Our German son-in-law once showed me over a late 1920s building next door to his and our daughter’s apartment block in Bremen, in the north of the country.  The building–now housing government offices–was an Art Deco masterpiece which he rightly thought would interest me.  Besides handsome brickwork and impressive stairwell details, it featured a working “paternoster,” an old-fashioned European elevator with small doorless compartments going up and down in constant slow motion.  Ulrich and I tried it, cautiously, stepping into a compartment and then stepping out when it reached the floor above.  Here’s an amateur video of a very similar paternoster in Prague:

If you ever have the chance to see Doris Dörrie’s very funny German comedy Männer (1985), be sure to watch the credits, which feature cast and crew going up and down in a paternoster.

But why the name “paternoster”?  In Latin, the Lord’s Prayer begins “Pater noster,” “Our Father,” and hence at a very early stage of both English and German “paternoster” became a name for the prayer itself, or for a similarly powerful invocation or charm.  In the Middle Ages witches reputedly recited the “black paternoster,” i.e., the prayer chanted backwards, but this is probably not something you should try yourself.  In Dickens’s Bleak House, Guster, the little maid of all work in a ramshackle London house, firmly believes there is money buried under the cellar, “guarded by an old man with a white beard, who cannot get out for seven thousand years because he said the Lord’s Prayer backwards.”

Early on, “paternoster” could also mean a rosary, that is, a set of beads on a string which, fingered, could assist the penitent’s memory, and then by figurative extension any set of identical things on a string or in a series.  In fishing, a “paternoster line” is one set with multiple hooks at regular intervals; in geology, “paternoster lakes” are small, circular—that is, bead-shaped—bodies of water left in a line down a valley by a glacier.  The compartments of a paternoster elevator, though not bead-shaped, are identical and installed in a seemingly endless series.  As the maker of that video of the Prague paternoster emphasizes, the contraption is somewhat dangerous.  Perhaps one should utter a prayer while using it, and in that case, why not a Lord’s Prayer or a Vater Unser or a Pater Noster?