The bizarre reason music is banned on one street in Germany
Germany is a country overflowing with a vibrant world of music, life, and colour.
It is the place that gave birth to electronic music, where David Bowie went to create his most prolific records, and where the world’s most renowned classical composers made their names. It’s not short in its love for song. But on one specific street, the beating musical heart of Germany falls silent, and all for a very specific, if slightly bizarre, reason.
Most of us will be familiar with the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, a German folklore tale from the Middle Ages in which a ratcatcher came to the town in Lower Saxony to lure away the verminous beasts with the help of his magical pipes. But when the residents refused to pay for his services, the Piper took matters into his own hands and instead kidnapped the town’s children using his same bewitching powers.
As fairytales go, it is a very dark affair, and one that, although it has been warped and fictionalised more and more over the course of the centuries, has forever left its scar on the people who actually live in Hamelin, even to this day. The German population is famed for its straight-talking attitude and no-nonsense approach to society, but it seems that when it comes to the fantastical abduction of their children, there’s no room for even the slightest hint of suspicion.
It’s for this reason that even today, with all the reasoning and insight that contemporary life has to offer, in a place called Bungelosenstrasse, music is still viewed as the work of the dark forces. Unlike practically every other corner of the country, bursting at the seams with the third largest sonic industry in the world, that street will always fall eerily quiet – and it’s all because of the wrath that the Pied Piper left behind.
Bungelosenstrasse, which translates into English as the ‘Street Without Drums’ is rumoured to be the last place where the children kidnapped by the Pied Piper were seen frolicking in joyful obliviousness before they vanished into thin air, never to be found ever again. As such, the place is deemed a curse, and it’s a longstanding tradition that music and dancing are entirely banned throughout the length of the street, lest the Pied Piper suddenly returns.
Admittedly, it seems quite unlikely that a guy dressed in a multi-coloured costume pretending to go around the community catching rats, but instead snatching the kids, would rock up on the streets of Germany in 2025, but clearly you can never be too sure. In many ways, however, it’s just as well that the rest of the country doesn’t seem to be drawn into the lore with such suspicion – otherwise Europe’s cultural capital may never have made its name.
Ironically, however, the concept of a street without music and dancing sounds like it would make quite an intriguing sonic muse if any artist were brave enough to write something about the story of the place. They may be met with some hostility from the locals, but maybe it could be just what they need to let go of their mystical dark past and embrace the future.
