends, according to the folklorist Alan Dundes: an inherent lack of closure. By contrast with myths or folktales, neither the plot of a legend nor its life in social usage are ever definitively brought to completion. It is therefore not impossible that we will meet with spring man again in the future, and perhaps in entirely unexpected circumstances.61 But what do oral narratives about spring man, recorded over the long span of time from the beginning of the 1920s all the way to the first decade of the new millennium, actually have in common? Is it appropriate at all to speak of one specific and unitary phenomenon that continually interweaves or connects the fairly distant stages of his existence through space and time? And if so, what was specific to particular times and places? In the following chapters we focus on the three dimensions of spring man’s narrative complex that define him most distinctively. First of all, we shall examine descriptions of his appearance; next, the names given to the mysterious phantom, which are integrally connected with his appearance; and finally we’ll explore the period explanations for his existence and motivations.

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FROM PHANTOM TO MORTAL: SPRING MAN’S APPEARANCE AND CHARACTER Spring man’s appearance in the prewar, wartime, and postwar periods varies greatly in the oral versions of his tales. The visual form of this mysterious phantom is not the center of attention in most narratives; spring man is therefore only infrequently described in any detail. This relative absence of descriptions of the phantom’s appearance is connected with a general tendency of verbal folklore to marginalize descriptions of the appearance and psychology of characters and instead emphasizing laying out the plot and telling about the consequences that followed from its action.62 In the rare cases when the appearance of the jumping phantom is described, it runs the gamut from an utterly ordinary human figure to the most-frequently depicted form of a phantom equipped with jumping springs on his feet (covered inside his boots or attached to the soles): It was a human being who had springs on his feet. I found out about it in school, perhaps in 1944, at the school I went to in Davle.63

The motif of the jumping springs on his feet is only exceptionally filled in with details about spring man’s clothing: For me and my friends the figure was shrouded in a black hooded cloak, he had springs on his boots, and it’s more or less like that that I have him in my memory to this day.64

The motif of the jumping springs fixed to his feet, or perhaps some other mechanical apparatus that enabled extraordinary jumping, appears in only a third of the documented cases when his unusual locomotion is mentioned, but only when the narrator is posed with a direct question about what means spring man used to be able to move around in such manner. To a significant extent, they therefore represent a “metafolkloric” explanation coming from the narrator, that did not necessarily have to be present at all in the original tales.65 The steel spiral or compression spring was a relatively new technology at the time of World War II, and thus it naturally offered itself as an explanatory mechanism for spring man’s jumping. People could encounter springs of this type in various modern equipment, and also in public spectacles such as the spring-propelled Vyšehrad “robot” showed in Prague and later represented in period film newsreels.66 The mechanism of the compression springs inspired more than just oral renditions of the tales in the wartime era. In 1943, the period of the simultaneous outbreaks of spring man panics in several Czech

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cities, the surrealist Jindřich Heisler (1914–1953), who, because of his Jewish origin had been secretly hiding out in the Prague apartment of the famous Czech and later French painter Marie Černínová (better known by her pseudonym of Toyen), created an artistic object in which he replaced the leg of a running athlete with a steel spring.67 However, spring man was sometimes also equipped with a razor blade (hidden in his boot or attached to his gloves), or perhaps a straight-blade razor, a knife or other sharp objects, which he used in attacks on his unsuspecting victims (mainly women). The phantom is also described fairly frequently as a figure that radiates light or shines in the dark. Sometimes only spring man’s eyes shone or he was adorned with a shining cross, but the most frequent version of this theme was that light allegedly shone out of his whole figure. This luminous effect was explained by his white clothing (often a corpse’s shroud), a mechanism that gives off light (a handheld lantern, flashlight, or incandescent lightbulbs), by most often by means of phosphorus or some radioactive materials that shine in the dark. A description of spring man in the form of a shining skeleton (a figure with a death mask on his head, dressed in a black jersey with ribs painted in phosphoric paint) is particularly frequent, as is an inhuman, tall, jumping or even flying figure. Interpretations of spring man as a mere phantomatic image, a projection by a magic lantern or a film projector, are also fairly common. The most fantastical tales describe spring man in the form of an ephemeral, immaterial apparition, or even as a more or less anthropomorphic mechanical being that varies in size (from several dozen centimeters all the way to inhumanly large dimensions) and a form fashioned from springs and wires: In my area, in Havlíčkova Borová, they also spoke about spring man during the war. It must have been sometime in the winter, because in my memory it’s a corkscrew-shaped tall figure that took giant steps in the high snow and doesn’t sink down into it.68

The plurality and indeterminacy of spring man’s appearance was mainly influenced by the dominant trait of social memory that created and maintained the tales about him: conceptual thinking. According to James Fentress and Chris Wickham, social memory data are not comparable with individual sensory perceptions, especially in the areas of visual, auditory, or tactile details: spring man—as a product of social memory—essentially had to be a relatively vague concept devoid of any details. This applies both to his alleged appearance and to tales about him: rather than representing a stabilized folkloric text, narrations about spring man were a collectively shared “idea about a certain story accompanied with specific images and phrases.”69 Collective semantic information that is easily transmittable through social

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memory was woven into each and every text of the stories about spring man, while there were only relatively marginal sensory images attached. These narratives represented individual expressions of the collective element of social memory, in which narrative motifs, fixed topoi, visual perceptions, and their abstractions from various discourses are mixed together, and as we will later see, they are also accompanied by a false etymology of spring man’s name.70 To a significant extent, spring man comprised knowledge of a shared cultural experience from that period that did not require particularly precise descriptions. This is illustrated, for instance, by the following reminiscences from the small town of Jičín from the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s, which is additionally one of the few that also describes period performances of narrations about spring man: Oh, sure, spring man, that was a popular subject at one time! Spring man was appearing all the time around Valdice! Grandmas would come running, freaked out, saying that they’d been cutting grass for their rabbits and shouted: “Spring man! Spring man!” [with a hushed voice he imitates terrified yelling]. One time, Mrs. Špačková came running up like this, her eyes wide as saucers: “Spring man! Spring man! Spring man was there!” Well, they were going for a walk under the former city bastions to get grass for their rabbits, right, and spring man was somewhere over there. People went from the bastion path into the fields, and there were deeply cut tracks. There were two crossroads at Soběraz and at Studeňany, that’s the back way we used to walk to Soběraz. And she showed up all freaking out to Kolonie and she shouted: “Spring man! Spring man! Spring man was there! Ladies, spring man was there!” Then, what a commotion! All of Valdice was out there, everyone came out right away. And the guys gathered themselves together and went searching for spring man. Well, of course they never saw or caught any spring man at all. And it happened several times, there were spring men all the time. They always talked about spring man, but there were more spring men showing up in different places. . . . As children we then sometimes pretended to be spring man; we frightened each other in the cellar and the boys said: “Don’t go there, spring man is there, spring man is there!” And now everyone peeked in there, in those buildings there were these long, dark cellars, literally catacombs. Yeah, the way children play. I don’t know what the adults understood under the label of spring man back then, but it had to be a negative figure, a dangerous guy, because they were afraid of him. The grannies were all agog; they ran away and shouted: “Spring man, spring man!” and the guys immediately got together and went to take a look. Well, maybe some pervert was there looking at the grannies, and the grannies ran away; yeah, but it was always somewhere near the bastion, a lane next to the fields, and the guards up in those prison watchtowers would certainly have seen it if anyone like that was there.71

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We do not have much information about the historical development of spring man’s alleged appearance. It seems, however, that he was—unlike the overwhelming majority of pop-cultural depictions—mostly described at first as a figure clad in light, or even white garments, a shroud, or a sheet. It was only during World War II that darker colors such as black became dominant in the collective imagination. The phantom dressed up as a phosphorescent skeleton was also a prominent form, as shown in the example of the following narration, localized to the mines between Chvaletice and Telčice in Kolín region, which attempts an explanation of spring man’s curious appearance: They used to scare us during the war with Franta Spring Man so that we wouldn’t go out at night and wouldn’t go near the mines. They said that spring man worked in the mines, and because these were uranium mines his ribs glowed from the radiation. We weren’t supposed to walk around there because besides spring man there were also all kinds of pits and tunnels that you could easily get lost in. Every night, we were afraid to look out the windows because we didn’t want to accidentally catch sight of him just in case he might appear there all of a sudden.72

In some areas, the form of the phosphorescent skeleton became so dominant that it entirely overshadowed spring man’s main trait of jumping strangely. The most striking example of this is the character of phosphorous man, who allegedly rampaged in the center of Slovakian capital of Bratislava at the end of 1943, and to whom the following chapter is dedicated. PHOSPHOROUS MAN: SLOVAKIAN VERSION OF THE NARRATIVE COMPLEX The Slovak urban phantom called fosforový človek (“phosphorous man”) or less formally just fosforák is among the most specific local versions of the narrative complex on spring man. By contrast with the Czech narratives, the motif of odd jumping was downplayed in this version, while the motif of his disguise as a phosphorescent human skeleton was highlighted: Then in Bratislava, Slovakia, the Grim Reaper rampaged; an unidentified man made use of the blackouts by having skeleton ribs drawn on his clothing underneath his coat in phosphorous paint, and when he exposed himself in front of some woman on a dark street, he scared her so badly that he could easily rob her.73

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Rumors and legends about the phosphoric phantom first appeared in 1943 in the capital city of the Slovak Republic during the war, but they quickly also spread into the Czech lands, and also reached Prague: In Bratislava in Slovakia they say a bogeyman who was dressed in tight black long underwear with a human skeleton was drawn on it with light green phosphorescent paint was rampaging during the last years of the war. Therefore, he was given the name fosforák [phosphorous man] or fosforkostra [phosphorous skeleton]. On top, he wore a long black cape and he set out in the evenings into the blacked-out streets. If he met a lone female pedestrian, he opened up his cape and shocked the terrified woman with his luminous skeleton. They say the poor wretches usually fainted from horror and the skeleton guy took advantage of their defenselessness and stole money, jewelry, furs, and other valuables that lone women might have had with them during the war. I do not remember ever hearing about a sexual motive. They say that phosphorous man frequently operated in the area around the streets that were then called Groesslingova and Kempelenova and on St. Jacob’s Square in Bratislava.74

According to tales from the period, the phantom appeared most frequently at the outer edge of Bratislava’s Old Town, in a tenement-house neighborhood in the city’s inner periphery near the Blue Church and the Ondrejský cemetery. The epicenter of his attacks was clearly the park on Jacob Square. Besides certain rumors about him there were also more-developed narratives in the form of legends: After many unsuccessful attempts at catching the terror of the town—phosphorous man—in the act and relieving the ever more hysterical public of its worries, the police decided to ask for the army’s help with a more ambitious operation. In the area where the phantom had been seen most often, soldiers and police officers with dogs were stationed in buildings, passageways, behind garden walls, in telephone booths and similar hiding places. They were to wait there for the signal for action to rush out into the streets and seize anyone suspicious. In order to keep the operation as secret as possible they were to reply to any questions from the public by saying that they are “checking the preparedness of the CPO (Civil Antiaircraft Defense) in case of airborne danger.” The signal for action was supposed to be given by the “bait” as soon as they spotted something suspicious. She was a brave woman (or, in other accounts, a man dressed as a woman) wearing an expensive fur coat, holding a purse in one hand and a whistle in the other. On the first evening nothing happened. The operation was called off after midnight, and the spies all went home to bed. It was only one of the later operations that the whistle sounded. Phosphorous man attacked. Of course, at the sound of the alarm he immediately realized that it was a trap, and he took flight. He probably got away from his pursuers very easily, because by

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the time the hunters had collected themselves and reacted he already had a large head start. However, it was a K9 officer that they sicced on him who saved the honor of the army and police. Unfortunately, the sources are silent about the further fate of the captive, and they are leaving the undertaking to later historians.75

How widespread this narrative was, with its significance fully comparable with the panic over spring man in wartime Prague, Pilsen, or Pardubice, is also borne witness to by the fact that he soon became the butt of jokes in Bratislava’s collective humor: My brother recalled that at that time a phosphorous skeleton joke or wisecrack was making the rounds in Bratislava: “Skeleton, why are you glowing?” with an allusion to the Slovak poet Ján Kostra (so it was something like: “Kostra, why are you glowing?” which is another way to say “Why are you showing off” because people said this poet did not suffer from a lack of self-confidence).76

Even the official humor of the wartime Slovak Republic reacted to the urban panic over the phosphorescent phantom. On November 18, 1943, the Hlinka Guard and Hlinka Transport Guard’s nationalistic daily paper Gardista reported on phosphorous man. The Slovaks also dealt with the figure of phosphorous man—just like the Czech publications Národní politika, Lidové noviny, and Český deník had treated spring man—in a lighthearted tone in the essay column “Len tak mimochodom”: Just by the way, about the figment of the lush Bratislavan imagination—about the phosphorous monster. To start from Adam, Bratislava has had a sensation in recent crimes—a phosphorescent man. Faith, God! In the various horrors of this world war, which—thank God—haven’t reached us yet, the alleged existence of this person has filled Bratislava with a certain new self-confidence and the knowledge that we also have something here that we can be afraid of, which walks through the streets of Bratislava—and the most important part!—that is possible to talk about ad infinitum.77

The text mentioned several alternative period explanations for this phenomenon, while at the same time the version that suggests his connection with the resistance movement naturally could not be framed in any other than a disparaging manner. The official culture portrayed phosphorous man primarily as a criminal, or sometimes as a bankrupt resistance fighter: According to some, he was a completely ordinary robber who specialized in stealing purses and bracelets from solitary ladies, and according to others he was supposed to be some bankrupt partisan who froze in Bratislava. Owing to a lack of funds he was forced to walk the back streets of Bratislava and to make his living in an undignified way.78

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However, the main content of the text was made up of humorous descriptions of potential meetings between the citizens of Bratislava and this mysterious phantom, which symbolically disparaged his potential reality through their comic tone. The text then ended with a description of the activities of students who were intending to capture him, and emphasized an explanation for the panic in Bratislava as an attempt at reassuring the distressed public: However, we would be incomplete and unjust if we did not add that the phosphoric specter also had its good sides. After the blackouts in the streets of Bratislava in recent times there were definitely fewer people wandering around, especially of the female sex. An acute hysteria arose out of this, which held Bratislava under great stress. This stirred up fear among the people, but also combativeness, so the phosphoric monster was already threatened with a serious danger, especially from our university students, who got involved in the matter with all their youthful vigor and had already begun to organize expeditions to suspicious parts of the city. Surely, they will end up giving him a proper thrashing, because one who has a cudgel in his hands is going to find some kind of monster (our saying: “Where we want to beat someone, a club can be found” in the opposite sense), but the police prevented the matter from going so far and they unraveled the mystery of phosphorous man. This is what happened: Some girls were wandering around in Petržalka long into the night. Their worried fathers were very upset, so they put their heads together and came up with this phosphoric specter. One of them painted himself with phosphorous and gave them a good scare. The girls stopped wandering around, but the phosphoric fiction got loose in Bratislava and here, growing into hysterical proportions, he lived on in remote, dark alleys, only in the heads of people who had rich imaginations.79

In the same period, a full-page caricature referring to this bizarre current event in Bratislava with the title of “The Bratislava Phantom: Phosphorous Man” also appeared in the humor magazine Kocúr. The illustration by an unknown author depicts a wrathful-looking man with a cheroot in his mouth and a cane in one hand. He is clutching a pitcher with a human skull painted on it in the other, while his body is painted with a glowing image of a skeleton. Around him, in a street with wine bars indicated with wreaths, stand terrified passersby—an older woman and a young couple with the woman fainting with horror. The illustration thus symbolically attempts to cast doubt upon the seriousness of the phosphorous man panic, associating it with alcohol, superstitious “old wives’ tales,” and youthful flibbertigibbets. The caricature was accompanied by a text: “Phosphorous bombs? Good grief! But a

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phosphorous man, well hey, that’s something that not even the English have,” taken from the above-mentioned text in Gardista.80 The narrative complex on phosphorous man, including the peculiar name given to this phantom, was not only limited to Bratislava. In the same year (1943) a panic over “phosphorus man” (called both fosforák and fosforový muž) also took hold in eastern Moravian city of Zlín.81 Its late echo were children’s tales about phosphorous men, which were still widespread in eastern Moravia at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s: Sometime around 1980 they were telling a story at the elementary school in Zlín that “phosphorus men” were walking around in out-of-the way places in the city at night. They were these guys in long black rubber coats that had painted phosphorescent skeletons on, and they wore masks on their faces with phosphorescent skulls. We identified them with anti-Communists, dissidents or something like that. They say that they always waited for a woman and jumped out at her. They say that one old woman that they took by surprise in the old

Figure 1.4. The Bratislava phantom: Phosphorous Man. Illustration from the magazine Kocúr, 1943.

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graveyard in Malenovice, who was there to place flowers on a grave, died of a heart attack from terror!82

Another witness describes a story about the phosphorous men with a greater degree of humorous remove. His version contains a whole range of typical motifs from Czechoslovakian legends of the 1970s and 1980, such as the motif of the toilet plunger used as a crutch in mass-transit vehicles or the public use of symbols that were mythologized and “forbidden” in that period, such as the swastika:83 They were telling stories about phosphorous man from 1978 to 1979, maybe even in 1977, at the high school and in the elementary schools. Small children were afraid of him, but high school students mostly took it as a joke. They say that phosphorous man sometimes got onto the trolleybus in Zlín. He was a great big tall fellow in a black coat with a hat, on his fingers he had chargers for soda siphon bottles painted with swastikas and the phrase “A-bomb.” He carried a violin case with him, and when he got on, he took a toilet plunger out of it, stuck it onto the ceiling of the trolleybus, and rode without holding onto anything else.84

The popularity of these narratives is also indirectly illustrated through parodies in the form of a specific genre of children’s tales that lampoon spooky stories: pseudo-thrillers. In one of the houses there lived an old, confused woman, who didn’t see well. Someone rang her bell at night. She went to open the door and saw only the silhouette of a man with a scythe across his shoulder. It was phosphorous man, who wanted to frighten her. However, this woman couldn’t see jack, so she says: “And you’re here to cut the grass?!” Upon which, phosphorous man became angry, swung his scythe, and cut off her head. They found her in the morning between the two doors and the police noted that this was phosphorous man’s work, because on the site of the crime there were little flakes of phosphorous.85

FRANTA PÉRÁK, JUMPER, ELECTRIC MAN: ALTERNATIVE PERIOD NAMES FOR SPRING MAN However, the moniker of phosphorous man was fairly exceptional. In most of the Czech territories this urban phantom was simply called spring man (pérák) or they were referred to in the plural as spring men (péráci). According to the writer Jan Weiss, this name was coined in Prague through

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children’s speech from the original name of spring-man (pérový muž); we also meet with the same type of naming in other journalistic texts from the period of World War II.86 In the region of central-eastern Bohemia (in Kolínsko and Nymbursko) the phantom was better known during the war as “Franta Pérák” (Franz the Spring Man): Spring man—that was during the war. It was a real person, they called him Franta Pérák. He was a guy, a Czech, who harmed the Germans. He engaged in sabotage, he robbed whatever he could from them, and in order to better escape from them he put sofa springs on his feet. In Sadská he jumped over wagons at the train station, he jumped across fences, and so on. When the Germans were guarding the entrance to an enclosed area with some kind of stuff, he was on the other side of the fence and just jumped over unobserved and broke or stole something. Or when they chased him, he jumped back over the fence and they had to go around it. When the Germans surrounded him, he could also escape, thanks to those springs—because he jumped over them. Even though, well, I don’t know why they didn’t shoot him when he did this. When the Germans were looking for him, he hid himself in the forest by Kersko.87

The various visual versions of spring man were sometimes named by storytellers as specific phantoms. Besides phosphorous man there were, for instance žiletkář, or sometimes břitvák (both of these terms translate to “razor man”) and podřezávač, (“cutthroat”), or Kohlenklau (“coal thief”). However, their interchangeability was typical in the period oral tradition. These different phantoms should be understood in the manner of ideal types. That is, we should not lose sight of the important reality that the concept of spring man (just like other Protectorate-era phantoms) as a unique figure is, to a significant extent, a construct of postwar popular culture. In versions of his tales from that era it is quite difficult to distinguish spring man from other similar figures such as phosphorous man and the above-mentioned razor man. Spring man is thus often described with having their specific attributes, such as a phosphorescent skeleton or razor blades: I don’t know much about that, sir. Only the things that were said back then and what was in the newspapers. Spring man . . . he cut people’s clothing from behind. He was some kind of maniac and was taking revenge on people in general. Some believed this and took it seriously, others laughed. The police, they would know more about it. But I think they didn’t catch him then. A maniac, he was. There are more of those, sir, who harm people just for their own pleasure.88

Another similar narration describes an encounter with spring man in more sinister detail:

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Spring man attacked pretty young girls. Grandmother’s friend had a horrible experience in Košíře, and it wasn’t even dark out. He cut women’s dresses open with razors. They say that he was able to cut a fellow’s throat silently and get away.89

It was only the postwar (popular) culture that made selections of certain typical “spring man” features, while rejecting others. A typical example is the postwar nationalistic interpretation by journalist Štěpán Engel: And because people had started to love this Spring-Man, the government began to slander him. They said that he was not a patriot, but a deviant person who cuts open women’s skirts, and that he was an ordinary pickpocket who used a razor blade to rob his victims and no hero.90

This syncretic conception that brought the figure of spring man together with the aggressive use of razor blades lived on in the postwar culture. One of the main “discoverers” of spring man in the 1980s was the Czech writer Ondřej Neff, who in his texts—especially in a pair of comics that have significantly influenced the contemporary pop-culture understanding of the spring man motif—describes spring man as a mechanical being with dual technological enhancements—both steel springs fixed to his feet and razor blades in the fingers of his gloves: Spring man, he was a man who fixed up special boots with spring soles. He was able to jump a distance of dozens of meters, and even jumped over a whole house. He had also gotten himself some razor gloves. At night he jumped around blacked-out Prague and woe to an SS or Gestapo man who dared to stick even his nose out! Spring man was already there and the razor gloves swiped through the dark and the meddlesome nose with the swastika on it was lying on the ground; then alley-oop, and spring man was somewhere else.91

It is necessary to limit the idea of spring man as being one unique person and relegate the precise distinctions among individual types of Protectorate-era urban phantoms to locally specific narratives circles (the Prague milieu for razor man and the Bratislava milieu for phosphorous man) and subsequent scholarly, etic approach which creates artificial analytical categories: The blackouts gave rise to figures of urban legends. One of them was “razor man,” who allegedly chased women in the dark city streets. Another was “spring man,” who they said scared passersby by jumping unexpectedly into their way from dark alleys. In reality, during the occupation there were very few street crimes thanks to the random police checks and the possibility of a perpetrator being detained by the Gestapo.92

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Miloš J. Pulec, the Marxist “discoverer” of spring man for scholars, also distinguished among individual types of Protectorate-era phantoms in a similar way, and he even attributed specific social functions to each of them: While razor man, a figure hyperbolized through the rumor mill from a deviant individual who cuts open women’s coats into a criminal-monster who slaughters dozens of innocent victims daily, did not distinguish between Nazis and Czechs, spring man became as it were a symbol of our resistance to fascism.93

In connection with this, Pulec also created a construction of a kind of pure “ideal type” of spring man as an anti-fascist fighter, but it is very hard to find this figure in the period oral tradition: Spring man in the Protectorate-era tradition generally stands on the side of anti-fascist fighters, Czech people “like to tell stories” about him, and he doesn’t frighten progressive citizens. This distinctive character is only diminished where he is confused with or mistaken for “razor man” or another “ideologically neutral” or “wicked” figure.94

The character who is most radically different from spring man is razor man. Rumors about the latter during World War II were—by contrast with stories about spring man—significantly confined to Prague, where they had also originated. The impulse for their origin was the genuine activities of a real razor-wielding criminal or criminals; that is, persons with specific sexual deviancies, a variation of belligerent sadism, who had been damaging women’s outerwear in public transport vehicles. The psychiatrist Vladimír Vondráček considers these stories in a similar way in his memoir: Toward the end of the occupation a report of a “razor man” who allegedly attacked women and cut them with a razor blade was spreading around Prague. I do not know what was really going on. The Germans punished those who spread such stories. Ultimately, several cases of deviants like this really could have occurred.95

These rumors were not only limited to the period of World War II; on the contrary, they could be heard even afterward, usually triggered by real incidents in public spaces: Right after the war I was a member of a Boy Scout troop and there we, the boys, very often enjoyed telling stories about the terrifying phantoms of World War II. I remember that one time a scout came in late for a club meeting and furiously related that people had stopped a tram and called the police, who were seeking razor man, who was said to be in action. They searched people’s shoes to see if

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anyone had razors attached to their soles. That’s because some of the people on the tram had their shoes cut with a sharp object.96

Brief eruptions of such rumors are common today, even at an international level. Factors that contribute to their enduring popularity are both related incidents in public spaces and the great popularity of razor blades as a dangerous object that has been greatly mythologized in modern folklore.97 In the oral culture these wartime and postwar rumors then mutated into relatively complicated narratives in the form of legends: Someone with eyes as big as saucers related an incident that was supposed to have happened to his friend. The friend was supposedly stopped by a man on the street after twilight who was asking for help. He lifted the boy up against a nearby building and put a razor to his neck and threatened that he’ll cut his throat if he doesn’t climb into a half-opened window in the apartment on the second floor and open the door for him. The terrified boy obeyed, climbed inside, but resourcefully opened a window on the other side of the building and fled from razor man, who was waiting for him at the door.98

Another type of Protectorate-era urban phantom who often merged into spring man, was sewer man (kanálník): Besides the well-known types of spring man and razor man I also heard about another spook that was rampaging in Prague during the occupation; that is, sewer man, who in the dark nights (during the war, of course there were very strict blackout orders for all light sources) opened up all the manholes to the sewers and took joy in watching the unlucky pedestrians fall into the underworld.99

A very specific, though today relatively unknown version of spring man was Kohlenklau, also known in Czech as uhlák (coal thief). This version is mainly interesting because the character represents a unique case of syncretism between popular and oral culture. He is also the only such figure to have enjoyed a more widespread rendering of his visual likeness at the time. The crouching figure of a man with walrus whiskers and a sack slung over his shoulder was inspired by period propaganda posters and stickers, which called upon the citizenry to conserve fuel and advised them on how to avoid heat loss through faulty heating systems. Kohlenklau was originally drawn by Wilhelm Hohnhausen from the Stuttgart advertising agency Arbeitsgemeinschaft Hohnhausen as a caricature of a coal thief who appeared in these propaganda materials. This figure was the “face” of a broad-based propaganda campaign called “Kampf dem Kohlenklau” (Struggle Against Kohlenklau), which the Nazi apparatus launched in Germany and the occupied lands on 23 June 1942. Its impact was so powerful that to this day it is

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still regarded as one of the most ambitious (and most successful) campaigns for energy conservation the world has ever seen. It was not only posters, stickers and newspapers and magazines called upon people to save coal for the wartime economy, but also a short educational film for schoolchildren, and even a board game, “Jagd auf Kohlenklau” (Hunt for Kohlenklau) and a card game “Kohlenklau Quartett.” German children in the fourth grade and higher classes in elementary schools were able to take place in essay competitions, writing on the subject of “The Hunt for Kohlenklau,” which were then sent to fathers serving on the fronts. The writers of the best essays were awarded prizes of the above-mentioned board game. Kohlenklau even penetrated into the vernacular culture of German soldiers: they painted this figure on military equipment in a similar way that American soldiers decorated theirs with pinup girls or “Kilroy Was Here” graffiti.100 This gargantuan operation is reminiscent in some ways of modern marketing techniques such as viral marketing—at the very least in that they managed to permanently inscribe it into the collective imagination (the form of Kohlenklau is still popular in Germany today). In the Protectorate, a competition was organized to award the best Czech translation of the name Kohlenklau, but due to passive resistance by the population it didn’t seem to have met with any success: Do you know who Kohlenklau is? Kohlenklau is that petty thief over there who gets pleasure out of wasting coal, gas, or electrical energy at the expense of the wartime economy. For propaganda purposes we are seeking a suitable Czech name for Kohlenklau. The textile industry economic group in the Central Industry Association is offering these prizes for the best Czech names for Kohlenklau: 1st Prize 6000 K, 2nd Prize 3000 K, 3rd Prize 1500 K, and four further prizes of 500 K. The name they are seeking should be succinct, apt, and funny, and it should express that Kohlenklau is a pest.101

In the oral culture of the Czech lands it was mostly German-speaking residents of Northern Bohemia who told stories about Kohlenklau, and he was often interchanged with spring man there. The folkloric Kohlenklau allegedly walked around everywhere that people were not conserving coal properly, where the stoves were not in good order, and where black smoke was rising from chimneys. This figure, at first intended as only a joke, later became a feared nocturnal demon and a pedagogical bogeyman people used to frighten their children with. For example, in Dvůr Králové and Hradec Králové, parents told disobedient tykes that if they misbehaved Kohlenklau would carry them away in his huge sack. In Jablonec nad Nisou at the beginning of the war a certain elderly German-speaking woman complained that she was very afraid of Kohlenklau, and she asked all her neighbors who he really and truly was, and whether the phantom was real.102 For Czech-speaking citizens,

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Kohlenklau was more of a pop-cultural figure, even though they, too, were often aware of his connection with spring man: [Spring man] He mucked around and pranked the occupants, and was untouchable because he jumped on springs. His predecessor during the wartime occupation was “Kohlenklau,” who stole coal.103

In a similar manner, as with various other types of urban phantoms, it is also appropriate to understand the essential unity of spring man—that is, the idea that he was one, single phantom figure. Period storytellers and their audiences naturally often noticed the alleged appearance of spring man described in various ways, acting with various motivations, and appearing in various places. So long as it did not diminish the credibility of these tales, they often chose a different strategy—a certain “multiplication” of the phantom’s appearances. A great number of the documented narrations therefore speak of “spring men” in the plural. The following recollection, which describes spring men through the use of the motif of jumping phosphorescent figures, can serve as an example: Grandmother told me that during the war spring men were running riot in Chabařovice (Karbitz). Their escapades involved painting ribs on tight black clothing and jumping around the graves in the Chabařovice cemetery at night.104

In this period there were likewise native categories, or specific folk models created that distinguished between “good” and “bad” spring men: They say that spring man appeared regularly at Rokoska in Prague. At some place there he jumped over a villa and strangled a German shepherd that had worried him. People were afraid of him, because this spring man was wicked and dangerous, he frightened people, and beat and robbed them. By contrast with him, they say that there were also good spring men who only harmed the occupiers and collaborators. One rumor had it that they were agents (probably parachutists) from the Allied armies, but others said they were domestic resistance fighters or some kind of pranksters.105

HERO OR CRIMINAL? SPRING MAN’S ACTIVITIES AND MOTIVATIONS The presence of the mysterious phantom, whether he was called spring man, phosphorous man, or some other name, aroused the collective need to explain the motivation for his disconcerting invasion into the public space. In that period, spring man was usually perceived as an inherently ambivalent being.

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Like attempts at distinguishing spring man from other urban phantoms, his interpretation as a resistance worker is rather artificial and typical for a scholarly approach (unless it’s a locally specific version). This approach enjoys its greatest support only in postwar sources of a literary nature—especially in secondary pop-culture adaptations. The anti-fascist interpretation was homogenized in the Czech scholarship by Miloš J. Pulec: Tales about spring man supported the fighting spirit of the anti-fascist line, led to ridiculing the occupiers, discouraged those who were unauthorized from wandering into areas with partisan operations going on, covered sabotages, and directly enabled them. .  .  .  It is possible to say that in the same way that the legends about Kozina and Lomikar, Kubát, or Mr. Tunkl are anti-feudal legends, the traditions of spring man represent anti-fascist storytelling. This is precisely why the stories about spring man deserve the special attention of folklorists as a folk tradition that connects extravagant fantasy with the concrete mission of the anti-fascist resistance movement.106

Modern scholarship is a good deal more skeptical toward the interpretation of rumors and anecdotes as a manifestation of resistance movements, or even— at minimum—a form of passive resistance. Besides the psychologizing explanations that interpret the rumor mill (šeptanda) as a relief from frustration and a symbolic form of aggression against the hated repressive regime,107 more recent approaches prefer to emphasize the significance of these narratives for the maintenance of social conformity and resignation to the repressive power apparatus. According to contemporary researchers, rumors and legends thus serve primarily to help the victims of repression and persecution to better bear their suffering. According to alternative explanations, they compensate for the feeling of guilt from a lack of real action; in both cases, however, spring man is implicated with a definitive “domestication” of the repressive regime, and rather than an instrument of resistance he becomes one of social resignation.108 According to Werner Herzog, it is necessary to perceive narratives of this type mainly as a substitute for (and not at all as a manifestation of) courage and personal responsibility.109 As research into wartime folklore in Norway also demonstrates, illegal publications, posters, and graffiti in public spaces had a much greater influence on inspiring resistance activities during World War II than rumors, legends and anecdotes; this is because the former visual phenomena made it crystal clear that the public space did not only belong to the occupiers but also to the people who dared to take a stand against them.110 It is not that spring man was entirely missing in action as a resistance fighter in period oral performances, but that these were not among the dominant tropes. As an example, we can take this local narrative from Louňovice

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near Prague, where during the war spring man was perceived rather as a liason with partisans who were hiding in the Křivoklát forests. He allegedly hid himself near a local pond; his jumping springs were supplied by a local citizen, the “eternal student” Vojtěch Truxa, who was getting them from the car-parts company Valášek.111 Children in Jičín region then were talking about spring man as an agent of the foreign resistance at the end of the war: They were telling rumors about spring man toward the end of the war, and it was assumed that he was a parachutist sent from Great Britain who, with the help of this technology, was able to easily elude his pursuers. I was born in Jičín in 1933, but I lived in Podhradí during the war where the adults were recounting these stories, and of course we children were also taking them in. I was 9–10 years old at that time. As children, we considered spring man to be a person who was helpful to us Czechs, even though in a child’s mind he was somewhat supernatural, but he didn’t harm us. Later, I didn’t hear any more rumors about spring man.112

The resistance interpretation of spring man began to appear, as is clear in the above-mentioned tales, mostly toward the very end of the war as one of the many possibilities that could be attributed to spring man’s motivations; one that, however, mostly did not exclude the danger he posed at the same time to the Czech civilian population. Spring man’s resistance activity was additionally integrated into social practices that were inspired by these stories—even more than in the orally transmitted tales themselves. This mainly took the form of writing comical and satirical graffiti on walls with chalk, and—only exceptionally—with paint. However, spring man also functioned as an “excuse” that served as a semiserious cover for various activities, starting with arriving late to work or coming home late and ranging all the way to theft or coming up short of cash: People put the blame for every little rip-off on spring man. Here in Pilsen there was a lot of that.113

In connection with these petty criminal acts there also appear stories about bolder resistance activities performed by spring man, such as writing anti-Nazi graffiti on public or hard-to-access places and other provocations aimed against the occupying power, such as theft of (military) material and acts of sabotage; however, there are not any written or visual sources available now from this period.114 One of these graffiti inscriptions allegedly appeared in Pardubice, which was one of the “epicenters” of the spring man panic during World War II. This inscription referred to the name of a local factory in a humorous way:

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Pit-a-pat, tomorrow I’m going to Prokopka.115

The first practices mentioned above (comical graffiti, petty acts of “civil disobedience”) could have had a certain level of support in the period social milieu. The more radical ones (sabotage, attacks on police or military units) are probably narrative fictions, which are secondarily supported by the existence of the less extreme acts. Detailed descriptions of spring man’s activities (including the acts of resistance) were often additionally put forward in the spirit of a certain more or less self-consciously ironic distancing. This was especially manifest in performances by adults. With children and youths, who were without a doubt the overwhelming majority of the bearers of Protectorate-era “traditions” of spring man, attitudes in the range that spanned from entertained fascination to full identification with the reality of this figure predominated.116 It is also highly likely that children and youths were the main authors of spring man graffiti in public spaces.117 A great majority of the documented inscriptions additionally did not have a serious tone, such as this famous one: “Tomorrow I’ll be haunting the employment office. Spring man,” which appeared written in large letters on the wooden fence at the final stop of Tram No. 3 in Prague quarter of Kobylisy.118 People who were involved with genuine anti-Nazi resistance activities or who were truly persecuted by the Nazi repressive apparatus perceived spring man as entirely fictional, though he was entertaining. An example that testifies to this can be found in the recollections of Ludmila Sinkulová (1910–1988), who had been a left-oriented student of medicine before the war, and who had to hide herself under a fictive identity owing to her prewar political activities during the Protectorate period. In her interpretation, spring man is an entirely fictitious and primarily comic figure. This is rendered in three-dimensional detail under the heading “Spring man” in her memoirs: Spring man—a made-up little character, a kind of wire doll with long legs in which he had strong coiled springs. When he jumped, he was carried where he wanted to go unnaturally far and wide by spring-loaded lower limbs. He was practically invisible, he moved around in the world freely, he conducted sabotage operations in military manufacturing and everywhere else the occupiers were most vulnerable. He also pulled some rough pranks on the Nazis, but on the other hand he helped the oppressed and, above all else, he entertained them. A kind of modern invisible Eulenspiegel. His main headquarters was in Bohemia, especially in Prague, where thousands of stories about him circulated. They were told as jokes, and everyone added their own twists to them.119

In the preserved narrations there also appear—roughly as often as descriptions of spring man’s alleged resistance activities—explanations of the use and significance of tales about spring man as verbal “smoke screens” used by

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the real resistance to confuse unsuspecting civilians, or sometimes also the occupying power. But, of course, this too is to a great extent metafolklore; that is, a product of collective interpretations. The following reflections of a narrator who had acted as a tax collector in the area of Ledeč nad Sázavou is an example: It was actually just a superstition, right? A topic of interest. Who the hell knows what it was? That he had springs attached to his feet. But where did this superstition come from? No one knows. Maybe it was something against the Germans, to mentally spook or depress them.120

This theory is then explicitly confirmed by another informant from the same region: That was on account of the partisans, so that people would be afraid and stay out of the forests.121

Then this narration from Prague interprets the stories about spring man entirely explicitly as something used by the anti-Nazi resistance to sabotage the military industry: What it was with that spring man; well, that was generally known during the occupation. It was something like a razor man who robs people. Our people knew quite well that he didn’t exist, that someone made it up to keep women away from the night shifts. Our women probably knew that as well, you see, but it was this kind of mystical being so the women were still terrified by it, you know, the kinds who would have otherwise gone to work. So, if someone said, for example, that he had attacked Mrs. So-and-so from this or that number at Řipská Street—there was no power on earth that would get them outside after that.122

A few (not very many) narrations connect the figure of spring man with even more radical actions by the anti-Nazi resistance: “Spring man” was a figure that the resistance fighters and ordinary people played as a role. Most often there were rumors circulating that he had attacked someone or that he had again foiled some plan. Most frequently the story went around that he has springs on his feet that are attached to knee-high boots. He was supposed to have had several strange gadgets, mainly explosives. Even before Heydrich’s assassination, he specialized in trains and at various locations he cut through the tracks, or simply blew them up sky high. Later he was more likely to attack groups and sabotage convoys. In those horrible times people believed in all sorts of things. For small children “spring man” was probably mostly a spook, for us he was a vandal, and here and there someone signed his

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name on a wall. We were living on Lucemburská street in Vinohrady [Prague] and spring man’s signature appeared twice during the war on our block alone.123

More fantastical stories about all the places where spring man frightened or attacked gendarme detachments or units of the Protectorate government’s armed forces, or sometimes fled before the Gestapo, Wehrmacht units, or even the Nazi secret SD services, were generally limited to the large cities, particularly Prague: At the Ohrada in Žižkov he attacked SS men, and elsewhere he frightened the Wehrmacht squad walking their beat or the government troops.124 The most fantastical stories tend to be colored with a Fortean, “paranormal” tinge, or perhaps they tie into journalistic discourse from the last two decades of the twentieth century. Their veracity can be rather problematic: Mrs. Miluše Svobodová, a former archival worker, was a witness to how divisions of the Sicherheitsdienst organized hunts for spring man in Libeň, but in vain. “The great effort at rounding up spring man was also playing out in Žižkov in Prague,” recollects Jiří Klinger from Kobylisy. “An acquaintance of mine, the late Josef Špiling, caught a glimpse of him with his own eyes.” He was returning home from work late one evening, walking down Husitská Street, when some German soldiers stopped him. The area around today’s Tachovské Square was closed, and they say spring man had been seen around there. Mr. Špiling didn’t feel like walking around the blocked-off section so he tried a shortcut. However, at the end of the street he ran into the soldiers again. They looked very strange. They were standing next to a wall like statues and dogs were sitting by their feet as if they were afraid of something. Suddenly, out of the silence there was the sudden sound of a train, and when the wagons began to pass between the crossing-gates a black shadow emerged. At that moment, the soldiers began shooting their submachine guns. The figure took off from the ground, jumped over the train that was passing by, and with giant leaps it disappeared into the darkness of the Žižkov hill. The slow-moving train prevented the soldiers from running after him. This jumping “something” had a powerful effect on Mr. Špiling, and the episode strongly unsettled him.125

With tales of this type, it is difficult to analytically distinguish period testimony from later texts influenced by postwar propaganda, popular culture, or later Fortean paranormal discourse.126 The scarcest of all are narrations about spring man’s active resistance work, which we usually only have through secondhand, or even thirdhand, accounts: My grandfather worked for ČKD [Českomoravská Kolben-Daněk engineering concern] in Prague. During the war, in the winter of 1942 they began to have massive waves of layoffs and they were replacing their workforce according to whatever the collaborationist leadership happened to feel like. Grandfather

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said that spring man himself supported the wave of indignation over the layoffs  by intimidating the collaborationist leaders with his acts. Allegedly, he was supposed to have stolen secret documents and project blueprints from the headquarters in Prague, then he stole an unspecified sum of money and other valuables. No conflict or loss of life took place then. Spring man got into the office by using cables from the roof. They say he didn’t use his springs every day, but only when there was a “bigger” operation, same as weapons, which he preferred not to carry in order to be more discreet.127

The wealth of narrative material documented by the author of this text and his collaborators relating to the era of World War II lacks emphasis on spring man being a resistance fighter. It is rather the ambiguousness of his identity and motivations that were most typical for this phantom. Spring man used to be most frequently described as a mysterious voyeur, sexual aggressor, robber, or thief, and interpretations of him as a resistance worker were fairly marginal in that period. It is therefore necessary to take spring man’s role in the resistance as secondary, and derived to a significant extent from the above-mentioned interpretations. Because if spring man had been primarily understood as a criminal character, and legends of his alleged crimes and misdemeanors kept coming back to period audiences for the tales in new and reinterpreted forms, it is no wonder that the opinion predominated in the period oral culture that the police, gendarmerie, and political powers were mostly helpless to stop him. Spring man’s utterly free agency, transgressing many period social norms, habits, or even laws, thus naturally highlighted the impotence of the authorities who were unable to put a halt to his escapades. And even when people did not identify with many of spring man’s activities (although his complete freedom, particularly in the area of sexual behavior, could entice others to copycat acts), he still became a special example of free agency in a period of unfreedom. From this point, it was only a small step toward the idea that this phantom, who was able to move about entirely freely and without restraint under the conditions of a repressive regime, must have been its enemy. Protectorate-era authorities naturally also ascribed little importance to spring man. As George Ženatý, who drew information from Dr. Jaroslav Ženatý, the chairman of Presidium B of the Czech criminal police and the liaison officer for the Prague Gestapo, as well as a member of the resistance group Blaník, informs us: In the years  1940–1942 not even one of our Prague police districts informed us about the existence of “Spring Man” in their daily reports. This means that rumors of this type could not have been in circulation; and moreover, without any physical evidence it wasn’t possible to create reports about it.128

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Only a minimal number (twenty-one; i.e., one eighth) of the narratives about spring man interpreted in this book show a connection with resistance activities, either directly verbalized in the text or indirectly through commentary by the narrator. Nearly half of these narrations about spring man cast radical doubts upon his resistance activity (and fairly often also his “reality”), as we see in the following recollection: I remember spring man, that was during the war. It was kind of a legend, nothing more than a legend, that here in our region, and not only in Jičínsko, but also in Sobotecko, where I used to live, there was a person moving around who had a tall figure and he had springs on his feet that made him bounce up, and he took giant leaps. And he jumped and was able to go everywhere, and nothing was insurmountable for him. Well, this was more like a legend among the children, but it was also told generally among the people. Some legends were local and disappear after a while, but this one stayed for a good number of years; it was a generally widespread fable, not only in the cities but also in villages. I think that it began during World War II, sometime around 1942–1943 and it continued even after forty-five. And then it just faded away on its own. As I see it, it was one of the most widespread rumors of that era, entirely made up. [Were people afraid of spring man?] Nooo. Yeah, like maybe a few little children, ’cause they were telling them: “Just wait till spring man comes to get you . . . ” Yeah, all right, they were afraid. But for anyone sensible, they just took it as a legend. It was a kind of bogeyman for little children, and it was kind of a joke for the others, a harmless character. [And did spring man fight against the Nazis?] No, not at all. Honestly, if you hadn’t brought up this subject, I would have never in my life remembered.129

Ambiguity in spring man’s motivations was much more typical, and this is probably expressed the most powerfully in the following narration: Well, it was a person who had large springs on his feet and he jumped. Some people were even afraid of him. It didn’t have any deeper meaning; he only showed people how high he can jump.130

Narratives about spring man thus correspond to a general thematic focus on folkloric narrations from the period of World War II, which in the civilian milieu only rarely dwelled on subjects relating to the resistance. Rumors, legends, anecdotes, jokes, and folk songs alike were usually about the burning problems of everyday life in that era (especially provisioning), or sometimes there were xenophobic tales that blamed wartime hardships on innocent social, ethnic, and religious groups—rumors of this type actually represented 65 percent of all documented narratives of this type in the United States during the wartime.131

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So, what were spring man’s main characteristics? Besides the inherent ambivalence of his appearance and motivations, the basic unifying—and sole stable—element present in almost all the documented narrations is his swift movement by means of jumping. This is generally described as unusual, and in most cases a “rational” explanation is provided that claims he does it with the help of springs on his feet, as in the following narration: Where we went to school in Příbramsko they were telling stories at the end of the war that he had extremely strong springs mounted on specially adapted boots, and some even said that he took them from a sofa. He made such amazing jumps that with one leap he could cross five meters, or when he really made a super takeoff he could even jump up onto a roof. When they pursued him, he just jumped up onto the roof and then jumped down to the ground on the other side.132

There were also more “realistic” interpretations of spring man’s dominant trait in concurrent circulation: You know it. It was during the war, there were blackouts and they said that spring man was walking around outside and attacking people. He was a person who was able to run fast and they said that he had wires on his feet and was able to jump with them. I didn’t believe in him, but there were people who did believe in him and were afraid of him. It probably originated with someone who really did attack another person in the dark and the maybe he ran away really quickly and it seemed kind of unusual so a rumor arose that he has springs on his soles. These are the kinds of things that one forgets, about but at that time it was widespread, and people were really frighted and said “Don’t go out, spring man is out there!”133

These rationalizing narrations were fairly common even after the war, just like at the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s in Jičín region, where spring man had been predominantly conceptualized as a pervert who stole women’s clothing: He was amazingly relentless, that spring man, and he was in great shape. He managed to run for a very long time, and so on. When he was running away from someone there was no chance to catch him. They called him spring man because he robbed buildings even on the higher floors: they say he jumped up onto balconies to get the clothes or else he climbed along lightning rods and so on, you know.134

This most important and sole stable characteristic of narratives about spring man, which gave him his predominant name, also fulfilled an important interpretive function in the period oral culture. In its essence, spring man’s

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superhuman jumping was merely an extrapolation of the phantom’s swift disappearance from the place of the crime. Therefore, it was also “believable” that there was usually only one person who caught sight of him (just like all of the other similar phantoms and apparitions in history). Before they managed to bring in other witnesses, the alleged spring man was usually long gone.135 His bizarre locomotive capabilities also helped explain how he was spotted at various locations that were all distant from one another in quick succession, as well as his extremely swift movements. In a certain sense, this was a collective attempt at explaining away the implausibility or even impossibility of spring man’s actions or even his existence as such. The attempt to mask the reality that, owing to social conditions, spring man could not have been responsible for such heroic acts as were attributed to him in the oral culture. NOTES 1. Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 160–63. 2. Anna Křížová, female, born 1890, with her daughter, Louny (Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 163). 3. Jan Luffer, Katalog českých démonologických pověstí (Prague: Academia, 2014), 174–76. On the figure of the water sprite (vodník) in Czech artistic and popular culture, see Pavel Šidák, ”Vodník v české kultuře, zvláště v literature,” Studia Mythologica Slavica 15 (2012): 247–92. 4. Svoboda, male, born 1888, shoemaker, Na Rybníčku 2, Prague (Pulec, “Jak žijí pražské pověsti,” 58). On the influence of the magic lantern, and later of phantasmagoria and other optical apparatuses on the conceptualization of spirits in the broader historical context, see Davies, The Haunted, 187–201. 5. Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 160. 6. B.L., female, born 1942, high-school education, retiree, Kladno (Dotazníkový výzkum Kláry Pirochové, 2008. Private archive of Klára Pirochová, Prague). 7. Linda Dégh, Legend and Belief: Dialectics of a Folklore Genre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 90. 8. Chad Bryant, Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2007), 198–203. 9. Jan Weiss, “Pérový muž,” Národní politika no. 271, October 3, 1943, 3. 10. Štěpán Engel, “Pérový muž,” Svobodný zítřek. Týdeník pro politiku, hospodářství a kulturu 1, no. 2 (1945), 27 September 27, 1945, 16. 11. Ludmila Sinkulová, Byla jsem někdo jiný (Prague: Mladá fronta, 1983), 15. 12. Weiss, “Pérový muž,” 3. 13. Weiss, “Pérový muž,” 3. 14. Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 159–60. 15. František Krpata, “Pérový muž,” Lidové noviny 51, no. 339, December 10, 1943, 1–2.

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16. František Pipka, male, born 1899, Ledeč nad Sázavou (Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 163). 17. S.H., male, born 1978, college-educated, college instructor, Prague. 18. Deník čtyř septimánských chlapců [Diary of Four High School Junior Boys] (1943), p. 63. Private archive of Jaroslava Janáčková, Prague. 19. The informer has been rendered completely anonymous at his own request. On the “Campaign V” see Bryant, Prague in Black, 131–35. 20. Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 160. 21. Vladimír Vondráček, Konec vzpomínání. 1938–1945 (Prague: Avicenum, 1988), 257–58. 22. J.K.M., male, born 1927, high school education, retired, Nymburk. 23. L.H., male, born 1933, college education, electrical and mining engineer, Jirkov (Dotazníkový výzkum Kláry Pirochové, 2008). 24. M.A., female, born 1932, high school education, retired, Pilsen. 25. Luffer, Katalog českých démonologických pověstí, 8. 26. Krpata, “Pérový muž,” 2. 27. Female, born 1935, high school education, retired, Prague. 28. J.H., female, 1934, high school education, retired, Prague. The narration was documented by Lukáš Hares. 29. Josef Königsmark, “Pérový přízrak,” Český deník, November 11, 1943, 9–10. 30. Königsmark, “Pérový přízrak,” 9. 31. Königsmark, “Pérový přízrak,” 10. 32. Königsmark, “Pérový přízrak,” 9. 33. L.S., female, Pilsen. 34. D.Ř., male, born 1932, high school education, retired, Göteborg. 35. Lída Benešová, female, born 1923, Prague 8 (Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 163). 36. Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 160. 37. L.H., male, born 1933, college-educated electrical and mining engineer, Jirkov (Dotazníkový výzkum Kláry Pirochové, 2008). 38. Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 160. 39. F.H., male, born 1935, college education, ministry official, Prague (Dotazníkový výzkum Kláry Pirochové, 2008). 40. Ladislav Vilímek, male, born 1940, historian and archivist, Jihlava, e-mail correspondence from 19 March 2017. 41. Ladislav Vilímek, 2017. 42. L.A., male, born 1955, college-educated, literary historian, Prague. 43. J.L., female, born 1951, high school education, administrative worker— accountant, Kamenice u Konecchlumí; Pavel Kracík, Vyprávění o pérákovi na Jičínsku: Komentované přepisy terénních rozhovorů a jejich folkloristická analýza (Unpublished manuscript, 2017). 44. Vlasta Varhaníková, female, born 1936, Hluboká nad Vltavou (Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 163). 45. This informer was, by his own request, fully anonymized. 46. “Here and there the figure of spring man probably indeed survives even today. It is meant rather as a joke, for it has very little in common with the way stories about

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spring man were told in the period of the Protectorate” (Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 159); “In this way, the folk imagination was exhausted, and when spring man had fulfilled his mission he faded into darkest oblivion, from which even the attempts made after the May uprising [of 1945] could not persistently invoke him” (Pulec, “Jak žijí pražské pověsti,” 57). 47. For more detail, see chapter 4 on spring man as mythologized sexual aggression. 48. R.S., male, born 1984, college-educated, librarian, Černošice. 49. L.R., male, born 1938, high school education, technician, Mělník (Dotazníkový výzkum Kláry Pirochové, 2008). 50. Růžena Vlková, female, born 1900, Čilec u Nymburka (Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 163). 51. A.Š., female, born 1943, high school education, personnel worker and accountant, Prague (Kracík, Vyprávění o pérákovi na Jičínsku). 52. Barbara Masin, Gauntlet: Five Friends, 20,000 Enemy Troops, and the Secret That Could Have Changed the Course of the Cold War (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2006), 135. 53. H.H., female, born 1949, high school education, assistant, Sydney (Dotazníkový výzkum Kláry Pirochové, 2008). 54. J. M., male, born 1940, high school education, retired, Jihlava. 55. J.S., male, 1955, college-educated, office worker, Letonice. From memories of the storyteller’s father. Survey MD 53/30, MD 53 Doprava, Pérák a další záhadné postavy, 2012. 56. X.V., male, born 1950, high school education, Hodice. 57. J.S., male, born 1947, high school education, audiovisual technician, Prague. 58. V.H., female, born 1941, high school education, accountant, Jičín (Kracík: Vyprávění o pérákovi na Jičínsku). 59. J.S., male, born 1947, high school education, audiovisual technician, Prague. 60. This informer was anonymized. The narration was documented on 6 April 2017 in Prague. 61. Alan, Dundes, “On the Psychology of Legend,” in American Folk Legend: A Symposium, ed. Wayland Hand (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 23–24. 62. Axel Olrik, Epische Gesetze der Volkskdichtung (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1908). 63. I.H., male, born 1932, vocational education, cook, Davle (Dotazníkový výzkum Kláry Pirochové, 2008). 64. Ladislav Vilímek, male, born 1940, historian and archivist, Jihlava, e-mail correspondence from 19 March 2017. 65. Alan Dundes, “Metafolklore and Oral Literary Criticism,” Monist 50, No. 44 (1966), 505–16. 66. Jiří Havlíček and Pavel Ryška, “Charakter 3.” Artyčok.tv, December 29, 2014. Accessed on August 16, 2017, artycok.tv/26828/charakter-3-perak. 67. Jindřich Heisler, Z kasemat spánku (Prague: Torst, 1999), 168. 68. J.J., female, born 1930, college-educated, literary historian, Prague. 69. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, 46–47.

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70. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, 47. 71. O.K., female, born 1949, college-educated, Master of Pharmacy, Jičín (Kracík: Vyprávění o pérákovi na Jičínsku). 72. H.V., female, born 1933, elementary school education, retired, Uhlířská Lhota, Týnec nad Labem. Her narration was documented by Jakub Vozáb. In 1949 the local mines for manganese and iron ore (that is: they were not extracting uranium at all) began to specialize in pyrite, and the above-mentioned town of Telčice was demolished to make way for the new mines. 73. Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 160. 74. D.Ř., male, born 1932, high school education, retired, Göteborg, Sweden. 75. D.Ř., male, born 1932, high school education, retired, Göteborg, Sweden. 76. D.Ř., male, born 1932, high school education, retired, Göteborg, Sweden. “Kostra” means “skeleton” in both the Slovak and Czech languages. 77. “Len tak mimochodom,” Gardista, November 18, 1943, 3. 78. “Len tak mimochodom,” 3. 79. “Len tak mimochodom,” 3. 80. “Bratislavský fantom: Fosforový človek,” Kocúr 23, 1943, 275. 81. R.M., male, born 1964, college-educated, journalist, Úvaly. On the panic in Zlín, see chapter 4 of this book on Spring man as an ostensive practice. 82. P.Š., male, born 1971, college-educated, high school teacher, Zlín. 83. Janeček, Černá sanitka: Druhá žeň, 239. 84. R.M., male, born 1964, college-educated, journalist, Úvaly. 85. P.Š, male, born 1971, college-educated, high school teacher, Zlín. 86. Weiss, “Pérový muž”; Krpata, “Pérový muž”; Königsmark, “Pérový přízrak”; Engel, “Pérový muž.” 87. J.D., male, born 1927, high school education, retired, Kouřimsko. Narration documented by Pavel Douša. 88. Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 160. 89. O.Š., female, born 1964, high school education, housewife and mother, Prague. Narration documented by Lukáš Hares. 90. Engel, “Pérový muž.” 91. Miroslav Barták and Ondřej Neff, To je můj případ! (Prague: Novinář, 1989), 75. For comics by Ondřej Neff, see Ondřej Neff, Pérák, český super-hero: Toho dne byla mlha (Prague: Brutal Underground Press, 1989); Ondřej Neff, “Pérák, český super-hero: Toho dne byla mlha, “Crew 1, 1997, 51–58; Crew 2, 1997; 59–66, Crew 3, 1997, pp. 59–66. 92. Jan Callum MacDonald and Jan Kaplan, Prague in the Shadow of the Swastika: A History of the German Occupation 1939–1945 (Prague, Melantrich, 1995), 137. 93. Miloš J. Pulec, “Jak žijí pražské pověsti,” Český lid 46, no. 2 (1959), 57. 94. Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 160. 95. Vladimír Vondráček, Konec vzpomínání. 1938–1945 (Prague: Avicenum, 1988), 257. 96. D.Ř., male, born 1932, high school education, retired, Göteborg. 97. See the international folkloric motif Razorblades in a Waterslide, which is also widespread in Germany, France, and the United States and is one of the most

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widespread rumors in Czech culture since the early 1970s (Janeček, Černá sanitka a jiné děsivé příběhy. Současné pověsti a fámy v České republice (Prague: Plot, 2006), 70–72). The motif of razor blades is used in other, rather Czech types of stories (Janeček, Černá sanitka. Druhá žeň, 32–35). 98. D.Ř., male, born 1932, high school education, retired, Göteborg. 99. D.Ř., male, born 1932, high school education, retired, Göteborg. 100. Lone Sentry Admin: “Marder II Kohlenklau.” Lone Sentry Blog. World War II Photographs, Documents and Research. April 8 2010, accessed August 16, www​ .lonesentry​.com​/blog​/marder​-ii​-kohlenklau​.html. 101. ÚSP, “Víte, kdo je to Kohlenklau?,” Lidové noviny 52, no. 78, March 19, 1944, 4. 102. Jarmila Knauerová, female, born 1910, Jablonec nad Nisou (Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 160). 103. V.K., male, born 1928, retired, Prague (Dotazníkový výzkum Kláry Pirochové, 2008). 104. V.P., male, born 1979, college-educated, art historian, Ústí nad Labem. 105. D.Ř., male, born 1932, high school education, retired, Göteborg. 106. Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 161. 107. Alan Dundes, “Laughter behind the Iron Curtain: A Sample of Rumanian Political Jokes,” Ukrainian Quarterly 27 (1971): 50–59; Stanley Brandes, “Peaceful Protest: Spanish Political Humor in a Time of Crisis,” Western Folklore 36, no. 4 (1977): 331–46. 108. Hans Speier, “Wit and Politics: An Essay on Laughter and Power,”American Journal of Sociology 103, No. 5, (1998): 1395–96; Hans Speier, Force and Folly: Essays on Foreign Affairs and the History of Ideas (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969), 182. 109. Werner Herzog, Dead Funny: Telling Jokes in Hitler´s Germany (New York: Melville House, 2011), 3. 110. Kathleen Stokker, Folklore Fights the Nazis: Humor in Occupied Norway (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 206–14. 111. František Šedivý, male, Louňovice u Říčan, 54 (Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 160). 112. L.L., female, born 1933, college-educated, physician, Prague (Kracík, Vyprávění o pérákovi na Jičínsku). 113. Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 160. 114. Janeček, Černá sanitka: Druhá žeň, 127. 115. B.Š., male, born 1948, college-educated, college instructor, Pardubice. 116. Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 160. 117. Krpata, “Pérový muž.” 118. Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 161. 119. Sinkulová, Byla jsem někdo jiný, 403. 120. František Pipka, male, born 1999, Ledeč nad Sázavou (Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 163). 121. Eduard Doubek, male, retired teacher, Ledeč nad Sázavou (Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 163).

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122. Helena Janišová, female, born 1923, Prague 1 (Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 163). 123. M.Š., male, born 1927, high school education, retired, Černošice. Narration documented by Lukáš Hares. 124. Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 159 125. Ivan Mackerle, “Nepolapitelný Pérák,” Instinkt 1, no. 1 (2002), 64–65 126. The Fortean “paranormal” understanding of spring man emerges from reinterpretations of secondhand data; see, for example Aleš Česal, Záhady staré Prahy (Prague: Levné knihy, 2009), 192–98. 127. S.P., male, 1966, high school education, businessman, Prague. Narration documented by Lukáš Hares. 128. Mike Dash, “Spring-heeled Jack: To Victorian Bugaboo from Suburban Ghost,” in Fortean Studies 3, ed. Steve Moore (1996), 21. 129. M.B., male, born 1928, high school education, economist, Jičín (Kracík, Vyprávění o pérákovi na Jičínsku). 130. I.H., male, born 1932, apprentice training, cook, Davle u Prahy (Dotazníkový výzkum Kláry Pirochové, 2008). 131. Robert H. A. Knapp, “Psychology of Rumor,” Public Opinion Quarterly 8 (1944): 22–27. 132. E.D., female, born 1935, college-educated, housewife, Prague. Narration documented by Jan Pohunek. 133. Z.G., female, born 1923, high school education, retired, Prague. Narration documented by Dagmar Grešlová. 134. O.K., male, born 1945, high school education, welder and tinker, Žeretice— Hradišťko (Kracík, Vyprávění o pérákovi na Jičínsku). 135. Davies, The Haunted, 13.

Chapter Two

Phantoms of the Industrial Age The Cultural Evolution of Spring Man

The figure of spring man appears immediately after World War I in the Czech collective memory (or, more specifically, in communicative memory, or verbal folklore such as legends and rumors). This assignment of this timing is not in any way coincidental—it is connected with broader cultural processes of this period, mainly with the great many foreign parallels of this folkloric figure that could be found at the time. The literary historian Karel Krejčí had already drawn attention to international aspects of the Czech figure of spring man at the beginning of the 1970s, even though he had he had restricted the incidence of Czech storytelling about the figure to only the era of World War II—and of the foreign versions of the tales to only the period of World War I: Did this specter arise in the overwrought fantasies of Praguers during Hitler’s occupation? I heard that an entirely analogous legend was circulating in one southern Russian city in the period of World War I, when the approaching front induced a similar psychosis. Maybe someone imported the legend and the fantastic figure to Prague at a time when the city was experiencing a suitable psychological setting and it quickly made itself at home, only to just as quickly disappear—and it will probably rear its head somewhere else again.1

However, narratives about spring man are far older than this. This, in all likelihood, is “merely” a regional variant of an international narrative complex about a mysterious jumping phantom that was first noticed in the 1830s in Great Britain.2 It is thus not something that that is specifically and peculiarly a product of Czech culture, but a modified and globalized cultural import from abroad that probably reached the Czech lands by means of oral transmission.3

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SPRING MAN’S PREDECESSORS: SPRING-HEELED JACK AND THE PROWLING GHOSTS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY The popular concept of a mysterious jumping figure with an ambiguous identity, most often called Spring-heeled Jack, appears in the suburbs around London in January 1838 as a result of a combination of several social and cultural factors. The most significant of them were the tradition of orally transmitted rural demonological belief legends, radically reinterpreted in the period of industrialization and urbanization, and period rumors that reflected various social tensions connected with these broader historical processes. Similarly, as with the later phenomenon of the Czech spring man, not only “mere” texts, but also interlinked cultural practices played a role in the phenomenon of the Victorian Spring-heeled Jack. The first was informal festivities where people watched and followed real “prowling ghosts” on the suburban streets. This activity was mainly popular among young male manual laborers (which makes it a kind of vernacular or “proletarian” parallel to the later and more sophisticated phenomenon of middle-class salon spiritualism and occultism). The second, related, practice was done by people pretending to be the above-mentioned ghosts and apparitions (who most often went out with the goal of having a lark, frightening gullible people, or sexually assaulting lone women). Spring-heeled Jack was the most significant representative of this unique and tremendously popular (and now half-forgotten) cultural phenomenon. He represented a specific category of the period’s vernacular culture, with poetics and aesthetics mostly independent from the previous Gothic novels or the later literary ghost stories and occult and spiritualist literature.4 Prowling ghosts were one of the two ideal types of cultural understanding of ghosts in the nineteenth century, a phenomenon that was at first popular, then suburban, and finally became part of the proletarian culture. These ghosts were drawing upon vernacular practices with a tradition that can be documented as far back as the seventeenth century that usually featured the emergence of apparitions (usually people in costumes) into public spaces. The second ideal type of the “modern” ghost of the nineteenth century was the literary ghost, which, by contrast, was associated with the intimate environment of the household and salons; a phenomenon of elite and later of bourgeois culture, with a poetics and esthetics drawn from Gothic novels and later “scientific” spiritism and occultism (which are easier for us to appreciate today, for many reasons).5 Prowling ghosts, unlike the more intimately situated literary phantoms, are inherently connected with the public space, and starting in the second half of the eighteenth century they appeared in just about every English city as a

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feature of the specific culture of the manually laboring classes, and later in the proletarian milieu. They enjoyed their heyday around the mid-nineteenth century. One of the prowling ghosts’ most distinctive habits was their constant movement and “prowling” for unsuspecting passersby around the outskirts of large cities (which gave rise to their name and thus distinguishes them from the more static literary phantoms that were bound to specific sites). Period interpretations did not consider them to be spectral apparitions, but real masked persons (often aristocrats, who were behaving in this way because of a bet, or local ruffians who attacked women), combined with certain “supernatural” qualities, most often the ability to take inhuman jumps, shining garments, invulnerability to bullets, or the ability to breathe fire, all of which at the time were “rationally” explicable through the use of various inventions or technological innovations. The appearance of these phantoms, whether merely in narrative rumors and legends or in the form of activities by pranksters and imitators who went out marauding in disguises inspired by the narratives, often culminated in a “ghost panic.” However, this term can be somewhat misleading because it is constructed “from above” in the elite culture or sometimes by journalists; in this it displays certain parallels with the modern concept of a moral panic.6 In its essence, it was an informal mass encounter assembled for the purpose of collectively sniffing out and hunting down the prowling ghosts, who were usually young male manual laborers. For them, these encounters predominantly represented a kind of semi-spontaneous festivity, a cheap and popular form of urban entertainment. For the middle classes and their press, the ghost panic represented an entertaining spectacle as well as an opportunity for moralizing. This socially clearly defined cluster of folkloric narratives and cultural practices soon became welcome sources of inspiration for newly emerging genres of popular news reporting and mass-produced culture—especially the Victorian penny-dreadful books and popular theater performances.7 The prowling phantoms as a sui generis phenomenon were only rediscovered by historical scholars fairly recently. This is because the interest in historiography about the issue of revenants had traditionally focused on hauntings in the spheres of learned and elite culture, which was available to their analysis through written and iconographic sources, while the ephemeral manifestations of the cultures of manually laboring classes was passed over. And folklore studies in research into the “supernatural” put the main accent on rural or traditional folk culture, accessible to analysis through sources of an oral nature, usually categorized into the folkloric genres of legends—and for a long time they passed over urban phenomena. Phantoms connected with the proletarian culture of industrialized cities therefore represent a doubly strange “revenant discourse” that stands both outside of the educated/elite culture as well as the folk culture. Distinct from the scholarly conceptualizations of the

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afterworld, the elitist aristocratic and bourgeois spiritism and occultism, and the archaic rural demonical beings of folk culture alike, these “working-class spooks” represent a relatively neglected cultural phenomenon of a syncretic nature that straddles the boundaries of verbal folklore, cultural practices, and public spectacles, and which is most interesting owing to its liminal positioning between vernacular and popular culture. The mysterious figure of Spring-heeled Jack, the most interesting of these prowling ghosts, whose moniker was borrowed from the generic Victorian name for a street pickpocket,8 was thus the locus of a fairly complicated crystallization of the above-mentioned cultural phenomena, and he gave rise to one of the first ambivalent heroes of modern popular culture. Spring-heeled Jack originated primarily as a product of the period’s sensation-hungry journalism, which reacted to a wave of rumors about the activities of one of the prowling ghosts who had allegedly rampaged through suburbs of London and nearby villages at the end of 1837 and beginning of 1838. He was launched into his greatest fame by a letter to the mayor of London, sent by an anonymous citizen from the suburb of Peckham. It was published in The Times on 9 January 1838 and warned about upcoming attacks by one of the (for the time being still anonymous) prowling ghosts. The perpetrator of these crimes was supposed to be a person of high-born origin who allegedly made a bet about marauding in the suburbs disguised as a ghost, bear, and devil. The authorities at that time took a very reserved attitude toward the entire affair; however, this item of news offered an attractive sensation to journalists. The letter from January 1838 therefore inspired a great number of further media reports about Spring-heeled Jack that ranged from fabrications in the newspapers to sensation-seeking journalism and even to attempts at serious investigations into the origin of the whole thing. The journalistic coverage of the Spring-heeled Jack cases from the beginning of 1838—combined with the rumors—inspired various persons to commit more or less serious attacks, mainly on young women, and often with a sexual subtext. The best-known case is of eighteen-year-old Jane Alsop, who was assaulted at the entrance to her parents’ home on 19 February 1838 by an attacker with a helmet on his head and a long black cape, under which he was wearing tight white clothing made from waxed canvas. The man introduced himself as a police officer who was trying to capture the feared Spring-heeled Jack nearby, and he asked the girl to bring him a light. Miss Alsop came out of her home at his invitation with a candle, and then the man spat blue fire on her and with hands equipped with sharp iron claws he began to tear her dress. The girl, still pursued by the assailant, ran to the doors, where she was rescued by members of her family who were able to pull her inside in time; the mysterious assailant then fled. Another victim was Lucy Scales, who was attacked on the street on 28 February 1838.9 In both cases, the police did not manage to apprehend the

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real culprit, even though a number of suspects were rounded up during the investigations, and the guilty party or parties among them probably had these attacks on their conscience. Spring-heeled Jack was described in the oral tradition, just like the later Czech spring man, in many diverse forms: from a “ghost” in a white shroud through a dark figure with shining eyes, an apparition in iron or bronze medieval armor (referring to traditional forms of depicting ghosts in period theatrical productions), a demonic animal (most often a bear, bull, horse, or baboon), a horned figure reminiscent of the devil, and even a “steampunk” phantom in white clothing with a helmet on his head who spits fire.10 It is precisely the last form that made it into the Scotland Yard’s official investigative records of the attack on Jane Alsop and which later became iconic for the character’s contemporary pop-cultural treatments.11 Other period witnesses then added shining eyes, huge ears, and invulnerability to bullets to descriptions. The period pop-culture image of Spring-heeled Jack was closer to its folklore origins—it ranged from a black-clad phantom in a cape with springs hidden in his soles to a figure wearing red with a lion’s mane, horns, iron claws, hooves, and fiery breath. In early treatments, the demonic aspect predominated, but after 1870 this was gradually tamed down and humanized into the figure of a masked avenger.12 However, just as with the Czech spring man, the principal and most stable element of all the narratives about Spring-heeled Jack was his unusual jumping, generally explained as enabled by jumping boots with steel springs or rubber soles. Other frequent aspects of the description of the jumping phantom were gloves equipped with iron claws and glowing rib bones painted with phosphorescent paint.13 The character of Spring-heeled Jack, which intertwined the Victorian (sub) urban folklore and products of popular culture, is comparable with the murderous barber Sweeney Todd from the same period, or the later Jack the Ripper.14 However, his popularity was longer-lasting and in the period without a doubt more widespread than the fame of the first two figures. This was caused by two factors. The first was that Spring-heeled Jack had a radically ambivalent identity and motivations, which ranged from demonic being to ghost, sexual aggressor, robber, thief, and even sometimes a mysterious Robin Hood–type figure who was a masked aristocrat protecting the poor and weak; in this, he was radically different from the above-mentioned phantoms, whose identity and motivations were shallowly drawn in comparison. The second factor was his constant dynamic “jumping across” the boundaries between folklore and popular culture, or rather between orally transmitted communicative memory and tabloid journalism, paraliterature, and popular dramas. This dynamic caused the uncommonly long period of popularity for this narrative cycle in Great Britain, which dates from 1838 to 1877. After the events in London in 1838 a great number of further local panics over Spring-heeled Jack broke

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out, of which the most significant examples took place in 1872 in Peckham, in 1873 in  Sheffield, and in 1877 in the British Army’s large barracks in Aldershot. At the same time, it’s not at all coincidental that Spring-heeled Jack’s greatest heyday is identical with the greatest flourishing of penny dreadful novels, which began to be published in the 1830s, peaked in the 1850s, and began to decline around 1870. According to Karl Bell, the attacks attributed to this phantom are also a manifestation of a broader “cultural violence” that, besides in the popular culture, was also manifesting itself in many other cultural forms among the working classes of that era.15 A wide range of works was produced using the motif of the jumping phantom in various genres, which spread his celebrity into the entire English-speaking world. And after 1904, when the last panic of this type had broken out in Liverpool, his stories even reached the European continent.16 This pop-cultural mythology then retroactively influenced the vernacular culture—after the nineteenth century it inspired many pranksters and jokers as well as sexual aggressors who terrified innocent people in Spring-heeled Jack costumes. In the form of a Kinderschreck, a children’s bogeyman, he lived on in England’s industrial cities like Sheffield well into the twentieth century.17 However, an amalgam of pop-cultural and folkloric mythology about the elusive apparition jumping on steel springs proved appealing to people’s imaginations elsewhere as well—primarily in other Anglo-Saxon countries, where this character became ever more popular over the course of the twentieth century in popular culture. Among the first modern pop-cultural treatments of this topic is the thriller film by Victor M. Gover, The Curse of the Wraydons from 1946, which was based on the theme of a theater production of the same name.18 However, a livelier interest in Spring-heeled Jack would only reawaken in the last decades of the century. In more recent works, such as the fantastical novel The Anubis Gates (1983) by Tim Powers, or the children’s book Spring-heeled Jack: A Story of Bravery and Evil by Philip Pullman from 1989, he is most frequently reinterpreted as a visitor from space, a time traveler from the future, or a superhero.19 Since the beginning of the new millennium, Spring-heeled Jack has been stereotypically associated with the distinctive steampunk movement, which was originally a literary genre that has become more of an aesthetic style over time; a movement which also engages in a search for a “new” British identity in a period of globalization. In many contexts today, Spring-heeled Jack is becoming the “face” and “symbol” of steampunk itself.20 Some works that significantly influenced this role have been the novel series from the alternative “Victorian” past Burton & Swinburne by Mark Hodder, especially the first volume The Strange Affair of Spring-heeled Jack from 2010.21 Spring-heeled Jack has enjoyed similar popularity in Fortean discourses about ghosts, UFOs, and paranormal or “cryptoscientific” phenomena, where he appeared slightly earlier than in the fantasy and children’s literature, at the

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end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s.22 It is also worth mentioning that Spring-heeled Jack showed up in the title of an anthology of English legends put together by the folklorists Jennifer B. Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson titled The Lore of the Land: A Guide to England´s Legends, from Spring-heeled Jack to the Witches of Warboys. Thus, the jumping phantom today represents a symbol of the English folkloric tradition as a whole; traditions not only associated with a supposedly idyllic and timeless rural culture as on the Continent, but the period of the British Empire’s greatest prestige, associated with industrialization, urbanism, and colonialism.23 At the global level, the figure of Spring-heeled Jack reflects processes of urbanization, nationalization, and the commercialization of vernacular cultures and their gradual hybridization through new forms of mass-distributed popular culture.24 The more distant echoes of the Spring-heeled Jack “myth” could then appear as the sundry jumping phantoms that periodically appear in rumors and legends of various cultures—often in the former British colonies. Black Flash can be considered an example of this in 1938. This figure allegedly appeared in Provincetown, Massachusetts; and then there is the Baltimore Phantom that appeared in Maryland in 1951, and the mysterious jumping Kaala Bandar aka Monkey Man or Monkey Monster from Delhi, where there was a widespread panic in the metropolis in mid-May 2001.25 A unique variant form of these phantoms are the jumping apparitions from even more culturally distant regions, such as the penyamun in contemporary eastern Indonesia. Rumors about this dangerous phantom who is equipped with flying shoes emerge from the local “traditional” folklore about skull hunters, but today—similarly as in most of the contemporary spring man narrations found across the world—it seems to reflect social tensions associated with a fear of foreigners who bring the increasingly powerful agency of the state administrative apparatus, globalizing economy, and growing tourism along with them.26 These distant echoes of the narratives about Spring-heeled Jack therefore now represent a unique amalgam of elements from local vernacular cultures, mass cultures promoted by the modern state, and reflections of global popular culture which exists in a particular dynamic discourse termed “public culture” by the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai.27 However, it was not the primarily pop-cultural form of Spring-heeled Jack that spread his fame so far from the territory of Great Britain. In the first decades of the twentieth century, in connection with population movements and with social changes brought about by the First World War, the tales inspired by this originally English urban phantom then make their appearance in several places in the Eastern and Central Europe.

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SPRING MAN’S FELLOW TRAVELERS: RUSSIAN POPRYGUNCHIKI OF THE 1920S. Besides the Czech lands, the most significant cultural space where locally particular versions of the narrative complex about Spring-heeled Jack arose in Europe was in Russia. In the Russian metropoles of St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Odessa these stories were widespread among the masses in the 1920s, which was the same period as their heyday in the Czech lands.28 The Russian versions of these narratives are mainly interesting as examples of an extensive diffusion of the oral texts into social practice. A specific historicism and “matter-of-factness” that overshadows the folkloric nature of this phenomenon was also typical for the Russian milieu. In almost all of the recorded cases, the alleged Russian “spring men” were associated both in period oral storytelling as well as in popular culture with the marauding of real criminals who only exploited the legends and rumors about jumping phantoms to intimidate their victims. However, only a negligible percent of these alleged practices can be authenticated with good-quality sources, and thus to a significant extent they remain the subject of speculation—and of folklore.29 One exception to this is represented by the practices of the infamous criminal gang led by Ivan Balgauzen called Vanyek zhivoy trup (Vanyek Living Corpse).30 In the years 1918–1920, this gang, which, besides the more general designation of poprygunchiki (usually translated as “leapers” in English) was also called “Zhivye pokoyniki” (“Living Corpses”) made itself famous by exploiting rumors about jumping phantoms to cover their criminal activities. In the feverish period of riots, rampant criminality, and the related social anomie after the Russian Revolution in 1917, the members of this gang were robbing superstitious nocturnal pedestrians in St. Petersburg (during this period, the city was called Petrograd). Balgauzen’s gang was not one of the largest in this period (the number of members varied between five and twenty), nor was it among the most famous or the most brutal criminal organizations, but it wrote its name in Russian history and popular culture thanks to its knack for applying the local folklore to its work.31 Balgauzen’s crew mainly operated in the area of the city cemeteries—Smolensky, Volkovskoe, and Ochtensky—and near the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, where they assaulted and robbed their terrified victims. Their main targets were clearly other muggers and the local impoverished population. In the case of the former, the gang exploited the petty criminals’ superstitiousness to lay hold of goods that they had already stolen; their other potential victims were the credulous countrypeople who went in to visit the city graveyards. According to the historian Andrei Dimitriyevich Konstantinov, legends and rumors about jumping phantoms had already been circulating in  St. Petersburg for

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several years before the 1917 revolution; Balgauzen was thus drawing inspiration from them to optimize his criminal activities.32 During the revolution, the leader of the gang was “expropriating” the apartments of wealthy St. Petersburg citizens in a naval uniform, which lent him a certain authority and immunity from reprisals. Later—allegedly with the help of his accomplice, the dipsomaniac tinker Demidov—it was said that he created bouncing springs that he attached to the soles of his shoes on the basis of local rumors being told about “spring men.” With their assistance, he then began to burglarize apartments on higher stories. The existence of this apparatus is, as in all the other European stories of this type, extremely difficult to verify. Some of the other “spring man” accessories that the gang also allegedly used are more probable—clothing and masks painted with phosphorescent paint, blackened faces, and especially stilts that produced the impression of superhuman height. The chilling appearance of these thugs was complemented by their white dead man’s shrouds, which Balgauzen made with help from his young partner Maria Polevaya, who was also known as Solna Manka and who allegedly led most of the gang’s activities. Balgauzen’s gang primarily relied on the psychological factor of fear for the successful management of their criminal escapades. It is said that they resorted to violence fairly infrequently (roughly in one out of ten cases), so only two dead victims were ascribed to acts committed by Balgauzen himself by 1920. Thanks to this, he evaded the attention of the militia until the time when he allegedly had racked up more than one hundred attacks. The deeds of the St. Petersburg “spring men” were further glorified in numerous rumors and legends that were circulating in the city. In March 1920 the gang was therefore apprehended and dispersed by agents of the militia disguised as the gang’s typical victims; that is, they looked like careless but wealthy-looking rustics. As period photographs and other sources illustrate, the fame and bloodcurdling reputation of Balgauzen’s gang was radically enhanced by period rumors and legends. In reality, this was more or less a gang of children and adolescents, because it was actually easier for children and youths to terrify passersby on stilts. On the other hand, the criminal activity of the St. Petersburg “spring men” was fairly successful; in their main hideaway on Malookhtinskiy Prospekt No. 7 the militia confiscated 97 fur coats, 127 suits, and 37 gold rings. The leader of the gang, Ivan Balgauzen, and his right hand, the tinker Demidov, were executed, and the remaining members of the gang were sentenced to work camps. According to a popular Russian literary myth, after serving her sentence Maria Polevaya returned to St. Petersburg (or rather Leningrad), where she then made her living as an upright and respectable tram driver.33 The legendary St. Petersburg “spring men” in the 1920s allegedly inspired imitators in other parts of Russia, or rather the Soviet Union. The most prominent were the southern Russian phantoms who were rampant in the

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Figure 2.1. The St. Petersburg gang  Zhivye  pokoyniki  (Living Corpses), known to the residents of St. Petersburg as poprygunchiki (leapers), 1920. Museum of the History of Militia, Cultural Center of the General Headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation, 2017. Photo by Nadyezdha Atanesyanova, 2017.

cosmopolitan port city of Odessa (which is now part of Ukraine) between 1920 and 1922. A gang with a similar modus operandi was also said to be running wild in 1925 in Moscow in the area of the Vagankovskoye Cemetery. By contrast with their predecessors in St. Petersburg, this gang was famous for its cruelty, and because of the large number of victims it was very quickly eradicated by the militia. However, the later incarnations of Russian jumping phantoms that appeared during World War II became even more famous. In this period, during which the Czech spring man also enjoyed the height of his fame, similar rumors were circulating in the besieged city of Leningrad. Here, the “spring men” allegedly specialized in stealing ration cards, and because of the conditions of martial law, they were mercilessly shot on the site of the crime. However, by far the best-known return of the Russian “spring men” took place in Moscow in the fall of 1941. The rumors of jumping phantoms from that time were later interpreted as a fabrication of the Nazi secret service Abwehr, with the aim of demoralizing the local population during the Great Patriotic War. Even here there were allegedly—similarly as there had been two decades ago in St. Petersburg—criminals who were apprehended thanks to sting operations

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Figure 2.2. Reconstruction of the disguises used by the St. Petersburg gang “Living Corpses,”  1920. Museum of the History of Militia, Cultural Center of the General Headquarters of the Ministry of the Interior, St. Petersburg, Russian Federation. Photo by Nadyezhda Atanesyanova, 2017.

by secret militia agents who passed themselves off as attractively wealthy targets.34

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In the case of the Russian incarnations of the migratory legend of Spring-heeled Jack, it is very difficult for researchers to distinguish between isolated criminal activities of this type and period urban folklore which was spreading into the Russian countryside. The dominant “realistic” nature of these tales, which consider the jumping phantoms to be real criminals who were merely exploiting urban folklore, was then supplemented in the rural milieu with versions of the stories that considered the poprygunchiki to be actual living corpses or phantoms. The peculiar dialectic of these explanatory discourses—the realistic criminal stories of the materialistic “Soviet man” of the Russian metropoles contrasting with the ghost stories and belief legends about living corpses of the superstitious Russian villager—represent an interesting position, which we significantly lose sight of with the Czech spring man. In both of these positions—the legendary criminals and the supernatural characters of the ghost stories—the poprygunchiki live on in contemporary Russian folklore, primarily in the lore of children and in ghost stories, to this day. Today, the Russian phantoms called poprygunchiki are—similarly to the Czech spring man and his British predecessor Spring-heeled Jack—an integral part of Russian popular and artistic culture. We can find the oldest literary reflection of these rumors in Russia in the second act of the 1861 comedy Balzaminov’s Marriage by the Russian playwright Alexander Nikolayevich Ostrovsky. This text probably represents the oldest Continental evidence for this originally British migratory legend: Beauty: While maintaining all due caution, it is necessary to say that a band of robbers has appeared. Belotelov: Where do they come from? Beauty: People say they’re from the deep forests. During the day, they hide under the Stone Bridge and at night they walk around Moscow wearing iron claws on their hands and feet. They walk on stilts and their ataman is dressed in a Turkish gown. Belotelov: Why on stilts? Beauty: For speed and for a frightening effect.35

However, the “spring man” urban panics that came about in the beginning or the 1920s etched themselves more deeply into Russian artistic and popular culture. The oldest literary evidence can be found in a memoir by the writer Alexey Mikhailovich Remizov, Взвихренная Русь, published when he was in exile in Paris in 1927. This work used a combination of prose and poetry, and made ample use of folkloric motifs mythologized in a manner reminiscent of Balgauzen’s Saint Petersburg gang and its inglorious demise. It primarily

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accentuates the use of electric lamps, which also appear in some of the stories of the Czech spring man as well: “Walking dead” have appeared behind the Nevsky Monastery: hungry at night, they abandoned their sepulchers, shone electric lamps in the fog, leaped along paths, and stole the luggage of terrified people who were out for late walks.36

  The criminal aspect of the jumping urban phantoms is also emphasized in a work by the avant-garde poet and novelist Konstantin Vaginov Harpagoniada from 1933. Here, we meet with Russian “spring men” in the fifteenth chapter, “Anfertyev’s Performance as a Host” in the memoirs of the literary figure of a former St. Petersburg crook named Mirovoy, which reflects the potential social context of activities associated with these jumping phantoms:   During the Civil War, Mirovoy reigned on Pushkin and Ligovka Street. He supplied his minions with the best material, which replaced all other Earthly pleasures. In truth, in these years he was also using an inordinate amount himself. At that time, he used to lounge about in his room on Pushkin Street. The building was full of girls who sold themselves there. Mirovoy played a poor wretch tied to the bed. In his feather quilts he had little hidden packets that proffered bliss. They gave him rings, snuff-boxes, gold watches, clothes, and undergarments for them; they stole, and brought entire loaves of bread that was more precious than gold, sugar in blue boxes, leather jackets and divers’ boots, which were in style at that time. All of these objects just flitted through his room, only to immediately disappear without a trace, who knows where. Girls flocked around his bed, cursed till the hills turned green, and begged for hours on end for him to take at least something from the junk they brought in. It was sultry in the room like in a spa. Mirovoy was young and strong. He lay there. In the little park across the street, next to the Pushkin monument his assistants gathered together, sitting around on benches, waiting to wake up, or for the moment when they will have their turn. For security reasons, guys were not allowed to enter his room. The assistants sat on green benches under the sickly city trees and smoked old cigarettes—everything that was in some way connected with the times of peace was already called old then—snorted the finest stuff, and they were nervous, because they were beginning to have the feeling that someone was coming after them. Not all of his assistants were professionals at that time. Some of those working for him included broad-shouldered sailors, bashful young officers, students who calculated that studying wouldn’t pay off for them when they could instead have everything for free, and bank clerks dressed like foreigners. At that time, I was living large.37 Just about everyone dropped out, but I’m still living it up here, and I write songs. I recalled a debauched night in the Vyborgsky District. That time from behind the fence, wearing a white robe, I fell upon some grandpa. I thrust a shank

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under the wretch’s chin, and forced him to strip naked and skedaddle away through the snow. I could have burst from laughing. I found diamonds in this innocent oldster’s pants. Today, no one still carries diamonds on them at night, and it occurred to me that it’s unthinkable to run into diamonds like that today. Just come in, bud, let me square up with you,” said Mirovoy to Anfertyev, who had just come in with vodka and money: “How can it be that these lowlifes aren’t coming in here?” He dealt out marked cards and out of languor he let loose with an old song he had composed in the years of his banditry: “Ah, apple on the window, The living dead have multiplied in Leningrad, On their feet they have springs, Eyes full of fire, Toss me that coat, comrade, Look how well I wear it.” “You’re a proper Villon,” Anfertyev laughed. “What’s that?” “He was a French poet, he composed poems and robbed people. And then they almost hanged him.” “Well, they’re not going to hang me,” said Mirovoy. He pulled out a bottle and poured from it.38

Vaginov’s poem is a paraphrase of a period chastushka, a vernacular song that informed listeners about current events. These were documented by Russian folklorists between 1919 and 1926 in Tver Oblast, which is located between St. Petersburg and Moscow. This traditional song represents an interesting illustration of the period folkloric reception of rumors about urban phantoms in the Russian countryside, which were spread in a similar way as rumors about the Czech spring man from the large cities mainly along the main railway lines: Ah, apple on the pig iron, Spring men have appeared in Saint Petersburg. Ah, apple on the window, Corpses have appeared in Saint Petersburg.39

However, the best-known literary illustration of this phenomenon is the second volume of the fictional epic novel based in the time of the Russian revolution, The Road to Calvary from 1928, whose author Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy wrote a scene featuring the legendary St. Petersburg jumping phantoms, which dramatically confront one of the primary female characters:

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Dasha gave birth a month ago and her baby, a boy, died three days afterwards. The birth was premature, induced by a terrible disturbance. Two larger-than-life men in fluttering shrouds attacked Dasha at twilight on the Field of Mars. Probably those were “spring men”; they had attached peculiar springs to their feet and in those fantastic times they were the terror of St. Petersburg. They whistled at Dasha and gnashed their teeth. She fell down. They pulled off her cloak, and in a flash had bounded across the Swan Bridge. Rain beat down hard, and the bare linden trees heaved and sighed in the Summer Orchard. Behind the Fountain, someone cried a drawn-out “Heeeeeelp!” The baby kicked in Dasha’s womb, it wanted to come into the world. It called to her importunately and Dasha rose up and walked across the Trinity Bridge. The wind pushed her to the cast iron railing, and her wet dress was stuck between her legs. Nowhere was a tiny light or another human being to be seen. The roiling Neva was below. Dasha’s first pangs arrived after she crossed the bridge. She understood that she would not get home, and she only wanted to reach a tree and lean against it, out of the wind. Here, on Red Clouds Street a patrol stopped her. A soldier gripped his rifle and leaned over her deathly pale face: “They stripped her. Those rabble! And look, she’s about to burst.”40

Further literary reflections of the phenomenon of jumping phantoms are found in numerous Russian texts in the genre of children’s literature. As an example, we can look at two novels published in 1948 by Anatoly Naumovich Rybakov: Kortik [Dirk] and Bronzovaya ptitsa [The Bronze Bird], which represent “spring men” from a child’s perspective as phantoms draped in capes with an electric torches in their mouths, who were able to jump up to fifth floors and even to jump over a building.41 Later, an even more acclaimed reflection of the legends and rumors about Russian “spring men” is represented in works by the writer Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky, who mentions the phenomenon of spring men in several of his texts. The best-known of these is his famous 1928 book about the development of children’s speech and work with language titled From Two to Five. In the course of presenting children’s folklore and children’s literary texts, he also mentions the remarkable transformation of St. Petersburg’s rumors about “spring men” in literature starting in 1919. Using the example of his own son Boris, whom he had acquainted with the use of Russian epic verse at an early age, he shows a fascinating process of the metamorphosis of prosaic texts about “spring men” in another folkloric genre—byliny (traditional oral epic poems), which are in modernized in both subject and motifs by the child author: The results of this early acquaintanceship with the Bogatyr songs later made a significant manifestation in my young son Boris, whom I have already spoken about here. For he had hardly even learned to write, when to the great wonder of everyone around he composed an entire cycle of byliny and then he also wrote

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them into a notebook with his naïve child’s letters, where I have preserved them to this day. I will share one of them in its literal wording here; only the spelling has been touched up, otherwise nothing has been changed in the text. This bylina was written in 1919: someone was foolish enough to share some kind of malarkey that had been spreading around the city in front of the boy, about some kind of ruffians who they say were running riot in the streets, and who jumped as high as the roofs of buildings and had some kind of special springs attached to their shoes to help them with this. They were said to wear shrouds and the city militia was supposed to be waging a furious war against them.

The eight-year-old-author tells about these “spring men” in his bylina:

THE WAR OF THE SPRING MEN WITH VASKA SHVETS Gold is not alloyed with gold, Silver does not flow into silver, Two mountains did not meet together, Spring men are converging from all sides, They are converging on that great big, On the great big Smolensky Cemetery, And there, they confer in a big council, In a big council, in a council not small, About how they would slaughter St. Pete’s guards, St. Pete’s guards, the city militia, So that no one will pursue them anymore, No one would pursue, no one would bury them, Bury them, and they wouldn’t shoot with bullets, Hard bullets, bullets from lead. And here one dead man rises up, A dead man in a white, shining shroud, And this dead man speaks thus: “Hail, my dear, fierce spring men, Fierce spring men, rich young heroes, Let us all walk through the town, We will kill St. Pete’s guards, St. Pete’s guards, the city militia.” The spring man did not manage to finish his speech And a cry rose up from all the spring men in a loud voice: “Let’s all walk around the town, We’re going to kill St. Pete’s guards, St. Pete’s guards, the city militia.” All the spring men started running around the city, Around the famous city, the city of St. Pete, And they began to thrash St. Pete’s guards,

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St. Pete’s guards, the city militia. Suddenly, a tram bears down upon them, A tram bears down on them and with wagons behind it. A good youth jumps out of the wagons, A good youth called Vaska Shvets. Three corpses threw themselves at Vaska. Vaska Shvets took the first and ripped him in half, He took the second corpse and ripped him, He seized the third corpse by the feet And began to walk back and forth in the street, And began to flog the spring men with this spring man. And he was thrashing these spring man for three whole years, Three whole years and three hours. His massive shoulders grew tired, His chain mail was torn, But he could not kill the corpses. But here a voice spoke unto Vaska from the heavens: “Hail, you, my dear Vasili Shvets, Do not ride away from these places. You strove against the spring men for three whole years, Three whole years and three hours, Three hours and three minutes, Strive against them now for eight more years.” And Vasili Shvets then did as he was told, He began to strive against the spring men yet again. And day after day when the rain wafts, And week after week like the way the river flows, And year after year, the way the grass grows, And thus, eight whole years passed And Vaska killed all of the corpses, All of the corpses, to the very last one. And then we sing the glory of these corpses, We sing their glory for the ages! No matter how carefully I read these verses, I cannot find one place here where the author departed from the canonical style for byliny. It is evident that the young poet has fully mastered the distinctive patterns of this difficult genre, both in its rhythmics and syntax, and also its lexical form, and he has full control of them.42

Chukovsky presents this faux bylina as an illustration of children’s work with language and its forms; he ignores the tale about the “spring men,” which he had pejoratively labeled as “malarkey.” However, his son’s original text is a fascinating example of how easily the mind of a modern person can creatively get hold of folkloric forms—in this case their contents (the story about the

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“spring men”) as well as forms (oral epic Bogatyr songs). Whereas the form has remained the same in this case, as Chukovsky noticed, and Boris was very faithful to historical oral models, the content—with the simultaneous preservation of a wide range of traditional topoi—was modernized through the use of new technological motifs of firearms, trams, and militiamen (with only one inappropriate archaism in the form of the chain mail: in this one case, form had won out over content). Russian urban phantoms are also drawn as similar character types as in the epic bylina by the eight-year-old Boris Chukovsky (that is, as a group of wicked criminals which a positively depicted militia heroically fights against) in a wide range of film and television productions. This conceptualization of spring men is mainly typical for more recent period crime series; but besides these, there are also film and television adaptations of some of the above-mentioned literary works. For example, one of the most recent pop-culture treatments of this subject was the television series MUR. Tretiy front from 2011 which was set in Moscow during World War II. In this series, white-robed jumping phantoms are assaulting innocent citizens in the park, and then they are confronted with the guardians of the law of that period.43 Another example comes from the first two episodes of the sixteen-part television series Gospoda-tovarishchi from 2014, which describes the investigation of crimes committed by a Moscow gang in 1918, which copied the notorious activities of Ivan Balgauzen from St. Petersburg.44 And an even more recent example is the twelve-part Russian television series Murka that aired between 2015 and 2017, and traces a story about agents of the Soviet secret service NKVD who leave for Odessa to fight against the wide-branching criminal scene there. Already in the first episode, which takes place in 1922, they meet with a feared gang of local “spring men,” who were robbing and murdering poor, innocent civilians. They then apprehend the gang members and “in the name of the Revolution” give them their justified punishments.45 Just like the British Spring-heeled Jack and the Czech spring man, the Russian jumping phantoms also became a favorite topic in Fortean literature as well as in popular works that mythologize the past of the Russian metropoles, especially St. Petersburg.46 By contrast with the ambivalent British phantom with a plural identity, and the Czech spring man, in whose pop-cultural rendering his activities in the resistance are predominant, the Russian poprygunchiki are described in purely negative terms as aggressive criminals, almost without exception. The jumping phantoms in Germany are also conceptualized in a similar, though of course locally distinct manner after World War II.

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SPRING MAN’S DESCENDANTS: HÜPFEMÄNNCHEN IN POSTWAR GERMANY The German version of the narrative complex on jumping phantoms, most often called Hüpfemännchen, appeared at the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s (more specifically, between 1948 and 1953, with the most significant activity beginning in February 1950) in Saxony and Thuringia. Just like in the Czech lands, a great number of local panics appeared there. But by contrast with the Czech spring man, the German phantoms—similarly as in Russia—were predominantly understood as “spring men,” that is, a large and varied corps of mysterious beings. These beings were additionally usually interpreted purely negatively as characters in scary stories: When Elfun Josiger from Saalfeld recalls these old tales she still gets goosebumps to this day: “Both of my grandmothers and my mother always frightened me with these wicked Hüpfemännchen, who found it so easy to jump inside into apartments.”47

The German jumping phantoms were perceived similarly by Waltraud Wagner, who in the time of these panics was a fifteen-year-old girl living in the Thuringian town of Wünschendorf: They used to say that they jump around the area and allegedly they have skeletons painted on their bodies. Therefore, we were very afraid of them as young girls.48

According to Dietrich Kühn, one of the few German researchers who has dealt with this subject, stories about Hippemänchen and Spiralhopser represent a typical example of the modernization of “traditional” demonological legends about encountering a supernatural being; therefore he classifies a mention of them in his annotated anthology of Saxon folk legends.49 By contrast with the demonic beings of the “traditional” belief legends—and just like the majority of the Continental “incarnations” of Spring-heeled Jack— these phantoms were predominantly described as people wearing costumes who behaved aggressively: They were people in disguise. Hupfmänneln wore jumping springs in the soles of their shoes, thanks to which they could jump high like kangaroos. On their hands they had studded gloves so they could scratch the faces of their enemies. Everyone heard about this, recalls Hans-Jürgen Voigt from Weischlitz.50

We also find the frequent motif of a sharp, dangerous object attached to the hands and used for attacking surprised (usually female) victims, which is

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associated both with Spring-heeled Jack (steel claws) and with the Czech spring man (razors, or sometimes razor gloves) in the following narration, imparted in the form of a personal experience narrative: Gudrun Bauch from Vollmershain told about an incident that she experienced as a young girl at her grandmother’s home, where one evening her neighbor was over for a visit: “She suddenly remembered that she’s going out to check the mailbox. Grandmother pleaded with her not to go, because there were supposed to be “Huppmänneln,” as they used to call them in the Schmöllner neighborhood, running wild outside. But the neighbor refused to listen. Then I suddenly heard her calling for help, and I still see it in front of me. The neighbor stood like a pillar of salt: she looked dreadful—her hair was all disheveled and her face was scratched as if someone had scratched her with claws or talons.51

Besides sharp objects attached to gloves or prepared in hands for swift attacks, we find additional typical “spring man” motifs in the German phantoms: the shining skeletal ribs painted with phosphorus and concealed under a cloak or overcoat, dark or white clothing reminiscent of a shroud, masks, and, most importantly, the motif of an unusual style of jumping. In extreme cases the jumps could be up to twenty to thirty meters long or high, which was usually explained as possible thanks to jumping springs. The German Hüpfemännchen in period oral narrations were also, just like the later Czech spring man, subject to a great deal of ideologization—which is why Ulf Lehmann therefore labels them as “political bugbears” (politischen Schreckgespenst)52 For example, in Saxony the spooks allegedly focused their energies on intimidating farmers who were resisting collectivization in the early 1950s. The security agencies of the German Democratic Republic therefore interpreted them as a group of disguised saboteurs who disrupted the functioning of the workers’ and peasants’ government, or—more often—as a mere anti-regime rumor. This report that was published as an official public notice by Schweinitz/Elster Saxony-Anhalt District on 10 February 1950, in which it attempted to exploit these rumors for anticlerical propaganda purposes, can serve as an example: It remains a well-known fact that the enemies of our democratic regime attempt to paralyze the political, economic, and cultural life of our young German Democratic Republic. .  .  . There is nothing more obvious; now, they are reaching for new means. And therefore, they invented Spiralhopsern! A great many frightened visitors who were out at the pictures or for an evening visit, and many children hiding in terror under their mother’s apron tell that outside there are white figures roaming around armed with clubs and razor blades and they attack everyone who is unable to recite the Lord’s Prayer or to enumerate the Ten Commandments.53

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The social and political tensions associated with the beginning of the Cold War were also reflected in the period interpretations of behavior that could have been considered relatively innocent in other times. For example, on the day of 20 May 1952 the Landesgericht (land court) in the city of Gera sentenced a group of young men from Ronneburg to imprisonment for three to eight years for espionage, singing Nazi songs, and “frightening the local inhabitants dressed as specters.” In reality, this was obviously just a clique of young friends who were getting together to have fun and play some minor pranks.54 However, the collective vernacular explanation of the Hüpfemännchen phenomenon was often even more fantastical than the official explanation. These phantoms were considered to be agents of the Soviet occupying power who were intimidating the local population. Their alleged motivation was to frighten people who lived near the Soviet military bases, especially in places where the Soviets were searching for deposits of uranium. The politically opposite explanation of the Hüpfemännchen considered them to be a band of saboteurs who were damaging local test drills that were prospecting for uranium, and after the gang was exposed its leader fled to West Germany.55 The radioactive chemical element also provided an explanation for the phosphorescent appearance of these phantoms, which we know from other parts of Europe. The greatest frequency of narrations is geographically concentrated around the area of the Wismuth company plant with headquarters in the Saxon city of Chemnitz. It was originally a Soviet mining company, and after 1954 then Soviet-German, which from 1954 to 1991 was the world’s fourth-largest producer of uranium primarily intended for the Soviet nuclear industry. During a brief period, tens of thousands of foreign laborers poured into the area to work in the large plant, taking up residence in the area of the Thuringian Forest and the Ore Mountain (Erzgebirgs-Vorland) region, which had previously been sparsely populated. This rapid influx of allochthonous elements significantly transformed the social composition of the population, and it was precisely these sweeping social changes that most helped the rapid spread of these fantastic narratives.56 Three quarters of the laborers, who had been recruited mostly through flyers, had come from various other parts of Saxony and therefore had little connection to the local culture, which was also reflected in their potential behavior toward the native population. Waltraud Wagner also recalls this reality: When something even moved at night, we were afraid. They just said that they are from Wismuth. Maybe it’s because they were outsiders.57

It is no coincidence that the greatest boom in rumors about Hüpfemännchen at the nationwide level ends after 1951, when the management of the local

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mines significantly toughened up the conditions and regulations on the job, and the security force at the workplaces introduced harsher penalties for workplace misconduct. In the following three years seventy employees were even branded as spies, deported to the Soviet Union, and executed there.58 The German narrative complex about “spring men” thus, just like everywhere else in the world, was associated with the accelerating processes of industrialization and urbanization in the distinctive regional form of Saxon and Thuringian “uranium fever.” The German “spring men” thus to a certain extent are a folkloric or mythological metaphor of these processes, and their shining, radioactive appearance is a metaphor that is nearly literal. According to the writer Lutz Seiler from Gera, an alternative, although less prevalent explanation for the rumors about these phantoms lies in a cover-up story used by former members of the SS, who made use of these tales for a conspiratorial smoke screen for their secret meetings and illegal activities.59 However, an explanation that sits closer to the real period social practices would be that here, as elsewhere in Europe during this transition period, there was an increase in criminality and various rough pranks pulled by numerous individuals acting independently of one another. According to the poet Wulf Kirsten, who had lived during this period in Klippenburg in Saxony, these rumors are primarily connected with the shortages of food at the time and with activities associated with nighttime thievery. He himself had been a witness to a great many similar incidents in the last year of the war: They were youths, cut-ups, who only wanted to scare people. . . . In this crisis situation things happen like this: you scare people, you terrify them, and then you can steal as much as you can carry away. . . . German thieves took part in this, the former forced laborers, and among them was certainly someone who, in order to frighten people, had attached springs from old mattresses to his feet. And they didn’t just steal geese and sheep, but mainly rabbits. And then chickens, roosters . . . It began in this period and thanks to this, the Huppemännel multiplied a hundredfold.60

Short-lived rumors about these phantoms were sometimes capable of stirring up a mass hysteria. For example, in Erfurt in 1951, an enraged mob nearly lynched the chef from a luxurious hotel who was returning home at night in his work clothes. He found it very difficult to convince the crowd that he was not one of the mysterious jumping phantoms—which the local oral narratives described as dressed in white.61 In other parts of Germany, the color worn by phantoms could be black or green. There was also an interesting period distinction between jumping phantoms, with some

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classified as “small” ones, who could only make nasty scratches on a person, and others as “big” ones, which were allegedly much more dangerous.62 Wulf Kirsten also highlights the connection of these stories with the “traditional” rural demonological legends that were shared during the “blind man’s holiday” (the hour between the end of daylight and beginning of candlelight): In the village, there used to be social sessions: people came together and talked, they talked about issues like this one. In this period people still told stories, no television existed yet—that was important. And they still believed in ghosts. The belief in ghosts was already a holdover, but it was always present, and I remember it from my mother, who was always telling about such things.63

Therefore, in some parts of the German countryside there appeared a concept close to “traditional” tales of revenants, and according to these the jumping phantoms were the ghosts of German soldiers who had fallen on the Eastern Front without a proper burial and therefore they returned home as wandering spirits.64 Then in children’s versions and literary stylizations there were anthropomorphic beings of various sizes made from springs and wires appearing in fantastic forms. One example of where they may have had their home base was the enormous, not-yet-completed Elster Viaduct near Pirk in the Saxon municipality of Weischlitz.65 Thanks to the high, pointed hoods they allegedly wore, some adults at the time compared them with members of the Ku Klux Klan. A record feat by one of these jumping phantoms was that it allegedly leaped across the Saale River, which is fully comparable with one of the “records” of the Czech spring man: jumping across the Vltava River valley at its widest part in Prague, between Baba and Bohnice.66 The German versions of this narrative complex, as has been seen above, were distinguished with uncommon variability in naming this numinous figure. Where we only find a few versions of the Czech spring man’s name, often associated with highlighting specific aspects of his appearance or activities (such as phosphorous man or razor man), the Thuringian and Saxon “spring men” acquired a wide range of distinctive vernacular names in the period oral stories. However, at the same time, every single one of them placed emphasis on his specific manner of locomotion by jumping. Besides the clearly dominant names Hüpfemännchen and Hüppemänner there were also Hippelmänner, Hippemänner, Hoppmännel, Hubbemännel, Hupfmännel, Huppmännel, Hüppemänner, Springer, Springstrolche, Springteufel, and Stoppelhopser. Some of these were purely specific local variations (such as Scheechemänner, which was used in the area of Meißen in Saxony). The terms Spiralhopser and Spiralfedermenschen are, on the other hand, rather

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artificial, used in journalism and literature (similar to the Czech Pérový muž [“the Spring-Man”]).67 The tales of these phantoms were documented most thoroughly in Thuringia and Saxony; only one was recorded in another federal state adjacent to it: Saxony-Anhalt. It is especially interesting to note the geographical continuity of the localities where these narratives were recorded in Germany with the Czech lands: quite a few of the stories were prevalent in the states of Saxony and Thuringia as well as in the nearby Ore Mountains along the Czech border. One of the places where they occurred was the village of Breitenbach, near the Saxon city Johanngeorgenstadt in the Ore Mountains. This community is located in the Karlovy Vary region and is now mainly known as a recreational area, which was renamed Potůčky in 1948. It falls into a region where stories about spring man were already demonstrably present in the 1920s. The stories from the Ore Mountains are also reproduced in Ottokar Domma’s biographical novel Erinnerung eneines Großvaters (1999), which presents the memories of the author’s grandfather, who was born on 20 May 1924 in Schankau (which is today a neighborhood in the city of Karlovy Vary called Čankov), reflecting the rumors about jumping phantoms that had been common in this very community.68 The motif of jumping phantoms was thus either brought from the Czech lands by expelled Germans who had already shared this tradition all across the regions of the Ore Mountains and the Jizera Mountains before the war, and it flourished again during the “uranium fever” that raged at an unprecedented heat at the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s, or it existed as a latent part of the shared prewar Czech-German tradition on both sides of the border. Tales about spring man in any case represent an interesting part of the shared Czech-German cultural heritage. A MYTH OF PEOPLE ON THE PERIPHERY: SPRING MAN AS A HYBRIDIZED PART OF WORKING-CLASS CULTURE Narratives and cultural practices associated with the British Spring-heeled Jack and prowling ghosts, the Russian poprygunchiki, and German Hüpfemännchen display an evident connection with the urban and industrial environment. To a significant extent, they are products of the culture of industrial metropoles, or sometimes of their peripheries. However, cultural elements are not shaped (only) by spaces themselves, but primarily by human actors within them, who attribute specific meanings to these spaces.69 It is therefore necessary to interpret these narratives in the context of their clear social categorization in time and space, as typical products of working-class

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Figure 2.3. Incidence of the motif of Hüpfemännchen in Germany, 1948–1953. Map by Tomáš Rataj, 2021.

culture. The overwhelming majority of them were first spread within this social milieu, and we can take the following World War II narration about the Czech spring man as an example: My eighty-two-year-old brother-in-law, who comes from a small village called Křekovice in the Rakovník district had heard as an eight- or nine-year-old, how their neighbor Jan Kovanda was telling his father about a man with springs on his feet. Mr. Kovanda was working as a mason in the Stadion factory in Rakovník. In the factory they were making bicycles, but during the war they shifted their manufacturing to machine parts for the arms industry. The neighbor spoke about spring man, who was able to jump as high as the railroad cars and no one could ever catch up with him.70

It was no coincidence that the first mentions of a Czech spring man appearing in the industrialized environment of northwest Bohemia are conspicuously similar to where his British forerunner had been born—in mining and laboring communities. It is not only the context of the texts but also their social context that displays the evident continuation of the Czech spring man with the British model.

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However, just like his British forerunner, this phenomenon, as is the case with working-class culture as a whole, is fairly difficult for researchers to access. Although one of the most prominent specializations in Czech folklore studies in the 1970s and 1980s was what is elsewhere called the “anthropology of labor,” the results of this body of research are only marginally applicable to understanding this phenomenon.71 Even though investigating the oral folklore of the laboring classes was an integral part of this research specialization, the researchers’ period ideological and subject limitations caused a glaring neglect of the urban demonological tradition.72 However, urban phantoms such as spring man are still difficult to classify alongside the manifestations of “traditional folk culture” or with rural demonological folklore.73 The Czech situation forms a good parallel for the way that the figure of Spring-heeled Jack in Great Britain was neither directly connected to the gothic novels of the second half of the eighteenth century nor a part of the period bourgeois and aristocratic occultism, let alone of the later local vernacular “folk spiritism.” This is because in its essence it was a product of cultural hybridization. In its original form this phenomenon is a syncretic manifestation of suburban working-class culture, which brings together the legacy of hybridization of two pairs of vernacular discourses: rural folk culture and the newly emerging urban working-class culture, and the orally transmitted folklore and (reflections) of popular culture. Its oldest manifestations from the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century can only be reconstructed with difficulty, mainly owing to the absence of oral sources and the necessity of relying on the strongly judgmental or even prejudiced sources of a written nature. For this period, we have our phenomenon dominantly mediated through the middle-class lens of the period press and literature, in which comic, ironic, or—at best—indulgent undertones predominate. The prowling ghosts, those “phantoms of the periphery,” are thus usually presented as an entertaining spectacle, a peculiar mix of bizarre penchants, irrationality, and—above all else—the lack of taste of the manually laboring classes.74 We can also interpret this phenomenon as a unique metaphor for period social conflict over the nature of public space. This was perceived by young working-class men as a collectively shared, generally accessible, and much-valued gathering place, whereas the middle classes and their authorities perceived informal meetings for the purpose of observing the prowling ghosts as potentially fertile ground for riots, petty criminality, and illegal business activities.75 At the beginning of the 1900s this phenomenon gradually disappears from the working-class culture—due to ever-intensifying monitoring of public space as well as to the growing sophistication of the working-class environment, and above all else, owing to the rise of new forms of popular culture for the masses, such as workers’ theaters (which, incidentally, often featured the motif of ghosts in performances).76

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Spring man was not the first Czech case of a “prowling ghost”—the suburban sensation of working-class culture that connected orally transmitted rumors with cultural practices and their subsequent reinterpretation through mass communications media and popular culture. He had been prefigured nearly fifty years previously by the famous phantom of Podskalí who had enthralled the people of Prague at the end of the year 1874, and several of his less-famous fellow travelers and successors, such as the phantom of Libeň from 1907.77 In the intensive coverage by period mass communications and the interest among the common people in Prague in meeting with him, which culminated in collective surveillance and “hunts” for the spook, these specters were much more similar to the Victorian Spring-heeled Jack because with spring man these aspects—due to the censorship of the wartime era and in the communist press and the difficulty of organizing larger-scale spontaneous gatherings during and after World War II—were relegated to the background. SPRING MAN AS A REGIONAL ECOTYPE OF AN INTERNATIONAL MIGRATORY LEGEND In all likelihood, narratives about the Russian phantoms called poprygunchiki, the German Hüpfemännchen and also the Czech spring man, are genetically related to their archetype, the originally British migratory legend about Spring-heeled Jack. After 1904 the migratory legend about this “ideal type” of prowling ghost spread to Continental Europe and gave rise to the above-named regionally specific versions. Migratory legends were defined as a unique genre of legends in 1958 by the folklorist Reidar Th. Christiansen.78 They are characterized as internationally dispersed, realistic tales that are told as though they were reports of real events; tales which circumscribe a common epic narrative core and connect it with specific local experiences that then lend them credibility for the local community. According to Christiansen, the main function of migratory legends is maintaining faith in the facts described in their texts. While these facts are “fictitious” to a significant extent, migratory legends remain alive in the society, because they must continually supply proofs of their veracity, often in the form of allegedly personal experiences.79 According to the sociologist Gary A. Fine, migratory legends are typically composed of two mutually dynamically communicative layers: the narrative core, which remains constant across the great majority of social situations in time and space, and narrative details, which are always firmly anchored in a specific local environment. While the narrative core of a legend is a significantly stable (and at the same time also passive) “timeless” element, it is actually the narrative details that determine how widespread and popular a given migratory legend

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will be through time and space. This is because its primary objective is to make the legend more attractive for local storytellers and audiences through its adaptation to local conditions and taste.80 The process of stories spreading in this way was cogently described by folklorist Linda Dégh: “a legend arises on the basis of specific historical, social, and cultural situations, it is created by specific people and later it is spread through both oral and non-oral media, during which time it continually shapes and seeks out new channels to spread through. The plot of a legend is not stable and fixed, only its basic idea is.”81 The narrative core of the migratory legend of spring man was a fairly general concept about an anthropomorphic being that was distinguished by an unusual movement by means of jumping, often explained as with the use of a specific mechanical contrivance such as springs on his feet, and who is mainly active in an urban or suburban environment. The relative simplicity of this narrative core, thanks to which the main nonhuman (or protohuman) character (originally Spring-heeled Jack) lacked any kind of firmly fixed and easily identifiable form, proved to be an advantage for the dissemination of this legend.82 This fairly uncomplicated narrative core could thus be easily supplemented with details corresponding to specific geographical, historical, political, social, and cultural contexts that tailored it to specific environments. For example, in the Czech lands during World War II, this was the motif of the jumping phantom’s activities in the resistance movement; in Russia the criminal motivation of the phantoms associated with the unusually strong overlap of these narratives with social behavior was emphasized, whereas in German it was the politicization of these narratives that stood out. This process, termed the “Loki effect” by Gary A. Fine, however, could only be successful in periods when there was a suitable social situation for its development—ideally, unrest connected with significant social changes in politically and economically turbulent times, bordering in some cases even on social anomie. The Russian revolution and the civil war could be considered to fulfill these criteria in St. Petersburg, Moscow, and Odessa, as did World War II in the Czech lands, as well as in Bratislava, Moscow and Leningrad, and the difficult beginnings of Germany’s reconstruction after World War II. The local contents of individual “national” (or, more precisely we could speak of regional and local) narratives then began to take shape in specific regional versions—to use Carl von Sydow’s term oikotypes (ecotypes).83 However, owing to their brief duration and ephemerality, more stable geographical units comparable with  the oikotypes of “traditional” demonologic legends or folktales did not arise. Rather, it is possible to track a process similar to ecotypization only secondarily, after the shift of these narratives into popular and artistic culture; the fifth chapter of this book is dedicated to this process. During his odyssey through time and space these originally suburban folkloric narratives have undergone a remarkable development, turning

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into “postfolklore” rather than “traditional” folklore. This term is used by contemporary Russian folklore studies to refer to orally transmitted texts in the international repertoire of societies that have undergone the processes of urbanization and industrialization. According to the folklorist Sergei Neklyudov, the “traditional genres” that were previously predominant such as folktales and legends become unproductive and are pushed aside by folkloric genres that had been marginal before.84 Most frequently these are genres that had originated within relatively closed subcultural repertoires (a typical example are modern anecdotes and jokes that were originally associated with the literary cultures of lawyers, doctors, and other intellectual professions), or sometimes “new” genres inspired by artistic and popular culture (contemporary legends, rumors, contemporary children’s folklore). In the case of industrialized societies, Volodomir Pozdnyeyev even speaks of an entire postfolkloric culture in which “traditional” genres are predominantly only found in non-oral forms.85 Tales about spring man have undergone an identical development—arising out of the relatively closed repertoire of the working class culture in suburban Great Britain and activated a synergetic interaction between oral and popular culture, they have been translated into broader and in places even nationwide repertoires in Russia, Germany, and the Czech lands. Czech narratives about spring man can thus be labeled as regional (proto) ecotypes; that is, a specific part of a geographically defined version of the international migratory legend of Spring-heeled Jack. The discovery of a “narrative zero,” that is, the (hypothetical) situation when these tales became part of the continental repertoire is, just like the search for ur-forms of other, perhaps far more stable forms of folkloric narration (such as folktales) is essentially impossible.86 By contrast with stories of this type, research into these subjects is mainly complicated by the fact that these narratives—similarly to the related international cycles of legends connected with subcultures that are specifically circumscribed by professions, such as early modern miners’ legends about underground spirits (such as permoníci, a type of Czech gnome)—were clearly not spread in “waves,” which would mean a gradual penetration of the story across language and cultural borders, but “by leaps” through individual migrations.87 A potential model for the hypothetical reconstruction of how stories about spring man were spread looks back to how miners’ legends were disseminated in the past and suggests that it could have taken place through migration of individuals and small groups of a population in search of work. Additionally, in comparison with the conservative countryside and the middle-class social world, the social memory of the culture of the mining and laboring milieu is generally more porous to external, often international influences; moreover, this environment is often significantly

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more complex and heterogeneous than the uniform rural or middle-class discourse.88 The social memory of the working-class milieu, as Maurice Halbwachs has noticed, is additionally often structured in and around workplaces; and thus, these are the places where the stories about spring man were historically most frequently spread at the international, national, and local levels.89 The “working-class” legends about spring man connected with industrial suburbia thus display significant parallels with archaic miners’ legends of the past, and this is not only thanks to their swift “jumping” transmission across great geographical distances, but also by their nature as a specific repertoire of “migrating people” whose professions cause them to move from place to place.90 The folklorist Oldřich Sirovátka describes bearers of the tradition in this manner; that is, they are individual members of the manually laboring, professionally specialized, and primarily non-rural classes. However, this social environment only represented a cultural platform upon which the motifs of the migratory legend about a jumping phantom landed in the Czech environment. After having penetrated beyond their original social milieu, as soon as these tales became a stable part of the Czech folkloric repertoire they could, for a whole range of reasons, be reinvigorated in specific historical situations while at the same time functioning in a range that spanned from mere amusing anecdotes to the instigation of local collective panics. The tales about spring man thus became an integral part of contemporary Czech folklore, which at the present time is probably a latent element, but it is certainly not impossible that it could undergo a new wave of innovation and appear sometime again in the future—for this is what has generally happened with the many parallels in the folkloric repertoires of Central and Eastern Europe. The Russian rumors and legends about “white tights” (belyie kolchotki in Russian, or baltosios pėdkelnės in Lithuanian) can represent a certain parallel to the stories about spring man. The “white tights” were an fictive elite unite of female snipers from the Baltic lands, which periodically appear during practically every significant contemporary military conflict that this power is involved in, from both wars in Chechnya (1994–1996 and 1999–2000) to the conflicts in Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria, Abkhazia, and most recently (since 2014) in eastern Ukraine. These mythologizing narratives based upon folkloric prototypes from the period of the Winter War with Finland and World War II describe the sniper unit as a biathlon team that volunteered to fight against Russia because of their hatred for everything Russian. Stories about the “white tights” represent a mythical legitimation for a number of military conflicts; their main antiheroines at the same time combine traditional Russian stereotypes of the “witch,” who is a wicked, powerful woman, and of the western “fascists,” who are blond, blue-eyed Nordic aggressors. The appeal of these tales is also heightened by the sexually “castrating”

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motifs. The white tights allegedly take special delight in only shooting men in the crotch and thus literally as well as symbolically castrating the Russian efforts to “fend off” their enemies who were assisted by these demonic Baltic amazons.91 Many other stories of mythicized social threats with a similar cultural dynamic, where there is a synergistic combination of oral folklore with media reportage and the products of mass-circulated popular culture periodically, reappear in Central and Eastern Europe. The most widespread rumors about “black ambulances,” that is, about human organ thefts, have been appearing in a similar way as the “white tights” and spring man at least since the 1930s, always in troubled periods in history (in the Czech lands, for example, right before the Velvet Revolution, so from the end of 1988 through the end of 1989).92 Narrations about spring man are not the only folkloric text that with origins in the West that arrived in the Czech lands during the twentieth century and dexterously adapted itself to locally specific conditions. A more modern example would be the narrative and performative complex associated with evoking a female spirit, most often called Bloody Mary (sometimes “Krvavá Mary” or “Krvavá Máří” in Czech), which has long been a part of the culture of adolescent girls. This complex, which first appeared in the beginning of the 1970s in the United States, arrived in the Czech Republic during the second half of the 1990s through a synergetic convergence of trends from oral and

Figure 2.4. Incidence of the motif of Spring-heeled Jack in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Map by Tomáš Rataj, 2021.

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popular culture (oral transmission and films and series that were made for television). However, it reached its greatest height of popularity in the new millennium thanks to the internet, primarily social networks.93 Even more recent examples are the related figure of Slender Man, who reached the Czech lands only after 2014, a panic associated with “killer clowns” in the fall and winter of 2016, and the moral panic around a reputed internet game called the Blue Whale Challenge in the first half of 2017.94 In elucidating why spring man was often perceived as an absolutely real and existing figure in the past, research into contemporary mythicized notions such as “chemtrails” or contemporary conspiracy theories that frequently inspire even more obstinate defenses among their adherents than historical tales about spring man may be of some help.95 All of these contemporary phenomena display quite a number of similar features with the cultural complex on spring man, and their study should therefore yield many interesting findings that will be applicable to research into what is today more of a “historical” phenomenon. NOTES 1. Karel Krejčí, “Úvodem. Zvěsti a novely,” in Podivuhodné příběhy ze staré Prahy (Prague: Odeon, 1971), 9. 2. The writers Mike Dash and Ivan Mackerle were the first to draw attention to a possible connection between the Czech spring man and his British precursor. See: Dash, “Spring-heeled Jack: To Victorian Bugaboo from Suburban Ghost,” 21–22; and Mackerle, Nepolapitelný Pérák, 64. 3. On the concept of “glocalization” as an example of similar folkloric texts of Anglo-Saxon origin, which gained purchase in the Czech lands, see Petr Janeček, “Bloody Mary or Krvavá Máří? Globalization and Czech Children´s Folklore,” Slovak Ethnology/Slovenský národopis 62, no. 2 (2014): 221–43. 4. Middleton, Spirits of an Industrial Age, viii–xviii. 5. On today’s perception of ghosts in vernacular culture see, for example, Gillian Bennett, Alas, Poor Ghost! Traditions of Belief in Story and Discourse (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1999); and Jeannie Banks Thomas (ed.), Putting the Supernatural in Its Place: Folklore, The Hypermodern, and the Ethereal (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2015). For more, see, for example, Paul Cowdell, “Ghosts and Their Relationship with the Age of a City,” Folklore 125, no. 1 (2014): 80–91. 6. Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. Third Edition (London: Routledge, 2002). 7. Karl Bell, The Legend of Spring-Heeled Jack: Victorian Urban Folklore and Popular Cultures (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2012), 73–141. 8. David Clarke, “Unmasking Spring-heeled Jack: A Case Study of a 19th Century Ghost Panic,” Contemporary Legend 9 (2006): 28. 9. Davies, The Haunted, 170–72. 10. Bell, The Legend of Spring-heeled Jack, 53–60.

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11. This description is an excellent match for the clothing of carpenter Thomas Millbank, the main suspect in the case of Jane Alsop, who had been arrested by authorities the night after the attack in a pub after he boasted of being Spring-heeled Jack. On the night of the attack, he had been wearing white overalls and a white coat; moreover, a candle belonging to the Alsop family had been discovered in connection with his arrest. Several weeks later, the police arrested other “prowling ghosts” that were imitating Spring-heeled Jack: Daniel Granville, who had fashioned a mask with long blue paper in place of a tongue that was supposed to look like spitting out flames, and James Painter, who terrified his neighborhood wrapped in a shroud (Davies, The Haunted, 171–72). 12. Jennifer B. Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson, The Lore of the Land: A Guide to England´s Legends, from Spring-heeled Jack to the Witches of Warboys (London: Penguin Books, 2006) 480–81. 13. Bell, The Legend of Spring-heeled Jack, 20. 14. Bell, The Legend of Spring-heeled Jack,8–10; 212–15; Middleton, Spirits of an Industrial Age, 230–39. 15. Bell, The Legend of Spring-heeled Jack, 89. 16. The thesis about the first decades of the twentieth century as a period when the British narrative cycle about Spring-heeled Jack becomes a generalized type of folklore in the form of migratory legend that begin spreading to other parts of the world has even been sanctioned by the greatest scholar of this phenomenon, Karl Bell (Bell, The Legend of Spring-heeled Jack, 46). 17. David Clarke, “The Park Ghost: Sheffield´s Spring-heeled Jack” in Spring– Heeled Jack: Sources and Interpretations (unpublished manuscript), ed. Mike Dash, 226–30. For the folkloric figure of the bogeyman, see Simon J. Bronner, “Rethinking the Boogieman: A Praxeological Inquiry into the Origin, Form and Cognition of a Troubling Folk Character,” in The Practice of Folklore: Essays Toward a Theory of Tradition (Jackson: University of Misssissippi Press, 2019), 85–116. 18. The Curse of the Wraydons. Victor M. Gover. 94 min. Great Britain, 1946. 19. Tim Powers, The Anubis Gates (New York: Ace Books, 1983); Philip Pullman, Spring-heeled Jack: A Story of Bravery and Evil (London: Yearling, 1991). 20. John Matthews, The Mystery of Spring-heeled Jack: From Victorian Legend to Steampunk Hero (Rochester: Destiny Books, 2016). 21. Mark Hodder, Burton & Swinburne: Strange Affair of Spring-heeled Jack (Amherst: Pyr, 2010). 22. Peter Haining, The Legend and Bizarre Crimes of Spring Heeled Jack (London: Frederick Muller, 1977). 23. Westwood and Simpson, The Lore of the Land. 24. Bell, The Legend of Spring-heeled Jack, 12. 25. Satish K. Verma and D. K. Srivastava, “A study on mass hysteria (monkey men?) victims in East Delhi,” Indian Journal of Medical Sciences 57, no. 8 (2003): 355–60; Dash, Spring–Heeled Jack: Sources and Interpretations, 151–55. 26. Adriana Kábová, “Context in Tourist Encounters and the Double Meaning of the Word ‘Toris’ in Sumba, Indonesia,” International Journal of Tourism Anthropology 4, No. 3 (2015): 269–285.

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27. Arjun Appadurai and Carol A. Breckenbridge, “Public Modernity in India,” in Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, ed. Carol A. Breckenbridge (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 1–20. 28. The last significant British panic over Spring-heeled Jack in the Yorkshire city of Bradford took place in 1926 (Westwood and Simpson, The Lore of the Land, 481). 29. On the other hand, these practices are seen among a wide range of foreign parallels, especially from Great Britain, where many of the alleged ghosts and spirits were eventually revealed to cover for the activities of smugglers or poachers who were guising in order to divert attention away from their criminal activities (Davies, The Haunted, 178–183). 30. His photography and related documents are stored in the collection of the police museum in St. Petersburg (today, called the Museum of the History of Militia, Cultural Center of the General Headquarters of the Russian Federation’s Ministry of the Interior, in the Russian Federation’s St. Petersburg and Leningrad regions.) 31. Vadim I. Musaev, Prestupnost’ v  Petrograde, 1917–1920 i bor’ba s  ney (St. Petersburg: Sankt-Peterburgskiĭ institut istorii (Rossiĭskaya akademiya nauk) [St. Petersburg Institute of History (Russian Academy of Sciences)], 2001). 32. Andrei Konstantinov, Banditskiy Peterburg. Dokumentalniie ocherki. Tom I. (Moscow: Neva, 2004), 45–47. 33. Ibid, p. 47. 34. Georgiy Petrov, “Banda ‘poprygunchikov’ iz postrevolyucionnogo Petrograda,” Letopis. Novosťi archeologii i istorii. 31 July 2014, accessed 17 October 2017, oursociety.ru/publ/istorija_rossii/ banda_poprygunchikov_iz_postrevoljucionnogo_petrograda/4–1–0–265. 35. Alexander N Ostrovsky, Zhenitba Balzaminova (Moscow: Azbuka, 2017), 38. 36. Aleksey M. Remizov, Взвихренная Русь (Paris: Tair, 1927), 188. [This work has not been translated into English. Transliterated, it is Vzvikhrennaya Rus,’ and the title could be translated as Swirling Russia, Russia in the Whirlwind, or even possibly Blustery Russia. Note of the translator]. 37. In the Russian original: “At that time I was jumping on springs.” 38. Konstanin Vaginov, Harpagoniáda (Prague: Brody, 1998), 160–63. For English edition, see Konstantin Vaginov, Garpagoniada (Ann Arbor: Ardis Publishers, 1983). 39. Alexandr F. Belousov (ed.), Fol´klor tverjskoy gubernii (Moscow: Nauka, 2003), 188. 40. Aleksey Tolstoy, Road to Calvary (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1946), 269. 41. Anatoly N. Rybakov, Kortik: Bronzovaya ptitsa. [Dirk, and The Bronze Bird] (Moscow: Detgiz, 1958), 18. 42. Korney Chukovsky, Od dvou do pěti. Knižnice teorie dětské literatury 7. Second Edition (Prague: Státní nakladatelství dětské knihy, 1961), 244–46. For English edition, see Korney Chukovsky, From Two to Five (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). 43. MUR. Tretiy front. Elyor Ishmukhamedov. Russian Federation, 2011. 44. Gospoda-tovarishchi. Vasily Serikov—Vsevolod Aravin—Aleksei Rudakov. Russian Federation, 2014–2015. 45. Murka. Anton Rozenberg—Jaroslav Mochalov. Russian Federation, 2015–2017.

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46. See, for example, Aleksandr Semenov, Mysticheskiy Sankt-Peterburg (Moscow: Zolotoye secheniye, 2012); Aleksandr Wey, Mysticheskiy Peterburg: Istorii polunochnogo goroda (Saint Petersburg: Astrel-SPb, ACT 2013); Arkady Vyatkin, Peterburg mysticheskiy (Moscow: Eksmo, 2014); Aleksey Pashkov and Yuri Nezhinski, Mysticheskiy Peterburg (Saint Petersburg: Accent Graphics Communications, 2017). 47. Ulrike Merkel, “Von der Angst der Spiralhopsern in Thüringen und Sachsen. Rainer Hohberg arbeitet an einem Radiofeature über die seltsamen HüpfemännelErzählungen in der Nachkriegszeit,” Ostthüringer Zeitung. Kultur & Freiheit, March 7, 2017, 9. 48. Rainer Hohberg, “Gespensterjagd in Mitteldeutschland Als die Hüpfemännchen kamen,” Deutschlandfunk, first broadcast August 11, 2017. 49. Dietrich Kühn, Sagen und Legenden aus Sachsen. Second edition (Weimar: Wartburg Verlag, 2003), 273. 50. Merkel, 2017, 9. 51. Merkel, 2017, 9. 52. Ulf Lehmann, “Die Wahrheit über den Spiralhopser,” Heimatkalender 2014 für die Region Herzberg (Herzberg: Bücherkammer, 2013): 98–99. 53. Lehmann, “Die Wahrheit über den Spiralhopser,” 98–99. 54. Hohberg, “Gespensterjagd in Mitteldeutschland.” 55. Hohberg, “Gespensterjagd in Mitteldeutschland.” 56. On a similar situation in postwar Estonia, see Kalmre, The Human Sausage Factory. 57. Hohberg, “Gespensterjagd in Mitteldeutschland.” 58. Michal Urban and Helmuth Albrecht, Hornické památky Montanregionu Krušné hory/Erzgebirge = Denkmale des Bergbaus  in der Montanregion Erzgebirge/Krušnohoří (Jáchymov: Montanregion Krušné hory and Erzgebirge, 2014), 170–75. 59. Hohberg, “Gespensterjagd in Mitteldeutschland.” 60. Hohberg, “Gespensterjagd in Mitteldeutschland.” 61. Dash, “Spring-heeled Jack: To Victorian Bugaboo from Suburban Ghost,” 22. 62. Hohberg, “Gespensterjagd in Mitteldeutschland.” 63. Hohberg, “Gespensterjagd in Mitteldeutschland.” 64. Hohberg, “Gespensterjagd in Mitteldeutschland.” 65. Hohberg, “Gespensterjagd in Mitteldeutschland.” 66. Miloš J. Pulec, “Jak žijí pražské pověsti,” Český lid 46, no. 2 (1959): 57. 67. I owe thanks to the Thuringian writer and researcher of legends Rainer Hohberg from Hummelshain for suppling the list of names for the German versions of this phenomenon, and for his invaluable assistance in documenting and interpreting local literary and folkloric sources. 68. Ottokar Domma, Erinnerungen eines Großvaters (Berlin: Karl Dietz Verlag, 1999), 59. 69. Elizabeth S. Bird, “It Makes Sense to Us: Cultural Identity in Local Legends of Place,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 31, no. 5 (2002): 519–47.

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70. Narration documented by V.Z., male, a participant in the course Český slovesný folklor a folkloristika offered within the University of the Third Age (continuing education for senior citizens) program at the University of West Bohemia in Pilsen, winter semester 2016–2017. 71. Jiří Woitsch, “Kam zmizela etnografie dělnictva? / Wohin verschwand die Ethnographie der Arbeitschaft?” Český časopis historický 110, No. 3–4 (2012): 692–707; 708–27. 72. It is significant that the more fantastical manifestations of the working-class tradition—for instance, when the inhabitants of Zákolany near Budeč believed that they heard cannons from the Russian army in 1914, or rumors of the existence of a Czech currency called the “sokol” that had been prepared, and of plans for the coronation of a Czech king in 1916—were published in the period only by researchers who were working outside official academic research centers (Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 158). 73. On Czech rural ghost stories, see Luffer, Katalog českých démonologických pověstí. 74. On the nature of Czech (sub)urban folklore of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see, for example, Petr Janeček, “Pražské pověsti Popelky Biliánové a jejich folklorní autenticita,” Acta Universitatis Carolinae—Philosophica et Historica 1—Studia Ethnologica XVI. (Prague: Charles University in Prague, 2007): 101–4. 75. Davies, The Haunted, 92–93. 76. Davies, The Haunted, 94. 77. Petr Janeček, “Podskalské strašidlo: Přízrak industriálního věku. Proměny vnímání nadpřirozena v době průmyslové revoluce,” Dějiny a současnost 40, no. 10 (2018): 28–30. 78. Reidar T. Christiansen, The Migratory Legends. A Proposed List of Types with a Systematic Catalogue of the Norwegian Variants. Folklore Fellows’ Communications No. 175. 2nd edition (Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia, 1992). 79. Christiansen, The Migratory Legends, 4–5. 80. Gary Alan Fine, Manufacturing Tales: Sex and Money in Contemporary Legend (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1992). On the application of the concept of migratory legends on contemporary legends, see Ulrika Wolf-Knuts, “Modern Urban Legends Seen as Migratory Legends,” Arv. Nordic Yearbook of Folklore 43, (1987): 167–79; and, for a more recent take, see Ambrož Kvartič, “The Local Impact of Migratory Legends: The Process and Function of Localisation,” Journal of Ethnology & Folkloristics 6, no. 2 (2012): 87–95. 81. Linda Dégh, Legend and Belief, 19–21. 82. Bell, The Legend of Spring-heeled Jack, 189. 83. Carl von Sydow, Selected Papers on Folklore (Copenhagen: Rosekilde and Bagger, 1948): 44–59. 84. Anatoly Kargin and Sergei Neklyudov, “Fol’klor i fol’kloristika tret’yego tysyacheletiya,” in Pervyy vserossiyskiy kongres fol’kloristov: Sbornik dokladov. Issue 1. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyy respublikanskiy tsentr russkogo fol’klora, 2005), 14–28. On the concept of “postfolklore,” see Sergei Neklyudov, “Posle Fol’klora,” Zhivaya starina 1 (1995): 2–4. For a more critical view, refer to Inna Golovakha-Hicks,

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“Demonology in Contemporary Ukraine: Folklore or ‘Postfolklore’?” Journal of Folklore Research 43, no. 3 (2006): 219–40. 85. Volodimir Pozdnyeyev, “Tret’ya kultura. Folklor. Postfolklor,” in Pervyy vserossiyskiy kongres fol’kloristov: Sbornik dokladov. Issue 1. (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyy respublikanskiy tsentr russkogo fol’klora 2005), 300–8. 86. For the more recent view on the contrasting potential of polygenetic interpretation of rumors and legends, see Gary Alan Fine, “Cokelore and Coke Law: Urban Belief Tales and the Problem of Multiple Origins,” Journal of American Folklore 92, no. 366 (1972): 477–82. 87. Oldřich Sirovátka, Srovnávací studie o české lidové slovesnosti (Brno: Ústav pro etnografii a folkloristiku of the Czech Academy of Sciences, 1995), 27–39. 88. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, 115. 89. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, 120 90. Sirovátka, Srovnávací studie o české lidové slovesnosti, 28. 91. Amandine Regamey, “Les femmes snipers de Tshétchénie: interprétations d´une legende de guerre,” Questions de Recherche / Research Questions 35 (2011) accessed August 16, 2017, www​.sciencespo​.fr​/ceri​/sites​/sciencespo​.fr​.ceri​/files​/qdr35​ .pdf; Kalmre, The Human Sausage Factory, 75. 92. Petr Janeček, Černá sanitka a jiné děsivé příběhy. Současné pověsti a fámy v  České republice (Prague: Plot, 2006), 262–72. For a more up to date and comparative perspective, see Amandine Regamey, “Comparing Violence: Organ Theft Rumors in Chechnya and Latin America,” Laboratorium 4, No. 3 (2012): 42–66. 93. Janeček, “Bloody Mary or Krvavá Máří?,” 221–43. 94. On the figure of Slender Man, see Trevor J. Blank and Lynne McNeill (eds.), Contemporary Legend Special Issue: Slender Man. Contemporary Legend 3, no. 5 (2015), and Trevor J. Blank and Lynne McNeill (eds.), Slender Man Is Coming: Creepypasta and Contemporary Legends on the Internet (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2018). 95. On Czech and Slovak conspiracy theories, see Zuzana Panczová and Petr Janeček, “Popular Conspiracy Theories in Slovakia and the Czech Republic,” Diogène: Revue internationale des sciences humaines 249–50 (2021): 150–67.

Chapter Three

The Social and Cultural Functions of Urban Demonology

Narrations about spring man—similarly to stories of his predecessors, the suburban phantoms and prowling ghosts of Victorian England—resist “literal reading.”1 One of the main reasons for the difficulty of understanding these texts is that most of the available sources about spring man are narratives that have the ephemeral nature of legends and rumors, or sometimes personal experience narratives. To put a finer point on it, these informally transmitted vernacular texts have already submitted to collective “censorship” through their retellings and are therefore chock-full of esoteric period cultural references that remain obscure and inscrutable to contemporary researchers. A significant percentage of them additionally have the character of metatexts; that is, texts that do not only refer to other texts but also to their period interpretations and related social practices. Researchers interested in spring man thus find themselves in the complicated role: “whoever interprets rumors, interprets interpretations,” as aptly described by the historian of rumor Hans-Joachim Neubauer.2 This research position is all the more difficult when, due to specific characteristics of the period when these stories were most widespread (the 1940s to 1960s), there is only a minimum of written and visual sources available on the subject. By contrast with his English, but partly also Russian—and German—fellow travelers, spring man had not become one of the most-discussed issues in media reports or in mass popular culture. Partly (though not entirely) owing to the relative absence of written and visual sources, this book therefore attempts to capture the phenomenon of the Czech spring man from the position of a scholarly discipline that is primarily oriented toward the study of everyday ephemeral phenomena such as rumors and legends; a discipline that moreover discovered these texts for Czech academic research in the 1960s—that is, from the perspective of folkloristics, or folklore studies. Claiming to work within this discipline is thus to follow 101

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the already well-established traditions in this line of research and to express respect for this field. This book thus follows—with a little exaggeration—a significant “tradition” (in the sense of an academic school of thought), in order to clarify the period “tradition” (in the sense of the cultural complex built around spring man). This work then—in conformity with the position of the folklorist Dorothy Noyes—brings only the application of “humble theory,” which is a folkloric theory applicable to a narrowly delineated and clearly defined area of social reality. This area, traditionally termed folklore, represents a shadow side of modernity connected with the life worlds of non-elite and marginalized classes that were long neglected by the other humanities and social science disciplines. Owing to its own double marginality (caused by the marginal subject of what they study as well as by its peripheral position among the other academic disciplines), folklore studies has often avoided the grand theories and grand narratives that were typical in the other fields; in this it faithfully tracked the local economics of the meaning of the cultures it studied, while at the same time refusing exegetic approaches, which would complicate the space for maneuvering (both for those who study and those who are being studied).3 The historian Robert Darnton spoke in a similar manner about the utility of more “grounded” approaches to studying folklore, which, by contrast from grandiose anthropological and psychoanalytical theories, enable scholars to better understand the cultural specifics of the societies studied.4 This is the reason why this book investigates the narrative complex about spring man primarily through the folklore-studies lens of the concepts of legends and rumors. The author understands legends and rumors in the spirit of modern folklore studies; not at all “merely” as folkloric genres (texts of oral literature) but as praxis: symbolically significant social processes associated with the broader cultural unit.5 This social situatedness of legends and rumors leads to the attempt to understand their social context, without which these texts begins to lose any kind of significance besides that which is attributed to them by researchers.6 One of the main traits of legends and rumors—and of verbal folklore in general—is the very open access to them for the great majority of members of the given culture. People become informally acquainted with these texts during their enculturation process and they use them frequently and without conscious reflection during many different everyday interactions. Legends and rumors are thus called “handy” by the folklorist Simon J. Bronner for the many occasions of their social use—from arguments during discussions to explanatory models, and even for models of binding forces of conformity.7

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THE WORLD OF A MYTH REVIVED: FOLKLORE OF WORLD WAR II The unprecedented increase in Czech narrations about spring man during World War II had clear social causes—at an international scale it was always in a period of social unrest or during a war, revolution, or postwar reconstruction of a country when narratives of this type occurred most frequently. These situations create a “world of revived myths,” which are often revitalized folkloric themes and motifs that may have lain latent and half-forgotten even for two or three generations. For example, during World War II the overwhelming majority of the legends and rumors passed around in Great Britain were mere updates of folk stories that were already in circulation in slightly altered forms during World War I; most of them were revived during the first eighteen months of the military conflict.8 Similar revitalizations also took place in the same period in the Czech lands, primarily with anecdotes. Czech tales about spring man during World War II also did not exist in a narrative vacuum. On the one hand, they were a continuation of a fairly intense prewar tradition. However, they shared the same social and cultural context, and a wide range of functions most prominently with the most widespread and best-documented folkloric form of the time: Protectorate-era anecdotes. They were able to react more realistically and often more forcefully and pointedly than narratives about spring man, not only in reaction to the political events, but also on all kinds of other changes in people’s daily lives. Rumors, which were sometimes elaborated into the more structured forms of legends also reacted similarly to anecdotes to new elements in public life. To this day, we still lack a thorough overview of wartime rumors, these “weapons of the weak and oppressed,” for the territories of Bohemia and Moravia. It is naturally possible to assume that, similarly as in other countries, the great majority of these stories were on a negative note and often consisted of verbal criticism of the occupying and Protectorate regimes, the army, and the civil administration, primarily focusing on the most trivial problems in people’s everyday lives at that time. Rumors and legends had already played a role in the tense atmosphere of the impending military conflict. During the period of growing verbal aggression from the side of Nazi Germany in the media rumors about a German “tin circus” (this was the idea that Hitler’s military program was false propaganda) were spread by the word of mouth, even reaching Czechoslovakia. According to these legends, the German army vehicles were not manufactured from high-quality materials and the Czechoslovak army would be able to handily annihilate them using only small arms. Rumors of this type soon mutated and expanded into more extensive cycles of anecdotes. According to the sociologist Antonín J. Obrdlík these stories, which were

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spread to a great extent by refuges from Nazi Germany, were disseminated with particular vigor after the German Anschluss of Austria.9 Besides hazy rumors and anecdotes about “tin” tanks and plywood aircraft after the mobilization of the Czechoslovak army, the following legend that spoke against the German threat was also circulating. It could be found in other European lands as well, including France and Germany. It was said that one of our people drove his Praga automobile all around Germany; that was, I think, a few months before the Munich Agreement. He was driving along a street somewhere near Berlin, and just then on that street there were German tanks driving by for some kind of training drill. This guy of ours was going really fast, right, and suddenly his brakes failed, or maybe he lost control of the entire vehicle—I don’t know—but he simply couldn’t brake and he flew right into the tanks. Well, what could he do? At the last minute he said a prayer and covered his eyes with his hands. There was a terrible crash, right, and when he opened his eyes what in the world do you think he saw! At the place where he ran into that German tank, right there, he had utterly demolished it with his Praga, and that tank was falling right into pieces, because—they say—it was only made from thin sheets of tin. Yeah, and this is what they said about those Germans, that they have everything, tanks, aircraft, all made from tin, and that we can shoot them to pieces with Flobert guns [handheld revolvers], right. Then when they came, everything was different, wasn’t it?10

This story with a cathartic function is classified by the psychologist Marie Bonaparte as The Car and the Tank, which symbolically devalues the strength of the enemy and gives fictitious hope in an impending conflict.11 According to Obrdlík, stories like these afford emotional escape before a terrifying reality, and they functioned as a symbolic collective compensation for fear and anxiety. The reports from official media and the rumor mill were subject to a kind of reciprocal proportionality in which the more terrifying the reports coming in from the press and radio became, the more fantastic the consolatory stories in oral circulation became. Stories about the powerlessness of the German army were sometimes balanced by speculations that took an entirely opposite tone, which were also spread by the press. Before the beginning of the war itself these rumors were supplemented with tidings about an alleged impending use of gas weapons. Most of these cautionary tales have a great number of international parallels, and after the real confrontation with the enemy began, these stories disappeared very quickly—just as they had in the other countries. After the 1938 Munich Agreement, the occupation of the Czech lands, and the establishment of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in 1939, other types of folkloric narrations spread across the entire country. After the initial wave of rumors about heroic resistance by the garrisons in the Czechoslovak

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border fortifications, several of which they allegedly defended for whole weeks after the Munich capitulation, a collective passive resistance arose. One of the most widespread forms of this passive resistance was ignoring official celebrations such as the arrival of the Reichsprotektor or Hitler’s birthday, and others included loud manifestations of dissatisfaction during the broadcasting of German weekly newsreels, facetious “bilingual” announcement of the names of tram stations, feigning ignorance of the German language, and other types of verbal resistance. Among these forms of collective passive resistance perhaps the largest-scale was operation V, inspired by the London radio broadcasts, but the occupying authorities could not suppress it and ultimately claimed the graffiti as them as their own.12 After that, there was a boycott of the Prague trams on 30 September 1939, which was initiated by grapevine messaging that had been inspired by the foreign radio broadcasts.13 Another well-known act of this type was the famous poem “Přísaha českého dělníka” [Oath of the Czech Worker], which was published in the evening paper České slovo on 15 June 1942 after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich by its editor Václav Sábl under the fictitious identity of metalworker named Josef Láznička; the first word of each line of this ode to the Deputy Reichsprotektor made up the following sentences: “Vám, vrahové dětí i žen všechno až náš čas bude splatit krví nezapomenem. Nezapomenem! Přísaháme.” [You, the murderers of children and women, we will pay back everything with blood when our time comes, we will not forget. We will not forget! We swear.]14 The narrations about the impotent enemy were soon replaced with the period’s beloved “Polish jokes” full of wordplay, anecdotes about Nazi and Protectorate functionaries, jokes that reflected the shortages common in everyday life under the Protectorate, and—mainly—topical gallows humor.15 A significant portion of the anecdotes mocking the Nazi leader were not—despite the rhetoric in nationalistic joke collections published after the war—of native Czech origin, but they were brought into the Protectorate from Germany and Austria, mainly by people who had fled from the Nazis.16 The first Czech collection of anti-Nazi anecdotes had actually been published in German in Karlsbad (now Karlovy Vary) in 1935.17 A similar situation also obtained in occupied Norway—even there, some of the anti-Nazi anecdotes were of German origin.18 Some of the political anecdotes, similarly as in Nazi Germany and elsewhere in occupied Europe, represented mere updates to texts from the First World War era. Perhaps the most frequent type of anecdote plays with the bilingual lettering on signs, and most of these jokes were regularly updated. Among the most typical were an anecdote about a sign saying “Hitler is a jackass (or murderer),” but these particular texts had not been translated into German, as the law required. The butts of this joke were first Protectorate President Hácha and  Reichsprotektor Neurath, and then

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Hácha together with other Nazi officials such as Heydrich, and later, only a generic school principal and a Gestapo officer.19 Rumors, similarly to the ever-present anecdotes about the changes in the period social situation, also reacted very nimbly to circumstances. Concurrently with a wave of “Polish” jokes and tales about the Czech men who aspired to fight against the Nazis defecting to Poland, some rumors began to spread that the miners in Ostrava took these volunteers across the borders via a secret underground labyrinth. Similarly, fantastic rumors also circulated about weapons buried after they had been banned by the occupying power—it was claimed that so many weapons were hidden from the Nazis that one day the whole nation could rise up, because there would be one weapon for everyone and the caches contained not only small arms, but also machine guns and artillery. Not all rumors were on such a positive note. For example, in 1940 horrifying reports were spreading around Prague about hospitals being forced to sterilize Czech women and giving children lethal injections on orders from the Protectorate government.20 Similarly, in an operation by the occupying power against Czechoslovak parachutists who assassinated Reinhard Heydrich hiding in the Orthodox church of Sts. Cyril and Methodius in Resslova Street in Prague, the inhabitants of the buildings there were convinced that the Germans were preparing to exterminate the entire neighborhood, and they therefore put on their best clothes and said goodbye to their friends and relatives.21 Mass arrests of those who were listening to the forbidden foreign radio broadcasts were explained by the existence of detecting apparatuses: with these fantastic gadgets the Gestapo could allegedly precisely determine which households were listening to London. (The oral rumor mill thus neglected the possibility of people’s own carelessness or denunciations by others.) The phenomenon of listening to foreign radio broadcasts also gave rise to neologisms—for example, a reel that enabled uninterrupted listening even with a “gutted” apparatus was called after Winston Churchill a churchillka, foreign radio news was called Kroměříž (a pun on the name of the Moravian town and “kromě Říše,” which means besides/outside the Reich).22 Period rumors also provided conspiracy explanations for natural phenomena like changes in the weather—such a cold summer as there was in 1940 was said to be caused by intensive air battles,23 and local versions in Vysocko explained the blizzard and the bitter weather on 15 March 1939 when the Nazi army entered the Czech lands as the wrath of an enraged mountain spirit known as Rübezahl.24 The oral tradition also did not shy away from Jewish subjects—among the Jews themselves there was a self-preservation anecdote circulating at the beginning of the war about how the only reason for the Gestapo’s creation of lists of Jews was so that they could occupy themselves with some activity; as soon as all the Jews would be counted up in some country, they said, the Gestapo would immediately deliberately lose the lists and begin counting

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anew.25 The mass deaths in the concentration camps were explained by uprisings or by the fact that the prisoners had succumbed to the cruel conditions working in sulfur mines.26 Meanwhile, Czech majority in the society didn’t flinch from anti-Semitic tales, which we know from the period of the Second World War from several European countries: This was told in the period when the Jews still had the same rights as Czechs. Women waited in line for vegetables, well, and then a Jewish woman came along and she impudently ran to the front of the entire long line. You know, the women began to curse and scold her for jumping ahead of the line, and the shop manager came and said to this Jewish lady that she should take her place in line like the rest. Well, so she gave the vegetables a shove and made them fall on the ground, and spat on the rest of them so that no one could buy them. Well, they told that story a lot, and people believed it, you bet they did.27

Besides rumors, legends about a friendly enemy were also spread; a type of story known from other countries, and which are still current in contemporary folklore today. In the legends these days, the Nazi soldiers are simply replaced with current character types like radical Muslim terrorists (the contemporary “Grateful Terrorist” contemporary legend type, often functioning as psychological coping mechanism).28 A beloved period anecdote that attempted to humanize the occupiers told that puppet Czech president Hácha and Nazi Protector Neurath were listening to the forbidden foreign radio broadcasts together in the Prague Castle.29 Another one that was very widespread was a legend about a German soldier who gave a civilian (who was characterized by the obligatory “friend of a friend”) a cigarette and told him to unroll it. This friend of a friend found a paper inside with a message saying that Czechs shouldn’t kill German soldiers who couldn’t help what they were doing, but only “the black ones”—that is, members of the SS. Marie Bonaparte collected an identical legend in France, and a similar tale was even circulating in the occupied lands during the First World War.30 Naturally, there are even more legends about the friendly enemy—for example, according to one, some German officer was trying to convince Czechs not to amass weapons at the end of the war, because there would be enough left over for them from the Germans.31 “A MODERN INVISIBLE EULENSPIEGEL”: SPRING MAN AS MASS PSYCHOSIS OR CATHARSIS? The most prominent explanations for such an irrational and fantastical phenomenon as the alleged appearances of spring man in the Czech lands

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have been psychologizing interpretations. Often, even period witnesses to the phenomenon fall back upon these explanatory mechanisms, such as the prominent Czech comic artist Miloslav Havlíček: [Once you told me about an encounter with Spring Man—that would certainly interest comic book readers.] At the end of the war, perhaps already during the Prague Uprising or right before it—but it was already warm and sunny, and there were flowers everywhere—in Žižkov people “spotted” Spring Man. That is, it had to be some form of collective suggestion, everyone shouted out how they saw him flee across the rooftops, and each one passed the news to someone else. People were standing in the streets and looking to see if he might be there somewhere. Of course, no one was really there, but it’s food for thought on how mass psychosis works . . . [Perhaps that was a subconscious expression of awareness of the end of the war approaching?] It’s hard to say, but people really believed in this illusion.32

The tendency to interpret spring man as a case of mass psychosis or mass hysteria (in modern terms: “mass psychogenic/sociogenic illness”) are not new in any way; in his memoirs the leading Czech psychiatrist Vladimír Vondráček also offered this as an explanation.33 Psychologizing interpretations of the phenomenon of spring man are very powerful, especially for explaining cases like the one mentioned above: that is, short-term eruptions of social unrest that are limited in time and space and only actually last for a few minutes. The following memory, which is also from wartime Prague, is another similar example: It was in the winter of 1944. I was a little girl with my parents at the St. Nicholas markets on the Old Town Square. The offensive in the Ardennes was taking place right at that time. The Prague Germans were feeling their oats again so they were singing so raucously, shouting, and drinking mulled wine. Therefore, we left the market early. We and the other Czech people were walking all out of spirits to the tram stop at Charles Square. We were waiting there, when suddenly someone called out: “Spring man!” I looked around, but I only saw a shadow that flew over the tram—perhaps it was a bird. However, the people all suddenly began to talk excitedly and the atmosphere at the tram stop was all of a sudden different.34

However, psychologizing approaches of this type are hardly able to explain the “long-lasting” phenomenon of spring man, which is experienced over a course of weeks, months, and in certain forms, also years. A longer-term

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cathartic function of the stories about spring man is documented in the memoirs of the Prague resistance worker Ludmila Sinkulová, one of the few written sources of this type that is associated with the resistance milieu: We were talking, and we were coming up with ludicrous ideas. Whoever was around joined in: Spring Man was worked into a lather, the way we kept him busy in these tales. The Petschek Palace [the Gestapo headquarters, where members of the resistance were interrogated and tortured] or the Kobylisy shooting range [where mass executions were carried out by the Nazis] was what we expected in the next few days. Each of us was afraid for the others, all of us for all the others, and of course for ourselves, so we made jokes and laughed like a person who whistles in the forest at night when he’s afraid.35

Sinkulová puts the explanation for tales about spring man as individual or collective catharsis into direct relation with Nazi repression: The high-water mark for spring man’s hijinks was during the Heydrichiade [reprisals after the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, also known as the Heydrich Terror in 1942], as a straight-up schoolbook example of psychological escapism.36

The writer Jan Weiss had similar considerations of the function of stories about spring man in the postwar revised edition of his short story “Spring-Man”: So, all kinds of tales were spun about spring-man in the pubs and cafés at that time. It was no wonder, when signs saying that political talk is strictly forbidden in the room were hanging above people’s heads! Sometimes, a person needed to speak louder, to laugh from the depths of their lungs, proclaim or take issue against something, argue, swear, or jeer and not have to look around himself anxiously. That spring man, maybe it was a kind of safety valve, a vent through which the steam of rage could sizzle out.37

Even spring man’s “discoverer,” folklorist Miloš J. Pulec, emphasizes the cathartic aspect of these narratives: People in this desolate era made fun; they laughed at the impotence of the occupants, and in oppressive atmosphere of the Protectorate even this was a lot.38

The connection between states bordering on social anomie, such as military conflicts, and legends and rumors have also been borne out by further psychological studies. The spreading of rumors and other “realistic” folkloric narratives is mainly supported by the shift that takes place in wartime situations from individualism to more collective experiences. The main psychological motive for spreading rumors and legends seems to be—besides social

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integration and enhancement of individual status—a simple human effort to cope with uncertain and potentially dangerous situations which wars certainly are. Rumors and legends thus represent an effective psychological process of collective problem-solving in socially precarious times and situations of conflict.39 Additionally, in periods of military conflict, a free-flowing social anxiety—caused by the impossibility of personally participating in the battles for individuals who are left adrift in collective makeshift arrangements—often arises within the territory’s civilian population behind the lines. The trigger mechanism for rumors can therefore be similar to the one with denunciations, which—according to psychologists—is a kind of longing to substitute an information “pseudobattle” for real battles. At the same time, in these situations, individuals’ level of identification with the masses grows stronger and the above-mentioned dilemma of inaction under adverse circumstances mentioned above is mirrored in a schizoid perception of the world, which can generate absurd chimeras such as urban phantoms.40 Legends and rumors about wartime phantoms explained through psychological approaches were not only limited to Central Europe. The most famous and literally “textbook” example is the “most-cited case of mass hysteria” associated with a phantom figure called the Mad Gasser of Mattoon. The Mad Gasser was supposed to have begun his mysterious spree of attacks between 31 August and 1 September 1944 in the American city of Mattoon, Illinois. The assaults carried out by the unknown phantom who peeped in on people (usually women) through their windows caused paralysis in his victims and other acute symptoms that began to be attributed to an unidentified nerve gas in the collective oral accounts. In swift succession, these mysterious attacks were reported to the police by several of the city’s inhabitants. They filled in details about the appearance and equipment of the mysterious phantom, who was allegedly supplied with some kind of gas weapon. A panic erupted in this city of fifteen thousand, which had sent a large part of its male population away to the war. Armed citizens joined the police patrolling the streets, and the entire affair took over the local press, and then even state and national media outlets. The intensive eruption of the panic even brought the Illinois state police into Mattoon; yet despite all the efforts by officials and volunteers, they were not able to apprehend anyone, and the whole matter was officially closed after a mere twelve days. According to social psychologists, there were three basic factors that contributed to the origin of these rumors about a mysterious phantom that fomented a short-term “mental epidemic”; i.e., a psychogenic or rather sociogenic mass psychosis in Mattoon. The first was the previously unaccounted-for sensationalism of the local newspaper, the Daily Journal-Gazette, which 97 percent of the city’s population read. This daily was publishing tabloid headlines for articles about “the first victims so far,” and a “rampaging vagabond anesthetist” during the first two

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days of the panic, which influenced the collective imagination to expect further attacks. Another factor was the psychological profile of the alleged victims of the Mad Gasser, who often longed for more social visibility or attention. Most of them were less-educated women from the poorer, manually laboring classes, whom the period psychologists claimed were more susceptible to collective suggestion. A marginal, and according to the psychologists merely supplementary role was played by mistaken interpretation of isolated cases of encounters with vagabonds or homeless people.41 The symptoms of all of the mysterious phantom’s alleged victims faded away very quickly: four of them, who had been examined by local doctors immediately after they reported the attacks, were diagnosed with hysteria, and the symptoms of the others corresponded to the same diagnosis. Newer interpretations of the panic in Mattoon retreat from the medical perspective and emphasize the potential for practical jokes played by locals who stirred up the panic, perhaps with rumors and related newspaper articles that subsequently inspired them to take their own actions. Among the suspects was allegedly a member of a locally prominent and eccentric family, the amateur chemist Farley Lewellyn. Due to his homosexual orientation, Mr. Lewellyn suffered from feelings of exclusion living in this small city. He had supposedly been the mastermind behind several of the first attempts at gas attacks before he was put away in an asylum for the mentally ill.42 Cases of alleged gas attacks similar to what happened in Mattoon were documented by social scientists in many other parts of the United States not only during the war, but also long after it. They were usually connected with a higher concentration of persons of the same gender (often women) in closed environments that were usually places relating to their occupation (factories where they were involved in wartime production, workers’ lodgings, school dormitories or classrooms, cheap rented rooms in socially excluded neighborhoods). One of these epidemics of “contagious hysteria,” that broke out in 1944 in one of the nearby factories could potentially represent the inspiration for the panic in Mattoon. Folklorists consider similar environments, bordering on Goffman’s “total institutions,” as ideal for the spread of rumors and folkloric narrations in general—the opposite-gender version would be military or prison folklore. In comparison with tales about “classic” urban phantoms such as Spring-heeled Jack or spring man, to a certain extent the panics connected with alleged gas attacks represent a “higher” stage of folkloric demonology. Whereas with spring man and his fellow travelers who jump on steel springs we can speak of a mechanization of demonology, the Mad Gasser represents its chemicalization, which steadily gained popularity during the second half of the twentieth century.43 Another potential phase could be the electrification of folkloric demonology in which the contemporary collective nightmares, such as Slender Man, killer clowns, the deadly Blue Whale Challenge, or cyberterrorism, become

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primarily associated with the medium of the internet, specifically Web 2.0 and electronic social networks.44 Another case studied by psychologists that has similarities to spring man comes from wartime Italy. From Czech war-era folklore we know about treacherous bombs shaped like fountain pens, and the nefarious “butterfly bombs” that were intended to kill curious little children.45 In Italy, these bombs were allegedly thrown from a mysterious airplane called Pippo, the Italian parallel of spring man. Rumors about the spectral aircraft, which according to the Italian historian Giovanni De Luna represent the “most curious aspect of wartime Italy,” were widespread in northern Italy during the period of the German occupation (1943–1945), a period connected with the struggle against partisans, with shortages of material goods, and above all else, with intensive Allied bombardment.46 This fictitious personalized aircraft allegedly only flew at night, was mainly distinguished by the peculiar sound it made, and it was usually entirely harmless; it was said to very rarely attack individuals who were adhering to the blackout rules. The mysterious machine was most often considered to be an American aircraft, and its name was either taken from a popular song, from the Italian translation of the name of Goofy (Walt Disney’s cartoon dog character), or—most likely—onomatopoeically from the sound it allegedly used to make during flight. Besides rumors and legends, Pippo also became a character in children’s songs, rhymes, and lullabies. According to some Italian historians, it is necessary to seek the origin of this tale in observation of the British night bomber, the de Havilland Mosquito. Similarly to the Czech spring man, this nighttime phantom is still alive in Italian popular culture even today. However, the aspect of the technologization of the demonic is heightened more with Pippo than with spring man—whereas in most versions of the story, spring man is merely equipped with mechanical jumping springs, the Italian Pippo is inherently a fully technologized nighttime terror; an entirely dehumanized folkloric demon in the form of a mysterious machine. The best-known positively perceived phantom of World War II was the mysterious, never-quite-glimpsed American figure of Kilroy. American soldiers allegedly found graffiti claiming “Kilroy was here” almost everywhere they landed, including entirely deserted Pacific islands. A great number and variety of rumors and legends circulated about the origin and identity of the mysterious Kilroy, but the most likely originator of the entire “myth” would have to be the ship inspector James J. Kilroy, who worked at a shipyard in Quincy, Massachusetts. He was in the habit of signing the bulkheads of the ships he had inspected and dispatched to battle with this inscription. For the American soldiers who were the first to board these ships it was a mystery how these inscriptions appeared inside the ships when they had been sent fresh from the shipyards, so the inscriptions began to multiply, as did the

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rumors about them. The Canadian equivalent of Kilroy was Herbie, who took his name from the popular figure of a stereotypical Canadian soldier in the army newspaper Maple Leaf. This character was even voted Canadian of the Year in 1944 by Canadian soldiers.47 Rumors about wartime phantoms that were personalized in this way also occurred sporadically during other wartime conflicts, but not to such an extent as during World War II. Examples include the mysterious phantoms La Porte, Wetterman, Super Charlie, and the Phantom Blooper, whom American soldier told stories about during the Vietnam War.48 Something all the wartime phantoms have in common is that their stories were only spread at the very end of the war, in the period of peak social unrest. The development of these rumors is thus integrally related to the general social fatigue from the exhausting military conflict and people’s longing for it to end already. Moreover, a good portion of rumors of this type were widespread in areas which were exposed to the threat of aerial bombardment and were therefore affected by nighttime blackouts. Urban phantoms can thus be explained as a certain personification of the all-pervasive fear within the darkened space that was potentially threatened by bombing during the night. In the obscured cities, whose streets yawned with emptiness and from which real crimes had disappeared for a time, folkloric tales about fictitious crimes began to spread. But why did these rumors about urban phantoms spread, and what social function did they actually serve? If we can look past their entertainment function, which is usually at the conscious forefront in most folkloric narratives today, the main reason for their spreading was a lack of faith in the official media, which for a period of time had become an obedient arm of state propaganda, and not only in the totalitarian and occupied countries but also in the democratic ones. A lack of faith in the official communication channels in the context of the irregular wartime situation caused the societies to return to traditional oral communication and orally transmitted genres of folklore, such as anecdotes or these rumors and legends. Rumors, the time-tested “weapon of the weak and oppressed,” thus for this period gained the trust of the masses who would have been skeptical at other times. Besides the rejection of or resistance to official media, the fact that in modern societies prosaic folklore is usually revitalized in periods with high social tension also played a significant role.49 Stories about urban phantoms undoubtedly also functioned as a social steam vent for the verbalization of negative emotions and ideas, similar to anecdotes or pranks. Another social function could also be a certain kind of escapism, letting people inhabit a blissful realm of fantasy and mentally take a break from the all-too-real difficulties of their everyday lives, which were permeated with the horrifying reality of the war.50 A society exhausted by the long-term conflict began to conjure up fantastic notions, some of could have

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played a cathartic role. Research by social psychologists has proven that as a means for establishing social ties or reconciling individuals with an uncertain and dangerous situation, even entirely nonsensical rumors can be helpful. These social functions of rumors are not even hindered by the fact that they often convey terrifying or disconcerting stories, because shared negative emotions are paradoxically just as useful for creating social ties as positive ones.51 A terrifying rumor about urban phantoms can thus play social roles that are just as positive as an anecdote about people jeering at Nazi pooh-bahs or feckless German soldiers. In the case of spring man, Miloš J. Pulec’s Marxist interpretation is also interesting: he perceived the transmission of stories about spring man (from our perspective today, with an overestimation of his nature as a resistance fighter) in his “martial function as an active avenger” as a collective reaction of “the people” to their increasing unease living in a fascist state, which he considered to be just another developmental phase of capitalism. In the moment when a more powerful collective resistance not only to the specific practices of the occupying power but also to its very establishment arose, a suppression of the “rationalist consciousness of the masses” took place, and rumors were created that “recall the superstitious traditions of fantastic beings and supernatural apparitions.”52 The question remains of to what extent Pulec was only meeting period expectations of writing about the demise of demonological legends in a “progressive” period of social evolution in state socialist Czechoslovakia by separating narratives about spring man out of this category and attributing progressive functions to the stories that were a better fit for the period Communist ideology. It is possible to supplement the psychologizing explanation for spring man with a modern folklore-studies approach that emphasizes an orientation toward experience when studying folkloric phenomena—it understands some folkloric phenomena as partially influenced by individual empirical experiences, or rather as specific cultural interpretations of primary perceptions that have been taken in through human senses and associated with agitated emotional states. This explanation is very applicable to phenomena connected, for instance, with borderline psychosomatic states such as the sleep disorders that allegedly gave rise to the phenomenon of “night terrors”—experiences that were previously believed to be attacks by witches, vampires, or similar parasitical demons.53 Research oriented along these lines is only in its infancy in modern folklore studies; however, such projects vividly illustrate the suitability of connecting research in the area of individual memory processes and their relationship to social memory with research into generally shared narratives.54 In this context it would be apt to mention that fact that the main localities where people allegedly encountered spring man were almost without

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exception abandoned places. Very often they were parks (for example, during World War II, it was said to happen on the darkened Charles Square in Prague or on St. James’ Square in Bratislava); that is, abandoned spaces that people frequently walked through alone. The aspect of unique cultural interpretation of sensory perceptions in narrations about spring man should definitely not be underestimated, nor should their specific localization in time and space. It is precisely the connection between panics over urban phantoms with the specific time and space of the anonymous nighttime metropolis that connects people’s common everyday life experiences with fiction into a unique synergy of emotions, yearnings, anxieties, and fantasizing, which Karl Bell emphasizes in the example of the “urban gothic” aspect of Spring-heeled Jack.55 The fact that the majority of the most periods of most intense panic over spring man spread in the autumn and winter; that is, in the period when evenings are long and it gets dark early, also contributed to the plausibility of “spring man” stories. The Pardubice, Pilsen, and Holešovice panics over spring man and the one in Bratislava over phosphorous man all culminated in the same period: roughly from October to December 1943.56 It is precisely in these dark places that people (most often women) sometimes really did encounter mysterious figures (most often men, potentially criminals or sexual aggressors), which frequently had nothing at all to do with spring man. Some of these encounters could even have unpleasant consequences: Somewhere else in Brno they say that at twilight a certain elderly lady took fright because spring man was coming after her, and she set off running and broke her leg.57

These unpleasant encounters could then be processed using narrative devices that were commonly available in the culture, in a manner similar to the one with which the semiotician Yuri Lotman and those who followed in his footsteps describe the process of retelling dreams. The originally heterogeneous cluster of sensory perceptions and the related emotional and physiological reactions in a dream are then distilled after the dreamer awakens into the form of a culturally acceptable coherent narrative, which over time also even convinces its author that the given dream (or, in our case, the “event”) really happened in the way they have described it to themselves or to others.58 The psychologist Frederick Bartlett came to similar conclusions, claiming that ambivalent sensory perceptions are generally susceptible to structuring and “organization”: if we want to articulate them and impart them to others we often select the first semantic association that comes to mind—which could be in certain situations (for instance, when meeting with a stranger in a dark park) may well have been spring man during the right period.59 Convincing narrations originate on the basis of just these kinds of emotionally very

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intense and often unpleasant experiences, and local period psychoses about spring man strengthened them. Such stories thus contributed both to the figure’s “memetic” spread in the local oral culture and to his cultural processing and incorporation into a collectively shared worldview. This integrative function of mythologizing stories was emphasized by the anthropologist Terence Turner, according to whom narratives like these form a “meta-category, whose purpose is the reintegration of divergent and often traumatic individual experiences into the normative arrangement of categories.”60 Tales about spring man had this—more generally understood—integrative function not only for the “victims” of such nocturnal encounters, but for practically everyone in their audiences. For those who did not directly experience a liminal encounter of this type it was not only the emotional delivery by alleged witnesses to spring man’s escapades, but also their unusually detailed localization in time and space that lent these stories credibility. The anthropologist Edmund Leach draws attention to how these fantastic-sounding stories, which could be considered as mere fiction without their setting in a specific time and space, gain a significant degree of credibility and diminish skepticism in their audiences thanks to their setting in the everyday, material experiences of their time and place.61 It is precisely this tie and special appropriation of the originally international migratory legend that has caused such bizarre tales about encounters with a mysterious jumping phantom to suddenly begin to seem like believable and important current events. Their setting in the ordinary experience of the flow of time and of spaces that people know intimately—and, above all else, their connection with specific persons who had allegedly chanced upon the suburban phantom—caused these tales to become, just like other rumors and legends, in the words of the folklorist Tatiana Novichkova, “deliberately commonplace”; that is, a common part of everyday life. No matter how fantastic, bizarre, or ridiculous stories about jumping phantoms may seem today, for many of those who heard the tales in the period, spring man was certainly not a humorous figure from anecdotes. He seemed to be a potentially existing and potentially dangerous being that one might actually meet in person.62 “HE WAS DRESSED IN DARK CLOTHING AND HAD THESE FLASHLIGHTS UP HERE”: SPRING MAN AS AN OSTENSIVE PRACTICE However, spring man was not only a “mere” legend or rumor; that is, a folkloric product of the collective imagination that was disseminated through oral transmission. Similarly to his British predecessors and Russian and German fellow travelers, the phenomenon of spring man played multiple social roles.

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One of the most dynamic of them was real people passing themselves off— sometimes even dressing themselves up—as this evasive suburban phantom, unique and ephemeral cultural practices that can only be tracked down with difficulty in original source materials. In earlier interpretations by researchers, the possibility of real people impersonating this spectral being was relatively marginalized and was understood to be anomalous. The reason for this false impression was the text-centric nature of traditional folklore research. The portion of narratives about spring man, mainly those that emphasized his function as a resistance fighter, had ceased to be attractive in communication after World War II, and they lost most of their social functions and merely waited passively in the collective memory for the first folklorists at the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s to revive their memory within the scope of their fieldwork. These researchers then had a fairly difficult task cut out for them. Inasmuch as these scholars primarily focused on only the wartime period (and to a significant extent ignored the vital period tradition), their narrators only provided them with rehashed war stories or mere allusions to the past narrative situations.63 Documentarists of the “spring man tradition” therefore in their analytical work transcended textual analysis mainly focused on attempting to “reveal” the origin of the ungraspable phantom. They thus brewed up a confusing mixture of native emic explanations of spring man’s identity and motivations, or sometimes the meaning of the stories told about the figure from the perspective of the storytellers (the phenomenon Alan Dundes terms metafolklore),64 with their own interpretations as researchers, which were often influenced by period ideological and political contexts. However, in this way the prewar and wartime spring man was typical (in a positivist spirit) for folklore studies of the age in that he was primarily interpreted as a narrative fiction; i.e., a phenomenon of collective imagination that exists primarily in oral transmission. The notion of a “real” spring man existing outside of the framework of narration; that is, acting in other kinds of social transactions, or perhaps even actively and physically entering into social interactions was perceived as marginal and kept separate from the purely narrative “fiction” spring man that was more compelling to researchers at the time. If there were any “real” spring man activities mentioned in the period research, it was usually in the prewar period context in connection with the church issues. According to Miloš J. Pulec, the greatest expert and most meticulous documentarist of “spring man stories,” the potential (anomalous) “real spring men” were most frequently agents of the Catholic Church: sacristans, friars, or even vicars, who were allegedly reacting in this original manner to the exit movement after World War I—attempting to terrorize the working masses and pressure them into returning to the church. This interpretation is strongly ideological, and also

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contains some degree of error, because prewar stories of this type are, much more than they are a reflection of real social practice, a reflection of vernacular anticlericalism that has been known since the end of the nineteenth century. In the area around Prague, similar spectral phenomena—various ghosts, poltergeists, and the phantom from Charles Square at the end of the 1860s, which allegedly lured crowds of a thousand to its haunting grounds, the apparition in the barracks near the church of Sts. Peter and Paul in Zderaz from 1867,65 and the famous phantom of Podskalí from 1874—were all interpreted by some observers as activities of Jesuits, friars, or vicars.66 Explanations for the escapades of ghosts, phantoms, and similar spectral phenomena by means of malicious activities undertaken by the Church, primarily Jesuits or members of the monastic orders, is moreover a widespread phenomenon all across Europe. We have to seek its roots both in the vernacular reflection of Reformation propaganda and the later German anticlerical Kulturkampf, as well as—primarily—in the folklorization of motifs from Gothic novels and Romantic literature, mediated through the semi-folk culture of broadside publications and the popular press.67 Taking into account the complicated working and personal relations Miloš J. Pulec had with the Old Catholic Church, where he had served in a significant function, and his active cooperation with the Czechoslovak state socialist regime, this centuries-old “time-tested” folk explanation for spring man’s existence is the only one that Pulec considered to be close to actual social practice: They say that sacristans and other agents of the Roman Catholic Church pretended to be spring men; they wanted to use this disguise to scare people and deter them from leaving the church. These spring men, already held liable by tradition from the period of the exit movement after World War I, already had all the defining features: most importantly, tall boots with springs, but also shining eyes; they say it was a horse’s head with a flashlight. Storytellers describe incidents with spring men as though they were the plain truth, they name witnesses who had beaten the masqueraders, and they also knew in detail where the props used for their mummery had been found. From the shadows of the cathedrals and vicarages, from those places out of which demons used to swarm to terrify our great grandfathers, spring men turned out after World War I—and in various actions they attempted to assume the function of the diabolical intimidators. Spring man is the last modernized form of the medieval devil, equipped with seemingly more logical accessories than horns, flames, and a hoof. Among the miners from Mostecko, telling stories about a devil from hell could only elicit laughter, but a fellow who jumped on steel springs? Even today we don’t say without thinking about it first whether jumps like his—perhaps several meters— could be possible after intensive training. And then in several districts the legend of spring man remained current from one war to the next. The masks worn by the cathedral ministers and the flickering image cast by the parish’s magic

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lantern, projecting a figure that seemed to jump like it was on springs, was supposed to lend it functions that were new, and from our perspective certainly more remarkable.68

The existence of these practices can only be proven from historical sources with great difficulty (though it must be said that the same is true of disproving them as well). However, the fact remains that this anticlerical vernacular explanation also cropped up during World War II: As a matter of fact, they were “vicars”—friars from nearby Bohosudov. Why did they do it? So that people would be frightened. One of my grandmother’s acquaintances said she could attest to this: she had caught sight of one of the spring men jumping down from the cemetery wall.69

Some of them preserved the motif of church representatives artificially spreading the idea of spring man, but with a rare positive subtext: A similar case, but from the time of the war was recently tracked down by Ladislav Louthan from Liberec. He found out from Mrs. Lhotáková from Držkov that at night the vicar projected moving pictures of a jumping figure into the valley each time a German military convoy was driving through.70

Researchers have not expended any great efforts on searching for other forms of social behavior relating to spring man, even though they paradoxically indicated that “explicatory fables about how someone ‘did’ spring man were very common.”71 However, these “fables” were understood as a mere supplement to fictitious stories whose goal was primarily to support the realism of narrations that were intended to serve to frighten simple people or, later, the occupying military forces. The great number of these tales—and the emphasis that storytellers place on them—is disconcerting for researchers, as well as being extremely interesting. Many of them were obviously composed ex post, especially the ones that attempted to rationalize the mysterious phenomenon by use of a collective strategy of scapegoating—they placed the blame for spring man’s local escapades on a person who was considered unpopular and expendable by the collective.72 Thus, during the postwar period some of those who could have been retrospectively accused of spring man activities were specific individuals among the Czech (or Sudeten) Germans who were expelled after World War II from the Czech lands. We have examples of this ethnic externalization of a folk demon recorded in towns of Litomyšl and Jihlava. The physical absence of an individual who has been slandered in this way, connected with the postwar demonization of everything German in general thus created a communication strategy that was effective at that time, and which

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very handily parried the skepticism of potential doubters about spring man’s former existence. The best-documented example of this type is the spring man from Jihlava, who was identified after the war by part of the local population with Ignaz (Hynek) Hanus, the owner of the local garden shop: I remember it quite well: in  Jihlava they had a real spring man. It was some German, a gardener, who dressed up as him. He frightened people most frequently there near one of the cemetery walls. Well, everyone was afraid of him, and eventually no one walked that way, but then they figured it out. After the war they expelled him, I think.73

This local attribution of the role of the mysterious phantom to an ethnically defined scapegoat of the local community was also confirmed to Miloš J. Pulec in 1962 by Arnošt Kába, who at that time was working at the Bohemian-Moravian Highlands Museum in Jihlava: The concept of spring man is known here as a fabulous figure from the period of the occupation that got up to antics and harmed Germans and collaborators, attacked them in lonely places, etc. . . . There wasn’t much said about spring man’s function as a partisan during the occupation, so far as we know, nothing was told that would be related to the place or to an event. However, in the city of Jihlava during the Protectorate a real “spring man” “performed” in the function of a mere spook in an outlying street under the city walls called ‘V důlkách’ and also by the cemetery, and they say also in the suburbs (Na slunci). People saw him; he especially went after women. He was black and enormously tall, he had huge boots on springs, he crouched down in order to bounce up from the earth and he even jumped over plank fences, which the street V důlkách is lined with. The German police cast about for and probably also apprehended spring man, because his activities ceased. The Czech and German public assumed that the eccentric gardener Hanus, a German who had been expelled in 1945, had played the role of “spring man.”74

However, the true background of the case in Jihlava was somewhat different. The alleged Jihlava spring man Ignaz Hanus Jr. was born in 1904 to the local German family of Ignaz and Emilie Hanus, who resided at Zahradní street No. 7. Ignaz was a gardener who entered the Wehrmacht [German Army] on 13 January 1942, and he did not appear in Jihlava during the war, nor was he expelled from there afterward.75 But for many people, he was paradoxically the one who in the last years of the war had bedeviled Jihlava with his alleged wild antics. If someone was really playing the role of spring man there (which is a possibility we cannot eliminate), it would have to have been another person. Attributing the role of spring man to Ignaz Hanus

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Figure 3.1. The narrow area of the former street V důlkách in Jihlava, where spring man allegedly caused havoc during World War II, is in many ways an ideal archetypical environment for spring man activities in general. Archive of Martin Herzán, 1960.

was also partially legitimized by the fact that the alleged Jihlava spring man often appeared right in the area of Hanus’s garden shop. The demonization of this specific German-speaking citizen of Jihlava (as well as his peers elsewhere) is thus a typical example of “projective inversion,” a psychological mechanism that, according to the folklorist Alan Dundes, can be commonly found in legends and rumors in the modern world. The violence that was actually committed by the majority society (or its longing to commit such violence) is then retroactively “justified” through purported violent acts done by the minority, against which the majority has merely “justifiably defended itself.”76 According to Dundes, this is precisely why there exist such a great number of xenophobic texts in contemporary folklore. This mechanism is one of the main triggers for pogroms and for racial or ethnic riots: many were launched by xenophobically focused rumors and legends.77 The Jihlava case is interesting for researchers primarily because it represents an inverse projection that was both retrospective and ex post. Ignaz Hanus thus became the “Jihlava spring man” (that is, the perpetrator of fictitious violence) only after the expulsion of a large part of the German-speaking population (that is, an act of genuine physical violence perpetrated by Czechs, who had become the majority after the war ended).78

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Similar testimonies about “real” spring men were not only limited to Jihlava. But how can we interpret cases where real people were not only considered to have been spring men, but where they may have even potentially impersonated them? That is, did they imitate the activities of the fictitious spring man as they were described in oral narratives using embodied techniques of mimetic memory? This ephemeral cultural practice can be best understood through the semiotic concept of ostention, which has been used since the 1970s in folklore studies. We can define ostension as a type of communication in which a certain fact, phenomenon, or situation fulfills the primary function of a sign. In our case, it is a communicative process in which the folkloric narrative (the legend or rumor about spring man) changes into the form of a unique practice. During this process the knowledge of the given narrative synergistically combines with the knowledge of its context, its current social meaning, and its performance and other related social practices.79 The “lowest” level of ostension is proto-ostension, which is distinguished by a mere change in the mode of folkloric narration, whereas in a “fabulate,” as conceptualized by C. W. Sydow—i.e., a generic fictitious narrative in the third person (for example, about how someone caught a glimpse of spring man somewhere)—narrators create a more intimate, and often for the audience also more believable “memorate” related in the first person (shifting themselves into the role of the one who encountered spring man). Proto-ostension, which was anticipated in the humanities in works by the semiotician Yuri Lotman, is thus essentially an intensive appropriation of a generally shared folkloric text (of a legend or rumor) by the narrator, who culturally “translates” this narrative into their own experience. Only a small number of documented narrations about spring man are of this type.80 Another type of ostension is quasi-ostension, which takes place in the moment when real events are erroneously interpreted as “confirmation” of the realism of the legend or rumor. Quasi-ostension is often the basis for many collective panics, including the contemporary moral panics created by mass media.81 In the case of spring man, it is possible to consider the cultural translation of the activities of real voyeurs and sexual aggressors into the forms of legends and rumors about spring man by the public as a form of quasi-ostension.  The last form of ostension is pseudo-ostension, during which the plot of the legend or rumor is deliberately “hammed up” with the help of serious and nonserious social behavior. The narrative complex about spring man was used in the form of pseudo-ostension in two basic ways. The first was out-of-bounds social behavior that reacted to the orally transmitted rumors and legends where a certain person deliberately exploited stories about spring man to cover for their behavior, or they adapted their practices to these stories; this agonistic tradition mainly concerns adults and it is very difficult to capture in period sources and even more difficult to interpret. The

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second, and by far more common manifestation were the activities of children who were reacting to narratives about spring man (including pop cultural and literary treatments) secondarily, but in a more active manner through children’s games. This latter manifestation is still very much alive today. A unique example of the diffusion of several modes of ostension is represented in the local panic over phosphorous man that broke out in Zlín in 1943. Local girls who were staying in the dormitory at the Bata factory, where in the evenings they were terrified by telephone calls by an unknown man who introduced himself at first as “spring man,” and later as “phosphorous man.” When the events took on the features of a local panic, the personnel department of the Bata factory took charge of finding a solution in cooperation with the local outpost of the Gestapo. It then came to light that the mysterious “phosphorous man” was Bronislav Matulík (1926–1945), an underage student from the local technical school who was working in the wartime manufacturing operation. His motivation was simply to make mischief: he wanted to frighten the girls he saw during the day in the factory plant with his phone call. The dangerous situation, which could be classified as a disruption in the wartime manufacturing, was defused by intervention by the employees of the Bata factory as well as by Matulík’s family members, who vouched for his moral probity.82 However, this prank of impersonating an urban phantom was only the first of Matulík’s attempts at disturbing the silence and the airless torpor of the Protectorate. At the very end of the war, Bronislav Matulík joined the local partisan group called Tomáš. After he was apprehended on 12 March 1945 along with two other partisans in an attempt to take weapons from members of the 5th Hungarian Cavalry Squadron in Malenovice, he tragically died in the Mauthausen concentration camp.83 The case of Bronislav Matulík clearly reveals significant period aspects of ostension associated with urban phantoms. According to witness testimonies, his activities began in the period when “something was in the air” and all of Zlín was expecting that something important was going to happen soon.84 The combination of this anticipation with the all-embracing boredom and emptiness of the Protectorate then led this young man to engage in pranks, which were quite typical for his generation during the war era.85 A lover of action, and the protagonist of a great many humorous but also risky incidents in the Bata factory, as well as the blond darling of the local girls (thanks to whose particular interest he allegedly had the window of his workshop painted white); however, because of period conventions, the rules at the Bata factory, and his Evangelical Christian family background, he could not meet with them in public, so he impersonated the mysterious “phosphorous man” as an escape from the boring everyday routine. For a short span of time he thus dragged Zlín out of its torpor. In the name of the phantom who had “phosphoric hair that shines from afar, one leg, and bread in his armpit” he first

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called girls he knew on the telephone and invited them on dates, and then he started calling girls he didn’t know to ask them out on dates, which of course the terrified girls refused.86 Bronislav Matulík did not abandon his efforts to enliven the Protectorate-era gloom after he was revealed as the “phosphorous man” of Zlín; his incidents of the nature of publicly listening to foreign radio broadcasts proliferated, until he ultimately decided to embark on the path of real, active resistance, for which he paid with his young life. However, there also existed other, longer-enduring and more intensive types of public ostension connected with spring man. The most famous example of a unique pseudo-ostension is a famous individual who bore the name of the jumping phantom for a good part of his life: the legendary soccer player from the Viktoria and Škoda Pilsen clubs, Josef “Perák” Šnajdr (1921–2016): All his fellow players and the fans knew him by his nickname “Spring Man.” At one meeting of the “Old Guard” he told us how he acquired it. “So, they started to call me this name in Rokycany, where I was playing an away game in 1943, during the war. At that time some resistance fighter was engaging in sabotage against the Germans, and he even blew up trains. He was great at jumping and he was nicknamed Spring Man. Well, and I used to be excellent at jumping for headers on the playing field, so someone shouted Spring Man! at me during the game, and then it stuck.”87

Without a doubt, Josef Šnajdr represents the best-known example of the penetration of “mythology” connected with spring man into the public space. It is also rather interesting that the soccer player “Spring Man” was playing at the beginning of the 1940s in Zlín (where he played for several years in the division and also later in the league for Bata Zlín); that is,in the place where the local panic over phosphorous man (the one caused by Bronislav Matulík). Another example of ostensive application of narratives about spring man is the quasi-ostensive interpretation of a real crime that took place in the first half of the 1960s by children from  small northern Bohemian town of Kopidlno, which is illustrated in the following extended narration: For us, spring man was a guy, a delinquent, a spy, who had special pull-on boots. Some kind of springs were attached to the bottom of his boots, thanks to which spring man could appear at any time and any place when you’d least expect him. With these boots he could easily even jump over the shelves in the brickyard where they dried the bricks, and he was taller than a two-story building. Even though we were afraid of him as boys, and spring man had us all scared to death; well, those boots! We envied him those boots and really wanted to have them too. Then we could be as uncatchable as he was and no cop could ever nab us. I grew up in Kopidlno, where there was a brickworks on the northern edge of town at that time; this is where spring man appeared most frequently. The

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Figure 3.2. Bronislav Matulík, the “phosphorous man” of wartime Zlín, 1944. Family archives of Rostislav Matulík.

brickworks used to stand in the place where today there is a prefab-panel housing development that stretches to the north from the railroad crossing passing through the road from Kopidlno to Jičín. It’s still commemorated to this day

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Figure 3.3. Josef Šnajdr, who was called “Spring Man” in the Zlín uniform, early 1940s (second from the left, on the bottom). Archive of Pavel Hochman, Pilsen.

with the street name U Cihelny [By the Brickworks]. Across the road, right next to the brickworks, then there used to be the Kazamát. Kazamáts, those were old huts or railway wagons that served as shelters for the poor; today, we would call them the socially disadvantaged. The kazamátters were usually employed right there in the brickworks. It happened quite often in the brickworks that during our games, one of us boys shouted that spring man was approaching when a strange noise was heard. We all then gathered ourselves together and we ran away from the brickworks. We also used to warn each other that no one should go to the brickworks alone in the evening, because spring man might be lurking there. Spring man was our nightmare! Even though we had gone, for example, to play in the game park on the chateau grounds. Sometimes, even the girls went with us. That was terrifying enough. When we were fencing with sticks, the girls would scream while we were playing, and they were somehow always not that much into the game. We boys then always had to yell at the silly things so they would keep their traps shut, or else spring man would hear us. For spring man had no problem jumping over a high fence, or over the old, full-grown trees in the game preserve. Sometimes it also happened that when we were playing on the path between the brickworks and the Kazamáts that some other boys from a different clique suddenly ran past us with terrible yelling and screaming that spring man was in the brickworks and we should run away as fast as we can! So we ran away, and screamed in just as much terror as they had.

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We knew that spring man was dangerous for us. And after the tragedy that took place in the beginning of the 1960s, when two murdered children were found in a train near Pardubice, and no one could find out during the investigation who had killed the children, we guessed exactly who had done it! But we just didn’t have any proof, and just saying that spring man killed them wouldn’t work with the police. So we were hoping that thanks to the possibility of using certain potential investigative methods it would occur to them to take the children’s eyes out of their heads, because everyone knows that in the eye is a lens that photographs everything it sees, just like the lens in a camera. And when they could determine from the children’s lenses that the killer was spring man, then we would also maybe find out a lot of other things too. Maybe, that he was a spy from Russia, or where he had gotten those pull-on boots, or who gave them to him. We children were even more afraid after this event. Once, when I was walking home from school with the boys, we saw a dog that had been run over on the road. When we were children only one car passed through the town—which didn’t even have two thousand residents—per day, and not even every day. And suddenly, here was this run-over dog! Who ran over this dog? What did the car look like? And was it just a stupid coincidence? When we looked at one another, it occurred to us immediately. Spring man! If, we thought, he was capable of killing those children in the train, why wouldn’t he also run over this dog? Spring man had a hold on us until we were maybe ten, eleven years old. Then he went away all on his own. It was like he was just cut off, and all at once we stopped talking about spring man when we were together. He just ceased to interest us.88

The above-mentioned crime, which was attributed by the children of Kopidlno to spring man, was a double murder that took place on 29 July 1963 near the main train station in Pardubice. The culprit was a sadistic pedophile and cannibal named Josef Kulík (1930–1964) who murdered two young boys, Vladimír Drtina (six years old) and Oldřich Křenek (nine years old), in a disconnected railway carriage.89 With regard to the circumstances and the manner in which he carried out these brutal murders, the trial that was later carried out with Josef Kulík was not made public, which only fostered the spread of unsubstantiated information, according to which members of the SNB (National Security Corps) gained an image of the murderer by photographing the pupils in the eyes of one of the dead boys. The period spread of these rumors was captured in the period in investigations conducted by the police themselves.90 In this rumor an archaic folk idea that had been widespread back at the turn of the twentieth century—namely, that the pupils of a dead person captured the last thing they had seen, and in the case of victims of violent crime, it would then be their murderer’s face—was revived. In the second half of the twentieth century, criminal cases were still recorded in

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which the murderer would deliberately wound or even entirely take out their victim’s eyes in order to prevent their apprehension.91 The “Russian” identity of the children’s spring man from Kopidlno was then commented upon in an intriguing manner by a relative of our informant: Just my thoughts about a theory for why spring man could have been a Russian. Kopidlno is located on the borders between the Central Bohemian Region and the Nymburk district. In Kopidlno there was a sugar refinery, which was prosperous at one time, and around Kopidlno there was a fairly broad swath of towns that had grown rich from growing sugar beets. Everywhere there were plenty of well-situated villagers and prosperous landed famers. And when the communists—the Bolsheviks—the Russians came along, it was all taken from them, stolen actually. The local people hated them. I even remember when I was a little girl with my grandmother in Kopidlno and their cars with flags from the USSR passed by her fence. Grandmother clawed at my arm and said we’re going away so that the Bolshevik assholes don’t think we’re interested in them. Even my daddy says that he remembers how when he was a boy all the adults swore a lot about the commies and their friends. And when everything that came from the East was labeled as something bad and evil, the boys would have thought that this is where spring man came from too.92

Some other tales about urban phantoms actually indicate an even more intense form of (potential) ostension—in the form of direct physical presence of people who were impersonating spring man in public spaces. This man, who possibly had some unusually well-developed technology, is an example of this type of wartime spring man in the Pankrác neighborhood of Prague: Question: I’d like to ask two special questions, one after the other. Do you know something about spring man? L.: Well, he had boots, and on them he had, like they used to have those gaiters and these huge springs, so he jumped with them, right. Well, and he was some kind of madman, like you can find even today, and he frightened people, yeah, and he frightened the girls the most. Question: And were you afraid of spring man? L.: Well, we had our eyes bugging out, because he was dressed in dark clothing and had these flashlights up here. Question: And how many of them did he have? L.: Well, I can’t swear on my honor, but on each side. And before they were, look, as big as this, two-celled ones. And he wore a belt like this, and he had them attached to his belt. Well, but we didn’t know whether it was real. But here in Pankrác there was this madman.

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Question: Did you see him? L.: Yes. Question: So: flashlights on his belt, two flashlights on his head, and flashlights on his feet, right? L.: Yeah, and always when it was really dark, and best after midnight. And these flashlights were always, like, really visible. Question: And this spring man was there during the war? L: Well, he was really something at that time. And we couldn’t help being so frightened.93

The mention of “frightening girls” by Mrs. L., who is representative of the social and professional groups that were most prevalent as storytellers of World War II–era urban narratives about spring man—that is, a member of the working class—is no accident, because one of the most frequent motivations for spring man’s physical entrance into the public space is to get into aggressive, often sexualized confrontations with the female part of the population. “LIKE WHEN A RUTTING DEER BARKS”: SPRING MAN AS MYTHOLOGIZED SEXUAL AGGRESSION A great many documented narrations, both from World War II as well as from the postwar era depict spring man as an ambivalent phantom who was mainly dangerous for young women in lonely places. Here is an example of a situation of this type when workers were returning from night shifts in the factories from Prague during World War II: Spring man mainly attacked in Vysočany and he was known for his partiality to the opposite sex. The intensity of spring man’s attacks grew stronger mainly in the times when the Germans forced women to go work the night shifts. Several times, he attacked a patrol squad and he even injured a few soldiers. Allegedly, he jumped on his springs over the garages and repeatedly absconded that way. And as if that wasn’t enough, after these operations he stalked women who were leaving after the night shifts. Therefore, he never gained the affections of the local population. Women were afraid of him, and men hated him for it.94

Other stories from the period of World War II are more explicit in their descriptions of spring man’s sexualized activities: They also told stories about that spring man here in Litomyšl. He was a local barber, a German, who was expelled after the war. He attached springs from a

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sofa to his feet, and with their help he jumped up high and at night he used to look into the windows of homes right at the time when unsuspecting girls and women were undressing. He was quite a terror—today we call them voyeurs.95

The memories of many period witnesses significantly highlight an interesting fact: that the designation “spring man” [pérák] at the period was used in place of other expressions that are commonly used today for specific sexual practices and deviations. Narratives about spring man thus, to a certain extent, perhaps represented a way to speak about these subjects that were tabooed at the time, and allowed speakers to express themselves specifically, and then to process them culturally. This function of spring man is clearly illustrated by a story from the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s from the town of Jičín: Once, spring man appeared in Valdice, at other times the grannies were waiting in line by the butcher’s shop and they were saying: “Spring man was there! My sister-in-law came over and said that spring man was on the loose over there!” Well, I don’t know who spring man was supposed to be, I only found out at the end of last year from the television that he was supposed to be someone who jumped on springs. As children, we understood that he was a pervert. I perceived spring man as a general term for a pervert who wanted to attack and kill the women there. When some suspicious-looking guy showed up, we called him a spring man. Today, they are called “perverts,” but we called them “spring men” then.96

Thus, spring man represented (among other functions) a way that people in that period were able to vernacularly conceptualize culturally tabooed, socially liminal, and emotionally unpleasant experiences with sexualized aggression of various types. It was thus a typical example of the application of a social function of legends and rumors that the folklorist Bill Ellis has termed the “Rumpelstiltskin Principle.”97 This principle is named after the demonic imp from European folktales (international folktale type ATU 500 The Name of Supernatural Helper, previously known as Rumpelstiltskin. Guessing the Helpers´ Name or Tom Tit Tot)98 who threatens the main heroine of the tale. She gains power over him only when she is able to guess his real name. According to Ellis, many legends and rumors fulfill a similar function—they attempt to disempower some social phenomenon, whether it truly or only putatively threatens the society by “naming” it, with the help of an orally transmitted, collectively shared story. The tale about spring man thus verbalized experience with sexual aggression (or cultural concept of it) into a culturally objectified form; that is, into partially fictionalized narratives:

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Spring man—he was a pervert who was threatening women after the war around the Olšany cemeteries. Spring man was able to squat down and jump over a lower wall thanks to the springs he had built into his soles. As soon as he had touched someone’s bottom, he was already bounding away.99

Spring man’s sexual aggression could take various forms, which even ranged into drastic extremes: In the forests around the Elbe River in the area around Pardubice there allegedly was allegedly a supernatural being that had springs instead of feet, and therefore they called him Franta Pérák [Franz the Spring Man]. This being allegedly raped young girls. He had springs on his feet so that he could move quickly and thus more easily attack the girls and then escape from the site of the crime.100

We also find hints of the motif of sexual aggression in some of the narrations told about the German Hüpfemännchen: I was maybe fourteen, and today I still remember the day like it was today, when one of my friends was sitting in our living room. She was working on shifts and she had to ride her bike to Gera. She said: “Believe me, I was there alone, and they surrounded me. And then that—ah, skeleton. Then then they jumped so high that no one could explain it. They spread terror. It was truly nasty, something against humanity.”101

Christa Hurth, who was sixteen years old at the time, describes her encounter with the German “phantom” in the beginning of the 1950s even more explicitly: Whether it was this neighbor or that one, I don’t know. We looked outside, and we were terrified. A naked man was standing in the garden. And immediately we thought—a Hüppelmann. I don’t know whether he was also naked below, but his upper body was naked. That was visible. We rushed outside and ran—for the police.102

Spring man was not the only example of mythologization, or rather the folklorization of sexual aggression against women. Sexual violence against women has also been mythologized in a similar manner, for example, in postwar Soviet Estonia. As the folklorist Eda Kalmre mentions, in this period the subject was so deeply socially taboo that it wasn’t even talked about in intimate family circles. The only manner in which it was possible to verbalize this edgy, but at the time also very topical subject, was through the generalized, nonspecific forms of legends or rumors. These texts were usually told at that time as generally shared knowledge of a recent event that had happened to a relatively distant person (that is, not to

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someone specific who would then suffer from stigma as the victim of a rape). They thus helped to culturally “name” and thus gain at least a symbolic dominance over Ellis’s “demon” of a culturally tabooed social subject.103 We have evidence of this mythologizing function for spring man in a great many locations: besides Jičín, Prague, and Pardubice, also, for instance, from Jílové u Prahy region. An integral part of these stories was often also a connection to a specific person who reputedly or really did engage in these sexualized practices, which were then labeled with the period term “spring man”: This took place in the 1960s, when we as little kids used to go sledding in the woods in Libeř, and spring man was causing trouble there. Because of him, we had to go home early. They said these things about some person who was looking in at women through their windows. Usually when they were showering. He was lurking behind the fir trees when the girls were getting off the bus. He really jumped over fences, and very handily. He was one of the honorable local citizens. He took ladders and peeped into windows. My father-in-law caught him: they were in the kitchen, and suddenly he saw him and said “Sit here quietly.” That time he caught him, but he didn’t say who it was. He threatened him, and there was no more trouble after then. Spring man also one time peeped in on some old lady in the houses, and she had a nervous breakdown from it. He also looked into the window of the sister of Dr. M., when she went to the toilet. He could have easily made some special construction that he climbed up on, and he left it there. Sometimes, he sometimes “did it” [relieved his bowels], when the boys chased him, and later someone slid on the mess. They say he was the father of a family who had never harmed anyone.104

To a significant extent, spring man thus provided a way to talk about something that shouldn’t be spoken about, that was not allowed, or which at the very least was very difficult to speak about.105 It is no coincidence that erudite period observers, such as the psychiatrist Vladimír Vondráček, describe spring man as a phantom that primarily attacks women: Perhaps “spring man,” who terrified women because he jumped to a height of several meters in front of them, belonged to the realm of fairy tales.106

These ostensive sexualized dimensions of spring man, which were already becoming clearly defined in his Victorian predecessor Spring-heeled Jack, is most extensively documented in the Czech context in his local incarnation in Jičín at the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s. The Jičín case clearly illustrates the syncretic nature of the cultural complex on spring man, which in this town of fifteen thousand (comparable in size with Mattoon, where the Mad Gasser had allegedly run amok in 1944) was not only composed of orally transmitted rumors and legends, but also a unique collective

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interpretation of a singular and culturally bounded social behavior, which for a short period of time took on the features of a local panic.107 It is precisely the dynamic—and in its essence practically dialectical—combination of “fictitious” oral narratives with the unique social practices of a specific person that distinguishes the narrations from Jičínsko from other texts about spring man that were documented in the rest of the Czech lands. There were isolated occurrences of stories about spring man in Jičín and the surrounding areas as early as the 1940s as a relatively weak echo of a vital national tradition from the wartime era. In the postwar period in the Jičín area, spring man was primarily considered only a phenomenon of children’s culture: And you know, I remember spring man! That was something they talked about, but only among children. We went by foot from Pařezská Lhota to Libuň, and we had to walk through a forest and the children used to say: “Wait for me, so spring man doesn’t catch me.” I went to school in Libuň until I was eleven years old, so this was between the years of 1946 and 1951. But who that spring man was, I no longer know.108

The adults in the Jičín area, especially within the town of Jičín itself, were affected by stories about spring man somewhat later, between the end of the 1950s and beginning of the 1960s. At that time, the stories affected the life of the city so powerfully that there is even an entry about it in the city chronicle. In 1959, the chronicler Bohumil Machačka (1899–1972) wrote an official entry in the Kronika města Jičína in the form of an independent section in the chapter on “Political and Public Life”: 5. Manifestation of the class struggle—the rumor mill. Before Christmas there arose a great disturbance among the citizens of our town and the nearby area. Among the people it was told that in the early evenings some man enters homes and he peers into the windows, steals, and then sometimes hangs out ladies’ laundry and frightens women in other ways, and they became afraid to walk to work for the second shift or to leave their homes at all after dusk. This man who disturbed the public was called “Spring Man” by the people. There were cases where women protected themselves from him by taking a club, a meat mallet, or other similar weapons to bed with them. The description of this “Spring Man,” however, was various. The end of his haunting was effected by the SNB [National Security Corps] in mid-January 1960.109

The Jičín chronicler also reacted to spring man’s activities in an entry from 1960:

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The Rumor Mill. In mid-January, the SNB announced that the man the population referred to as “Spring Man” had been captured, in order to allay public fears. This man never took anything from anyone, and he didn’t do anything other than frighten people. According to the SNB report, he was a twenty-one-year-old man who, perhaps out of fondness, occupied himself by frightening women. The rumors had it that he was a “soldier,” who as a track athlete had been given training in running which allowed him to visit women in the area very quickly, getting to several locations within a single day. When he was apprehended, they say he jumped as high as two meters.110

What was the development and the cultural dynamic of the Jičín case, which was so consequential in its time that even the official town chronicle had to react to it? The official reaction by the authorities at the time was not only based on the “rumor mill,” but also on social behavior of a semi-criminal nature. The official interpretation, which attempted to homogenize the “liquid” communicative memory into the official cultural memory of commemorative chronicle entries, was of course influenced by the period’s power dynamics and efforts to “politicize,” or rather to “depoliticize” the entire affair. What the “rumor told” has actually proven to be true to a significant extent. But let us begin with the folkloric aspect of the entire affair. Rumors mentioned in the Jičín chronicle really were circulating at that time. One of the period witnesses retrospectively (with relatively imprecise dating) remembers:   I remember that my parents were talking about spring man sometime around 1957. As a little girl at that time I was sick with something: I had a fever and I was sleeping in the kitchen because they weren’t heating the other rooms. Daddy covered the lamp over the table with newspapers so the light wouldn’t disturb me. And I know that he and Mama whispered in the semidarkness that spring man has been jumping around Jičín and that he’s some soldier who escapes from the barracks and chases ladies. But unfortunately, I don’t have any more of these memories.111

The period rumors about the spring man from Jičín affected the entire broader surroundings of the town, primarily exciting the imagination of the local children: I was already going to the second stage of the elementary school in Jičín, so that was sometime after 1958. And I know that the older boys said that spring man was a soldier, and that he ran around in a duffle coat, they called it a trench coat, at that time I guess that was in fashion, and that he jumps over fences, steals underwear, and that he runs around Jičín, around Čeřov; and, sure, those were

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just kind of speculations. I never heard anything at all about those springs on his feet; I only heard that now from you. I thought that he was some kind of, you know, weirdo; well, a pervert, that’s what we thought about him. Later, I didn’t hear any more about spring man.112

But as soon as the rumors about the Jičín spring man spread further afield, they began to influence behavior—not only of children, but also adults: Well, you’re right about that, they said that spring man was running around Jičín. I had been going to Jičín to the municipal second stage elementary school which had sixth to ninth grades, so that was sometime between 1957 and 1961. I was living at that time with my aunts, and I went home to my parents in Veliš on Saturday and Sunday. And suddenly, people were talking about spring man. I never saw this spring man, but what I can remember is they were saying that he was some kind of soldier who was wearing boots with springs—that’s why they called him spring man—and he could move around Jičín so fast that they weren’t able to catch him. And it is my conviction that it’s thanks to these springs that they just couldn’t catch him, at that time maybe the police weren’t as well equipped and he vamoosed on those springs. They only said: “Spring man was here again. And then he was over there.” And my aunts were so terrified that as soon as it got dark I wasn’t allowed outside. [Laughter] But I have the feeling that maybe he was moving around a lot by the barracks at Šibeňák [pond]. I thought this was so at the time, because the barracks, they’re right there next to Šibeňák. [And what did spring man do, besides jumping?] Well, I never actually knew. I can’t tell you. I can’t say if he attacked some girl, or that he raped someone, it was just said that spring man was running around Jičín. I was afraid of—I don’t know what. But I asked my classmates from the elementary school about this spring man for you. The one who later moved away to Moravia, she remembers that he stole ladies’ underwear and even put it on. And the other one doesn’t know anything specific about spring man, but she recalls that when she was a girl her parents walked to where the Lindens began to meet her. They were living on Revoluční Street, and because this spring man was running around here and the barracks were nearby, they had rather gone out to meet her in the evening at the beginning of the Lindens—where now there’s a traffic circle—so that she didn’t have to walk even that short stretch home alone.113

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The collective panic in Jičín around spring man is exceptional mainly for its well-attested connection with the activities of one specific person—a soldier-runner, who, with his intensive and frequent sexualized social practices terrified this county seat for several weeks. The person who actually incited this panic with his odd behavior was a twenty-one-year-old private, J.Ž., serving his first year of compulsory service in the garrison in Jičín. But of course, the authorities of the period could not admit the fact that a private from the Czechoslovak People’s Army was secretly cavorting about the town and terrifying its law-abiding citizens in a chronicle entry. In the beginning of 1960, owing to the apprehension of the above-mentioned private, the collective panic over spring man in Jičín gradually diminished. However, these folkloric narratives managed to throw this county seat into such an uproar that they survived—though only in the latent folkloric repertoire—for years to come. Rumors and legends about this phantom remained in active retellings there for the entire first half of the 1960s. The “myth” of this particular spring man, who is perceived in Jičín to this day as a purely local figure who evinced voyeuristic and fetishistic traits, was kept alive with regularly occurring though less-prominent cases of other individuals who followed in the footsteps of the nocturnal runner of Jičín. These anonymous spring men were either perpetrators of sexually motivated petty offenses, or sometimes just mischief-makers. The “Jičín spring man” definitively disappeared from the active collective oral repertoire of the inhabitants of Jičín in the beginning of the 1970s, and was written into the history of the city as a mysterious, memorable—and ever more mythologized—incident: I used to hear about the so-called spring man from my mother and my grandmother when I was a child. However, there was never a coherent story, but just short and fragmentary little snippets. I would certainly have remembered, because this mysterious figure interested me greatly as a little girl. I even tried to rig up some kind of boots with sofa springs and I experimented with walking quickly and jumping like him. We were living in an apartment building on Tyršova Street across from the grocery store, close to the barracks on the Linden Alley. In front of the building there was an old red beech tree. When the neighbors’ underwear went missing on the second-floor balcony in about the year 1973, the theft was attributed to a certain spring man because that was pretty high up and the burglar would have to have gotten over the balcony on the ground floor as well.114

The phenomenon of the Jičín spring man functioned during the period of its greatest flourishing on several levels. The most obvious of them was the collective panic that arose out of the nonstandard social behavior of the above-mentioned young man who had in an aggressive and potentially

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sexualized manner penetrated the intimate spaces of the homes of many residents of Jičín. These acts then on the semantic and folkloric levels connected with latent older legends about spring man, which—coincidentally in the same space where the private focused his activities in  Jičín—had been circulating in the children’s collective several years before he reported for his military service. J.Ž. and later his imitators, who were sometimes local fetishists and voyeurs, began to therefore be labeled “spring man.” Their activities were fused in the collective imagination into one mythologized figure; and in the local interpretation, this one immediately displayed the most typical attributes known even from other parts of the Czech lands and Europe, such as superhuman jumping abilities. In the same period there also appeared the typical fantastic explanatory motif of the jumping springs. At the same time, at the level of the Jičín microregion there was conformity with the stories about spring man to local specifics that was taken even to a pedantic level. So, for instance in the area around the big prison in Valdice, the stories about spring man became to a significant extent a symbolic expression of the collective feeling of continual latent danger from prisoners who might escape: Spring man? I remember Čeřovka especially was all wrapped up in him, because one of the versions was that he’d run away from Valdice and he had these huge springs on his shoes and jumps over fences and gardens, and now he’s robbing houses in Čeřovka, and frightening people, and I don’t know what else, it’s just terrible. Like, there was quite a panic around this, because in my childhood no one locked their gates in Čeřovka, it was like living in a village. So I remember this, and I know that when I went to see my grandmother Sedláčková at the palace—grandmother worked as a concierge at the palace when the Local Committee was still there—and I was supposed to go back home in the evening to Čeřovka, that Dad received orders to come pick me up, which always made me angry because I could get home myself. People were afraid of spring man because he may have attacked someone somewhere. But, like, you know, then everyone was telling how they had seen something and so on, and it could have already been made up. But it had to arise out of something, one hundred percent, because it wouldn’t have gotten around Jičín like that for no reason. [In what period was this?] It could have been in 1958, when I was in the second grade. But it was mainly Čeřovka that was all wrapped up in this thing. Because we were simply there next to Valdice, right? And in general, in any situation like this where there were burglaries, it was coming from Valdice. It was always connected to Valdice because sometimes the prisoners escaped, which maybe isn’t even written

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anywhere, because they hushed it up, you know? And usually when they cut and run from Valdice they skedaddled through Čeřovka. They didn’t walk through the alleys into the city, but usually there were things stolen from backyards or something, you understand. I’ll tell you that so many times when as an adult I was on the way back here from the pedagogy faculty in Hradec and arriving in the evening, Dad came out to meet me at the station to help me with my bag, but he used to say: “Look, someone escaped again, so I’d rather come out and meet you.” This Čeřovka was truly out of the way. I think that the reason behind all these stories was Valdice, this was always the source of a certain amount of fear.115

The Jičín case also clearly demonstrates the performance dynamic of the development of a legend spreading a certain locally defined subculture, as described by the sociologist Georgina Boyes. If a certain subculture; that is, a social group that shares similar symbols, values, and ideas, finds itself symbolically threatened, one of its reactions is often expressing this threat through performance of its legends and rumors. By sharing stories, the narrators and their audiences are subjected to the idea of this shared danger, naturally in the reduced and culturally acceptable form of a story. However, this—paradoxically and synergistically at the same time—leads to conformation of the veracity of the story, which through the repeated performances becomes more and more of a current event and, most importantly, less and less dubious. With repetition of the performances, skepticism wanes in the given subculture, and narrative strategies for opposing skepticism proliferate. Thus turns the spiral of performative confirmation of the topicality, veracity, and mainly the overall cultural significance of the given story, which is accelerated mainly by the continual repetition of its transmission.116 The activities attributed to young private J.Ž. were the cause of the specific features of the Jičín narrative complex on spring man, which are its relative realism and its setting in very specific localities. This specificity arose from the reactions to the liminal social behavior of this individual, who terrified local inhabitants not only with his evening and nighttime running, but mainly with his “haunting” in the form of entering the spaces of gardens and homes, which are considered intimate, peering into windows, and stealing underwear. Already by themselves these activities would have sufficed to create a local narrative tradition. However, in connection with the already-existing latent awareness about the existence of the figure of spring man they caused a local panic that lasted for several weeks. Its intensity may have also been heightened by the fact that at the end of January 1959 a short story by Jan Weiss titled “Pérový muž” [Spring-Man] was published in the very popular nationwide magazine Květy, and this could have served the local population or even

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J.Ž. himself as inspiration or as an explanation.117 Unfortunately, we do not know whether when he first started with his activities J.Ž. was acquainted with the folklore and literary mythology around spring man; however, it is certain that later he actively reacted to local rumors and legends (or perhaps also to the general feeling of threat) associated with the figure’s activities. In a very strong sense of the word, he truly became the Jičín spring man. The “case study” of narrations from Jičín offers a three-dimensional rendering of another specific aspect of the narrative complex on spring man, which relates to the form of its transmission and which is possible to apply to narrations about spring man in general. So long as narratives about spring man (whether in Jičín or anywhere else) are presented in the form of a personal experience narrative (that is, a biographical narration that reproduces a person’s experience and/or memory and which always display a strong tendency to “realism”), spring man is described in them as a real person, and in cases when he jumped it is explained merely as his extraordinary athletic condition and talent in movement. However, if the narrator presents the story in the third person as a reproduction of someone else’s experience, or shares something that comes from the general cultural knowledge—and thus chooses the genre forms of legends and rumors—the texts are more often supplemented with explanatory commentary. However, it is mainly in the third person that they gain a fantastic quality—typically with the motif of jumping springs attached to the figure’s feet. This tendency confirms the more general ideas by theorists of social memory, according to whom images in the collective memory have a tendency to schematism and to supplementing with generally shared details, while images from individual memory may be richer in empirical details, but are more difficult to convey intersubjectively.118 Even people who had personally met with the “real” Jičín spring man could accommodate their experiences to powerful schematization from the collective renderings and refer to details that were originally absent in their experiences—for example, spring man’s jumping springs. However, the stories told by people who had only known of spring man from hearsay were far more rigorously schematized. The transformation of a local joker, voyeur, and fetishist into spring man—that is, a mysterious phantom who jumps around on springs—is thus to a significant extent the product of this general tendency for the operation of social memory. The Jičín spring man, just like all of his parallels in various historical periods and geographical areas, was thus a fundamentally social phenomenon.

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SPRING MAN AS A LIMINAL PERSONA: A PRODUCT OF COGNITIVE DISSONANCE As the previous chapters have attempted to demonstrate, the entire oeuvre of period narrations about spring man share only a minimum of their traits, while at the same time none of them—by contrast with later period when he had been picked up by popular culture—have any direct connection with resistance activities. One of spring man’s most prominent traits are his inherent connections with the time of evening (or sometimes twilight), abandoned places at the boundaries of industrial and natural spaces (in large cities, with the industrial peripheries and urban parks; in smaller towns on the boundary between areas that are built up and those that are undeveloped, and then in the countryside he is associated with the areas around railway tracks, bridges, quarries, or mines), with the idea of unusual locomotion in the form of jumping, and the ambivalence of his identity and intentions, which logically implies that he is potentially dangerous. Spring man was thus a typical liminal figure on several levels, who moves on the boundaries between the ordinary and everyday and the unusual and extraordinary: day and night, civilized and natural surroundings, walking and jumping (or perhaps flying). Spring man’s liminal traits, just like his related amorphousness and ephemerality, were caused by his inherent ambivalence, which arose from his general positioning in the period’s cultural system. The attractiveness and exceptionality of spring man (similarly as his English predecessor Spring-heeled Jack) was largely caused by his unique positioning on the ontological boundary between the real and the fictitious, the natural and the super- or unnatural, and the possible and the impossible.119 Not only spring man’s appearance, but also his nature and his motivation radically refuse classification into that period’s (and also to a significant extent even contemporary) clearly defined cultural categories. It is precisely for this reason that he was so intriguing for period storytellers and their listeners; for he was located on the very borderline of the conceptualization of the known world, which was necessary through telling and listening to stories about him to arduously collectively negotiate anew. These inherent cognitive inconsistences in legends and rumors about spring man, which to a significant extent represent an unsolvable cultural problem, was hastened by (among other factors) the folkloric variation process. This variation caused an explosive proliferation of stories about the jumping phantom, for example in the form of the Czech and Slovak local panics in 1943.120 The ambivalence of these narratives thus gave rise to a situation in which it would have been very difficult to stop their synergetic diffusion into collective renderings, because each individual listener, with

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their dual interpretations of the stories they’d heard, was called to voice their own verbalization, expressed in either accordant or skeptical tones.121 Stories about spring man thus primarily—perhaps more distinctively than other, formally stabilized genres of oral culture such as folktales or oral epics—had a cognitive-simulation function, in a framework where these narratives served not only as a reflection and description of reality, but were also a “cultural model that enables us to catch sight of possible virtual solutions for unresolvable or otherwise unpleasant cultural paradoxes.”122 These stories “solved” these paradoxes or, more precisely, enabled their acceptance with the help of a realistic story that connects (real or fictitious) individual experience and an individual point of view with an ideal world of cultural categories that neatly dovetail. In freer allusion to approaches used by Claude Lévi-Strauss and those who continued in his structuralist, symbolic, and cognitive footsteps it is thus possible to consider the role of spring man as a unique mediating “culture hero,” whose primary role was—in a mythic manner—to “soften” problematic binary oppositions for the human mind. In the anthropological sense, spring man thus represented a borderline condition between good and evil, or between positive human culture and negative, chaotic nature. However, spring man was more often cast in this mediating role by researchers. Narrations about him, similar to anecdotes, which the anthropologist Mary Douglas speaks about, lacked significant overlaps (besides forms of ostension) with the behavioral level. The way these narrations about spring man actually operated in society usually represented a mere “cognitive exercise”—they were an “antiritual,” which Douglas says disrupts community harmony and the current social order, but does so only symbolically, at the verbal level; stories about spring man were thus a mere expressive form without an appreciable influence on the period.123 Within it they functioned in the same three dimensions in which the folklorist Bill Ellis says other legends and rumors about similarly liminal themes, such as xenophobia or conspiracy of the powerful, also manifest. The first of these levels is news, which informs about current and socially relevant topics in everyday life. Legends, in their news dimension, often use very archaic motifs and narrative structures (which in the case of spring man were inspired by the Victorian jumping phantom), and these are always updated according to the needs of current everyday life. The second level is the level of emergency, which informs people about topics that are not only current and relevant, but are also perceived at the same time as threatening the current cultural or social order. In this dimension, legends are a meaning-generating “political” act, which attempt through their narration to gain control over this phenomenon. Finally, the third level is the solution which offers a way to defuse the currently dangerous situation through means that are often symbolic or as in this example, metaphorical.124

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However, spring man was primarily something other than a hero—he was more of a trickster, or perhaps even a monster; that is, a liminal being who transgresses fixed cultural categories and causes cognitive dissonance.125 With his basic characteristics, spring man fully corresponded to the seven main traits of monstrosity, which have been defined by the anthropologist Jeffrey J. Cohen: 1) The monster´s body is a cultural body (according to the atheist worldview of Czech culture, the spring man was for the most people “real” human being, not a ghost; 2) The monster always escapes (probably the most dominant trait of the elusive jumping phantom); 3) The monster is Table 3.1. Liminal characteristics of spring man: Binary oppositions. By author.

Characteristic

First opposition

Second opposition

Time of his alleged appearance

day

night

Place of his alleged appearance

Built-up areas of a town or city

Outside the boundaries of a town or city

Manner of locomotion

walking

jumping

Qualities

positive

negative

Nature

human

demonic

Solution: “softening of the oppositions” The boundary between day and night; twilight, evening, early nighttime The boundary between inhabited and uninhabited spaces: peripheries of metropoles, urban parks, suburbs of smaller towns, industrial or cultural spaces that connect the countryside with larger cities (country train stations, bridges, viaducts) Atypical, quick movement on the boundaries between walking and jumping, sometimes flying Ambivalent motivations: from resistance fighter to criminal and sexual aggressor Ambivalent nature: from a real human being to a ghost or phantom

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the harbinger of category crisis; 4) The monster dwells at the gates of difference; 5) The monster polices the borders of the possible; 6) Fear of the monster is really a kind of desire; 6) The monster stands at the threshold . . . of becoming.126 The fact that the cultural objectification of the monstrous spring man most frequently appeared in rumors and legends (collective texts), for which cognitive dissonance is one of the most typical features, only potentiated his disconcerting invasion into the period memory. At the same time, spring man was not, as we have seen in the previous chapters, just any old kind of monster—he represented a fairly late native Czech reincarnation of a socially and historically clearly defined type of monster, the prowling ghost, which was associated with the working-class culture and the suburban environment. This was a monster whose most preeminent incarnation was the British Spring-heeled Jack, and which entered the Czech lands nearly a century after his first appearance during the headlong industrialization process in the early Victorian metropolis. Due to the anomalous wartime and postwar situation, when mass forms of popular culture were only received in limited form; the Czech spring man remained a “purer” product of the oral tradition than his British forerunner for an even longer time. However, the monstrosity of the Czech spring man quickly ended as soon as he began to be commodified, hegemonized, and ideologized for the needs of artistic and popular culture. NOTES 1. Middleton, Spirits of an Industrial Age, xi. 2. Neubauer, The Rumour, 169. 3. Dorothy Noyes, Humble Theory: Folklore´s Grasp on Social Life (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2016). On the appropriateness of using “middle-range theory” for research in the field of European ethnology, see Günter Wiegelmann, Theoretische Konzepte der Europäischen Ethnologie. Diskussionen um Regelln und Modelle. Second Edition (Münster: LIT, 1995), 213–51. 4. Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Random House, 1985), 18–19. On the usefulness of the two fundamental disciplines—folklore studies and anthropology for the study of the historical layers of oral storytelling, see pp. 15–16. 5. Simon J. Bronner, “Toward a Definition of Folklore in Practice,” Cultural Analysis 15, No. 1 (2016): 15–22. 6. Richard Bauman and Lauri Honko and Juha Pentikäinen and Lutz Röhrich and Vilmos Voigt, “Current Trends in Folk Narrative Theory,” Arv. Scandinavian Yearbook of Folklore 36 (1980): 25–55. On the study of folklore in a social context, see Richard Bauman, “The Field Study of Folklore in Context,” in Handbook of

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American Folklore, ed. Richard M. Dorson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 62–368. 7. Simon J. Bronner, Explaining Traditions: Folk Behavior in Modern Culture (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2011), 13–62. 8. James Hayward, Myths and Legends of the Second World War (Stroud: The History Press, Cheltenham 2010), v. 9. Obrdlik, “Gallows Humor,” 710–11. 10. M.N., female, born 1925, high school education, retired, Prague. 11. “I often think about how it could have happened that in our people there was a rock-hard conviction that Hitler was not adequately armed, and that his tanks were only tin toys, which, although they are numerous will be useless in battles because they will quickly be shot to pieces. They talked about his airplanes as machines with a short lifespan . . . That was the voice of the people . . . most of us lived in this. At the same time, neither our government nor our military authorities supported these tales and this propaganda.” (Bedřich Golombek, Co nebude v dějepise, Brno: Průboj, 1945, 13­–14; for more, see 17, 51). Marie Bonaparte had already collected several versions of this contemporary legend in France in 1939. This story, by contrast with other legends, did not succumb much to a process of variation; its main hero was most frequently an Englishman driving his luxurious Rolls-Royce in the Rhineland or across the Slovak or Hungarian borders. An inverse version was circulating before the war in Denmark: in this one, the main hero was a German who was traveling around England in his luxurious Mercedes. The basic message of the legend was identical—the industrial superiority of the narrator’s nation above the products of the future antagonist, symbolized by the luxurious automobile. Individual variations of this legend adjusted, at maximum, the construction of the tanks—besides tin sheets they were also sometimes supposedly constructed from lacquered wood and driven by a small motor from the automobile manufacturer Opel, or even by men pedaling bicycles who were hidden inside the tanks (Bonaparte, Myths of War, 65–66). The modernized versions of this story from the Cold War in the 1960s spoke about fighter jets made from wood which were paraded by the Soviet Army during military marches on Red Square in Moscow; see Rodney Dale, The Tumour in the Whale: A Collection of Modern Myths, London: W. A. Allen, 1978, 104). 12. MacDonald and Kaplan, Prague in the Shadow of the Swastika, 59–60; Golombek, Co nebude v dějepise, 222. 13. MacDonald and Kaplan, Prague in the Shadow of the Swastika, 48. 14. Golombek, Co nebude v dějepise, 256–57. 15. Promulgation of anecdotes, rumors, and slander were criminalized and punished by extrajudicial courts martial [Disciplinární soudy vnitřní fronty], which were already established in the Protectorate on 15 March 1939, which, according to the Law on Malicious Offences [Zákon o zlovolných přestupcích] that forbids, among other things, political anecdotes. These courts were to punish “grumblers, fault-finders, and complainers,” so, for example, in December 1944 the Prague court-martial sentenced a sixty-three-year-old Roman Catholic priest to execution for “malicious remarks.” The priest had served a mass for a condemned man and spread reports of the Jews in Theresienstadt being tortured. The court concluded that “promulgators of political

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slander who as clergy are esteemed as being correct . . . to thrust a knife into the back of the German Reich in a moment when it is fighting against enemies  .  .  . do not deserve any other fate than to be cast out from their nation.” The priest was executed by guillotine at Pankrác on 16 January 1945 (MacDonald and Kaplan, Prague in the Shadow of the Swastika, 95). On the other hand, denunciations for spreading political anecdotes were allegedly very common. On Protectorate-era rumors and anecdotes, see Bryant, Prague in Black: Nazi Rule and Czech Nationalism, 198–203; on humor in repressive regimes more generally, see Elliott Oring, “Risky Business: Political Jokes under Repressive Regimes,” Western Folklore 63, No. 3 (2004): 209–36. 16. For comparison see, for example, Hans-Jochem Gamm, Der Flüsterwitz im Dritten Reich (Munich: List, 1965). 17. Jörg Willenbacher, Deutsche Flüsterwitze. Das Dritte Reich unterm Brennglas (Carlsbad: Graphia, 1935). 18. Stokker, Folklore Fights the Nazis, 6. 19. Golombek, Co nebude v dějepise, 213. 20. MacDonald and Kaplan, Prague in the Shadow of the Swastika, 54; for other period cautionary rumors, see, for example, Golombek, Co nebude v  dějepise, 249; 252. 21. Golombek, Co nebude v dějepise. 257. 22. Golombek, 161, 164. 23. Golombek, 201. Similar rumors also appeared in 1945 in connection with the intensification of Allied bombing. 24. Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 161. 25. Golombek, Co nebude v dějepise, 186. 26. Golombek, 314. 27. V.D., male, born 1926, high school education, retired, Pilsen. For a nearly identical version of this contemporary legend from wartime Britain, see Bonaparte, Myths of War, 151. 28. Trisha L. Smith and Grafton Eliason and Jeff L. Samide and Adrian Tomer and Mark Lepore, “The Grateful Terrorist: Folklore as Psychological Coping Mechanism,” Voices: The Journal of New York Folklore 36, no. 1–2 (2010): 23–27. 29. Golombek, Co nebude v dějepise, 157. 30. Bonaparte, Myths of War, 68–70. 31. Golombek, Co nebude v dějepise, 212. 32. Miloslav Havlíček and Tomáš Kučerovský and Rostislav Matulík and Tomáš Prokůpek (eds.), ZOOOM 3—Miloslav Havlíček. Výtvarná monografie (Brno: Analphabet Books, 2014), 25. Interview conducted by Rostislav Matulík. 33. Vondráček, Konec vzpomínání. 1938–1945, 257. For more recent similar interpretation, see Satish and Srivastava, “A study on mass hysteria (monkey men?) victims in East Delhi” (2003). 34. A.V., female, born 1939, college-educated, curator, Prague. 35. Sinkulová, Byla jsem někdo jiný, 261. 36. Sinkulová, Byla jsem někdo jiný, 403. 37. Weiss, “Pérový muž,” 1961, 254. 38. Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 161.

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39. Prashant Bordia and Nicolas DiFonzo, “Psychological Motivations in Rumor Spread,” in Rumor Mills: The Social Impact of Rumor and Legend, ed. Gary Alan Fine and Véronique Campion-Vincent and Chip Heath (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers 2005), 87–101. 40. Milan Černoušek, “Každodenní psychologie ve válkách,” in Česká společnost za velkých válek 20. Století, ed. Jan Gebhart and Ivan Šedivý (Prague: Karolinum, 2003), 51–56. 41. Donald M. Johnson, “The ‘Phantom Anesthetist of Mattoon’: A Field Study in Mass Hysteria,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 40 (1945), 175–86. For a broad-spectrum view of mass sociogenic illness, see Robert E. Bartholomew and Simon Wessely, “Protean Nature of Mass Sociogenic Illness: From Possessed Nuns to Chemical and Biological Terrorism Fears,” British Journal of Psychiatry 180, no. 4 (2002): 300–6. 42. Scott Maruna, The Mad Gasser of Mattoon: Dispelling the Hysteria (New York: Swamp Gas Book, 2003). 43. Glenn Swogger, Jr., “Rumble in the Bronx: Mass Hysteria and the ‘Chemicalization’ of Demonology,” American Council on Science and Health, August 1, 1999 (New York: American Council of Science and Health, 1999). 44. Blank and McNeill, Slender Man Is Coming. 45. Petr Janeček, Černá sanitka: Třikrát a dost. Mytologie pro 21. století (Prague: Plot, 2008), 249–51. 46. Alan R. Perrry, “Pippo: An Italian Folklore Mystery of World War II,” Journal of Folklore Research 40 (2003): 115–48. 47. Janeček, Černá sanitka: Třikrát a dost, 264–65. 48. Thomas E. Barden and John Provo, “Legends of the American Soldiers in the Vietnam War,” Fabula 36, no. 3–4 (1995), 217–29. 49. Marvin K. Opler, “Japanese Folk Beliefs and Practices, Tule Lake, California,” Journal of American Folklore 63, no. 25 (1950), 385–97. 50. William. R. Bascom, “Four Functions of Folklore,” Journal of American Folklore 67, no. 266 (1954), 333–49. 51. Bordia and DiFonzo, “Psychological Motivations in Rumor Spread,” 87–101. 52. Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 161. 53. David J. Hufford, The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centered Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989). 54. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, ix. 55. Bell, The Legend of Spring-heeled Jack, 128–35. 56. The folklorist Jan Harold Brunvand considers the autumn and winter period generally to be a time when rumors and legends that warn against attacks by unknown and mysterious figures in public spaces spread most frequently in contemporary society. However, he explains this situation with the fact that (at least in the American context) it is the time of year with frequent pre-Christmas celebrations (Halloween, Christmas parties) and buying Christmas presents, when people go out into public spaces more than at other times. In his view, these frightening tales also create a dramatic contrast between bright and merry holidays and fear of violent assaults; see

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Jan H. Brunvand, Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid: The Book of Scary Urban Legends (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 64. 57. Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 160. 58. Yuri Lotman, Culture and Explosion (Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter, 2009). 59. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, 35–36. 60. Terence Turner, “Oedipus: Time and Structure in Narrative Form,” in Forms of Symbolic Action. Proceedings of the 1969 Annual Spring Meeting of the American Ethnological Society ed. Robert F. Spencer (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1969), 35. 61. Edmund Leach, “Conclusion: Further Thoughts on the Realm of Folly,” in Text, Play, and Story: The Construction and Reconstruction of Self and Society, ed. Edward M. Brunner (Washington: American Ethnological Society, 1984), 358. Cited in Bird, “It Makes Sense to Us,” 539. 62. T. A. Novichkova, “Dva mira—zemnoy i kosmicheskyi—v  sovremennykh narodnykh legendakh,” Russkaya literatura 1 (1990), 135. 63. “With only rare exceptions, we did not record any live narrations, only retellings, fragmentary memories of narrations, memorats” (Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 162). 64. Dundes, “Metafolklore and Oral Literary Criticism.” 65. Janeček, “Pražské pověsti Popelky Biliánové a jejich folklorní autenticita,” 97. 66. Janeček, 101–2. 67. Davies, The Haunted. On similar motifs in contemporary globally diffused legends that were still documented in the second half of the twentieth century and their evident literary origin in German romantic literature, see Rolf W. Brednich, “Where They Originated . . . Some Contemporary Legends and Their Literary Origins,” Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore 20 (2002), 11–14. 68. Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 160–61. 69. V.P., man, born 1979, college-educated, art historian, Ústí nad Labem. 70. Mackerle, “Nepolapitelný Pérák,” 64–65. 71. Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 162. 72. On the xenophobic role of folklore, especially rumors and legends, see, for example Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg and Flavien T. Ndonko and Song Yang, “How Rumor Begets Rumor: Collective Memory, Ethnic Conflict, and Reproductive Rumors in Cameroon,” in Rumor Mills: The Social Impact of Rumor and Legend, ed. Gary Alan Fine and Véronique Campion-Vincent and Chip Heath (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2005), 141–58 (and other texts in this publication). On the strategy of the scapegoat as an anthropological narrative universal, see Clyde Kluckhohn, “Recurrent Themes in Myths and Mythmaking,” Daedalus 88, No. 2 (1959), 268–79. On the phenomenon of the scapegoat in cultural in general, see René Girard, The Scapegoat (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press Books, 1982). 73. Karel Dvořák, male, born 1910, Prague 3 (Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 163). 74. Pulec, “Podání o pérákovi,” 163. 75. However, his mother Emilie, who was living at Schillerova (today Benešova) Street No. 3, did not escape the mass expulsions of majority of the Czech (or Sudeten) Germans after the war. Even though her name was on a special list with others because altogether four Czech witnesses had vouched for her so that she would not

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have to be expelled, during the “wild expulsions” she, along with her daughters Emma and Adolfina were still put into a special transport from the internment camp in Stonařov u Jihlavy and sent to Austria. Their home was confiscated by the national authorities tasked with property confiscations. My heartfelt thanks go to Ladislav Vilímek for help explaining the background of the case of the Jihlava spring man. His painstaking archival work has refuted many erroneous claims about this phenomenon. 76. Alan Dundes, Interpreting Folklore (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), 33–61. For more, Alan Dundes, Parsing Through Customs. Essays by a Freudian Folklorist (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). 77. Fine, “Rumor Matters,” 2. 78. Bryant, Prague in Black, 208–69. 79. Linda Dégh and Andrew Vászonyi, “Legend and Belief,” Genre 4 (1971): 281–304; Bill Ellis, Aliens, Ghosts, and Cults: Legends We Live (Jackson: The University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 161–98; Dégh, Legend and Belief, 422–42. For similar material, see Kalmre, The Human Sausage Factory, 59. 80. Carl von Sydow, Selected Papers on Folklore (Copenhagen: Rosekilde and Bagger, 1948): 44–59. 81. Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panics. 82. R.M., male, born 1964, college-educated, journalist, Úvaly. 83. Report from the gendarmerie in Malenovice No. 450/1945 from 13 March 1945. Fund B 72, file. 125, No. 895, Moravian Provincial Archive, Brno. 84. R.M., male, born 1964, college-educated, journalist, Úvaly. 85. The most recent general work on pranks and practical jokes committed by Czech youth during the Protectorate era is Petr Koura, Swingaři a potápky v protektorátní noci (Prague: Academia, 2016). 86. R.M., male, born 1964, college-educated, journalist, Úvaly. 87. Pavel Hochman, Viktoriáni: o fotbalistech, kteří psali historii slavného plzeňského klubu (Pilsen: Region All, 2016), 22. Josef Šnajdr was not the only Czech athlete who was given the nickname “Spring Man.” For example, another one was Jiří Gerhard, a volleyball player from the Uhelné sklady company team in Zlíchov (Prague) in the 1960s. However, his nickname was clearly unrelated to the mythical urban phantom (and the informer about this case was, by his own request, anonymized). 88. J.K., male, born 1952, apprentice training, cook, Jičín (Kracík, Vyprávění o pérákovi na Jičínsku). 89. Petr Borovec, “Stalo se za bílého dne  .  .  . !: (the criminal case of Josef Kulík),” Zprávy Klubu přátel Pardubicka 47, No. 5–6 (2012): 180–85; Ivo Pejčoch, Vojáci  na  popravišti:  Vojenské osoby, popravené v Československu z politických důvodů v letech 1949–1966 a z kriminálních příčin v letech 1951–1984 (Cheb: Svět křídel, 2001). 90. Chief detective, Captain JUDr. Miloslav Jedlička (born 1948), written message from July 2017 (Kracík, Vyprávění o pérákovi na Jičínsku). 91. On the relationship of the development of photographic technology and related rumors and legends, see Barbara Allen Bogart, “The ‘Image on Glass’: Technology, Tradition, and the Emergence of Folklore,” Western Folklore 41 (1982), 85–103.

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92. Written message from Ladislava Šlesingrová, female, e-mail from 3 July 2017 (Kracík, Vyprávění o pérákovi na Jičínsku). 93. A.L., female, 1931, primary school, Prague-Pankrác, retired (previously, a manual laborer). Narration documented by Adam Votruba and his pupils from the 7A class at the schools at Kavčí hory (preschool, elementary school, and vocational high school for services, Prague 4, K  Sídlišti 840 as part of the project Žijí mezi námi: Vzpomínky na dětství na Pankráci za druhé světové války. Rozhovor s paní A. L., 5–6). 94. Z.B., male, born 1929, primary school, retired, Černošice. Narration documented by Lukáš Hares. 95. L.K., male, born 1942, high school education, retired, Litomyšl. 96. O.K., female, born 1949, college-educated, Master of Sciences, Pharmacy, Jičín (Kracík, Vyprávění o pérákovi na Jičínsku). 97. Bill Ellis, Aliens, Ghosts and Cults, xiv. 98. Hans-Jörg Uther, The Types of International Folktales: A Classification and Bibliography. Based on the system of Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson. Part I. Animal Tales, Tales of Magic, Religious Tales, and Realistic Tales, With and Introduction. Folklore Fellows’ Communications Nos. 284–86 (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 2011), 285–86. 99. F.L., female, born 1930, high school education, retired, Černošice. Narration documented by Lukáš Hares. 100. I.M., female, born 1961, high school education, sales assistant, Pardubice. Narration documented by Josef Křivka. 101. Hohberg, Gespensterjagd in Mitteldeutschland. 102. Hohberg. 103. Kalmre, The Human Sausage Factory, 52. 104. H.P., female, college-educated, museum worker, Jílové u Prahy. Narration documented by Jan Pohunek. 105. The connection between spring man’s name [pérák] with the vernacular expression for the male organ [péro], which began to come into more frequent use in Czech after World War II, is complicated. Even though this fact could play a role in native explanations for the name of this notably sexualized phantom, its connection with the jumping figure was clearly not present since the beginning, or at least it was not documented by folklorists in the prewar collective tradition. The only mention of such a connection that comes close semantically has been found in the “Prague vernacular” (pražská hantýrka) of the first decades of the twentieth century. At that time in Prague, it referred to fellation; in the Moravian Slovakia region it meant a loss of virginity, related to the custom of wearing a kosárek (white feathers tucked into a hat) as a “token of youthful purity” (Pero. Felattio Ph (penna). Udělej mi pero (coitus in os) Ph. Ztratil šohaj pero (loss of virginity), MS. Karel J. Obrátil, Kryptadia. Příspěvky ke studiu pohlavního života našeho lidu. III, Prague-Litomyšl: Paseka, 1999, 607). However, these semantic associations are also fairly common in contemporary pop-cultural treatments of the spring man theme. 106. Vondráček, Konec vzpomínání. 1938–1945, 258. 107. In this part of the text,  I refer to the complex documentation, analysis, and interpretation of the tales about spring man in Jičín (including the relevant historical

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sources) contained in an unpublished work: Pavel Kracík, Vyprávění o pérákovi na Jičínsku: Komentované přepisy terénních rozhovorů a jejich folkloristická analýza (Unpublished manuscript, 2017). For his kindness in lending it to me and for many suggestions for this work I am greatly beholden to him. 108. H.K., female, born 1940, high school education, elementary school teacher, Pařezská Lhota (Kracík, Vyprávění o pérákovi na Jičínsku). 109. State District Archive Jičín, National People’s Committee fund, Chronicle of the Town of Jičín 1959, p. 147. 110. State District Archive Jičín, National People’s Committee fund, Chronicle of the Town of Jičína 1960, p. 133. 111. A.H., female, born 1950, high school education, office worker, Jičín (Kracík, Vyprávění o pérákovi na Jičínsku). 112. F.H., male, born 1947, apprentice training, agricultural equipment repairman and Czech Railways worker, Bartoušov (Kracík, Vyprávění o pérákovi na Jičínsku). 113. L.B., female, born 1946, high school education, preschool teacher, Jičín (Kracík, Vyprávění o pérákovi na Jičínsku). 114. S.M., female, born 1967, Jičín (Kracík, Vyprávění o pérákovi na Jičínsku). 115. D.F., female, born 1948, college-educated teacher, Jičín (Kracík, Vyprávění o pérákovi na Jičínsku). 116. Georgina Boyes, “Belief and Disbelief: An Examination of Reactions to the Presentation of Rumor Legends,” in Perspectives on Contemporary Legend, ed. Paul Smith (Sheffield: CECTAL, 1984), 64–78. 117. Jan Weiss, “Pérový muž,” Květy 4, January 22, 1959, 21. 118. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, 48. 119. Bell, The Legend of Spring-Heeled Jack, 71. 120. Niklas Luhmann, Gesellschaftstruktur und Semantik I. (Frankurt am Main: Suhrkampf Taschenbuch, 1980), 47. 121. Fentress and Wickham, Social Memory, 35. 122. Jiří Dynda, Svjatogor. Smrt a iniciace staroruského bohatýra (Červený Kostelec: Pavel Mervart, 2016), 62. 123. Mary Douglas, “The Social Control of Cognition: Some Factors in Joke Reception,” Man. New Series 3, no. 3 (1968): 369. 124. Bill Ellis, Aliens, Ghosts and Cults, xiii–xv. 125. David G. Gilmore, Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 1–22. 126. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 3–25.

Chapter Four

A Superhero for Every Regime Spring Man in Visual Culture and Literature

After World War II, the motif of spring man begins to slowly shift from the Czech communicative memory into cultural memory, and then more specifically into the spheres of artistic and popular culture. The figure of spring man appears in literature, films, and comics. At the same time, this shift was in no way taking place at breakneck speed. By contrast with the practically explosive expansion of oral narrations about this figure during a mere several months of World War II, this is a quantitatively much less prolific period of growth, comparable with the slow “cultural evolution” of spring man between World War I and World War II. This shift, which took place over several decades, is also significant in terms of the quality of narrations; for the manner in which the figure is collectively viewed has changed significantly. Once an ambivalent folkloric motif, spring man starts to become an increasingly more important and even stable subject for mass popular culture. With his integration into Czech popular culture he in many ways becomes phenomenon close to a folkloresque—a pop-cultural treatment of a folkloric subject with strong mythologizing potential.1 The folkloresque can also be simple adoption or a unique adaptation or parody of a folkloric template; however, in each of these cases, it is able to generate its own narrative universe, which is often entirely independent of its original oral inspirations. A similar process also took place in the case of the Czech spring man.

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REMINISCING ABOUT PHANTOMS: NOSTALGIA FOR SPRING MAN IN LITERATURE AND MEMOIRS The “literary” spring man straddles a kind of artificial boundary between the original “folkloric” spring man and the later “pop-cultural” one. We often find him represented in works that arose out of authors’ memories of legends and rumors that were told about this figure during World War II. Spring man is primarily perceived in literature as a more or less nostalgic memory, inherently associated with the bygone period of World War II and lacking a more robust connection with the lived present. This nostalgic line is represented in Czech literature in a trio of works by Klement Bochořák, Jan Weiss, and Otto Janka, and to a lesser extent also in a work by Jan Otčenášek. “The Wartime Phantom” [“Válečné strašidlo”] is a short story by the Catholic-oriented poet Klement Bochořák (1910–1980) from his meditativereminiscent collection of texts that create a literary treatment of Moravian demonological legends from his birthplace in the area near Kunštát. They were published under the title Příběhy a vzpomínky po večerech sebrané [Stories and Memories Collected in the Evenings] in 1958. This text skillfully portrays period rural narrations about spring man from Vysočina, which it places organically next to other local tales and legends, through a dialogue among local villagers: “They don’t talk about anything else than Spring Man; they talk about him everywhere now. He didn’t come after me yet, but Šulačka over there saw him.” “I’ll give you that, and I can even imagine it. A phantom on springs like that could be some kind of automaton, and the Nazis wind him up and use him to frighten the Czechs.” “And I’d say,” old Cresty added to the talk, “I’d say that it’s Hitler himself!” “Stop your twaddling!” But now old Beračka exclaimed and gestured toward heaven, and the others looked, horror-struck. And my good fellow, they saw it! It was moving perhaps forty meters above the ground and gradually descending to the floor. It resembled an accordion. Everyone scattered like when a shot is fired at partridges, and only old Beračka and Cresty remained. They had already seen all kinds of visions, so never mind Spring Man! Slowly, it descended to the floor, maybe because it had to shoot itself upward once more, because before you could count to five it could already be seen above the earth again. Truly, a kind of monster, with no legs and no head. It could contract and stretch out as it wanted. And whoopsie, going down!—and alley-oop back up!—but at the same time it was also receding, it jumped far away across the grainfields and it was lost in the distance like a speck. The

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villagers were utterly agog, everyone ran out of their farmhouses, but too late! Spring Man had already flown somewhere beyond the mountains. Back then during the war they were much afraid of it, especially the women, and in Prague they say there was a right panic from it. Everywhere it was only Spring Man, Spring Man! They say it often manifested at railway stations.2

After the war, Weiss’s “Pérový muž” [Spring-Man] from 1943 was published in a revised form; first in 1959 in the popular magazine Květy, then in 1961 it was revised again for publication in an anthology titled Bianka Braselli, dáma s dvěma hlavami [Bianca Braselli, the Two-Headed Lady]. Similarly as in Bochořák’s short story, this text is also surreal and also in a certain sense as it were, a kind of reportage documenting the rumors and graffiti about spring man that was circulating—for a change—in Protectorate-era Prague. The revised publications furnished the story with significant expansions of many details which had to be omitted from the 1943 version. Mainly, this concerns a good number of spring man’s incidents, his appearance and motivation, and especially the wartime-era context: Every era has its furores and sensations. So, it’s hardly a wonder that even in today’s times such naive and foolish ones, sometimes downright fatuous yarns and tales, ephemera and other fiddle-faddle with which the simple people not only afford an audience for and spread onward, but maybe even invent themselves, arise. It appears as if people deliberately cleave to these yarns and take delight in them in order to divert themselves from sad things, so they wouldn’t have to think about what is difficult, what weighs one down, and causes pain. It was perhaps in the nineteen-forties when a legend spread around Prague about a spring-man. There was nothing in the newspapers—perhaps only because it sounded so unbelievable and fantastic . . . A spring-man has appeared! According to one version he is a serial murderer; according to another, he is an ingenious inventor, while others tell that he’s a parachutist or perhaps a madman who has fled from the asylum. For several days already they say he has evaded the police with his enormous bounds. They are already on his heels; the hands of his pursuers are already reaching out to grab him—when suddenly—jump!—and the spring-man is gone like smoke. He vanishes like a grasshopper into a greensward, and the hand that wanted to grasp him seizes only air.3

Weiss’s revised tale further specifies the localization of the Prague spring man incidents. For example, instead of the generalized idea of storage sheds someplace in Prague, it speaks about a particular shed in the Pankrác neighborhood; instead of the nonspecific location “Michle” it speaks about Sámova Street in the same district, and so on. In a literary manner it thus localizes a good number of Prague manifestations of spring man—the most notable of

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which is his jumping across the roofs of tram cars (which suddenly lost their electricity) in the area near Prague’s House of the Disabled. The figure of spring man also flashes through Jan Otčenášek’s novel Kulhavý Orfeus [Limping Orpheus] from 1964, which describes the generational experience of graduates of academic high schools in Prague, who were all mobilized and sent to work in German factories after the closure of Czech universities. Spring man is presented here as a light subject of conversation for free time during the hard labor in the factories, and the protagonist in tales that are somewhere between anecdotes and rumors, and which consequently lead the conversation toward the situation on the front lines and to the thought of a real resistance: Pipsqueak took off his shabby wood-soled shoes—they were a good few sizes larger than his own soles and they called them “ships”—and he blissfully massaged his raw toes; Germ didn’t even notice. Fatty rolled over in a flapping broadcloth cloak and he leaned his back against the sun-warmed wall: “That’s hogwash,” he blurted out, “jumping over a tram!” Pipsqueak didn’t even glance up. “OK, don’t believe me! Not everyone has to be a sourpuss like you,” he grimaced. “That’s what spring man is for. My brother-in-law saw him with his own eyes, and he doesn’t fib. He was riding on that tram himself.” “And that’s nothing,” Leoš added flavor to the brew with a deathly serious face. “Last week he jumped over the Bohdalec hill, and he even slapped an SS-man next to the gas works. He takes a few jumps on his springs, and he, whoops: he’s bounced from Michle to Smíchov. Sometimes he jumps up onto a rooftop and leaps across whole streets. They say he’s faster than . . . ” None of those present even raised a brow, for this was Pipsqueak’s favorite subject; he was tireless in imagining the valor of this fabled character of the nighttime streets, and he came back every day with fresh tales. Yesterday he overturned the locomotive of a military train, and today the trains going to Říčany were delayed. Or: did you hear that he got married? His old lady is also on springs. Some guy from the motorworks spotted them in Vidoule: they were jumping side by side, holding each other’s hands. And what if they have offspring who are also on springs? In his renderings, spring man was not a clear-cut positive avenger who only attacked swastikas and quislings, but also a spiteful joker who frightened away pairs of lovers in the park, or scared an honest tobacconist to death.4

The connection between spring man and student heroes is even more powerfully developed in a radio play by Otto Janka “Byl jsem tady—Pérák” [I Was Here—Spring Man], which was recorded in 1989 under the direction of Karel Weinlich, and subsequently published in 1991. This work was born from the

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author’s reminiscences on his own resistance activities within the framework of the illegal boy scouting movement during the Prague Uprising in May 1945; the plot, in which everyday life in the Protectorate is interwoven with dreamlike visions of spring man’s resistance activities is described from the perspective of two young students who join the resistance. In the introduction, the author summarizes his heroic take on spring man: Who was spring man? A brave lad who attached strong springs to his shoes and he really put some heat on the Germans. He always gained victory over them and always outfoxed them, because he could jump like a flea, because he was even able to leap over buildings, and because he was bulletproof and elusive. And was as smart as a whip. And brave . . . As brave as Zorro—a secret avenger. All the stories that people told us about Spring Man were too fantastical and too beautiful for them to also be true, but people still believed in them a little, because they wanted to believe. .  .  .  It was so easy to believe in the Spring Man stories because people here were afraid at that time, but not so much that it would prevent them from fighting against the same tanks that Spring Man fought against, and so it just happened to come about that Spring Man really became an illegal resistance worker and actually did fight against the Germans in the end, even though he never existed. He helped people who lived here during the occupation, mostly those who were also fighting against the enemy— and against the fear that was inside them all day at that time.5

The motif of spring man conceived as a reminiscence of the period of World War II is also used by the first modern Czech Fortean author, the writer Ludvík Souček in his investigative work of fiction Případ jantarové komnaty [The Case of the Amber Room] from 1970: Quite so, people blathered about all kinds of things, but that’s how it goes during a war. But do you still remember Spring Man? How could you ever forget him, right? They say he was running around Prague then, he jumped over trams and buildings, and fled from the Gestapo like Zorro the Avenger. Just about everyone talked about him. We know that there was never any Spring Man, that stands to reason.6

A similar nostalgic thread is also present in works by German-language authors (who often have family origins in the Czech lands), who reflected one of the most significant postwar phases of development of the international narrative complex about Spring-heeled Jack, the East German legends and rumors about Spiralhopsern. The most famous of these literary echoes of the Czech “spring man tradition” is a work by the Kadaň native Jürgen Bernt–Bärtl Spiralhopser—Geschichten aus einer Kindheit from 1976, which evokes memories of these demonic beings that in their peculiar way symbolize childhood and to a certain extent even the lost Heimat in the Czech lands.7

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The main subject of this book, inspired (similarly to the above-mentioned Czech-language works) by the author’s personal experiences, is the difficulty of postwar integration of the expelled Czech Germans in Germany and conflicts between the Protestant die Hiesigen (locals) and Catholic die Flüchtlingen (refugees), who are contemptuously referred to as “Slavs” and “Poles.”8 Spiralhopsern here appear to the main child protagonist in fantastical forms like good spirits with one green and one blue eye (they were said to look with one during the day, and with the other one at night, and therefore they most frequently appear at twilight when they can see through both eyes). These guardian phantoms help the main hero to overcome the difficult everyday circumstances in postwar Germany: He started to dream about the Spiralhopsern. And immediately when he woke up, he really wanted to sleep again. And then he clearly saw mighty, gravity-defying jumps of the big ones, who have such beautiful eyes. And he also saw the little ones, how early during dusk they sit in the meadows, partly lost in the morning fog.9

The short story “Die Spiralhopser” also plays a similar role of nostalgic literary folklorism in Margit Voigt’s book Zwischen Ostern und Weinachten: Geschichten [Between Easter and Christmas: Stories] (2012). The story evokes a childhood spent in postwar Saxony, where stories about German spring men were going through one of the most active phases of their development.10 The chapter titled “Hübbmannl” in Bernt-Lutz Lange’s book Magermilch und lange Strümpfe from 1999 also evinces the poetics of childhood memories.11 A different poetics, closer to the period rumors and legends about Hüpfenmännchen, is then expressed in Günther Radtke’s young adult detective-adventure novel Gespensterjagd from 1961, which describes the struggle of the East German Volkspolizei against terrifying phantoms that are really hooligans with connections to western imperialists and disguised as jumping phantoms.12 These German-language texts present a paradoxical contrast with the later nationalizing development of the cycle on spring man in which the Czech national superhero fought against German Nazis; however, they draw attention to the fact that these narrations were an integral part of the German-language communicative memory. However, there exists a fundamental chronological difference between “Czech” and “(East) German” literary spring men: whereas in the Czech cultural memory spring man is stereotypically associated with the period of World War II, in the (East) German memory he is connected with the complicated period of Germany’s renewal at the end of the 1940s and beginning of the 1950s. Potential inspiration by spring man and his variant forms (mainly “phosphorous man”) is also evident in the figure of Široko/Širokko from Jaroslav

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Foglar’s 1947 enormously popular young adult novel Stínadla se bouří [The Shades are Revolting].13 The phantom of the mysterious city district of Stínadla that the member of the Rychlé šípy [Rapid Arrows] boy club meet with is similar to Protectorate-era phantoms not only with his spectral appearance, mysterious motivation, and hidden identity, but also by his nearly superhuman strength, dexterity, evasiveness, and especially with his connection to the folklore of the dark streets of the metropolis: From the streets in the borderlands, where Division Street bordered on the Shades, there came curious rumors about him and together with the reports from the old TOM-TOM and now Sběrač [fanzines] have made Široko into a virtually supernatural being! His strength was incredible, his speed simply breathtaking, and there was no height or length great enough for him. He jumped over walls as if he had wings, and he fell far down with the agility of a cat.14

Storytelling about Protectorate-era phantoms flourished after war in the milieu of Prague scouting—which Foglar had moved in his entire life.15 This fact thus—in combination with Foglar’s lifelong interest in frightening tales, ghost stories, and stories in popular culture with phantasmic heroes, such as Zorro the Avenger and Tom Mix—helped to create what is probably the most suggestive rendering of the urban phantom in Czech literature: The bushes were fully illuminated by the light of the lantern, something clinked and immediately the boys saw an odd figure dressed entirely in snug-fitting black clothing—but instead of a face—good gosh—what is it there? Something shapeless, white as chalk—ah yes—it’s some kind of mask—a mask that covers the whole face—he’s unknown and perhaps doesn’t want to be recognized. But who is hiding behind it?16 . . . Široko is not an imaginary person! We saw him! We stood there with him face-to-face! Or, better stated, we faced his mask! Yes, Široko had a large white mask on his face. We don’t know what he looks like. We don’t know who he is! But we know that he has an absolutely appalling strength. We tested it out for ourselves. There were five of us and those who know us knows very well that we’re fairly capable. But we couldn’t get the better of Široko. He threw us around as if we were feathers. His running, his jump up onto a high wall, and his jumping from one wagon to another, all of this only heightened our dread of him. Yes, we aren’t ashamed to write and admit this. We were afraid of Široko!17

Besides scholarly researchers, the informal communicative culture has naturally noticed similarities between spring man and the literary Široko. In discussions about the article on spring man that was published on the widely read nationwide news server iDnes.cz in 2013, besides readers’ contributions

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that symbolically link spring man with the Shades, there also appeared the following contribution that deftly brings together both literary mythologies: Spring Man was Širokko. He became Spring Man around 1940. He had more or less returned to his original activities, as they are written about in the book The Shades are Revolting, though he didn’t only stick to the Shades. He enjoyed playing with the Nazis. He worked as an engineer in some machine-works down in Holešovice, and there he also designed and produced those springs he used to lengthen his stride. He enjoyed it. “I was young, I had fun pissing off the Nazis,” he said. I only got to know him after I was long retired, we met at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s at the pub U Houbaře across from the Trade Fair Palace. The barflies even nicknamed him Spring Man or Širokko, and it wasn’t any secret. We younger guys called him Mr. Nekola. He died sometime in 1984–1985, and he was about seventy-five years old.18

FROM MONSTER TO SUPERHERO: COMMUNIST AND NATIONALISTIC IDEOLOGIZING SPRING MAN AFTER 1945 With the oral narratives falling into partial disuse after World War II, the mythologization of spring man began. His narrative cycle thus enters another phase of development, which by contrast with the ambivalent discourse of the original vernacular narratives (and to a certain extent also the literature), is characterized by a significant degree of homogenization. From a liminal nocturnal monster, spring man becomes—entirely in the spirit of a tendency within Czech artistic culture toward poetic, benevolent, and hominized fantastic elements, which reject the irrationality of the oral tradition and which physically anthropomorphize and ethically humanize demonic folkloric beings—a human hero.19 In this period, spring man is also deeply ideologized and he begins to fulfill new symbolic functions, which are most often political. He becomes Spring Man, a “superhero for every regime,” which is a role that he continues to play for many decades to come. The first heroizing treatment of the subject of spring man is a feature essay by Štěpán Engel titled “Pérový muž” [Spring-Man], which was published only a few months after the end of the war, on 27 September 1945 in Svobodný zítřek. After a bleak introduction that describes the despondent and paranoid atmosphere in Protectorate-era Prague, he leads the hero of the rumor mills of that age, Spring-Man, whom he discusses (like most of the journalistic treatments from the 1940s), with a partially humorous and indulgent, but now also a newly heroizing tone:

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If the proud title of hero suited anyone in the inglorious years of the occupation, it was chiefly Spring-Man, who had appeared in Prague around the year 1941 and the following spring. He tamed the Germans, who had gotten awfully high and mighty at that time. The eyes of storytellers shone with the fire of patriotic ardor when Spring-Man was even whispered of. I, myself did not have the good fortune to see Spring-Man, but I knew many good people who were in contact with him, they hid him from the police, offered him victuals and a place to sleep. Spring-Man also frequently manifested to his friends, pursued by the furious police who were hot on his heels; naturally, he always managed to escape in time. The uniformed minions sometimes already assumed that they have him, he bounds up to the rooftop of what was then the SS Standarte headquarters, from which with a second jump he bounded up and across the Vltava to Letná. It is possible to bring forward several reliable eyewitnesses from the ranks of Prague’s burghers to attest to this superb flying leap. According to the confidential arrest warrant (which the superintendent K.V. discovered in January 1942 when he was a figure of some importance in Petschek Palace) 182 cm, fair-haired, blue-eyed, with a massive forehead, a protruding chin, snow-white teeth, and a slim, athletic figure. He was dressed in black clothing, which totally obscured his bright appearance, with which he became from evening until the break of day invisible. However, the most important things were his shoes with special spring-fitted soles (the work of an unnamed shoemaker from Smíchov, made according to drawings by the Czech head design engineer of the Junkers factories).20

Whereas nostalgia was typical for postwar literary treatments of spring man, for pop-cultural versions (especially films and comics), ideologization was typical. The thirteen-minute animated film by Jiří Trnka and Jiří Brdečka, Pérák a SS [Spring Man and the SS], played a key role in this mythologizing process, which is primarily conceived as humanization, heroization, and nationalization of this figure. It was based on a story by Otakar Šafránek and shot a year after World War II ended (in 1946).21 This animated film was more closely akin to American cartoon propaganda from World War II period than it was to Trnka’s later work.22 It depicted spring man as a kindhearted chimney sweep who engages in battle against an entire detachment of SS, equipped with springs from a sofa on his feet and a black stocking pulled over his head in reaction to the activities of a Czech who denounced others to the Nazis. Here, from the artistic perspective, spring man represents a kind of combination of the masked heroes from prewar adventure films and popular literature (such as Zorro the Avenger) and the humorous characters of animated films (in the spirit of Walt Disney). In the year of its release, the movie was even mentioned in short article published by the major U.S. press agency United Press under the title “New Foreign Star Challenges Donald Duck”:

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Prague (U.P.)—Donald Duck has a new rival. Perak is the name, and he’s a war veteran. Perak was the resourceful gremlin of the German occupation. He worked as a dusky chinmey-sweep by day, but in the dark of night he made life miserable for the Gestapo in Czechoslovakia. Buildings and long distances were minor obstacles to Perak those days. He simply rose above them—like Superman without the fancy suit. Whatever misfortune befell the Germans in Prague, Perak usually got the credit. If some haughty Nazi officer had his monocle punctured by a bullet, Perak was responsible; whenever a volkswagon broke down, Perak was perched on the carburetor. Now 120 Czech artists, editors, technicians, and photographers are busy converting the wartime Perak into a peacetime celluloid immortal. Like many another GI, Perak has had to make adjustments, but he’s coming along fine. In fact, Perak may even find his way to the United States if the reports from Hollywood are true. These reports say that Donald Duck’s screen appearances may have to be curtailed because of his rising production costs. Perak and other Czech-made cartoons are handled by the division for state production of painted films, a branch of the nationalized Czech film industry. The subsidiary is only a year old, but already Czech cartoons have appeared in Holland, and contracts are expected with France and Denmark. Foreign critics viewed some of the cartoons recently at Marianske Lazne. Sometimes the movements appeared wooden and jerky, but there were numerous examples of artistic originality. Music usually provides the framework for the film.23

The film, projected for mass audiences shortly after the war and then again in the 1960s, definitively construed spring man’s role as a legendary figure of the Czech anti-Nazi resistance movement. Mainly thanks to this film, spring man turns from an ephemeral and amorphous monster into Spring Man, who was a clearly defined positive heroic character with a clear motivation. His ambiguousness has ended, and the phantom enters the role of a significant political symbol. The influence of Trnka and Brdečka’s conception of Spring Man was so powerful that it suppressed alternative versions of the spring man narrative in Czech popular culture, allowing for only a few exceptions. Several of his later adaptations also drew from the aesthetics of this film. Among the most interesting are the animated series Pérákovy další osudy [Spring Man’s Further Adventures] from the pen of Vladimír Dvořák, which was published in 1948 in Haló nedělní noviny, a Sunday supplement to the communist newspaper

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Figure 4.1. Heroized pop-cultural Spring Man in the role of a resistance fighter in  Jiří  Trnka and  Jiří  Brdečka’s film  Pérák  a SS  [Spring Man and the SS], 1946.  Národní filmový archiv, Prague.

Rudé právo. This was a kind of unofficial, although admitted, fifteen-part printed “continuation” of Trnka and Brdečka’s film: In the dark years of the occupation, stories were told of a man who with single leaps overcame all heights and depths. Thus arose the legend of Spring Man, who fought against the dull and cruel SS men with his agility and wit. It was a legend—but still, there was truth in it. It was a fable that the subjugated nation created for itself in its darkest era. Therefore, it was an expression of the uncompromising position of the Czech nation against the occupiers. And when the time of darkness had passed, the fable became an animated film that everyone knows by the title Pérák a SS. But why shouldn’t the name of Spring Man last longer than only a few minutes? We have selected several of Spring Man’s further adventures, which in today’s open-minded times will be edifying—and perhaps even entertainment. And we are going to regularly submit them in each issue of Haló for our readers. Follow them attentively, so your attention does not wander between the individual issues.24

The first six installments of the cartoon series are set during World War II, and to a significant extent they copy the poetics and partially also the plot of Trnka and Brdeček’s film. Here, the main adversary of the chimney sweep disguised as Spring Man is the same boot-licking Czech fink and quisling

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from before, who has just started yearning for the apartment, pictures, and wife of the conscientious typesetter Jan Přímý. In the seventh installment, a change takes place after the Prague May 1945 Uprising, in which the typesetter with the allegorical name (Přímý means frank, forthright, or straight) sets off with the help of the intrepid chimney sweep (the former Spring Man, who is now costumeless) for a new, clearly class-defined struggle for better tomorrows in building socialist Czechoslovakia: In the beginning of May 1945, Spring Man took off his uniform and became an ordinary person—a Czech worker with all the joys and sorrows of a member of the liberated nation. However, did Spring Man cease to exist? Did truly everything happen in May 1945 that we expected and that we promised ourselves? While Spring Man took off his mask, other put masks on. The enemies of the May events did not give up the struggle, which was then not against Spring Men, but against the Czech people, against their happiness and satisfaction, against peace for all.25

The enemy of Spring Man and the typesetter Přímý is the same former fink, who is now a “reactionary” and “profiteer,” and like Přímý he is also given an allegorical name: Mr. Pomej (this name refers to the slop fed to pigs): The main protagonist of our tale now therefore becomes this big-nosed snuffer, who is suddenly now called Mr. Pomej. Mr. Pomej is very irritable, because he is no longer only fighting against the lone Spring Man, but against the nation that Spring Man has come from. And therefore, we have kept the title of our series, even though we no longer encounter steel springs in it. However, we meet with another kind of steel.26

After the war, Pomej and his ilk are organizing a putsch in his country. His allies include the lawyer Mazaný (whose name means “shrewd”) and “English-speaking friends from the West.” However, the duo of Přímý and Spring Man expose him, the criminals are arrested, and Pomej’s former home is turned into a sanatorium for working-class youths. As the authors of the monumental Dějin československého komiksu 20. století [History of Czechoslovak Comics of the Twentieth Century] concisely summarize: “Spring Man’s Further Adventures show what the new world ought to look like, and how to deal with those who want to destroy it, or perhaps even attempt a coup d’état. The story’s characters are also aptly drawn, plainly distinguishing the caricatured ‘profiteers’ and con men from the amiable working-class people and the ‘Přímý’ types.”27 The comics historian Helena Diesing therefore considers this comic series as an interesting illustration of “misusing a popularly beloved character for propaganda purposes.”28

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In a similar propagandistic and ideological vein, albeit in a politically contrasting spirit Oldřich Jelínek’s anti-Soviet “counterrevolutionary spring man” proceeds in a four-panel comic strip Pérák a SSSR [Spring Man and the USSR], to fight against the Soviet occupiers during the period of the Warsaw Pact troops’ invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.29 This graphic work, printed in a special issue of the popular magazine Mladý svět that went to press after August 1968, is probably the only Czech comic strip to have openly criticized the invasion.30 This spring man, who was creatively inspired mainly by Trnka and Brdeček’s film, ties knots in the barrels of the Soviet occupiers’ tanks and leaves only the graffiti “Don’t forget to march away! Spring Man!” Spring man’s flexible accommodation to period ideology—usually associated with various forms of Czech nationalism—was thus even more resilient than his legendary jumping springs. The postwar shift of the motif of spring man into cultural memory was a complicated process that was influenced by, among other things, narratives that were still active in the communicative memory. Thus, primarily in the 1950s, stories appear with increasing frequency that depict tags spring man as an ally of Western “imperialism” or the expelled Czech (Sudeten) Germans. Concurrently with these ideologized interpretations of stories about spring man’s alleged resistance activities during World War II, stories that were influenced to a significant extent by Trnka and Brdeček’s film and Dvořák’s comic strip appear with increasing frequency in oral transmission. Aside from their influence on legends and rumors, this film and these comics also influence another area of the vernacular culture—informal children’s games— across the entire country. From Prague all the way to Slovakian borders, children pretend to the jumping character from the film by attaching springs to their shoes. This ostensive and mimetic activity will remain popular in children’s culture all the way until the end of the 1980s. For the following generations, it’s then brought back to life with newer works of children’s literature inspired by spring man, such as Jiří Veškrna’s animated series Macek kosmonautem that was published in the magazine ABC mladých techniků a přírodovědců in 1967, and Pavel Štencl’s short story “Hele, kluci, pérák” [Look, Boys, It’s Spring Man], published in the magazine Pionýr in 1980.31 The following narration can serve as an early illustration of the postwar diffusion of spring man into children’s culture: When I found out about Spring Man, my head was filled with his powers for a long time. I remember how as a boy of about six years when I was drifting off to sleep I would dream that one day I would be able to do something like that. Various adventures ran through my head, in which I was naturally the central character and the fascists were replaced with my imaginary villains (someone who had recently upset me, and so on). It even went so far as me attaching

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springs from an old ottoman to the soles of my shoes and attempting to hop on them. Thank goodness, the springs did not have the necessary rigidity and carrying capacity for even my weight at that time, so I pressed them down to the ground. The falls were therefore not at all serious. I only tripped as I walked, because the springs got caught in everything. If I had really been able to bounce up, it would have ended worse. But despite this, spring man was my hero for quite a long time. It was perhaps in the fourth grade that he was replaced by the French hero Fifi Pírko [Fifi la plume in the original French, or Circus Angel in English], who could fly with the help of “angel” wings.32

Spring man also penetrates into the public space in other ways. In 1946 the legendary Czech motorcycle Jawa 250 Type 11 entered serial production, and it quickly acquired the vernacular name of “Pérák” (Spring Man). According to some interpretations, the folk name for this motorcycle could have been influenced by the World War II–era popularity of stories about spring man. This machine was already being designed (illegally) during the war, which symbolically connects with spring man’s resistance role, and the impressive patented springs on its forks could be symbolically likened to the springs that the urban phantom had also allegedly used.33 The construction team for the motorcycle’s trial rides during the war used military paint colors and stuck SS stickers on them in order to avoid unwanted attention from the police. But, in any case, the vernacular name for this motorcycle was the primary meaning

Figure 4.2. The legendary motorcycle Jawa 250 Type 11, which was manufactured illegally during World War II, is put into factory production in 1946. Private archive, 2017.

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associated with the term “pérák” for a large part of the Czech-speaking population until the beginning of the twenty-first century. A similarly distant echo of stories about spring man can be found in the popular animated character of a dog jumping on springs in Maxipes Fík, which was created by the writer Rudolf Čechura and the artist Jiří Šalamoun and first appeared in the animated children’s show Večerníček in 1975.34 It is rather interesting that the author of this character, Rudolf Čechura, hailed from the area around Kadaň (where he also set the story of this work), which is a place where stories about spring man had already abounded at a mass scale before the war as well as being where the most famous German author who worked with this theme (Jürgen Bernt-Bärtl) had hailed from. The potential inspiration by the character of spring man is also evinced in a children’s adventure novel by Alexandr Lomm (the pseudonym of the writer Václav Klička) Noční orel [The Night Eagle] from 1981, which deals with a Soviet partisan who was air-dropped in the Beskid Mountains. He discovers that he has the ability to levitate, and under the name of Night Eagle he fights against the Nazis on his own as a mysterious phantom.35 Another milestone for spring man in the development of his Czech narrative cycle toward heroization took place at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s thanks to texts by two artists: the first is Milan Knížák, who is also a musician and performer, and the second, and more significant is the journalist and writer Ondřej Neff. Milan Knížák is the first author who explicitly connects spring man with the phenomenon of comic-book superheroes, which he does in a brief allusion in his work CESTOPIS IV. Horizontální. 1982–83 [Voyages IV. Horizontal]. Here, he defines the character as “Spring Man: the Czech Superman.”36 However, the author who has most seriously dedicated himself to the figure of spring man at the end of the twentieth century has been Ondřej Neff. And he, too, similarly to Weiss, Bochořák, Janka, and Otčenášek, was drawing from his personal experiences with stories told about spring man:   I have loved spring man as a figure since childhood. I was born just after the war and I grew up among boys who were older than me, who had experienced the war as children. And for them, Spring Man was an absolutely real figure whose existence they believed in so utterly that they convinced me.37

Ondřej Neff first worked with spring man in a short text written for a selection of drawings by Miroslav Barták in 1989, where he describes spring man as a jumping superhero equipped with razor gloves who fights against the Nazis; however, his description is still not without ironic detachment.38 In the same year, Neff then self-published the comic book Pérák, český super-hero: Toho dne byla mlha [Spring Man, Czech Superhero: There Was Fog That

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Day] in samizdat form. This samizdat work would later become a key text in the understanding of the spring man’s uptake into Czech visual culture. In this comic book, Spring man, who was created by the ingenious Professor Karas as a remote-controlled living robotic weapon deployed against the Nazis, wakes up after having been encased in cement for forty-five years into the unappealing reality of late-Communist-era Czechoslovakia; a country now full of illegal money-changers, corruption, and clientelism.39 A continuation of this comic book with the title Pérák contra Globeman, published by Neff under the pseudonym Aston on the internet in 2001, continues in this vein. In this work, which was reacting to the anti-globalization protests in Prague in 2000 and other period social and media issues, Spring Man is revitalized by young anti-globalist activists and sent to do battle against Globeman, a personification of globalization reminiscent of the mascot of McDonald’s, who is actually spring man’s old enemy, General SS Stauff.40 As the historians of Czech comics Tomáš Prokůpek, Pavel Kořínek, Martin Foret, and Michal Jareš have noted, the treatment of the motif of spring man in this artistic medium was reacting to changes in the period historical and social context just as profoundly as in his original oral forms: “Even despite this ephemeral period it is still remarkable how the figure of Spring Man regularly emerges in Czech comics in periods of great political shifts.”41 A good illustration of this tendency is provided by Neff’s planned but never completed next comic book about spring man that bore the subtitle Zachraňte Bilaka, which he created in the winter of 1989 and was supposed to reflect the events around the Velvet Revolution and Václav Havel’s election as Czechoslovak president.42 Even though in this period there still exist alternatives to the homogenizing interpretation of spring man as the first Czech superhero, this heroic interpretation—first represented by Jiří Trnka and Jiří Brdeček and most distinctly developed by Ondřej Neff—starts to become dominant in the Czech cultural memory. “THE MOMENT HAS COME FOR SPRING MAN”: COMMODIFICATION OF SPRING MAN IN COMICS AND VISUAL CULTURE AFTER 2002 Interpretations of spring man as the “first Czech superhero”—one of many potential and mutually conflicting interpretations of the cultural memory— definitively consolidated by the beginning of the next millennium. In 2002 an article was published in the social magazine Instinkt by the Czech journalist, cryptozoologist, and Fortean researcher Ivan Mackerle titled “Nepolapitelný Pérák” [The Elusive Spring Man], which rediscovers, or rather redefines spring man (similarly as he had done earlier with the olgoi-khorkhoi, a bizarre

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Mongolian cryptid “death worm”) for the broader Czech public. In his text, which mainly draws from Pulec’s 1965 article about spring man, Mackerle emphasizes Spring Man’s resistance activities: He mainly appeared at night. In a long black cloak and boots equipped with strong springs, which gave him an incredible ability: to jump into the air to enormous heights and lengths. He often smoothly jumped over a wall and sometimes even a building in a single huge leap, with which he foiled all attempts at catching him. No one had ever properly looked into his face, but they say that his eyes sometimes shown like flashlights. People began to call him “spring man.” . . . To this day, it is unknown who he actually was. A sleepwalking circus acrobat, or an inventive partisan who fought against the Nazis and collaborators? Spring Man sometimes turned up in the midst of the war, when the Nazis’ reign of terror and the hatred of the occupiers were at their high-water mark. From the shadows of the antiaircraft blackouts, which lent an entirely different, mysterious, and eerie character to places that had just recently been flooded in the light of the First Republic, a mysterious figure began to appear, who mainly frightened the Nazis for its elusiveness. And the people who had at first feared him, soon saw in him a hero, an adversary against the cruel occupiers.43

Besides emphasizing Spring Man’s activities in the anti-Nazi resistance, Mackerle also mentions (as the first Czech author to do so) the connection between spring man and Spring-heeled Jack (which he knew of thanks to his being a connoisseur of Fortean matters). At the conclusion, he adds some UFO lore into his infotainment journalistic work, presenting it as the most suitable explanatory framework for the phenomenon of jumping phantoms: However, it was clear that this could not only be one and the same individual. For he certainly couldn’t live that long, and besides that he often appeared in the same period in entirely different places. At the same time, it also seems out of the question that generations of pranksters would amuse themselves in this manner. Even the most able-bodied man, even if he had those boots with springs on them, couldn’t have managed these unbelievable leaps as high as six meters. Some researchers have therefore speculated that Jumping Jack wasn’t a human being, but “someone” from another dimension or planet. They illustrate this with a case from 1953 from Houston, Texas. It was said that the elusive jumper there leaped up into a tree and then disappeared. Immediately afterward, they said they had heard a whoosh and a UFO appeared in the sky. Was the Czech spring man from the occupation period also one of these beings “from elsewhere,” or was he a person endowed with supernatural abilities? After the definitive defeat of Nazism, spring man literally vanished into thin air, and so we can only seek an answer to this question with difficulty.44

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Ivan Mackerle, along with Ondřej Neff, are thus to a significant extent creators of the modern-day superheroic conception of this enigmatic figure. A great many texts describing Spring Man as a superhero appeared in the years afterward; his fame and following in the popular culture begin to grow at an explosive rate, and in some ways become comparable with the mass extent of oral narrations about spring man during World War II. The most significant project that definitively changes spring man into Spring Man; that is, a superhero, in Czech culture is launched at the same time as Mackerle’s article. In 2002 the community of authors gathered around the magazine Živel under the leadership of the graphic artist (and coauthor of the screenplay) Petr Krejzek began planning a large-scale project for a comic series that is going to interpret spring man in the spirit of the superhero genre as a kind of first Czech “superman.”45 These authors thus are the first (by contrast rather archaizing conception of spring man presented by Trnka and Brdeček, Dvořák, and Neff), to conceive of Spring Man as a traditional superhero from the Golden or Silver Age of American comic books.46 The Western inspiration is also in the narrative and artistic conception and in the language that uses comic-book anglicisms, but also—and primarily—in ahistorical mythologization of the period of World War II, by contrast with the previous, relatively “realistic” literary and visual renderings of spring man, in the narrative universe of this comic book the Nazi powers are demonized and connected with occult forces.47 This influential comic-book understanding of Spring Man was already foreshadowed in the text describing the creation of the cover of Živel No. 21:   Believe it or not, but creating this cover was giving birth. The artist we invited was Adolf Lachman, whose task was to create an “archetypal superhero” in the style of the American Superman and the Czech Spring Man.48

In the next issue the comic strip is then announced in an advertisement with a drawing by Adolf Lachman, that advertises the founding of the comic strip in 2003 and introduces future readers to its plot: Prague. 15 March 1939. Wenceslas Square. The first days of the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. The first days of fear and humiliation. Adolf Hitler is riding into the capital city of the formerly free Czechoslovakia in order to demonstrate the definitive dominion of the fascist utopia in Central Europe. The city is paralyzed with fear and uncertainty. Neighbors don’t trust neighbors, nor fathers their sons, and the future above the entire benumbed land lies like a choking shadow of the Grim Reaper.49

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Figure 4.3. Unpublished comic book Spring Man by Adolf Lachman, Projekt Pérák, 2002.

This comic series remains unfinished to this day, but despite that (mainly thanks to the information about it that can be found on the internet), it has still been quite influential on the Czech conception of this figure. After many

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peripeteias and transformations of the creative team behind it, only part of the work, which was produced by the artist Jan Bažant, was brought to life in 2009 within an issue of KomiksFEST! revue.50 A wide range of comic-book upcyclings of Spring Man as a superhero fighting against the Nazis then appeared over the next few years.51 Besides the “folkloric” and “literary” forms, a third and today unquestionably the most influential version of spring man, the “comic book” or “visual” form has been established. This form of the jumping phantom was definitively attested to in one of the comic strips by Tomáš Prokůpek and Karel Jerie, “Sbohem má lásko” [Goodbye My Love], which organically sets the figure of spring man into the metaphorical visual history of Czech comics in combination with the graphic poetics of the popular Rychlé šípy book series.52 One of the most recent, and clearly among the most influential (in its impacts on Czech popular culture) comic-book treatments of this figure is a spring man who is living in retirement in contemporary Prague, but is still capable of fighting against evil and injustice, found in the comic series Dechberoucí Zázrak [The Breathtaking Miracle] by Petr Macek and Petr Kopl, which has been in publication since 2016.53 The same authors also published first two hardcover comic books full of playful pop-cultural references devoted to Spring Man in his superheroic role of masked avenger battling the Nazis, titled Pérák: Oko budoucnosti [Spring Man: Eye of the Future] in 2019 and its sequel Pérák: Jantarová komnata [Spring Man: Amber Room] in 2021.54 Contemporary short films also draw upon the superhero poetics; for example, Pavel Soukup’s live action student film Pérák from 2013, which emphasizes spring man’s demonic form in an interesting manner,55 or Marek Berger’s animated student film Pérák. Stín nad Prahou [Spring Man: The Shadow over Prague] from 2016, which brings this superhero together with the “mythology” around the Prague Golem and the works of Jaroslav Foglar (the previously referred to author of the Rychlé šípy [Rapid Arrows] book series.56 Spring Man then plays an ever more ephemeral and marginal role, which is merely alluded to in Marek Najbrt’s film Protektor, where his legendary jumping springs are shown in one brief scene.57 We may also classify what is so far the most recent and most influential literary treatment of the spring man “myth,” the surreal novel Pérák (which was originally intended to be a screenplay for a feature-length film) from the pen of esteemed Czech writer Petr Stančík in 2008, into this heroizing conception of spring man with some degree of confidence.58 The related registration of a trademark on the title “Spring Man” by the author of this book then also caused a small amount of public discussion in 2008 about the “appropriation” of this well-known character who has been featured in other works.59 In 2019, the German edition of this book, titled Pérák: Der Superheld aus Prag was published in Switzerland.60

Figure 4.4. Spring Man on a poster for the film  Pérák.  Stín  nad  Prahou  by Marek Berger, 2016.

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The dramatic development of the pop-cultural mythology about Spring Man also continues the superhero lineage in the dramatic work Pérák—na jméně nezáleží, rozhodují činy! Akční historická fikce Divadla VOSTO5 [Spring Man: The Name Doesn’t Matter, but the Deeds Do!], though its overall conception of the “Spring Man myth” partially diverges from the other contemporary version of this figure. This performance, which had its premiere on 16 October 2011 in the Prague cultural center MeetFactory, was then reprised at the Divadlo Archa theater. While the visual form of Spring Man in this dramatization is entirely in keeping with the modern superhero conception of this figure (the father of the artistic conception here, besides Lukáš Kuchinka is the author of Spring Man comics Hza Bažant), a certain return to the originally liminal role of spring man represents the fact that this character is not in the center of the plot and he mainly serves as a dramatic connecting element between the activities of the main characters, who are members of a fictitious resistance group and their Nazi antagonists. The legacy from the Protectorate-era oral traditions is also represented in his identity and motivations not being revealed during the play: Spring Man never takes off his mask and he thus remains just as enigmatic a figure, and when the play ends he vanishes again, in order to continue to “strike out on his own.”61 The contemporary superhero Spring Man in comics, films, and theatrical productions is in most cases stripped of the kind of ironic perspective we find in the first heroicizing treatments of this material (to wit: Engel, Trnka and Brdeček, Knížák, and Neff). One of the reasons for this is the greater distance in time since the period of World War II, when this subject was still alive in the culture, and another is the gradual departure of the key “generation of experience” that had perceived spring man ambivalently, or sometimes even downright comically or ironically. Today, it is predominantly made up of people who were children during World War II, and who naturally (by contrast with youths and adults) often heroized spring man back at that time. However, the main reason for this is the entirely dissimilar pop-cultural relationship to this period, which is today mythologized in different and ever less and less “realistic” manners than it used to be in the past. It was only in the contemporary pop culture and his transformation into Spring Man that spring man began to perform—just like other literary and film characters—the function of literary myth. Spring man was “precipitated” out of a great many heterogeneous memories of people in the past generations into a symbolic figure of cultural memory, which no longer maintains distinctions between history and myth. Like every mythic figure, this one also has a primarily sacred signification and it metaphorically comments on the essential constituent parts of the collective identity. With his transformation into Spring Man, spring man additionally became an object of expertise: whereas the original oral narratives about spring man could be told by practically anyone, the

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contemporary Spring Man of the cultural memory is already firmly in the hands of self-styled specialists: writers, artists, filmmakers, journalists, and academics—including the author of this book.62 However, in order to become a figure of cultural memory, spring man had to first undergo a radical change in his poetics. His nature as an ambivalent nocturnal monster logically positioned him outside the modern mainstream Czech culture. It was only when the authors expanded his role into the resistance movement during World War II that they enabled him to fully develop his mythological potential. They then began to add further and further details to the originally marginal resistance motif, of course very closely and sensitively tailored to the modern Czech national identity. Spring man thus began to become more and more “Czech”—with his connection not only with the Czech resistance movement, but also with the ideology and practice of Czech nationalistic Sokol physical education movement and industrial paradise of Zlín, created by “Czech Henry Ford” entrepreneur Tomáš Baťa.63 This process of the nationalization of spring man is today symbolically illustrated in numerous discussions on the Czech internet, in which any possible connection between Spring-heeled Jack with the Czech Spring Man is vehemently rejected, and Spring Man is increasingly considered “our first superhero.” For many contemporary Czechs, Spring Man is thus a “myth” in the sense defined by Roland Barthes; his originally marginal role as a resistance fighter has been naturalized to such an extent that it’s understood as indisputably original, obvious, and natural.64 This—today entirely homogenized and immensely influential myth—at present represents the dominant social narrative about Spring Man, with which we meet in the vast majority of pop-cultural, artistic, and journalistic texts that deal with this urban phantom. Like very influential national myth, the pop-cultural myth about Spring Man also displays a powerful tendency toward expansion abroad. Similar to legends about St. Adalbert of Prague in the Middle Ages, the myth of Spring Man has also expanded to neighboring Poland, where it influenced the discourse in which Spring Man is most firmly established today: comics. In the comic strip “Kominiarz” [Chimney Sweep] by Przemysław  J. Olszewski and Alberto Pagliari, published in a Polish comics anthology Praga gada. O wojnie! [Prague Speaks. About the War] there appears the figure of a heroic chimney sweep who jumps across the rooftops of the Warsaw neighborhood called Praga (Prague) and fights against the Nazi occupiers during World War II. However, this comic strip was not only inspired by the Czechs—Warsaw legends and rumors from the wartime era, which had been documented in a special international project that combines oral-historical and museological approaches (such as rumors about a chimney sweep who threw bread down to the hungry from the rooftops, or about children’s dolls with bombs lurking within)—also play a significant role. The inspiration borrowed from Trnka’s

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film, even if it’s only at the level of informers and narrators who helped the anthologists when they were gathering material to work with, is fairly evident.65 We can compare the process of Spring Man’s national mythologization with other similar processes during which the originally plural and ambivalent folkloric tradition is reduced into the form of a Czech national “myth.” Some of the most interesting of these cases include the “myth” of the Prague Golem, the Sleeping Army of Blaník “myth,” and the utopian “myths” about just rulers, such as King Ječmínek, or Joseph II. Spring Man’s pop-cultural adaptations render similar and often even identical themes—protection of the unjustly persecuted in times of tyranny, such as the Golem, the return of justice to the hands of “the nation,” and resistance against foreign domination, such as the “myths” about Blaník, and the just rulers. “I AM HERE, AND I KNOW THAT YOU KNOW IT”: SPRING MAN OF THE 2010S IS BACK ON THE STREETS AS SYMBOL OF DENIAL OF CZECH NAZISM AND COLLABORATION DURING THE HOLOCAUST Over the last few years, we can observe how the phenomenon of spring man, or, more precisely, the mythologized Spring Man, began to slowly resist his partially forced role as a pop-cultural symbol. With his intrinsic flexibility he thus begins to return to the public space. One of the forums for spring man’s contemporary return is connected with the way people currently perceive him as a symbol of a genius loci of Prague’s former working-class neighborhoods, especially Žižkov and Karlín. Drawings and paintings of Spring Man thus begin to appear in several Žižkov restaurants, in the local publication Žižkovské listy,66 and, most notably, on the walls of the Atlas Café in the entrance hall of the Atlas cinema in Karlín (Prague). There, large paintings of the jumping phantom were created by the artist Jindřich Hájek; the reason was primarily nostalgia over the fact that “Spring man came from the same period as the building of the cinema and cafe.”67 In 2022, in the same neighborhood, renowned Czech comic artist Toy_Box created a huge mural with the Spring Man on the former railway viaduct over Husitská Street. Other incidents of spring man’s return are connected with his acceptance by the Czech steampunk, or rather diesel-punk movements; Spring Man costumes have been prominent at several cosplay events. However, the most consequential form of this emancipation of spring man in Czech culture is his potent and purely contemporary “return to the streets” after 2010 in the form of activist paste-up posters and graffiti made

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Figure 4.5. Spring Man. Mural art by Toy_Box, Husitská street in Prague, 2022.

by a movement fighting against contemporary forms of neo-Nazism. Dozens of these posters, informally pasted up in the public spaces of Czech cities, towns, and public transportation sites in two waves (after 2010 in cooperation with the local group of antifa’s antifascist operations and then independently after 2015) significantly revitalized the role of this phantom in Czech

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Figure 4.6. “Antifacism  has a strong tradition here!” Antifa sticker using the motif of Jiří Trnka’s spring man, ca. 2011.

communicative culture. These activities conceptualize Spring Man, the legendary anti-Nazi resistance fighter, as an ideological predecessor of the contemporary antifascist movement, while they draw visual inspiration both from Trnka’s and Soukup’s films, and from other pop-cultural treatments of this phenomenon. Spring Man is conceived in these works not only ideologically, but also as a moral model for uncompromising resistance against (neo) fascism and other hateful ideological movements; however, at the same time also reanimates his originally ambivalent nature.68 The arguments of the ideological opponents of the creators of this activist version of Spring Man; that is, arguments forwarded by Czech neo-Nazis, use knowledge of the “real” historical spring man, which they have drawn from the available scholarly and popular literature, to subversively counter the anti-fascists:

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These days, Nazis are always telling us that the real spring man was no hero but a pervert.69

Thanks to this “return to the streets” spring man is again returning to his original dialogical position as a belief legend, whose ideological message, significance, and veracity is continually negotiated and (de)constructed via social communication. Part of spring man’s recent revitalization has been his ever-more-powerful ingressions and even active influencing of public spaces. The most significant of these was his entrance into media discussions about the former Czech concentration camp in Lety and the degree of Czech collaboration with the Nazis during World War II, which took place in 2015, just before the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz. On the night between the  twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth of January an infiltration of the pig farm in Lety, which stands on the place where there used to be a Czech concentration camp where Roma and other “maladjusted” people were sent during the war, took place. Several works of graffiti were created that commemorated this event, and they were signed with the name of the legendary Spring Man. Concurrently, Spring Man also announced his return in Prague at the base of Letná Plain by hanging up announcements and shooting off

Figure 4.7. Guerrilla paste-up posters signed with the name of spring man in Prague, 2015.

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flares. Someone also flooded Prague, Brno, and Theresienstadt with guerrilla paste-up posters with Czech and English text that aimed to stir up the public: Perhaps you don’t know me, but I remember some of your ancestors very well. Especially those who bowed so low to the Nazis that they became Nazis themselves, while I dragged my ass through the mud in order to take down as many of them as possible. To this day, I feel sick when remembering all of these slimy Czech fascists, spineless officials, gendarmes, and guards who set up their own concentration camp in Lety near Písek. They locked more than a thousand people up in them, only because they were Roma and they didn’t let them die right there on the spot, but sent them away to be murdered in Auschwitz. The horrors of Auschwitz still reek to this day in Lety—and quite literally: there is a pig farm standing on the site now. Would you be dumping manure in Theresienstadt or excrement in Lidice? I’ll come back, because this makes me sick. Spring Man.70

The same announcement was sent by email to the ČTK [Czech News Agency] and selected Czech media outlets along with photographs of these events, which they gave a lot of coverage to in the following days.71 A video that reported on the entire operation was also shared on the internet portal Vimeo, where this follow-up text was also posted: I’m coming back to crack down on you—like when I first woke up and opened my eyes in Letná. I’m coming back, and I know that you know it. The posters in Theresienstadt, Prague, and Brno told me that they saw you. I’m coming back and my first steps led to Lety. Since last night there have been silhouettes of people who commemorate all the innocent ones who were murdered in Lety depicted on the walls of the pig farm. Red stains commemorate the blood spilled. Like during fascism, I’m coming back now like your black conscience. Black as the night in which I come alive. Black as a Gypsy who never returned from Lety. Black as the shadow behind you. From the nocturnal rooftops—maybe even now right over your heads. Spring Man.72

It is thus clear that neither spring man nor Spring Man have by far said their last words.

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NOTES 1. Michael D. Foster and Jeffrey A. Tobert (eds.), The Folkloresque: Reframing Folklore in a Popular Culture World (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2015). 2. Klement Bochořák, “Válečné strašidlo,” in Příběhy a vzpomínky po večerech sebrané (Havlíčkův Brod: Krajské nakladatelství v Havlíčkově Brodě, 1958), 34–36. It is also of some interest that a recently published anthology of Bochořák’s work left this short story about spring man out, because it didn’t fall into the romanticized understanding of “folk stories” as literary folklorism for contemporary readers (Klement Bochořák, Ohnivá noc: Tajemné příběhy a pověsti z  Moravy, ed. Ester Marie Nováková (Třebíč: Blok, 2004). 3. Weiss, “Pérový muž,” 1961, 250. 4. Jan Otčenášek, Kulhavý Orfeus (Prague: Československý spisovatel, 1965), 108. 5. Otto Janka, Byl jsem tady—Pérák. Příběh snu, který se stal skutečností, sochy, která promluvila, a kluka, který přeskakoval domy (Prague: Albatros 1991) 1. For the radio play, see Otto, Janka, Byl jsem tady—Pérák. Československý rozhlas, first broadcast in 1989. 6. Ludvík Souček, Případ jantarové komnaty (Prague: Albatros, 1970), 31. 7. Jürgen Bernt–Bärtl, Spiralhopser—Geschichten aus einer Kindheit (Halle: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1976). 8. Bill Niven, Representations of Flight and Expulsion in East German Prose Works (New York: Camden House, 2014), 141–43. 9. Bernt–Bärtl, Spiralhopser, 88. Translation by Petr Janeček. 10. Margit Voigt, “Die Spiralhopser,” in Zwischen Ostern und Weihnachten: Geschichten (Margit Voigt, 2012), 74–77. 11. Bernt-Lutz Lange, Magermilch und lange Strümpfe (Leipzig: Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag, 1999). 12. Günter Radtke, Gespensterjagd: Kleine Erzählerreihe 61 (Berlin: Deutscher Militärverlag, 1961). 13. Jaroslav Foglar, Stínadla se bouří: Knižnice Rychlých šípů II. (Prague: Časopis Vpřed pro chlapce a děvčata, 1947). 14. Jaroslav Foglar, Dobrodružství v  temných uličkách (Prague: Olympia, 1990), 104. 15. Jan Pohunek, “Jestřáb na podivné stopě. Folklorní, mysteriózní a záhadologické motivy a inspirace v  životě a díle Jaroslava Folgara,” Studia Ethnologica Pragensia 9, No. 2 (2018): 54–64. 16. Foglar, Dobrodružství v temných uličkách, 57. 17. Foglar, Dobrodružství v temných uličkách, 61–62. 18. Topejr: Skutečný Pérák. Contribution to a discussion on the article Rozhovor: Český superhrdina Pérák je víc než Superman, říká etnolog Janeček. iDnes.cz / Prague a Střední Čechy, July 3, 2013, accessed August 16, 2017, praha.idnes.cz/ diskuse.aspx?iddiskuse=A130703_171540_metro-extra_jbs. 19. Jaroslav Marek, Česká moderní kultura (Prague, Mladá fronta 1998), 28–29. A typical example of this kind of humanization of an originally ambivalent demonic being is the previously mentioned water sprite vodník.

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20. Engel, “Pérový muž.” 21. Pérák a SS. Jiří Trnka—Jiří Brdečka—Eduard Hoffman—Otakar Šafránek. 13 min., Czechoslovakia, 1946. 22. Trnka’s film was therefore (from the historical perspective partially unjustly because it was published after the war) also included, for example, in the DVD collection The Golden Age of Cartoons: Cartoons for Victory! Rare WWII Propaganda Film Shorts from Around the World. Chuck Jones. USA, 2006. 23. UP, “New Foreign Star Challenges Donald Duck,” Wisconsin State Journal, October 13, 1946. 24. Vladimír Dvořák, “Pérákovy další osudy,” Haló nedělní noviny 4, No. 13, 1948, 48. 25. Dvořák, “Pérákovy další osudy.” 26. Dvořák. 27. Tomáš Prokůpek and Pavel Kořínek and Martin Foret and Michal Jareš, Dějiny československého komiksu 20. Století (Prague: Filip Tomáš—Akropolis, 2014), 333. On the ideological typification of figures in this comic strip, see Vít Schmarz, “Nespolehlivé linky dějin,” in Signály z  neznáma. Český komiks 1922–2012, ed. Pavel Kořínek and Tomáš Prokůpek (Řevnice: Arbor Vitae, 2012), 192–215. 28. Helena Diesing, Český komiks 1. poloviny 20. Století (Prague: Verzone, 2011), 313. 29. Oldřich Jelínek,”Pérák a SSSR,” Mladý svět 10, No. 45, 1968, 2–3. 30. Prokůpek and Kořínek and Foret and Jareš, Dějiny československého komiksu 20. století, 501. 31. Jiří Veškrna, “Macek kosmonaut,” ABC mladých techniků a přírodovědců 11, No. 11, 1967, 27; Pavel Štencl, “Hele, kluci, Pérák,” Pionýr 27, No. 9, 1980, 2–10. 32. V.V., male, born 1955, college-educated, technician, Roudnice nad Labem (Dotazníkový výzkum Kláry Pirochové, 2008). 33. I owe thanks for detailed information and confirmation of the possible relevance of this hypothesis to Arnošt Nezmeškal and Miloš Hořejší from the National Technical Museum in Prague, and to Jan Králík (email correspondence from July 17, 2017). The vernacular name of “pérák” can be proven to have been in common use since 1952 (on the basis of research into classified ad headings in the most important Czech car magazine Svět motorů). For more on the manufacture of this motorcycle, see Arnošt Nezmeška, “Zbrojovka Ing. F. Janeček v období okupace,” in Věda a technika v českých zemích v období 2. světové války. Práce z dějin techniky a přírodních věd. sv. 20., ed. Miloš Hořejší and Ivana Lorenzová (Prague: National Technical Museum, 2009), 215–35, and Jan Králík, Jawa—můj osud: Příběh Jaroslava Freie, který zachránil Jawu a útěkem zachránil sebe (Prague: Grada, 2009). 34. Maxipes Fík. Václav Bedřich—Rudolf Čechura—Jiří Šalamoun. 13 x 7 min. Czechoslovakia, 1976. 35. Alexandr Lomm, Noční orel (Prague: Albatros, 1981). This novel was originally published in Russian in 1965. 36. Milan Knížák, Cestopisy (Prague: Radost, 1990), 132; 168. 37. Štěpán Kopřiva and Petr Litoš and Jiří Pavlovský, “Ondřej Neff,” Crew 3, 1997, 48.

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38. Barták and Neff, To je můj případ!, 75. 39. Neff, Pérák, český super-hero: Toho dne byla mlha, 1989; Neff, “Pérák, český super-hero: Toho dne byla mlha,” Crew 1, 1997, 51–58; Crew 2, 1997; 51–58 Crew 3, 1997, 59–66. For more, see Prokůpek and Kořínek and Foret and Jareš, Dějiny československého komiksu 20. století, 763. 40. ASTON: Pérák contra Globeman. 2001. Accessed on August 16, 2017, www​ .hyena​.cz​/perak​/. 41. Prokůpek and Kořínek and Foret and Jareš, Dějiny československého komiksu 20. století, 501. 42.Kopřiva and Litoš and Pavlovský, “Ondřej Neff,” 48. 43. Mackerle, “Nepolapitelný Pérák,” 64. 44. Mackerle, “Nepolapitelný Pérák,” 64–65. 45. Tomáš Pospiszyl and Morten and Hza Bažant, Projekt Pérák. 2004. Accessed August 16, 2017, /www​.monge​.cz​/perak​/. 46. On superhero mythology from the perspective of popular culture studies, see Richard Reynolds, Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology. Studies in Popular Culture (London: Batsford, 1992); and Peter Coogan, Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre (Austin: MonkeyBrain Books, 2006). 47. Tomáš Prokůpek, “Projekt Pérák. Rozhovor s Mortenem,” Aargh! 4, 2003, 69–71. 48. Morten, “Vznik obálky,” Živel 21, 2002, 2. 49. “Pérák. Nový český komiks! Na stránkách Živlu v  roce 2003,” Živel 22, 2002, 17. 50. Morten and Monge and Bažant, Hza, “Projekt Pérák,” KomiksFest! Revue 3, 2009, 12–42. 51. See Appendix 3., Spring man in Czech and Slovak popular culture—a chronology. 52. Tomáš Prokůpek and Karel Jerie, “Sbohem má lásko,” Crew 2, No. 24, 2009, 65–72. 53. Petr Macek and Petr Kopl, Dechberoucí Zázrak 5–13, 2016. 54. Petr Macek and Petr Kopl, Pérák: Oko budoucnosti (Prague: Crew, 2019); Petr Macek and Petr Kopl, Pérák: Jantarová komnata (Prague: Crew, 2021). 55. Pérák. Pavel Soukup—Milan Poboček. 13 min., Czech Republic, 2013. 56. Pérák: Stín nad Prahou. Marek Berger. 13 min., Czech Republic, 2016. On the potential ideological connection between the Czech spring man and the old Prague legend about another “mechanical man” who also fought against a power that seemed invincible—the Golem—who, like spring man, also came alive in a turbulent period full of violence; more specifically, the Early Modern anti-Jewish pogroms, see Krejčí, “Úvodem. Zvěsti a novely,” 9. 57. Protektor. Marek Najbrt—Robert Geisler—Benjamín Tuček. 100 min., Czech Republic, 2009. 58. Petr Stančík, Pérák (Brno: Druhé město, 2008). 59. ČTK: Legendární Pérák má ochrannou známku, po knize se chystá film. Novinky.cz, April 23, 2008. Accessed August 16, 2017, www​.novinky​.cz​/kultura​ /138264​-legendarni​-perak​-ma​-ochrannou​-znamku​-po​-knize​-se​-chysta​-film​.html.

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60. Petr Stančík, Pérák. Der Superheld aus Prag (Biel/Bienne: edition clandestin, 2019). 61. Pérák—na jméně nezáleží, rozhodují činy!Akční historická fikce Divadla VOSTO5. Jiří Havelka—Ondřej Cihlář—Zdeněk Janáček—Štefan Titka. Prague 2011. 62., Assmann, Culture Memory and Early Civilization, 50–51. 63. See, for example, Pérák: Stín nad Prahou, 2016; Petr Macek and Petr Kopl, Dechberoucí Zázrak, 2016; Marek Berger and Marek Varga, “Pérák. Zrození legendy,” Žižkovské listy 1–3, 2013, 50; 4, 2013, 35; 5–6, 2013, 50; 9, 2013, 46, 1–3, 2014, 34. 64. Roland Barthes, Mythologies (London: Paladin, 1972). 65. Przemysław J. Olszewski and Alberto Pagliari, “Kominiarz,” in Praga gada. O wojnie!, ed. Tony Sandoval and Alberto Pagliari (Warszawa: Fundacja Anymacji, 2013). In the following comic anthology dedicated to the postwar period there appears the figure of a local criminal, Paramonow, who according to the testimony of a period witness (which is, unfortunately, not corroborated by more sources), was supposed to have jumped from rooftop to rooftop with the help of steel springs attached to his feet. This comic-book figure is an artistic reflection of the criminal deeds of the robber Jerzy Paramonow (1931–1955), who was active in Warsaw in 1955. He was mainly famous because after a series of robberies he shot the police officer who arrested him and thus became an ambivalent hero in period folklore (Przemysław J. Olszewski and Alberto Pagliari, “Kominiarz & Pastereczka,” in Praga gada. O pokoju, ed. Tony Sandoval and Krysztof Ostrowski et al. (Warszawa: Fundacja Anymacji, 2014), 10. My thanks are due to the comics historian Tomáš Prokůpek for drawing my attention to this interesting international project. 66. Berger and Varga, “Pérák. Zrození legendy.” 67. Pérák. Kino ATLAS, 2017. Accessed August 16, 2017, www​.kinoatlas​.cz​/klient​ -181​/kino​-52​/stranka​-920. 68. In recent years, the theme of the heroized Spring Man has even penetrated popular music production with a political accent—see the hip-hop song “Perak” by the performers GnostaG feat. SpikeKillah from 2016 or the Oi! Punk song of the same name by the group Aculeos from 2017. Both songs update Pérák as a fighter against contemporary forms of neo-Nazism, racism, and intolerance, including mentions of contemporary Czech political figures associated with nationalistic and xenophobic agency. 69. X.Y., female, interview conducted on 6 April 2017, Prague. 70. Pérák. Email communication from 1 September 2017. 71. For example, Jan Kopřiva, “Na vepříně v Letech se objevily kresby připomínající oběti války. A podpis Pérák” [“Pictures that commemorate the war victims appeared on the pig barn along with the signature Spring Man”]. iRozhlas.cz, January 27, 2015, accessed August 16 2017, www​.rozhlas​.cz​/zpravy​/regiony​/_​ zprava​ /na​-veprine​-v​-letech​-se​-objevily​-kresby​-pripominajici​-obeti​-valky​-a​-podpis​-perak​ -​-1448397. 72. Pérák se vrací. Vimeo. 2015, accessed August 16, 2017, vimeo.com/117853503.

​​​​​​​Conclusion

The mysterious figure of the Czech mythical phantom who is generally, though not exclusively, called spring man (or sometimes Spring Man, the spring-man, Franta Spring Man, or jumper) is not from the perspective of its origin an exclusively Czech “national tradition” connected with the period of World War II, as contemporary popular culture attempts to suggest. The domestic orally transmitted stories about spring man, which inspired the pop-cultural renderings of this material, represent a unique regional version, an “ecotype” of an international narrative (and also, to a great extent, cultural) complex around a mysterious jumping phantom. This complex arose in the second third of the nineteenth century in the culture of the suburban laboring classes in Great Britain from the connections forged among folk narratives (belief legends, ghost stories, and rumors), specific cultural practices (ostensive impersonation of “prowling ghosts” and the related public performances and festivities) and mass-produced pop-cultural texts (penny-dreadful novels, journalistic sensations, popular theater performances, and other spectacles). From this unique amalgam of the industrial urban culture of the manually laboring classes in the years 1838–1877, a connection with the generic figure of the Victorian urban phantom usually called Spring-heeled Jack gradually crystallized. Concurrently with the crystallization of Spring-heeled Jack, an international migratory legend emerged about this figure, which after about 1904—boosted by mass-distributed popular culture—afterward inspired similar phenomena in other European countries. The medium for transmission of this legend was clearly primarily oral tradition, which in that period was significantly amplified by the dramatic population displacements, and especially by the precipitous social and cultural changes caused by World War I. Continental versions of this legend that adapted to locally specific conditions (including local folkloric demonology), then latently existed in oral transmission in the form of less prominent locally isolated narratives mainly integral with industrial working-class and mining and laboring communities. These coexisted within the framework of the folkloric repertoires of 183

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local societies with the local gossip, rumors, and legends; that is, narratives with direct relevance for their communities. However, the situation changed dramatically in the moments when these narratives suddenly took on a lot more importance—often for brief periods during waves of social unrest associated with important historical events and/or processes. The most significant short-term manifestations of this cultural phenomenon—besides the Czech spring man of the Second World War (1942–1945)—also included the Russian poprygunchiki of the Russian Civil War (1918–1920) in  St. Petersburg, Odessa, and Moscow and then during the Second World War (1941) in Moscow and Leningrad, the Slovak phosphorous man from 1943 in  Bratislava, and the German Hüpfemännchen from the turbulent postwar period (1948–1953) in Saxony and Thuringia. The mass occurrence of narrations about jumping phantoms during this period conspicuously correlates with the commemorative density of these periods in the construction of dominant historical narratives within the corresponding national traditions. The subsequent pop-cultural treatments of these materials are then focusing on precisely these formative periods in modern history: in the Czech lands on the experiences of World War II, in Russia in the period of the Russian Revolution, its aftermath, and the Great Patriotic War, and in Germany in its postwar reconstruction. Narratives about spring man thus form a kind of interesting vernacular commentary on the key moments in these individual modern national histories. The main argument for a monogenetic interpretation of these narratives as having arisen in one specific place and time (i.e. Great Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century) and their subsequent dispersal across the continent by means of “jumping” migration, or perhaps the diffusion of cultural elements, is the significant homogeneity of these ideas, which straddle the boundaries of folkloric motifs and more developed narrative units such as legends. In all the recorded international variations these are stories about a human being, or an anthropomorphic being that is mainly active in an urban environment and which is distinguished by an unusual form of movement: he jumps, and it is often explained as done with the help of springs or some similar mechanical apparatus attached to his feet. Supporting arguments are then the unity of the numinous poetics of all of these stories, which brings them close to the genres of “traditional” belief or demonological legends. The consistent social and cultural functions of these narratives, which range from serving primarily as information or warning to entertainment or cathartic, to the secondary pedagogical function of the children’s bogeyman, are also remarkable. The socio-professional background of the oldest versions of these narrations, which emerged from the working-class culture of the industrial cities, and then persisted across generations mainly with young male manual laborers, adolescents, and children is also consistent.

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Local variants of this migratory legend in the Czech lands were demonstrably alive in active oral transmission since 1919 (first in northwest Bohemia, including the German-speaking areas, from the second half of the 1930s as well as in central and eastern Bohemia). The period of the greatest spread of these tales was noted during the Second World War, from 1942 until 1945, when they briefly became a “national” narrative complex which during the war was found across nearly all the Czech lands, but especially in the large industrial cities such as Prague, Brno, Pilsen, Pardubice, Hradec Králové, and Zlín. It was most thoroughly documented in the regions of central, eastern, and west Bohemia, and the least frequent appearance was documented in south Bohemia and southeast Moravia. After the war, this narrative complex again “broke down” into a variety of local narrative sets that were isolated from one another, and were often connected with local incidents of a criminal nature. The appearance of these “local spring men” was usually of short duration, often only of a few days or weeks, or perhaps at most a few months. In this form, spring man also got into rural areas in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, where he had not been documented before. Concurrently, the reception of his pop-cultural forms was intensifying, especially among children, who had already become acquainted with him in 1946 thanks to Jiří Trnka and Jiří Brdečka’s film Pérák a SS. Starting in the 1980s, spring man was only ever noted in the form of a children’s pedagogical bogeyman used by witnesses of his greatest glory for disciplining small children, and from there he briefly entered the children’s culture itself. In this form he exists in the Czech communicative memory, or in children’s folklore to this day. The attractiveness and credibility of stories about spring man in those times were mainly caused by his inherently ambivalent nature. Spring man was a mysterious phantom who arbitrarily transgressed ontological boundaries of all kinds. For narrators and listeners to stories about him he thus evoked—perhaps more intensely than other motifs from belief legends and rumors—a radical cognitive or even ontological dissonance. Spring man was a being who occurred on the boundaries between day and night, the built-up and undeveloped areas, the center and periphery, city and countryside; in the broader sense, also between order and chaos, and culture and nature. But at the same time, his main stable trait—his unusual manner of movement—was ambivalent in and of itself, as it was something between ordinary human ambulation and super- or inhuman jumping, or even flying. From the perspective of reasons that were conjectured for his brief invasion into the everyday life of the period, this strange being also had indeterminable motivations, ranging from sexualized aggression and robbery to pranks, and even to activity in the resistance movement. From spring man’s liminal nature various native, emic interpretations of his “true” nature followed, which ranged from him being a sexual aggressor and robber to a prankster or resistance fighter,

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to a ghost, phantom, or demonic mechanized robot. Spring man was thus a disconcerting liminal being, and from an anthropological perspective even a cultural monster, who with his essentially ambivalent essence disconcerted the standardly experienced sharp boundaries between the real and the fictitious, and the possible and impossible. Stories about spring man that had the nature of ephemeral rumors, belief legends, and personal experience narratives represent one of the most interesting thematic cycles in modern Czech and Central European verbal folklore for researchers, for several reasons. First of all, it is a unique and at this time still historically the last case of a significant occurrence of a demonic, numinous, or fantastic being in the folklore of the twentieth century, which is additionally both geographically and chronologically spread across nearly the entire society. Stories about spring man were not only presented in period performances in the spirit of parody or semi-parody, nor only as “mere” children’s folklore, but as contemporary numinous texts submitted for potential belief by adults, which at the same time actively influenced the social behavior of the storytellers and their audience. Stories about spring man further illustrate four general tendencies of contemporary folklore: the significant influence of international migratory subjects and motifs, their agile adaptations to local historical, political, social and cultural conditions, the influence of nonstandard, crisis—and in this case wartime—social situations, and the censorship of mass communications media creating a larger role for folkloric texts. Last but not least, these narratives also enjoyed a subsequent reception in popular culture, which mainly selected particular texts from the mass of oral materials that suited their ideological goals, or sometimes their audience. Orally transmitted texts about spring man contain all the basic features that we typically find in the other historical layers of Czech “modern” folklore of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Their exceptionality mainly consists in their numinous, demonological, and unusually fantastical nature. Thanks to this, they represent a kind of symbolic link between the “traditional” demonological belief legends of the nineteenth century, whose poetics were briefly revived during the anomalous social situation during World War II, and “realistic” contemporary rumors and legends of the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century. Clearly, thanks to their linkage to this fading discourse of “traditional” legends, stories about spring man could still bring such a fantastic folkloric figure to life in the mid-twentieth century, albeit with modern, and significantly realistic and technological attributes. However, it is not possible to understand period narrations about spring man in a reductionist manner as “merely” folkloric texts. Similarly as with their historical antecedents in Great Britain, fellow travelers in Russia, and successors in Germany, this was a complex cultural phenomenon that also

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incorporated—in addition to the orally transmitted texts—specific forms of social behavior, which were mainly cultural practices of an ostensive nature (ranging from accepting the reality of spring man to direct impersonation of him, often associated with sexualized aggression aimed against women). Spring man’s uncommon vitality as an artifact of the collective imagination arises out of this association between several manifestations of vernacular expressive culture. His period cultural significance—and his later attractiveness for popular culture—amplified his triune nature, typical for folkloric phenomena of particular social relevance: texts (locally specific versions of international migratory legend), the manner in which they are spread (informal communication of the rumor type), and his ostensive penetration into social behavior (in the form of unique cultural practices or their collective interpretations). Whereas the textual level of the cultural complex on spring man had an international origin, the manner of its spread—and his uptake in social practices—found fertile ground in some of the specific niches of Czech culture and thus created an uncommonly dominant phenomenon in modern Czech society that spanned nearly the entire country. Thanks to the ephemeral expressive complex, which was at first mainly associated with the working-class suburban culture, entered the visual field of Czech artistic and popular culture immediately after the war. However, there naturally exist significant differences between the original “folkloric” spring man and today’s “pop-cultural” Spring Man, especially concerning the moral-ethical conception of this figure. The shift from spring man to Spring Man was a dynamic process of gradual stylization, heroization, and nationalization—moving away from the ambivalent World War II–era folkloric monster to a superhero-avenger with a global comic-book aesthetic. This process can be understood not only diachronically in the gradual transformations of the period political, social, and cultural context that influences taste and the related reinterpretation of cultural content, but also synchronically in connection with the change of mnemonic discourse about this fascinating figure. Whereas in the first half of the twentieth century stories about spring man only occurred in the communicative memory of speech and through intergenerational sharing of transmitted textual forms (legends, rumors, personal experience narratives) and symbolic social behavior (ostension, sometimes associated with short-lasting local cases of a collective panic), in the following periods a gradual shift into cultural memory made up of symbolically coded artifacts of objectified culture (primarily film, comics, literature, and theatrical works) would take place. This process, associated with a wide range of revivifying cultural practices that have been taking place with varying degrees of intensity and extratextual intentions since 1945, was characterized by the increase in ideological motivations attributed to the activities of this “fictitious” figure. Following their definitive

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reworkings after 2002, the previously ambivalent spring man seen in a great many films, comic strips, and dramatic and literary works, was commodified and partially flattened out into the heroic Spring Man. In this way, the simplified, but in the international context still related texts originally inspired by Spring-heeled Jack were also unique in portraying a superhero resistance fighter who struggled against the Nazis and their minions during World War II, created a “myth” in the Barthesean sense of the term for the contemporary generation. His (originally marginal) role in the resistance was “naturalized” to such an extent that today it is taken by a great many people in the audiences as his original and natural role. Spring man was not the only Central European originally folkloric hero who met this fate. Creations of the collective imagination have provided inspiration for works of art since time immemorial, and it was folkloric figures with heroic potential which were most frequently used in popular culture for these purposes. Entry into the world of popular culture has ensured immortality for many ephemeral figures from oral transmission; however, for these originally ambivalent heroes it also significantly flattens them out and homogenizes them. This process mainly took place in cases where the given folkloric figure has been utilized for ideological, primarily nationalist goals. In Central Eastern Europe, the Slovak national hero, social bandit Jánošík, the Czech Sleeping Army of Bohemian Knights of Blaník Mountain, and the Moravian legendary savior-king Ječmínek all represent well-known cases— and, by the way, all of them, just like spring man, were originally heroes of regional versions of international narrative complexes, or sometimes were migratory legends. The domestic version of the international figure of spring man was flattened in the twenty-first century into Spring Man, the “first Czech superhero”; however, it was thanks to this he also outlived what would have been a relatively brief run of fame and significance in oral transmission.

Appendices

THE MOTIF OF SPRING-HEELED JACK IN ORAL CULTURE: AN INTERNATIONAL CHRONOLOGY 1837—The earliest mention of Spring-heeled Jack, Great Britain 1838–1877—The “golden era” of Spring-heeled Jack, Great Britain 1904—The last significant mentions of Spring-heeled Jack, Great Britain After 1904—The emergence of the international migratory legend about a jumping phantom and its spread to the European continent 1918–1925—Poprygunchiki in St. Petersburg, Odessa, and Moscow, Russia 1919–1938—The earliest mentions of spring man in the Czech lands 1938—Black Flash in Provincetown, Massachusetts, the United States 1941—Poprygunchiki in Moscow and Leningrad, Russia 1942–1945—The “golden era” of spring man in the Czech lands 1943—Phosphorous man in Bratislava, Slovakia 1945–1971—Active appearances of spring man narratives in the Czech lands 1948–1953—Hüpfemännchen in Saxony and Thuringia, Germany 1951—Baltimore Phantom in Maryland, the United States 2001—Kaala Bandar (Monkey Man) in Delhi, India SPRING MAN IN CZECH ORAL CULTURE: A CHRONOLOGY 1919—The first mention of spring man in the northwest Bohemian town of Most 1920s—Narrations about spring man in northwest Bohemia and parts of west Bohemia 189

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1930s—Narrations about spring man in central and east Bohemia 1942—The beginning of more widespread storytelling about spring man in Prague 1943—Spring man panics in Prague, Pilsen, Pardubice, Zlín, and Bratislava 1943—The soccer player Josef Šnajdr acquires the nickname of Pérák 1943–1945—More widespread flourishing of storytelling about spring man 1945–1971—Active appearances of spring man narratives in the Czech lands 1959–1960—Spring man panic in Jičín After 1971—Spring man drifts into children’s culture SPRING MAN IN CZECH POPULAR CULTURE: A CHRONOLOGY 1943—A trio of short stories about spring man by Czech writers Jan Weiss, František Krpata and Josef Königsmark is published in national and regional newspapers Národní politika, Lidové noviny, and Český deník 1943—A feature essay, Len tak mimochodom about Slovakian Bratislava’s phosphorus man is published in the magazine Gardista; a caricature of him appears in the magazine Kocúr 1943—The surrealist Jindřich Heisler creates an art object inspired by spring man 1945—A feature essay by Štěpán Engel, “Pérový muž” [Spring-Man], is published in Svobodný zítřek 1946—The animated film Pérák a SS [Spring Man and the SS] by Jiří Trnka and Jiří Brdečka appears in Czechoslovak cinemas 1946—Serial manufacture of the JAWA 250 Type 11 “Pérák” motorcycle begins 1948—An illustrated series by Vladimír Dvořák, Pérákovy další osudy [Spring Man’s Further Adventures] is published in Communist Party newspaper Haló nedělní noviny 1958—Publication of Karel Bochořák book Příběhy a vzpomínky po večerech sebrané [Stories and Memories Collected in the Evenings] 1959—A short story by Jan Weiss, Pérový muž [Spring-Man] is republished in the magazine Květy, inspiring a local spring man panic in the town of Jičín 1968—The comic strip Pérák a SSSR [Spring Man and the USSR] by Oldřich Jelínek is published in the journal Mladý svět 1976—Czechoslovak Television broadcasts the first episodes “Maxipes Fík” on the animated children’s animated program Večerníček [Little Bedtime Story]

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1989—Ondřej Neff creates samizdat comics titled Pérák. Toho dne byla mlha [Spring Man: On That Day Was A Fog] 1997—Neff’s comic book Pérák. Toho dne byla mlha [Spring Man: On That Day Was A Fog] is published in the comic magazine Crew. 2001—Ondřej Neff publishes comics titled Pérák vs. Globeman under the pseudonym of Aston on the Internet 2002—An influential Fortean article titled Nepolapitelný Pérák [The Elusive Spring Man] is published by Ivan Mackerle in the magazine Instinkt 2002—A comic project about Spring Man is announced in the magazine Živel 2008—Petra Stančík’s novella Pérák is published 2009—Marek Najbrt’s film Protektor is brought to cinemas 2009—A special issue of KomiksFest! Revue is published with comics and texts about Spring Man 2011—First wave of antifa stickers and graffiti connected with Spring Man 2011—Debut of the play Pérák. Na jméně nezáleží, rozhodují činy! [Spring Man: The Name Doesn’t Matter, but the Deeds Do!] by the theater company VOSTO5 2013—The comic magazine Aargh! publishes an issue with Spring Man on the cover 2013—Debut of Pavel Soukup’s culminating project for film school, Pérák [Spring Man] 2015—Spring man enters the public space to engage with the issue of constructing a Roma Holocaust memorial at Lety to replace the pig farm 2016—Second wave of guerrilla stickers connected with spring man 2016—Debut of Marek Berger’s culminating project for film school, Pérák: Stín nad Prahou [Spring Man: The Shadow Over Prague] 2016—Spring Man and his successors begin to appear regularly in the comic book series Dechberoucí Zázrak [Breathtaking Miracle] by Petr Macek and Petr Kopl 2019—First hardcover comic book about Spring Man, Pérák: Oko budoucnosti [Spring Man: Eye of the Future] by Petr Macek and Petr Kopl is published 2021—Sequel to aforementioned book called Pérák: Jantarová komnata [Spring Man: Amber Room] by the same authors is published 2022—Mural of Spring Man by Toy_Box created in Prague

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Index

Page references for figures are italicized. anecdote. See joke antisemitism, 107, 181 Appadurai, Arjun, 69, 95n27, 193 Assmann, Aleida, 6, 9n5, 193 Assmann, Jan, 6, 9n9, 181, 193 Auschwitz, 3, 176–77 Barden, Thomas E., 146n48, 193 Barthes, Roland, 173, 181, 188, 193 Bascom, William R., 146, 193 Baltimore Phantom, 69, 189 Bauman, Richard, 143, 193–94 Bell, Karl, 68, 94n7, 95n13–15, 98, 115, 146, 150, 194 Bendix, Regina F., 194 Bennett, Gillian, 94n5, 194 Berger, Marek, 170, 171, 181, 182, 191, 194, 202 Bernt-Bärtl, Jürgen, 155–56, 165, 179, 194 binary opposition, 140–42 Bird, Elizabeth S., 97n69, 146n61, 194 black ambulance, 93 Black Flash, 65, 189 Blank, Trevor J., 99, 146, 194 Bloody Mary, 93, 94n3, 99, 198

Bochořák, Klement, 152–53, 165, 178, 190, 194 Bohemia, 1, 11–13, 16–19, 2325, 27, 30–32, 43, 47, 51, 87, 103, 124, 128, 185, 188, 189–90 Bolshevik Revolution. See Russian Revolution Bonaparte, Marie, 104, 107, 143–44, 145 Boyes, Georgina, 138, 150n116 Bratislava, 37–41, 44, 90, 115, 184, 189 Brno, 19, 31, 115, 177–78, 185 Bronner, Simon, 102, 143, 194–95 Brünn. See Brno Bryant, Chad, 57n8, 58n19, 144, 147, 195 Budweis. See České Budějovice Canada, 113 České Budějovice, 25, 33 Christiansen, Reidar Th., 89, 98, 195 Chukovsky, Korney, 77–80, 96, 195 Clarke, David, 94n8, 95, 195 Cohen, Jeffrey J., 141, 150, 195 Cohen, Stanley, 94n6, 148, 195 collective memory, 6–7, 9, 35–36, 63, 117, 139, 147, 193 commemorative density, 184 207

208

Index

communicative memory. See collective memory communism, 26, 30, 41, 82, 89, 114, 128, 158, 160, 165, 190 concentration camp, 3, 8, 107, 123, 176–177 Cowdell, Paul, 94n5, 195 Czechia. See Czech lands Czech lands, 4, 6, 7, 11, 14, 19, 22, 25, 26, 28, 38, 47, 63, 70, 81, 86 Dash, Mike, 62, 94n2, 95, 97, 196 Davies, Owen, 7, 9n7, 57n4, 62, 94n9, 95, 96, 98, 147, 196 Dégh, Linda, 13, 57n7, 89, 98, 147, 196 Douglas, Mary, 141, 150, 196 Drápala, Daniel, 196 Dundes, Alan, 33, 59n61, 61n107, 117, 121, 147, 196–97 Dvořák, Vladimír, 160–162, 163, 168, 179n24–26, 190, 197 Dynda, Jiří, 150n122, 197 ecotype, 89–91, 183 Ellis, Bill, 130–131, 141, 197 fabulate, 122 Fentress, James, 9n10, 35, 59, 60, 99, 146, 150, 197 Fine, Gary A., 89–90, 98, 99, 145, 147, 194, 197 Foglar, Jaroslav, 156–157, 170, 179, 197, 202 folklore, 6, 8, 34, 63, 65–66, 70, 87, 88, 95, 98, 113, 147, 157, 182; as discipline, 101–02, 114, 117, 122, 143; children, 21, 77, 91; contemporary. See modern military, 111; modern, 34, 49, 74, 92–93, 107, 121, 138; prison, 111; traditional, 12, 69, 88, 90, 91, 98; urban, 67, 74;

World War Two, 103–107, 112 folkloresque, 151, 178 Foster, Michael D., 178, 197 Germany, 46–47, 60, 80–86, 87, 90, 91, 103–105, 156, 184, 186, 189 ghost, 7, 8, 24, 67, 85, 88, 94n5, 96, 118, 141, 142, 186; literary, 64; panic, 65; prowling, 64–66, 86, 88, 89, 101, 142, 183 stories about, 6, 7, 64, 74, 98, 157, 183 Gibas, Petr, 197 Gypsy. See Roma Haining, Peter, 95n22, 198 Halbawchs, Maurice, 91, 198 Heisler, Jindřich, 34–35, 59, 190 Herbie, 113 Heydrich, Reinhard, 9, 15, 52, 105, 106, 109 Hitler, Adolf, 20, 61n109, 63, 103, 105, 143, 152, 168, 198 Hohberg, Rainer, 97, 149, 198 holocaust, 3, 176–78 Honko, Lauri, 143, 194 Hüpfemännchen, 80–86, 87, 89, 97, 131, 156, 184, 189, 198, 200 Iglau. See Jihlava Italy, 112 Janeček, Petr, 8, 9, 60, 61n114, 94n3, 98, 99, 146, 147, 179, 198–199, 202 Janka, Otto, 152, 154–155, 165, 178, 199 Jewish, 22, 34–35, 106–107, 144, 181 Jičín, 29–30, 32, 36, 50, 55, 56, 125, 130, 131, 132–139, 190 Jihlava, 26–27, 119–121, 121 joke, 21, 39, 42, 47, 51, 55, 58–59, 68, 91, 105–106, 109, 111, 139, 144, 154

Index

Kaala Bandar. See Monkey Man killer clowns, 93, 111 Kilroy was here, 47, 112–113 Knížák, Milan, 165, 172, 180n36, 199 Kohlenklau, 46–48 Königsmark, Josef, 22–23, 58n29–32, 60, 190, 199 Koura, Petr, 148, 199 Kracík, Pavel, 9, 58n43, 59, 60, 61, 62, 148, 149, 150, 199 Krejčí, Karel, 63, 94n1, 181, 199 Krpata, František, 17, 21, 57n15, 58n26, 60, 61n117, 190, 199 legend: and everyday life, 116; and social psychology, 107–116; anti-fascist, 114; anti-feudal, 49; as cultural practice, 102; characteristics of, 33; definition of, 13, 18; in repressive regimes, 49, 55; in subcultures, 138–139; meaning of, 141; migratory, 74, 89–92; of Communist times, 42; of Grateful Terrorist, 107 of World War Two, 103–107, 173; ostension of, 116–129; parodic, 21; Prague traditional, 12–13; rural demonological, 12, 64, 81, 85, 90–92, 152; xenophobic, 119–122 Lety, 3, 8, 176–178, 177, 191 liminality, 66, 116, 130, 138, 139–143, 142, 158, 170, 185, 186 London, 64, 66–67, 105–106 Lotman, Yuri, 115, 122, 146, 200 Luffer, Jan, 57n3, 58n25, 98, 200 Mackerle, Ivan, 94n2, 147n70, 166–67, 180n43–44, 191, 200 Mad Gasser of Mattoon, 110–12, 132

209

Maxipes Fík, 164, 180, 190, 200 Mattoon. See Mad Gasser of Mattoon. McNeill, Lynne, 99, 146, 194 metafolklore, 52, 59 Middleton, Jacob, 7, 9n8, 94n4, 95n14, 143, 201 Monkey Man, 69, 189 Monkey Monster. See Monkey Man Moravia, 19, 27, 31, 41–42, 106, 115, 120–21, 135, 149, 152, 177–78, 185 nationalism, 4, 5, 39, 44, 105, 158–164, 172–173, 182 Nazis, 4, 20, 45, 51, 55, 105–106, 109, 152, 156, 158, 159, 165– 172, 174, 177 Neff, Ondřej, 44, 60, 165–66, 167, 168, 172, 180, 191, 201 Neklyudov, Sergei, 90–91, 98, 199, 201 neo-nazism, 174–178 Noyes, Dorothy, 102, 143, 201 Obrdlik, Antonín J., 103–104, 143, 201 October Revolution. See Russian Revolution oikotype. See ecotype ostension, 122–24, 128–29, 141, 187 Panczová, Zuzana, 99, 202 Pentikäinen, Juha, 143, 194 Phosphorous Man, 37–41, 41, 42, 43, 44, 48, 85, 90, 115, 123, 156, 184, 189; in Bratislava, 37–41, 41, 44, 90, 115, 184, 189; in Zlín, 41–42, 123–24, 123, 125 Pilsen, 17, 22–23, 39, 50, 115, 124, 126, 185, 190 Pippo, 112 Plzeň. See Pilsen Poprygunchiki, 70–80, 72, 73, 86, 89, 96, 184, 189 postfolklore, 90–91, 98, 197 Pozdnyeyev, Volodimir, 91, 99, 202

210

Index

Prague, 1–4, 12–13, 15–16, 16, 19, 22, 23–25, 33, 34–35, 38, 39, 42, 44–46, 48, 50, 51–54, 63, 85, 88–89, 105, 106, 107, 108, 115, 118, 128–29, 131, 149, 154–55, 157, 158–161, 163, 166, 168, 170, 171, 173–75, 17778, 185, 190–91 Praha. See Prague Prokůpek, Tomáš, 145n32, 166, 168–69, 179n27, 180n30, 180n39, 180n41, 181n47, 181n52, 182n65, 198, 202, 203 Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, 1, 14–26, 16, 19, 43, 45–57, 59, 103–109, 120–21, 123–24, 144, 148, 152–55, 157, 158–160, 168, 172 Provo, John, 146n48, 193 Pulec, Miloš J., 8n2, 45, 49, 57n1, 59n, 98n72, 109, 114, 117, 118–119, 120, 166, 203 Razor Blade Man, 35, 43–46, 52, 81, 82, 85, 165 resistance against Nazis, 49–50, 52–55 Roma, 3, 31, 176–78 rumor, 6, 14, 15, 18, 21, 22, 26, 29, 30, 31, 38, 45, 46, 48, 49–50, 52–56, 60–51, 63, 64, 66, 69, 70–72, 74, 77, 82–84, 86, 88, 91, 92, 93, 98, 99, 101–107, 109–114, 116, 121–22, 128, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 136, 138–141, 144, 146, 147, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 163, 173, 183–87 Rokycany, 17, 22–23, 124 Rumpelstiltskin Principle, 130 Russia, 31, 63, 70–80, 81, 86, 89, 90–93, 93, 98, 101, 116, 127, 128, 184, 186, 189; civil war in, 90, 75–76, 90, 184 Russian Revolution, 70–71, 76–77, 80, 90, 184 Sachsen. See Saxony Saxony, 80–86, 87, 156, 184, 189

Sinkulová, Ludmila, 15, 51, 57n11, 61n119, 108–109, 145, 203 Širokko, 156–158 Slender Man, 93, 99, 111, 146, 194 Slovakia. See Bratislava social memory. See collective memory Soukup, Pavel, 170, 174, 181, 191, 202 Spiralhopser, 81–86, 97, 155–156, 179, 194, 200, 205 Spring-heeled Jack, 64–69, 70, 74, 80, 81, 88, 89–95, 93, 111, 132, 140, 142, 155, 167, 183, 188, 189 Spring man: after Second World War, 26–33, 190; alternative names of, 42–48; and Antifa, 174–178, 176; and Czech nationalism, 158–166; and name of motorcycle Jawa 250, 164, 164; and ostension, 122–124, 128–129; appearance of, 34–37; as bogeyman for children, 22, 33; as communist propaganda, 31, 82, 156, 160–62; as ghost, 67, 68; as mere joke, 21, 39, 42, 51, 55, n58–59; as monster, 141–43; as sexual agressor, 13, 28, 30, 45, 54, 64, 66–68, 115, 122, 129–39; 142, 149, 185–87; as superhero, 2–4, 5, 151–178, 161, 169, 171, 175, 176; as thief, 13, 28, 54, 67; before Second World War, 11–13, 189–190; during Second World War, 1, 14–26, 190; fighting Nazis, 4, 20, 52–55, 156, 158–161, 165, 166–173, 169; fighting neo-nazism, 174– 178, 182, 188; in comics, 160–163, 165–66, 168–173, 190–91;

Index

in literature, 152–155, 157– 158, 190–191; in movies, 159–160, 161, 170; in popular culture, 6, 8, 11, 29, 43, 53, 88, 143, 159– 178, 190–91; in Prague. See Prague liminal characteristics of, 139–143, 142; on grafitti, 2, 21, 50–51, 153, 163, 174–178; Stančík, Petr, 170, 181, 191, 204 superhero. See Spring man as superhero surrealism, 34, 153, 170, 190 Sydow, Carl von, 90, 98, 122, 148, 205 Thomas, Jeannie Banks, 94n5, 204 Thüringen. See Thuringia Thuringia, 81–86, 87, 97, 184, 189 Tobert, Jeffrey, 178, 198 Tolstoy, Aleksey Nikolayevich, 76–77, 96, 204 TOY_BOX, 174, 175 Toyen, 35

211

Trnka, Jiří, 2, 8, 159–161, 161, 163, 166, 168, 172, 173, 174, 176, 179, 185, 190 UFO, 68, 167 USA, 110–12, 159–160, 189 Ukraine, 72, 92, 98 Vltava, 2, 3, 85, 159 Voigt, Vilmos, 143, 194 Vondráček, Vladimír, 45, 58n21, 60n95, 108, 132, 145, 149, 205 VOSTO5, 170–72, 181, 191, 202 Warsaw, 173, 181 Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, 162–63 Weiss, Jan, 8, 14, 15–16, 22, 23, 42, 57n9, 109, 138, 152, 153–154, 165, 190, 205 Wickham, Chris, 9n10, 35, 59, 60n70, 99, 146, 150, 197 Woitsch, Jiří, 98, 205

About the Author

​​​​​​​Dr. Petr Janeček works as associate professor at the Institute of Ethnology, Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague. He is the author of collections of Czech contemporary legends and rumors titled The Black Ambulance (2006, 2007, 2008, 2020) and the collection of Czech ghostlore Bloody Mary and Other Scary Stories (2015) and the editor of Folklore of the Atomic Age (2011).

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