Ham beating
Schinkenkloppen ( fresh wax in the sailor's language ) is a centuries-old parlor game that has lost its popularity in recent decades, but which both children and adults can still enjoy, often in a traditional setting. It is not a corporal punishment , as is sometimes wrongly assumed, even if it may occasionally be threatened as such, but is in the broadest sense a variant of the blind cow .
regulate
A player hides his face in the lap of another, mostly seated, fellow player so that he can no longer see anything. Sometimes the eyes are also blindfolded or covered. This player then receives a slap on the buttocks from another (hence ham-pounding) or, in another, more modest variant, on the hand that is placed on his back with the palm up. The victim must now guess who took the hit. This is repeated until the right person has been guessed, who in turn has to kneel down and take his place.
Historical
The game has been known at least since the Middle Ages . A representation can already be found as an ivory carving on the outside of writing tablets from the 14th century, which are now exhibited in the Louvre in Paris . Similar to “Blinde Kuh”, a game offered the possibility of expanding the boundaries of the moral sense a little. Especially in mixed-sex groups of young adults, due to the more intensive body contact when pounding ham, an erotic effect was certainly neither undesirable nor unintentional.
In France, "Schinkenkloppen" was known as "Main Chaude" (in the variant with the blow on the hand) or "Hautes Coquilles" (with the blow on the buttocks), in England, based on the French name, as "hot cockles ”, in Holland as“ Handjeklap ”. Dutch artists such as Jan Miense Molenaer (1610–1668) or Gerrit Lundens (1622–1686) took up this motif as did the Swede Carl Gustaf Klingstedt (1657–1734), the German Leopold Franz Kowalski (1856–1931) or the French Jean -Honoré Fragonard (1732–1806), Hortense Haudebourt-Lescot (1784–1845) or Ferdinand Roybet (1840–1920). There are also depictions as tapestries .
Like “Blinde Kuh”, “Schinkenkloppen”, or more elegant “La Main Chaude”, enjoyed great popularity across all social classes well into the 20th century. Both among farmers and the bourgeoisie, as well as among adult ladies and gentlemen. The engraver and historian Joseph Strutt describes in his book Sports and Pastimes of the People of England that in the 18th century hot cockles was popular for the general entertainment of adults at Christmas when friends and relatives got together.
Postcard views and photos from the turn of the century show that ham pounding was also a popular pastime for the German Imperial Navy . On board this somewhat coarser variety was then called "fresh wax".
As a testimony to the Weimar Republic , a scene of a group of young men playing a game in the silent film People on Sunday from 1930 at about 36 minutes. Schinkenkloppen finds one of the most modern mentions in the Low German edition of the Asterix volume De Törn för nix (High German The Odyssey ).
See also
Web links
- Weird vintage games. List of Unusual Old Games
- Collection of artistic representations of the game (Russian)
Individual evidence
- ^ Meyers Großes Konversationslexikon Volume 7, p. 157, Leipzig 1907
- ^ Image of the plaque in the Louvre , mid-14th century.
- ^ Joseph Strutt: Sports and Pastimes of the People of England , p. 308 (Methuen & Co., 1801).
- ↑ Reinhard Dzingel: Schinkenkloppen . (PDF; 897 kB) illustrated article, Moisburg 2013
- ↑ Friedrich Kluge : Sailor's Language. Verbatim history handbook of German ship expressions of older and more recent times . Halle / Saale 1911
- ↑ René Goscinny , Albert Uderzo : Asterix snackt flat , Book 2, De Törn för nix . Platt maakt by Hartmut Cyriacks , Reinhard Goltz and Peter Nissen . EHAPA-Verlag, Stuttgart 1996, ISBN 3-7704-0467-X , p. 14