Leopold Rütimeyer and the discovery of the geschulten Diebe, a legendary masked Männerbund of the Lötschental

The paper tells the story of the discovery by the Basle doctor and ethnographer Leopold Rütimeyer (1856-1932) of a legendary masked fraternity in the Lötschental (Canton Wallis), high in the Swiss Alps, in the early years of the twentieth century, and how he interpreted the myths and rituals associated with it. The fraternity had two names corrresponding to its dual aspect. As a mythical band of robbers it was called « die geschulten Diebe » (the Well-schooled Thieves), and as a still-extant ritual association of young lads it was known as the Roitscheggeten (Smoke Chequers). Rütimeyer wrote an account of his discovery which appeared in the prestigious Leipzig-based ethnological magazine Globus in April 1907. According to local folklore the customs of the association, whose masks were most grotesque and primitive, were part of a tradition which went back to prehistoric times. Young men who wanted to join the robber band, which dwelt in a hideout deep in a primordial forest in the mountains, had to prove themselves by jumping across a mountain stream while shouldering a heavy bag of loot. Hence the name Well-Schooled Thieves. Each springtime they launched daring raids on the villages in the valley below, terrorising women and children. Rütimeyer interpreted the customs of the fraternity with reference to the theories of three comparative ethnologists, two of them Germans and one an Englishman. The most important of these was the theory of fraternities and male age cohorts as elementary social forms outlined by Heinrich Schurtz (1863-1903) in his Urgeschiche der Kultur (1900) and comprehensively developed in Altersklassen und Männerbünde (1902), the first global study of primitive mens associations. Rütimeyer also utilised Adolf Bastians practice of drawing ethnographic parallels and Edward Burnet Tylors idea of archaic cultural layers. Applying a combination of these theories, Rütimeyer concluded that the fraternity which he had discovered was a primitive menssecret society very similar to those described by Schurtz which had been encountered in Melanesia and West Africa. Such Männerbünde often dwelt in secluded mens houses in the forest. Entrants were accepted only after undergoing elaborate initiation tests designed to prove their physical prowess and fitness to join. These often involved the right to steal and to terrorise the local populace, particularly women and children. All these features were present in the Swiss lads association discovered by Rütimeyer.
The article concludes by briefly considering the wider significance of Rütimeyers contribution as an one example among many of a growing interest in Schurtzs theory of the Männerbund and its application to a broad range of academic disciplines, a development which was followed after 1918 by the utilisation of the theory by right-wing radicals in Germany and culminated after 1933 in a number of acrimonious political controversies within the Nazi Party over the relationship between male bonding and race, homosexuality and women in the Third Reich.