Krabat and the Black Mill

The legend begins with a poor Wendish herdboy. In the best known version a voice calls the orphan Krabat to the mill in the Koselbruch for three nights; in the older telling he loses his way in the forest and finds it by chance. The miller takes him on as an apprentice. Krabat soon notices that more than grain is ground here. From a heavy black book, the Koraktor, the master teaches his twelve journeymen the art of magic, and when the work is done he turns them into ravens that sit silent on the perch.

But the mill demands its price. On every New Year’s night one of the journeymen must die, so that the master can renew his pact with the Gevatter, the dark lord. At the new moon they grind what no miller should grind, and fear sits on every neck. Whoever has once learned the art can no longer leave the Black Mill, for the master binds their souls to him as long as he lives and rules.

In the end love wins. In the old Sorbian legend it is the mother who recognises her son among the transformed ravens and so sets him free. Otfried Preußler turned this into the Kantorka, a girl who challenges the master and picks out Krabat among the identical journeymen by the voice of the heart. The miller’s power breaks, the mill decays, and the survivors go free.

Behind the legendary figure stands a real man. The chronicle of Wittichenau, which the chaplain Franz Schneider compiled around 1850, records from the parish registers: in 1704 there died at Särchen the colonel Johann Schadowitz, eighty years old, born in Agram in Croatia, buried in the parish church of Wittichenau. From the word Croat, Schneider writes, common speech made the name Krabat. The Croat was rich, lord of Särchen, and had the reputation of a black artist.

People told that he had conjured a whole regiment of soldiers from a handful of oats and had ridden through the air to Dresden, where he lived in friendship with the Saxon elector and Polish king Friedrich August. The name Krabat comes from the Croatian Hrvat, the Croat. From the brief chronicle entry Sorbian storytellers grew an ever richer life story, and in 1896 Georg Pilk, in his version Der wendische Faust, first named the Black Mill near Schwarzkollm as the place of the sorcerer’s training.

The mill itself is gone. The old building in the Koselbruch, the later Brösing Mill, burned down in 1868, and scarcely anything remained of the original farmstead. The material lived on, however. Otfried Preußler’s youth novel of 1971 made Krabat known far beyond the Lausitz, in 2008 the great film adaptation followed, and the Sorbian writer Jurij Brězan devoted several novels to the Black Mill.

Since 2006 the society Krabatmühle-Schwarzkollm has been building a heritage farm in the Koselbruch, a Lusatian four-sided farmstead, for which protected barns from Dubring and Sollschwitz were moved here. Every July, since 2012, the Krabat Festival takes place, a ninety kilometre Krabat cycle path links the stations of his life, and the farm cultivates the Sorbian language and the customs of the region. Where fear once ruled, the legend is now celebrated. The Black Mill has become a place of remembrance.