The Treasure Chest

  THE TREASURE CHEST

  JOHANN PETER HEBEL (1760–1826) was born in Basel, where his German parents were in service to a Swiss family. Orphaned at the age of thirteen, he was given an education by his parents’ employers and studied theology. He qualified for the ministry but spent most of his life as a teacher, becoming headmaster of his old school in Karlsruhe in the liberal state of Baden in south-west Germany. His poetry, written in Alemannic dialect, was highly praised by Goethe, among others. His prose stories were written for a regional almanac edited and mostly written by himself.

  JOHN HIBBERD is Reader in German at the University of Bristol. He is the author of works on eighteenth-century German literature, on Kafka and on Wedekind.

  JOHANN PETER HEBEL

  THE TREASURE CHEST

  STORIES, ILLUSTRATED WITH CONTEMPORARY WOODCUTS

  INTRODUCED AND TRANSLATED BY JOHN HIBBERD

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England

  Penguin Books USA Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 182–190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  Stories by J. P. Hebel mostly selected from Schatzkästlein des rheinischen Hausfreunde, first published in 1811

  This translation first published in Great Britain by Libris 1994

  Published in Penguin Books 1995

  5

  Introduction and translation copyright © John Hibberd, 1994

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the translator has been asserted

  The illustrations in this edition are mostly taken from Der Rheinländische Hausfreund, where the stories were first published (courtesy Badische Landesbibliothek, Karlsruhe)

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  ISBN: 978-0-14-196053-1

  Contents

  Introduction by John Hibberd

  Further Reading

  A Note on Currency

  The Treasure Chest

  What a Strange Creature is Man

  The Silver Spoon

  The Cheap Meal

  Dinner Outside

  The Clever Judge

  The Artful Hussar

  The Mole

  The Dentist

  Two Stories

  Settling Accounts with a Ghost

  A Short Stage

  The Careful Dreamer

  A Bad Win

  Strange Reckoning at the Inn

  A Strange Walk and Ride

  An Unusual Apology

  Unexpected Reunion

  The Great Sanhedrin in Paris

  The Sly Pilgrim

  Treachery Gets its Just Reward

  Mixed Fortunes

  The Commandant and the Light Infantry in Hersfeld

  Kannitverstan

  A Poor Reward

  He Speaks German!

  Suvorov

  The Stranger in Memel

  An Odd Prescription

  The Barber’s Boy at Segringen

  A Curious Ghost Story

  The Hussar in Neisse

  One Word Leads to Another

  Moses Mendelssohn

  A Dear Head and a Cheap One

  Expensive Eggs

  The Three Thieves

  The Emperor Napoleon and the Fruit Woman in Brienne

  The Bombardment of Copenhagen

  The Strange Fortunes of a Young Englishman

  Innocence is Hanged

  A Bad Bargain

  A Profitable Game of Riddles

  The Recruit

  The Ropemaker’s Reply

  The Cure

  How Freddy Tinder and his Brother Played Another Trick on Carrot-Top Jack

  The Clever Sultan

  A Shave as an Act of Charity

  A Secret Beheading

  The Starling from Segringen

  You get as much as you give

  Well Replied

  The Mistaken Reckoning

  The Last Word

  Well Spoken, Badly Behaved

  The Patient Husband

  The Cunning Husband

  Harry and the Miller from Brassenheim

  The Fake Gem

  The Cunning Girl

  A Good Prescription

  Terrible Disasters in Switzerland

  How a Ghastly Story was Brought to Light by a Common or Garden Butcher’s Dog

  A Strange Divorce

  The Cunning Styrian

  A Report from Turkey

  How One Day Freddy Tinder Escaped from Prison and Came Safely over the Border

  The Cosy Sentry Box

  The Lightest Death Sentence

  The Strange Gent

  Field Marshal Suvorov

  A Stallholder is Duped

  An Officer’s Wife is Saved

  Andreas Hofer

  Patience Rewarded

  The Miser

  The Thief’s Reply

  The Apprentice Boy

  The Snuffbox

  How Freddy Tinder Got Himself a Horse to Ride

  The Champion Swimmer

  How a Fine Horse was Offered for Sale for Five of the Best

  Franziska

  Married on Sentry Duty

  Two Honest Tradesmen

  Cunning Meets its Match

  A Willing Justice

  Pious Advice

  The Weather Man

  The Tailor at Penza

  Tit for Tat

  Mister Charles

  The Glove Merchant

  Alphabetical List of German titles (with English translation)

  Notes

  Introduction

  Elias Canetti tells in his autobiography of his delight at discovering that Franz Kafka had called one famous piece from Hebel’s The Treasure Chest (‘Unexpected Reunion’, p. 25) ‘the most wonderful story in the world’. Canetti’s own reaction to Hebel was thus confirmed by a fellow twentieth-century writer, and for him that was important. He knew that generations of ordinary Germans had loved Hebel’s stories since their appearance in 1811. Yet the schoolmaster and cleric Hebel scarcely fitted modern notions of the literary genius. Might the common reader have been too easily pleased? Kafka and Canetti, and others with high demands of literature, thought not. They, like Goethe in Hebe’ls own time, recognized that Hebels collection of tales lives up to its title: it contains real gems of imaginative fiction. Great discoveries await the English reader who comes across it for the first time.

  This treasure trove is not unlike a child’s box of treasures, and that is part of its charm. It inspires uncommon fondness. Some of its contents are unpretentious, consolation prizes, it might seem, in the treasure hunt Hebel invites us to enjoy; but they are presented with such charm that even the most sophisticated of readers may accept them too with a smile of pleasure. They grow in value with familiarity. The great prizes can, of course, be hunted systematically, by reading the collection through from beginning to end, even if in his original foreword the author himself, in characteristically teasing fashion, advised his readers that the best items might not be found at the beginning, but towards the middle or end of
his volume. The Treasure Chest is, however, also there to be dipped into in the expectation of turning up something amusing or sad, curious, instructive or consoling, whatever suits a personal taste or a particular mood. It has something for almost everybody, things which invite repeated reading, prove unforgettable and give lasting enjoyment.

  The sheer variety of the pieces and their brevity makes this book very unlike what the modern reader expects to find on the fiction shelves of the bookshop or library. Clearly the collection would be comparable to a Readers’ Digest, were it not the creation of one person, bearing the unmistakable unifying stamp of his personality. Because it also has the marked and intriguing flavour of a particular time and place and because it is eminently suitable for the young and for reading aloud to others it might just be grouped with something like Uncle Remus’s Brer Rabbit stories. Yet any such comparison is likely to be misleading. Hebel’s delightful mixture of sentiment and humour is, for instance, similar to the quality which has made A Christmas Carol favourite reading down the ages. Yet his prose is unique. And unlike any Digest The Treasure Chest has become an enduring popular classic. Why was this? Who was the author Hebel, and how did he come to write the stories or articles, the anecdotes, vignettes, reports and jokes found in this volume? In answering these questions and attempting to explain the impact of his work, which some (paradoxically perhaps, given Hebel’s down-to-earth attitudes) have understandably called quite magical, we shall see that Hebel the man and Hebel the writer were very much of one piece.

  Johann Peter Hebel rose from very humble origins to become a schoolmaster and leading churchman; he knew the mind and the language of the ordinary people for whom he wrote the pieces he put into The Treasure Chest. His father (Johann Jakob Hebel, 1720–61) trained as a weaver before economic circumstances led him in 1747 to leave his native Palatinate in south-west Germany. Johann Jakob entered the service of a well-to-do citizen of Basel in Switzerland who as a major in the French army took him with him as batman on his campaigns. This batman was a cut above the ordinary: he filled two books with explanations of the principles and practical applications of arithmetic and kept notebooks in both German and French in which he recorded his journeys and copied out pages of poetry and prose, both pious and profane. It was in his master’s house in Basel that he met Ursula Oertlin (1726–73), a peasant’s daughter from the Wiese valley in the Black Forest in the margravate of Baden who was a maid in the same household. They were married in 1759 in a village in Baden. The ceremony could not be held in Basel, where mixed marriages were not allowed (he was of the Reformed Church, she a Lutheran). Their son was to be convinced, perhaps by the particular example provided by his parents as much as by the climate of enlightened thought in the eighteenth century, that love, common sense and humanity could and should transcend the barriers between different religions. The newly-weds lived in the tiny town of Hausen in the Black Forest that winter, where he worked as a weaver, and both returned to service with the Iselin family in Basel the next summer. (Hebel was later to write of men from small communities who could not support themselves all the year round from their craft or trade.) Johann Peter, born on 10 May 1760, was their first child. A year later his sister, Susanne, was born, but in the same year, 1761, she and their father died, victims of an epidemic in Basel. The widowed mother continued to live part of the year in Hausen, part in Basel, so the young Hebel received his earliest education in the country and in town and got to know the lives of peasants and burghers and the minds of rich and poor. He was thirteen years old and had begun to attend the grammar school in the town of Lörrach in the Black Forest when he learnt that his mother had fallen ill in Basel and had died on the road between there and Hausen. The vanity of earthly things, of which his pious mother must often have spoken, was an early and unforgettable part of his experience.

  Ursula Hebel had wished for her son to enter the Lutheran Church. His teachers had reason to hope that he would be worthy of such a career, for he was a very promising pupil. With that future in mind, and with the help of money from the Iselin family and the proceeds of the sale of his mother’s house in Hausen, the orphan was sent to the most prestigious school in Baden. Sporting his first pair of shoes he travelled for four days from the Wiese valley to the ‘Gymnasium illustre’ in the state capital Karlsruhe, and there over the next four years he maintained his early academic promise. In 1778 he went to study theology at university in Erlangen. By 1780 he had qualified for the ministry, but he was not offered a parish. It appears that he had somehow disappointed the teachers and clergymen who had high hopes of him. It can only be surmised that he had not been too assiduous in his theological studies and that his examination results were not outstanding. In Erlangen he could not afford orgies even if he had desired such indulgence, yet the signs are that he led a relaxed student’s life. He had joined a duelling club, kept a dog as his constant companion, and was seldom seen without his pipe. His later writings suggest that he distinguished between religious faith and doctrinal pedantry, practical and theoretical Christianity. Neither that attitude nor the fact that he was never a killjoy and was always to appreciate convivial evenings at a hostelry need, however, have debarred him from a country living. But unknown to him in 1780 his dreams of a parish in the Black Forest were never to be realized.

  The next ten years of his life were spent in relative poverty. He was a tutor to a rural vicar’s children, then a teacher at a school in Lörrach, with its 1,700 inhabitants the largest town in the Wiese valley. Those years were in retrospect to appear the happiest of his life. He was in the countryside he loved best, read a great deal, and had the opportunity to explore the Black Forest and to travel into Switzerland and Alsace. His treatment of carefree wanderers in his later writings indicates that he cherished the chance to roam the countryside and be free of responsibilities. In Lörrach he found three lifelong friends in a fellow teacher, a young clergyman, and the teacher’s sister-in-law. His relationship with her, Gustave Fecht, was a close one, but for long he was too poor to marry, and afterwards, for reasons which his biographers have failed to unearth, he never proposed to her. During this time in Lörrach he expressed the liberalness of his faith by indulging with a select group of friends in a fantastic semi–jocular cult of Proteus whom they revered as the spirit of the perpetual mutability of the world. He found release for his imagination in this cult and a temporary escape from philistinism in the tiny secret society of friends with its own secret language. He was able to sympathize with the polytheism that sees nature full of spirits. His Christianity was always to have a pantheistic tinge.

  In 1791 Hebel, now thirty-one, moved back to his old school in Karlsruhe as a teacher. He was simultaneously appointed to the position of subdeacon, which meant he preached once a month before the Margrave and his court. That was not a task he relished, he would have preferred a congregation of farmers, but he was valued for the feeling and the wit he put into his sermons. He was appreciated as an outstanding teacher too. He prepared his lessons thoroughly and had a special gift for clear exposition. His subjects were Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and geography; he also taught mathematics and nature studies. In 1793 when French Revolutionary forces approached the capital of Baden he took over the duties of the distinguished teacher of botany and biology, Gmelin, when Gmelin left Karlsruhe together with the Margrave and his entourage who sought safety further east. Hebel protested his incompetence as a natural scientist, but within a few years he had been invited to join leading German scientific societies. In 1798 he was promoted, with the title of Professor of Theology and Hebrew. He was drawing a good salary. He was entrusted with important tasks within the Church: composing prayers for regular use in services and revising the catechism. Yet he yearned to return to the Black Forest region. Even after thirty years in Karlsruhe he was still to write to his best friend in Lörrach that he felt a foreigner in the town on the plain and was moved to tears when he set eyes on a young soldier from his native valleys.

  It wa
s five years before Hebel visited what he regarded as his home country. From Karlsruhe he had gone on botanizing trips with Gmelin, who was to name a plant family after him (in vain, for it had already been named by William Hudson). He had made two longish journeys in 1794 and 1795. But not until the autumn of 1796 did he go back to the Black Forest and Basel. On this holiday trip he witnessed the French under General Moreau retreating over the Rhine and the effects of war on the civilian population who suffered from the requisitioning and looting by both sides. The cannon were still ringing in his ears when he arrived back in Karlsruhe. (No wonder that so many of his stories, written during or just after the exploits of Napoleon, tell of such times of war.) In the spring of 1799 and the autumn of 1801 he went ‘home’ again. It was in the months before and after the visit in 1801 that he wrote his Alemannische Gedichte, the most famous volume of dialect poetry in German.

  He had become interested in medieval German, the history of the

  language and the place of Alemannic in that development. He hoped to persuade others that the dialect of his native region was not a deformed version of standard modern German but a language with great merits of its own and a distinguished pedigree. According to contemporary experts it shared the name Alemannic with the language of the great medieval poets, the Minnesänger. His stated aim in the Alemannische Gedichte was to ennoble the language he had spoken before coming to Karlsruhe, to put it to edifying purpose and reveal its inherent ‘poetry’. But his real inspiration was simply his nostalgic love for his favourite countryside and its inhabitants. His loving imagination transfigured the landscape and the people. In these poems he anthropomorphizes the whole of nature. The river Wiese becomes a Black Forest girl who falls into the arms of the handsome Rhine. He invents his own mythology,

  drawing on local superstition and on the make-believe world of his earlier cult of Protean nature. He writes as if with the mind of the region’s peasant inhabitants. Few of them could have read these poems when they were published in 1803. But in the course of time they became as familiar to them as the Bible and their own folksongs, and nowadays the name Hebel is as meaningful to the people of the South-west corner of Germany, Alsace and Switzerland, where Alemannic is spoken, as Robbie Burns is to the Scots. And very soon he had a public among educated Alemannic speakers, and among Germans from other areas too, for whom he provided brief notes on vocabulary, grammar and pronunciation. The volume was greeted enthusiastically by leading writers of the time, including Goethe. Jean Paul, an author whom Hebel greatly admired, declared that one could never tire of reading these poems over and over again. Contemporaries were impressed by the charm of poetry that breathed the spirit of a particular countryside; it seemed above all natural.