The Treasure Chest Read online

  The dialect gave Hebel’s verses a unique vigour and freshness. Nevertheless he did not draw simply on folk tradition. The Alemannische Gedichte contain simple folksong-like strophes, but also more meditative and narrative pieces in blank verse and astonishingly convincing classical hexameters. Hebel transports his reader into the Wiese valley and the real details of its topography, not into a stylized Arcadia, and

  escapes the conventions of idyllic verse. Yet the influence of one of his favourite poets, Theocritus, can still be felt as a major presence. Besides, he had no desire to deny the spirit of his age and his calling as pedagogue and clergyman. He wished to improve his readers, to nourish their feeling for nature, their moral sense and their religious faith. He fitted ghosts and will-o’-the-wisps into an optimistic Christian framework. One of his poems, ‘Der Statthalter von Schopfheim’, transfers the story of David, Nabal and Abigail into the Black Forest setting. Because his convictions were so secure he was never aggressively didactic. He could range easily from nature poetry to songs and dialogues and a frightening ballad, and allow himself a playful tone and a sense of humour. The dialect medium lent itself to the inclusion of proverbial and down-to-earth pieces of wisdom. Hebel knew that its speakers did not indulge in pathos. But the strength of his religious faith is expressed in one of the greatest poems on mortality in any language, ‘Die Vergänglichkeit’ (rendered as ‘Sic transit’ in Leonard Forster’s Penguin Book of German Verse). Here Hebel draws on memories of his mother’s death on the road to Hausen. In the poem a father tells his young son in simple and sober words that all things must pass, the whole world, even the familiar mountains, the river Wiese, the city of Basel and its seemingly permanent church of St Peter will one day be destroyed: all men must age and die, but those who act as conscience dictates will rise from the dead and be taken to the happier homeland up above. This moving piece has found a secure place in anthologies of German poetry.

  Hebel did not think of himself as a poetic genius. Early on he realized that the verses he wrote as a child inspired by the German poets of the mid-eighteenth century were of no value. At the age of twenty-eight, on reading the Minnesänger, he had tried his hand at verses in Alemannic, but without success. His lack of poetic gifts seemed to be certain. Thirteen years later, however, inspiration had come, and with it general acclaim. The first, anonymous, edition of the Alemannische Gedichte was printed on a subscription basis and Hebel’s best friend from his time in Lörrach did valiant work collecting advance orders. Within a year, however, a second edition had appeared above the author’s name. Two more were published by 1808. Yet Hebel was not persuaded that inspiration would ever come again. For the fifth edition (1820) he was able to add a few more poems to the thirty-two from 1803. But he wrote philosophically, ‘The Muse is not always with me, she only visits me’ and that there was nothing to be gained from forcing her against her will.

  In 1806 the long-awaited opportunity to return to the Black Forest region offered itself. The largely Catholic Breisgau was – as one consequence of the battle of Austerlitz – incorporated into Baden and the town of Freiburg was to be provided with a Lutheran pastor. Hebel was offered the position. But he hesitated, and bowed to the wish of his ruler (now, thanks to Napoleon, a Grand Duke) that he should remain in Karlsruhe. For he was a valued member of the Lutheran establishment in the capital and at court. Soon, in 1808, he became headmaster of his school, where his main worries were that the classrooms were simply not big enough to accommodate the pupils (one of the classes numbered eighty-three boys). He remained in that post until 1814. After that he continued to teach at the same school, but as he rose to the top of the Lutheran hierarchy in Baden his energies were increasingly concentrated on Church matters. From 1803 to 1814, however, the school establishment and the state required his services as editor and author.

  It was not inspiration but duty which moved Hebel to write the prose pieces which became as famous as the Alemannische Gedichte when put together in the Treasure Chest (the Schatzkästlein des rheinischen Hausfreundes, 1811). They were provided to order, but written according to his own plan, in his spare time and with commitment and pleasure too.

  The ruler of Baden from 1746 till 1811, Karl Friedrich, was a typical enlightened prince of the times. He was one of the first in Germany to abolish serfdom (in 1783) and to emancipate the Jews (in 1809). (Hebel’s attitude towards monarchy was determined by the relatively happy circumstances in the small state of Baden as well as by his Lutheranism and his loyalty to a system in which he made his own career.) One of Karl Friedrich’s concerns was education, which he saw as a key

  to economic advance and the improvement of his subjects. The grammar school in Karlsruhe was close to his heart, and since 1750 it had been entrusted with the preparation of all books for use in churches and schools in the margravate and with the compilation and sale of the Lutheran almanac for Baden. The school had leased the rights over the almanac to publishers, but they lost money and the school was obliged to reassume responsibility for a publication which had been meant to bring the institution revenue but instead had become a financial burden. The problem was not solved when the government ruled that every household was obliged to buy a copy, since that only made for greater consumer resistance. The product was simply not as good as some of its competitors from other states. In 1802 Hebel was one of five wise men who discussed the situation, but as he put it, ‘many cooks spoil the broth’, and sales of the Curfürstlich badischer gnädigst pri-vilegirter Landkalender fur die badische Margravschaft lutherischen Antheils fell further. In 1806 Hebel made suggestions of his own. The almanac should be given a snappier and more attractive name: the Landkalender’s longwinded and clumsy title served only to warn the public: ‘Don’t buy me, I’m not for you!’ The technical presentation had to be improved and the publication must be put in the hands of one man, someone close to the majority of the people, the rural population, for whom the almanac was intended.

  Hebel had a friend of his, a country clergyman, in mind, but inevitably he was charged with carrying out his own proposals for reform. So the almanacs for 1808 to 1811, now named Der Rheinländische Hausfreund, were the work of Hebel alone. He was also solely responsible for the issues for the years from 1812 to 1815, and again for the 1819 edition. Already by 1810 Goethe, having seen one issue which he found delightful, was anxious to lay hands on more. Individual items from the Hausfreund were reprinted in major German periodicals. They had proved to be of more than local relevance and interest. The almanac began to sell outside Baden. And the leading publisher Cotta asked Hebel to put together a selection intended not just for the publication of Baden but for the wider German public. It appeared as The Treasure Chest – Schatzkästlein des rheinischen Hausfreundes –containing one hundred and twenty-eight pieces from the years 1803 to 1811.

  The almanac was usually the only reading matter in the ordinary household apart from the Bible and the Hymn or Prayer Book and was therefore seen as an important means of improving the people. It contained by definition the calendar for the year. By tradition it also brought instructive and improving items. Hebel had been writing pieces for it since 1803. Before 1808 his contributions had taken two main forms. He wrote instructive articles on natural history: on the processional caterpillars to be found in native oak woods; on the miracle of natural propagation by seed; on snakes, spiders and moles. The item on moles has been included in the present volume; it shows his gift as a teacher who calls on his pupils to recognize the value of expert knowledge and to act upon it. It also reveals him in what we would now call a green role. Elsewhere too he dwells on the wonders of nature and the wisdom of God’s creation. He pours scorn on superstition and fantastic myth, but exotic and incredible things are related as bait for the reader. There are fish that fly! Stories about the tarantula are to be

  regarded with caution, some spiders are poisonous, but not those in Germany; only the credulous believe in dragons! He warns strongly against the fashion for tight
garters worn by men below the knee, they restrict the circulation which works like an irrigation system in the fields – and what happens to plants that are deprived of water? After 1807 more similarly practical advice was to follow, on the preparation of corn seed, how to make ink, to preserve wooden posts from rot or to care for fruit trees, or why clothing should be disinfected after illness. Each issue brought descriptions of the heavenly bodies and the laws which regulate their movements, all in the language the common man could follow. But already, before he was responsible for the almanac, Hebel contributed little amusing or intriguing anecdotes with an explicit or implied moral. The moral might simply involve a suggestion for the treatment of arrogance and testiness, as in ‘Dinner Outside’ (p. 7) and ‘The Clever Judge’ (p. 8), two pieces from 1803.

  As sole contributor Hebel increased the number and variety of narrative items and set the reader riddles to solve. His material was

  seldom if ever original. ‘A Strange Walk and Ride’ (p. 23), for instance, is a version of a parable that has been told many times and is perhaps best known from the Fables of La Fontaine. Hebel drew on anything he read, heard or overheard, and most of all on a collection of jokes and stories published in ten volumes from 1763 to 1792 (Vade Mecumfür lustige Leute edited by Friedrich Nicolai). He had a genius for reducing a story to its essentials. But he spent much time and effort in rewriting the items. He hoped that this would not be noticed in the finished product which had to appear natural and spontaneous. Privately, however, he wrote of the pains he took: the articles might seem to be effortlessly natural, yet writing pieces which showed no sign of art or effort was more demanding than composing something more obviously impressive. He had two guides. One was the training in stylistics derived from his classical education. (‘Kannitverstan’ [p. 40], one of his most famous stories, started as a school exercise in Latin composition.) The other was his knowledge of the everyday language of ordinary people and his ear for the rhythms of their speech. For his aim as

  educator was to speak to the ordinary man in his own language. The task was made easier because he loved that language himself. Here, however, he made sparing use of dialect (and removed its most obvious features when revising his articles for inclusion in the Schatzkästlein). Yet the simple syntax, the pithy phrases, the freedom of word order, the avoidance of abstractions in favour of concrete analogies, in short the oral tone he adopted, has persuaded generations of readers that his work is natural, unstrained, and of the people. The impression of unsophisticated oral narration was strengthened by the rarity of paragraph divisions, though that may also have been determined by the need to save paper (some improvements to the almanac that he desired proved too expensive). His punctuation was (by the standards of later German) unorthodox: his commas usually indicate pauses rather than boundaries between grammatical clauses as would be required by normal German usage, and even his full stops can seem strangely placed, marking sometimes a break as soon as a new idea is to be taken up rather than before it is introduced. His prose, it has been said, must be read with the ear, not the eye. The repetitions, the variation of tense and the

  change of syntactical structure within a sentence are never overdone, but they too contribute to the impression that this is spontaneous oral narrative. Not all of these features have been consistently or precisely rendered in the translation. Use of the present tense in narrative, for instance, is not uncommon in spoken English, more especially among the uneducated, but in print nowadays it looks precious. And whereas traces of dialect are a normal feature of the German spoken by most social classes, in English dialect can too easily smack overmuch of quaintness. So something of Hebel’s sophisticated unsophisticatedness has to be lost in translation. But perhaps not too much. For it would need great changes indeed to alter the basic flavour of Hebel’s texts.

  Much of that flavour derives from the presence of the author himself in his persona as the ‘Hausfreund’ (Family Friend). In the engraving on the title page of each almanac he stands in the centre of the picture, with the village church in the background, speaking to a dozen men and women carrying a scythe or a rake or a whip, one, the magistrate perhaps, in frock coat and knee breeches, a book in his hand. A child and a dog are listening too. This friend of the family gives good advice. He wishes others to share and benefit from his knowledge. But he also jokes and entertains. As he tells a story he anticipates questions from the audience, guesses their thoughts and keeps them guessing. Ignorant of the rules of nineteenth-century literary realism, he declares that the tale must proceed as he dictates. But Hebel had observed that the man in the street, or in the fields, did not want a diet of fairy-tales. So he gives date and place when reporting events from history, or establishes the location, as if he were telling of events that really happened, for items that are fictional. Occasionally he claims to have been present at the incident he relates – as in ‘The Fake Gem’ (p. 97) which, he says, took place in Strassburg where Hebel did in fact have good friends. He offers comments as he goes along (sometimes as Biblical quotations which he could expect his audience to recognize). He points out the moral in a brief prologue or, more often, in an epilogue accompanied by a wag of the finger – and sometimes a wink - and the catchword ‘Merke!’ (‘Note this’or ‘Remember!’). His readers, he knew, were practical people who wanted something with a message, but they also had minds of their own and were keen to use them – so sometimes they were left to work out the moral for themselves. The Hausfreund confesses why a certain story moves him, but puts the more gushing speeches on the marvellous beneficence of nature and God’s creation in the mouth of his right-hand man or assistant (‘der Adjunk’, a friend in Karlsruhe – the ‘mother-in-law’ who also appears was Henriette Hendel, an actress to whom the bachelor Hebel lost his heart in 1808). He addresses the reader as reader, not listener, but this does not necessarily destroy the illusion that oral communication is involved. The modern reader must therefore be aware that he has to adopt the right tone and to pace the story right if he is to satisfy himself as ‘listener’. In many cases the reader of the Hausfreund in Hebel’s time would be reading aloud to family or friends. The fact that he was then standing in for the Family Friend could give a special twist to Hebel’s phrase ‘der geneigte Leser versteht’s’ (the good or kind reader will understand). But in any case the narrator can always assume that his readers or listeners are no fools and that he has not spoken above their heads. They are assumed to be his equals in faith, intelligence and common sense if not in knowledge, and he can establish a relationship of intimacy with them. The Hausfreund puts us at our ease, much as a BBC radio programme for young listeners used to with its opening words, ‘Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin!’ His good humoured and reassuring presence is felt even in those narrative items where he keeps his distance.

  Sales of the almanac increased dramatically as soon as Hebel had taken over. Clearly he knew how to speak to the common reader. His persona as Family Friend was part of a successful formula. Other almanacs posed as the work of one ‘Calendar Man’ – it was not a new trick, but in this case it worked better. For Hebel could become the Family Friend with no difficulty at all; he was to a large extent being himself, talking to his fellow countrymen who did not all have the advantage of his education and access to books. But Hebel’s secret to success was that he knew what the readers wanted. Many of them had difficulty reading, many would have to be read to, so the items had to be short. They must also be varied.

  Hebel aimed to satisfy different tastes by including comic anecdotes, stories of executions and murders, reports of sensations, disasters and mysteries. He included jokes too, and childish or silly some of them may seem, but they serve to establish that the Hausfreund is no snobbishly superior being, he can enjoy simple jokes like anyone else. A young woman of whom Hebel was fond, mother to some of his several godchildren, was astounded and embarrassed that he did not stand on his dignity with her. She was, she said later, too naïve herself to appr
eciate naturalness. She would have preferred to find a hero in him. But Hebel himself liked to put inhibitions aside when with friends, and it was as a friend that he spoke to his readers.

  Of all the comic pieces, those involving a trio of likeable rogues have proved enduringly popular. Here the author makes no pretence at improving the reader and shares the peasant’s (and not only the peasant’s) typical delight in the triumph of cunning and ingenuity. With him we can admire the pranks of ‘der Zundelfrieder’ (Freddy Tinder) and his companions in eight stories, sympathize with these characters’ pride in their skill and quickwittedness, and share their love of adventure, almost forgetting that they are petty criminals. Individuals who use their heads are sure of Hebel’s approbation. Other, equally entertaining pieces tell of how minor rogues are defeated by quick thinking and a sense of fun. Among the quite different items which cater for a taste for the sensational, reports of natural disasters could be used to suggest the need to be prepared for death or to be thankful if one was spared. Gruesome executions, often related with grim humour, lent themselves to illustrating the wages of sin. But not all such pieces have a moral. The appeal of ‘A Secret Beheading’ (p. 85) is in large part, as Hebel indicates at the end, that it combines sensation and mystery. When it comes to ghosts, on the other hand, he supposes rational explanations for their appearance – while still assuring us that in any case anyone with an easy conscience, like the hero of ‘Settling Accounts with a Ghost’ (p. 18), has no cause to fear spooks! But the rational explanation is given only after the thrill of fear has been exploited, just as elsewhere the reader is likely to experience a shudder of revulsion at cruelty and murder before the story shows that murder does not pay.