German literature – The Emerald City Book Review Archive

**Otfried Preussler, Krabat and the Sorcerer’s Mill (1971)**

My second German Literature month pick was a classic fantasy from the splendid-as-always New York Review Children’s Collection. I found it a fascinating and highly skillful variation on the themes of traditional folklore, playing with motifs of power, entrapment, love, sacrifice, and freedom.

Krabat is an urchin plucked out of a miserable life to become a miller’s apprentice. At first he’s delighted with his new home — he has to work hard but gets plenty to eat, and finds new friends among the journeymen — but soon he begins to learn disquieting things about his master and the mill. Who is the mysterious client who comes on the night of every new moon, and what is he grinding? Why are there unmarked graves in a nearby field? What does it mean for him to swear eternal service to his strange master? As Krabat starts to unravel some disquieting answers, he starts to wonder whether there can be a happier end to the story for him than for his unfortunate predecessors.

Though it’s enacted within a fairy-tale world of transformation and magic, Krabat’s dilemma is also a very familiar one. We can all become trapped in delusive dreams of power and selfish comfort, only to find that the end of such a path is spiritual death. Preussler tells his fabulous story quite plainly, letting events and images speak for themselves, but it’s all the more powerful for that. A compelling, chilling, and ultimately redemptive tale, perfect for long winter nights.

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**Jack Zipes, editor/translator, The Fairy Tales of Hermann Hesse (1995)**

While Witch Week was going on, I was reading a collection of Hermann Hesse’s short fiction that in some way references the fairy tale tradition (doing double duty for German Literature Month). I loved The Glass Bead Game when I read it years ago, and remembered it as having a fairy-tale quality in its powerful language and haunting images, so I was interested to see what Hesse would do with the shorter form.

I found that translator/editor Jack Zipes had gathered many different sorts of tales, originally published between 1904 and 1918: early Gothic-style romances like “The Dwarf,” pieces that mimic traditional folklore like “The Three Linden Trees,” several surreal dream narratives, anti-war satires like “If the War Continues,” and symbolic quest stories like “Iris.” Few are retellings or variants of traditional tales, but they share the heightened, concentrated language and rich array of symbols that come to us from our fairy-tale heritage. As well as drawing on the past, they point toward the future: several of them struck me as reminiscent of science-fiction themes and ideas, and I wondered if Hesse had some influence on authors in that nascent genre.

There are wonderful flights of the imagination here: A poet whose poems have no words and cannot be written down; a mysterious stranger who comes to a city and grants everyone one wish, with surprising results; an isolated forest dweller who quests toward the mysterious world “outside.” Most of the stories were written under the shadow of the Great War, and in manifold ways they cry out for human beings to fight the forces of oppression and mechanization by cultivating the living forces within. Some are more polished, others more like sketches or preliminary drafts for more substantial works, but all offer a fascinating window into the soul of an artist striving to articulate his deepest feelings and thoughts in a turbulent time.

In the last story of the collection, “Iris,” I found a statement that could easily apply to the purpose and meaning of these very stories:

All children, as long as they still live in the mystery, are continuously occupied in their souls with the only thing that is important, which is themselves and their enigmatic relationship to the world around them. Seekers and wise people return to these preoccupations as they mature. Most people, however, forget and leave forever this inner world of the truly significant very early in their lives. Like lost souls they wander about for their entire lives in the multicolored maze of worries, wishes, and goals, none of which dwells in their innermost being and none of which leads them to their innermost core and home.

Hesse’s fairy tales are meant to remind us of what dwells in our innermost being and to guide us home. Close to 100 years after their original publication, it’s a message we still urgently need to listen to, and I’m glad this collection is here to help us.

Classics Club List #35
Back to the Classics Challenge: Classic in Translation

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