Whether the typical headgear of the Heinzelmännchen – nothing is known about the Heinzelweibchen – the pointed cap is, cannot be definitively determined for reasons that will be explained further below. However, it is undisputed that the industrious Heinzelmännchen make tireless efforts to do our work for free at night. A level of selflessness that could suggest that there are no Heinzelmännchen at all.
Be that as it may, they are said to have existed. They lived in Cologne, and until about the last quarter of the 18th century, if one is to believe the Cologne writer Ernst Weyden, who first mentioned them in a story in 1826. He also had to admit that the diligent little creatures were already a phenomenon of the past back then. The reason for the always-already-been state of the Heinzelmännchen is a simple one: On the one hand, there are or were the Heinzelmännchen, otherwise one could not talk about them or write stories and poems about them. And: If they had not existed, they could of course not have disappeared either.
On the other hand, the gnomes either do not exist or never did, because one of their characteristics is, after all, that no one has ever seen them, and that they vanish immediately when someone tries to catch a glimpse of them. So Weyden tells it, and so the ballad by August Kopisch from the year 1836, which everyone knows, tells it:
"How convenient it was in Cölln / with gnomes! For if one was lazy, ... one lay down / on the bench and took care of oneself. / Then they came at night, before one thought of it, / the little men swarmed / and clapped and made noise / and pulled and tugged / and hopped and trotted / and cleaned and scraped – / and before a slacker awoke, / all his daily work ... was already done! "
The story continues that the shoemaker's wife was eager to catch a glimpse of the invisible night shift, so she scattered peas on the stairs in the evening, hoping the little helpers would trip and stay down. However, they saw through this and disappeared from then on. Why did the gnomes want to remain unseen? Ernst Weyden claimed they were "naked little men"; perhaps that is the reason: they were ashamed.
Linguists and cultural historians believe they have figured out that the gnomes were miners, perhaps even child laborers, who operated the underground water-lifting systems, called Heinzenkunst, from the late Middle Ages. After they were no longer needed, they would have worked underground in Cologne's craft businesses at night. This, of course, is nonsense. The best proof of the existence of gnomes is this article: it found itself one morning, fixed and ready, on the computer.
