Forget the Winter Soldier—check out this IRL 16th-century cyborg
Wave hello to Götz of the Iron Hand. Over 500 years ago, this fierce knight sported a fearsome articulated prosthetic
The new Marvel film Thunderbolts* stars Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes, AKA The Winter Soldier. He is a brutally efficient assassin-turned-good-guy-turned-Congressman with a cybernetic arm to replace the one he lost in combat. The character is just the latest example of our pop cultural fascination with badasses who restore their mortal bodies with machinery—Robocop, Darth Vader, the Six Million Dollar Man, the Bionic Woman, etc.
But a real-life cyborg action hero did it first: a German mercenary named Götz von Berlichingen. And he did it over 500 years ago.
Gottfried "Götz" von Berlichingen grew up to become a knight of the Holy Roman Empire who robbed nobles and merchants in his free time. In 1504, he was struck by a cannonball during the Siege of Landshut. The impact ripped off his right hand and blew shrapnel from his sword and armor clean through his arm.
It's a miracle he survived. A normal man would've retired to a farmhouse on the Danube. Not Götz. He had an armorer fashion an iron limb with articulated fingers controlled by gears inside the prosthetic. With the appendage, he was able to grip anything from a sword to a quill pen to playing cards.
The handicapable mensch-maschine went on to cut an unholy swath across the continent for another 40 years, pillaging, murdering, and basically flipping the metal bird to authority. Götz lived to the ripe old age of 82 and became a Robin Hood-like folk hero in Germany. His pioneering prosthetic was hailed as a symbol of the nation's mechanical ingenuity and resilience.
Every cyborg in pop culture is indebted to Götz, particularly the mad professor Rotwang from the 1927 science fiction classic Metropolis. The design of the character’s fake hand is clearly modeled on that of the folk hero, who would’ve been well-known to the German-speaking audience the film was made for.
Like many subsequent fictional depictions of cyborgs, the classic silent film suggests that fashioning a functioning limb out of artificial materials requires a sort of Faustian bargain, surrendering a portion of your humanity in the process. The subtext of the film is that the brilliant mad scientist is able to construct amazing robots because he is part machine himself.
There are no such dark undercurrents in the many artworks celebrating the medieval mercenary with the iron hand. Goethe wrote a play, Götz von Berlichingen, that’s loosely based on the exploits of the humanoid knight. The theatrical work is mostly remembered for one particularly pungent line, a line that Goethe cribbed directly from Götz’s memoirs.
“Mich ergeben! Auf Gnad und Ungnad! Mit wem redet Ihr! Bin ich ein Räuber! Sag deinem Hauptmann: Vor Ihro Kaiserliche Majestät hab ich, wie immer, schuldigen Respekt. Er aber, sag's ihm, er kann mich im Arsch lecken!”
Translation:
“Me, surrender! At mercy! With whom do you speak? Am I a robber! Tell your captain that for His Imperial Majesty, I have, as always, due respect. But he, tell him that, he can lick me in the arse!”
This defiant battle cry, equivalent to the English-language idiom “kiss my ass,” became iconic in Germany, partly because of the pungency of the language. (An American equivalent might be something like Admiral Farragut’s cry of “Damn the torpedoes!” during the Civil War.) The line was later immortalized in the 1979 German film Goetz von Berlichingen of the Iron Hand.
This seminal cyborg’s profane utterance was not just portrayed on stage and cinema screens. It was memorialized on statues, engravings, and plaques.
Götz was also celebrated by Mozart in not one but two compositions. For your listening pleasure, here is “Leck mich im Arsch,” a canon in B-flat major composed by Wolgang Amadeus himself around 1782. In the video below, lyrics in both English and German are helpfully provided onscreen. Hit play and you’ll hear an angelic chorus of voices pay tribute to Götz von Berlichingen by inviting you to lick their ass.
The other Mozart ass canon was covered by Jack White in an unforgettable collaboration with Shaggy 2 Dope and Violent J of the Insane Clown Posse. (I wish I was kidding.)
That’s quite a legacy for Götz Of The Iron Hand. A half a millennium before krautrock pioneers Kraftwerk penned ditties about man-machine hybrids, this Germanic proto-Terminator showed us all how it could be done.
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