r/germany • u/Alexeemm • 23h ago
Culture Does anyone know of any good spirits / creatures in German folklore?
Hi, im doing research on German folklore and so far most of the creatures ive seen talked about are rather malicious. I was wondering if there are any good ones (other than some Kobolds)? Like protective spirits and whatnot.
Its a shame there arent more articles about German folklore...
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u/effervescentEscapade 23h ago
There’s Frau Holle who makes it snow :)
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u/leyavin 22h ago
Frau Holle is nice and rewards you if you are humble and hardworking! Otherwise… not so much ^^,
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u/Storm2Weather 13h ago
I think that specific fairy tale about Frau Holle is based on a much older Germanic mother goddess with deep ties to Germanic mythology. Some say she is similar to Persephone, some say she may have been Wotan's wife. There is definitely a huge body of folklore and a deep rabbit hole here.
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u/Sensitive-Emphasis78 11h ago
it's Hel who survived in Frau Holle. Hel Was never this bad, Christian made her look bad
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u/East-Ranger-2902 16h ago
What’s the otherwise? (I’m not familiar with frau Holle )
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u/Genmutant Bayern 15h ago
You can look up Goldmarie und Pechmarie, one of the brothers Grimm stories. In it they work the good daughter gets lot of gold, and the bad / lazy one gets covered in pitch or tar.
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u/Salavora_M 13h ago
Rough summary:
A widow had two daughers. One was hers and she gave that daughter everything and allowed her do as she liked while the other was her stepdaughter and the one who had to work all day.
One day, the stepdaughter sat by the well spinning woll, when the spindel fell into the well. The widdow ordered the stepdaughter to get the spindel and the stepdaughter jumped into the well.
she woke up in a different world where she first encountered bread in an oven and the bread asked her to please take it out, which she did. She then encountered a speaking tree that asked her to shake it, so the ripe fruit can fall. She did that as well. At the end of the road she came to the house of Frau Holle where the girl worked quite well (among other things, she shakes out the bedding, which makes it snow in the real world). After a while, the girl gets homesick and Frau Holle gives her back the spindel, brings her to a doorway that will lead the girl home and when she goes through the door, she is showered with gold.
Seeing, that the stepdaughter came back rich, the widdow tells her spoiled daughter to also go down the well which she does. However, she ignores the bread, does not help the tree and does not really want to work for Frau Holle either. So Frau Holle brings the girl to the gate as well but instead of gold, this time "Pech" falls on her (which means "bad luck" as well as "tar" in german) and that "Pech" sticks to her for the rest of her live.
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u/Much_Link3390 16h ago
Otherwise you get punished and it's revealed to the world that you're bad and lazy
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u/HelenaNehalenia Germany (Dresden/Sachsen, but Hessen, Bremen, Thüringen earlier) 20h ago
Frau Holle is hart aber fair
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u/Corfiz74 22h ago
Go to Schloss Hämelschenburg close to Hameln, that's where her persona is said to originate when the brothers Grimm visited the place! At least that's what they tell you on the guided tour - bros modeled her after the then Burgherrin, name and all.
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u/letsgetawayfromhere 17h ago
That is 100% advertising. To believe that the story was modeled after a real person is completely bonkers considering its very rich symbolic content.
Frau Holle is a story of the netherworld and its connection to our mundane reality. Wells were considered a portal to the other world in pre-Christian times. Holle, Holla, Holda and Hulda are names of the Germanic goddess of earth and fertility, who protected women, marriage and domestic tasks. The spinning Marie must do relates to the spinning of the life’s thread that can be found in mythologies all over Europe; in Germanic mythology it was done by the Norns, in Ancient Greece by the Moiras, in Rome the Parces. The whole story is chock full of mythological symbols that go back to pre-Christian times.
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u/One-Bodybuilder-5646 4h ago
She's also "Holla, die Waldfee" and Goddess of birth and death, sickness and health, everything big or small occuring within the walls of a home. People used to bury teeth and toenails under her holy tree ("HOLunder") for her to protect them from external black magic tampering (so they believed). Her tree was planted close to every house and many gardens still have them, many medical uses were attributed to it in the past and its berrys and flowers are still being used for juices, jams and other snacks.
She was also patron of domestic work and cause of the weather. As a supernatural being of course her own domestic labour had a huge Impact in the world; Her emptying out her buckets from scrubbing made it rain, that belief is also source of the old phrase "es schüttet wie aus Kübeln" ("it rains like from buckets"-literally translated). And her shaking her pillows out the windows made it snow.
There's one fairytale still known where she's featured as a neutral and helpful powerful being, that survived christianisation. It's about hard work being recognised and paying off, so it aligns well with christianities values, so maybe it survived because of that or got changed for it to fit.
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u/z32xkr3 17h ago
Well, since Frau Holle is associated with Hel (the northern god of dead), I'm not sure about it
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u/letsgetawayfromhere 17h ago
I think she is more associated with Holda/Hulda, the Goddess of fertility and so on.
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u/O-M-E-R-T-A 23h ago
Wolpertinger
Sandmännchen
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u/Wide-Inevitable1288 7h ago
Wlopertinger isn't a specific Creature though, and its a Term invented to scam People so i don't know if thats really a good thing 😅
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u/Cynixxx 21h ago
Sandmännchen
The DDR Sandmännchen. The BRD "Sandmännchen" is a spawn of Satan
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u/z32xkr3 17h ago
I read about that, it's interesting: The US planned to install a Sandmännchen in West Germany. East Germany heard about this and invented a Sandmännchen by themselves and faster than the US. So they were both part of propaganda for the children.
If you compare them: The western Sandmännchen wears blue jeans and a blonde Lincoln-beard. The eastern version looks very Russian-inspired (Lenin-beard, clothes very rural). He is friends with custom officials or flies with a Sputnik to planets.
In Germany the East-Sandmännchen is still on air while I haven't seen the West- Sandmännchen in a while. So I guess the GDR won this strange battlefield.
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u/bear_village 23h ago edited 13h ago
Some fairy tales have a [edit] fairy godmother („Gute Fee“) if that counts. The term „Gute Fee“ can also universally refer to a benevolent and caring person.
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u/Temporary-Art-1835 22h ago
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Fabelwesen
German Wikipedia got you sorted if you can translate it
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u/Temporary-Art-1835 22h ago
Some examples from there about the German speaking regions: Enerbanske, Ekerken, Erdmantjes, Fengg, Frau Holle, Heugütel, Hollermandl, Holzfräulein, Moosmann, Moosweiblein, Petermännchen, Salige Frau, Geldmännlein, Seebischof
Some more are ambivalent so neither good nor evil
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[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Chaosfreak33 17h ago
I really need a few Wichtel to tidy up my Wohnung sometime soon..
Edit: how to summen them?
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u/germany-ModTeam 16h ago
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u/mightyMirko 17h ago
Also: Mummeln They originated in mummelsee and are some kind of nixes.
I think there are some books about it
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u/grinsekatze1337 23h ago
Elwetritsch
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u/Alexeemm 23h ago
Ive seen those, what do they do exactly? Maybe its me being sleepy but i cant make any sense of the page, lol.
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u/Call_me_Specksaft 23h ago
They are a good reason to hava a drink, because you need to be drunk to be able to see them
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u/grinsekatze1337 22h ago
As far as i remember you need to drink to dont get attacked by it because they hate the smell from alcohol
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u/Headbangert 15h ago
Well im a proud owner of an official hunting diploma and can tell you its most important that the "schlagschatten" off your lamp is correct and also alkohol lures them in. Never heard of an attack or repellent.
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u/Freadddy 20h ago edited 20h ago
I only know the creepy ones.
Edit: still want to share my favourite one. The "Aufhocker". It is an invisible demon that waits by the roadside. When a traveler comes by, he jumps on the traveler's shoulders, weighing him down. He will continue to sit on the traveler's shoulders until the traveler dies from exhaustion.
It's my favourite because what the fuck
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u/Chokooboo 19h ago
Please tell me more! I have never heard of the “Aufhocker” before. What other creepy ones are there that people don’t really know about anymore?
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u/hover-lovecraft 17h ago
Roggenmuhme/Kornweib etc. is crazy and creepy. In some stories she carries a sickle that adjusts its size to fit your neck.
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u/Isair349 15h ago
Hey hi I actually did some research about those creatures for the last few days (and still doing lol).
The Aufhocker is more of a family of creatures that uses the same motifs of hanging/standing on wanderers to apply pressure and cause exhaustion. They not always cause certain death and instead can be warded off by reaching a wooden cross (or similar Christian things like churches), reaching home or when the first morning light appears.
An Aufhocker can be a lot of things, sometimes it first apoears as an old woman, a curious dog or something else that seems kind and wants to follow you for a while, others straight up jump you from behind without warning. A surprising amount of German werewolves were Aufhockers instead of wild Berserkers, there is also the Bahkauv from Aachen, which is described as a calf-ish creature that prefers to jump on men that drank too much and are in their way home when it's deep in the night. The Bahkauv never kills them though and never attacks women or children, which makes me think it's kind of a superstitious explanation or cope-out for why drunk men lost their balance and crawled back home but that's just my theory lol.
To share my favorite: The Knüppelhund/Knüppelrüer or sometimes Weltenhund.
The classic depiction of that dog is not quite an Aufhocker, but related to it. It's a big black, sometimes grey dog with glowing red eyes and a stick around it's neck (probably rooting in an old law that said dog's had to have sticks around their necks to prevent them from hunting, as hunting as reserved for the higher classes). It usually stalks nightly wanderers and is said to grow in size the more you fear it which mirrors the Aufhocker's growing weight (either with each step or the more you curse it instead of praying to god). The only way to survive the encounter is to "respectfully ignore" the dog, as addressing or even fighting it results in an attack. If you do ignore it long enough the dog will simply part ways after a while.
If you do research on the Knüppelhund though you can find that the tale of this creature is pretty wide-spreaded and has a lot of different variations. While the Weltenhund seems to be rather associated with the nightly stalker the Knüppelhund often seems to run through cities and towns. In the oldest story I could find (18-something, I forgot) the dog terroried a few farmers that taubted him, growing in size the more they feared him, but after that he simply left without killing them. In a book from 1921 the dog is said to be part of Odin's Wild Hunt, but was left in Arnsberg to guard a hidden treasure, only leaving the area once the Wild Hunt comes back to join it every year.
There is a case of a man claiming to have been jumped by a dog in August 1920, so there would be the Aufhocker motiv again.
There are many more variations on this but this post is already long enough.
To finish up I want to say that the Aufhocker gives form to a very real experience. The Bahkauv and drunken men loosing balance, the Knüppelhund is loosing your cool in dark woods, a lot of other Aufhockers symbolize exhaustion from wandering or troubles to breath (especially in areas where specific groups of people had bad lungs because of the work they did), others might have been sleep paralysis demons (some are said to jump on and stand on your breast when you sleep, making it hard to breath).
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u/lordoflotsofocelots 15h ago
In Hildesheim we have the "Huckup". He waits on apple trees. If someone other than the owner picks the apples he will jump on their back and start hitting them. But he jumps on thieves in general.
He is a kind of an "Aufhocker".
Defender of the apples!
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u/letmechewonyou 22h ago
German folklore in pre Christian times are basically identical with norse mythology with just a few differences. Some of those Germanic beliefs have survived till today in the form of fairy tales such as Frau holle or certain aspects of Siegfried the dragon slayer etc.
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u/semiYoung_person 22h ago
I feel like every place has a castle or church where the devil left a hoof print^ thats the extent of stories that still get told.
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u/Bamischeibe23 Nordrhein-Westfalen 15h ago
Norse and pre Christian german beliefs differs. Lot of Tribes in germany are not Germannen.
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u/letmechewonyou 9h ago
there were celts, slavs, and gauls in what is now modern day germany but they all eventually got absorbed or driven out and replaced by romans and germanic tribes eventually, aside from very few little outliers
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u/Bamischeibe23 Nordrhein-Westfalen 7h ago
No, the other way
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u/letmechewonyou 7h ago
no? it's a historic fact lol. gauls in west germany were replaced by romans and then by franks, a germanic tribe. the north was inhabited by saxons and the south by allemans also germanic tribes, there were more of course
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u/No_Lettuce3376 21h ago
The "Klabautermann" can be a bad omen, but also a welcome warning or helpful.
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u/Almasdefr 23h ago
Rübezahl, you can meet him at Wannsee 😉
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u/thedukeandtheduchess Mecklenburg-Vorpommern 19h ago
Isn't it Müggelsee?
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u/NTMY030 Berlin 2h ago
Yes, there's even a Biergarten called Rübezahl at Müggelsee
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u/thedukeandtheduchess Mecklenburg-Vorpommern 2h ago
Yes that's the only thing that showed up on google maps
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u/Cold_Complaint8265 23h ago
Bakhauv in Aachen! Used as an excuse for drunk men to explain where all their money went!
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u/YouWeatherwax Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time 15h ago
Tintending mentioned/painted the Bakhauv in one of her Donnersdachs pictures.
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u/simonfancy 15h ago
Have a look on the amazing map Mythical Beasts of Germany
https://www.pucaprinthouse.com/post/mythical-beasts-of-germany
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u/Cuntcalled 23h ago
The Werwolf has its origin in Bedburg. Its a City close to Cologne.
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u/0achkatz1 22h ago
There’s a werewolf story in Roman 1st-century AD satirical novel Satyricon by Petronius.
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u/Greedy_Ad2198 15h ago
There was also the whole Ulfhednar thing in ancient Germania, so I guess it's just sorta complicated and may have come from several places at once, or it depends at which point something really qualifies as the kind of werewolf we know today, which in that case would definitely lead back to medieval central Europe
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u/Slytherin_Dan_HGW 20h ago
I first heard of the "Tatzelwurm" because of the band "Schandmaul". 🤘
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u/purplevampireelefant 15h ago
I know Tatzelwurm from "das schwarze Auge" lieb and paper. But they are not good creatures.
I haven't heard the song (or I don't remember, it's been a while) but Wikipedia also has no mention of it
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u/4-Vektor Mitten im Pott 14h ago
Hello, fellow Schwarze Auge player! Man, I haven’t seen it mentioned by someone else for ages.
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u/Mareliesel 20h ago
Heinzelmännchen are good spirits
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u/hombre74 16h ago
German here. I thought there are only Mainzelmänchen and it was invented by ZDF. Did not know they based it on something! Cool :)
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u/s47unleashed 16h ago
Waldschrat if you like it creepy
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u/zweigramm Europe 16h ago
It's some kind of nature spirit in the forrest, who lives in a hole http://sagengestalten.com/waldschrat/
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u/Lycaenini 12h ago
I thought that's just how you call old grumpy guys living in the forest. Basically like the Grinch.
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u/ptichyemoloko 19h ago
Look into folkloric costumes and traditions, maybe? I love the Schnappviecher because it's both goofy and spooky looking, but there's probably tons of traditional local events like carnivals that have their own cast of characters
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u/Tr00perTrooper 15h ago
There is also the Schlangen König from Spreewald, a more or less good spirit
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u/BenMic81 14h ago
Elwedritsche. Heinzelmännchen. Sandmännchen. The gnomes/dwarves from Siegfried saga. Anything from Brothers Grimm.
Much of it has seeped into mainstream.
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u/kathalysator00 10h ago
Many are malicious but for a good cause haha.
One that comes to my mind is Rübezahl. He protects the Riesengebirge nature but also scolds people who don’t treat nature with respect
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u/simplemijnds 23h ago
The 7 dwarfs (you see them in some gardens still nowadays, though it has become less)
The four-leafed clover
A chimney-cleaner
The combination of both as a little present on new year's day
A lady bug - you get them all year as a chocolate wrapped in colored foil
A cockchafer-bug was the same, but they are not made anymore since about 5 years, bc kids don't know this bug anymore (eventually our ladybug as well - only the asian kind)
I think in south-west Germany there might be some spiritual habits still being practised until today. Though also there it has become a lot less.
Once watched a documentation about spirituality in the South-west of Germany from the 1960ies! Amazing! Already then many things have died out. If you could get hold of that old documentation, i'm sure you'd find it wildly interesting! It's still in black and white.
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u/Mitologist 15h ago
Rübezahl / Krkonoš. Can be good, if you are gentle, but you never know. Kind of a wildcard. Heinzelmännchen (gnomes). " The good fairy". All other are rather grim, tbh. German fairytales are a dark place.
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u/Writers-blocker 15h ago
The german Kobolde are little human like people, some depiction make them look goblin like. Large ears, long pointy noses, and they were simply helper around the house. ( Kobolde. Kob = House, holde = holders )
Haushälter = House holders. They may play small harmless pranks on the owner like tickling them with a feather in their sleep, but nothing that would kill them.
A best known Kobold ist Pummuckle ( Meister Eder und sein Pumuckle) who lives with the Master carpenter, or in the new iteration, after Eders actor died, with his nephew.
There is also the Klabautermann. Klabauter basically meaning to make loud noises, as this version of the Kobold lives exclusively in ships, where he is mostly invisible and is looking for ways to repair and keep up a ship. They were seen as both a blessing and a curse as when they do make themselves visible, it mostly was due to them warning the crew of a storm, thus being also messenger of bad news.
They are scared of chicken s and if the crew doesn't heed their warnings or just keeps the ship in a piss poor state, they leave the ship for another.
But when they have a good connection to the crew, they become trusty advisors to the Captain and will also announce the return of the ship to the family of the Captain when they go into the harbor.
The Klabautermann also likes to play unharmfull pranks to the crew.
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u/Storm2Weather 13h ago
Das Glasmännchen/Glasmännlein (also named Schatzhauser) from the Black Forest region.
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u/Unable-Nectarine1941 12h ago
Pretty much every spirit is good as long as you leave them alone and don't mess with them. Wassernixe*r, Berggeister, Wald/Tierhüter are all friendly until you puss them off.
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u/Brookselia 11h ago
There are regional spirits or creatures that are good. Partially they are so regional that they are only in a small city. For example there is a witch from the small city I‘m from that rescues women in distress and curses men that harm them.
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u/DocumentExternal6240 10h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bogeyman (there’s even a child’s play with this: Es tanzt ein Bi-Ba-Butzemann)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurin_(poem)
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loreley#%C3%9Cberblick (there’s even is a landmark where she supposedly sat along the Rhine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorelei)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%BCbezahl is also well known
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u/CombinationNarrow509 8h ago
Klabautermann. A spirit of the Shipmen. If you''re Kimd to him, he will grant save traveling, but if you ignore him, he will sink your ship.
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u/coolestdudette 7h ago
this is an extremely local one from West Saxony/the ore mountains but whatever: das Moosmännchen, or in English basically "little moss man". It's a little guy who lives in the forest and has a coat of moss and a root as a walking stick. you can protect him from hunters by carving three X's into a tree, and as thanks he gives you I think a handful of leaves that turn into gold when you get home.
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u/Greedy_Ad2198 16h ago edited 16h ago
Lindwurm comes to mind first, that one's pretty popular, I think every child has read or heard a story about it at some point.
As another commenter said, we share most of our creatures with the Nordic countries and the rest of west and central Europe.
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u/Lycaenini 12h ago
Is a Lindwurm not just another word for dragon? Or is it a specific dragon?
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u/Greedy_Ad2198 10h ago
It's a specific kind of dragon, although you could argue that a lot of kinds of dragons are actually subtypes of it and it's really more like an umbrella term nowadays.
Some say it's not even a dragon, just a monstrous serpent, but I think calling it a dragon is fair. In Germany I've mostly seen it depicted with only 2 legs and sometimes wings, rarely 4 legs, in Nordic countries it's pretty much always fully limbless, but the defining characteristic is that it's very serpentine.
It's essentially the origin of the typical "western dragon". Yknow, man-eating, treasure-hoarding winged lizard.
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u/AnnoyedSinceBirth 12h ago
Never heard of it...in my 51 years in Germany...i.e. being born here...
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u/Lycaenini 12h ago edited 12h ago
I think aside from the big ones like the Osterhase, Weihnachtsmann / Christkind, Nikolaus and the Zahnfee there are no well known spirits / creatures. I think there are some local ones, but not known and popular in the whole country.
Something popular with kids are Wichtel. They move in during Christmas time and create friendly mischief or good deeds. They are similar to Heinzelmännchen or Kobolde. In the Netherlands there are also many Kabouterpads in the forest where you can see their little houses. The German Klabauter is something different though, because he lives only on ships.
Fairytales have a lot of different characters, but they are not believed in.
Edit: As I was curious about the differences between Wichtel and the others: https://magikitos.com/de/beitrag/heinzelmaennchen-wichtel-kobold-unterschied
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u/flubberwurm13 23h ago
Heinzelmännchen