Störtebeker: The German Pirate Whose Name Means "Empty the Mug"

Oktoberfest is on in Munich through October 4, and the crew here has been flying the blue and white all week. So it feels like the right moment to tip a hat to the most famous pirate Germany ever produced. Most people over here have never heard of him. In northern Germany, six hundred years after his death, he is still a folk hero.

His name was Klaus Störtebeker, and he sailed the Baltic and the North Sea around the year 1400.

A name you earn

Start with the name, because it is the best part. In Low German, the old tongue of the northern port towns, Störtebeker means something close to "empty the mug in one gulp." The story goes that he could drain a four-liter mug without coming up for air. Historians will tell you it may just have been a family name that picked up a legend along the way. Nobody at an Oktoberfest table has ever let that get in the way of a good story, and neither will we.

Grocers first, pirates second

Like the buccaneers, the crew he ran with started out doing something respectable. In 1392 the Dukes of Mecklenburg hired a band of sailors to help break a siege. Queen Margaret of Denmark had Stockholm surrounded, and somebody had to run food past her ships to the hungry city. Those supply runners took their name from the Latin word for provisions. They were the Victual Brothers. Grocers of the sea, more or less.

It did not stay respectable for long. Once a crew learns it can slip past a navy with a full hold, some of them work out that taking the cargo is easier than buying it. By 1394 the Victual Brothers had seized the island of Gotland and made its port of Visby their headquarters, and trade on the Baltic nearly ground to a halt. In 1398 the Teutonic Knights finally came for them and drove them off the island.

Equal shares

Pushed out of the Baltic, the survivors moved west into the North Sea and gave themselves a new name: the Likedeelers, "the equal sharers." Whatever they took, they split evenly, captain and deckhand alike. That one idea is a big part of why he is remembered so fondly. To the rich merchant cities of the Hanseatic League he was a menace. To ordinary people along the coast he was the pirate who shared. The line on his statue in Hamburg sums him up: Gottes Freund, der Welt Feind. God's friend, the world's enemy.

The walk

Hamburg's fleet finally caught him near the island of Heligoland. The traditional date of his execution is October 20, 1401, though some historians now argue it happened a year earlier. He and dozens of his crew were beheaded on the Grasbrook, a stretch of the Hamburg waterfront.

Then comes the legend northern Germany still tells. Before the sword fell, Störtebeker struck a bargain: every man he could walk past after his head came off would be spared. The blade dropped, and his headless body got up and walked. It made it past eleven of his men before the executioner stuck out a foot and tripped him. The deal was not honored, and all of them died anyway. It is almost certainly not true. It has been told for six centuries regardless, because it says exactly who he was supposed to be.

Still around

Hamburg never quite let him go. A skull believed to be his, with an iron nail still driven through it from the days when pirates' heads were put on display at the harbor, sits in the city's history museum. Somebody stole it in 2010, which is about the most Störtebeker thing that could have happened to it, and it came home the next year. A statue of him, bound and waiting for the sword, has stood near the old execution ground since 1982. And every summer on the island of Rügen, the Störtebeker festival stages his story as one of the biggest open-air shows in the country.

Prost, pirates

So that is our German pirate: a supply runner turned raider, a captain who split the take evenly, and a legend who kept walking for his crew after he had nothing left to walk with. Not a bad patron saint for a room built around sharing a table.

Munich keeps Oktoberfest going through October 4. Come raise a toast to old Klaus with us. Pick out a cigar worth the hour, pull up a chair with the crew, and take your time with it. He never got to.