The Most Wonderful Story in the World

Certain masterpieces exert their influence secretly, as if by subterranean stealth. Without dazzle, almost surreptitiously, they have the odd quality of seeming always to have been present. Their impact is slow, their momentum almost indiscernible; they suffuse the mental air rather than setting it violently ajostle. There are, of course, books that remain unappreciated for decades after their authors’ deaths, such as Stendahl’s “The Red and the Black” or Melville’s “Moby Dick.” These are not the sorts of work I have in mind. A tone of voice, a way of telling a tale, a peculiar whimsy; by such intangible but unmistakable accents we recognize that an author has pervaded the work of his successors and though strangely faceless has become wellnigh ubiquitous.This is the case of the German author Johann Peter Hebel (1760-1826). Rilke loved his poetry and could quote it by heart. Schumann set it to music. Brecht modeled one of his most distinctive works on Hebel’s masterpiece, “The Treasure Chest.” Kafka considered “The Unexpected Reunion,” the greatest of Hebel’s inimitable tales, “the most wonderful story in the world.” But apart from Robert Lowell, who translated “Transience,” Hebel’s darkest and most moving poem in his volume “Imitations,” American poets, not to mention readers, have remained pretty much unaware of this quiet, almost inconspicuous genius.Hebel was a Lutheran pastor and dedicated pedagogue, based for most of his career in Karlsruhe. He became a writer almost incidentally. He began as a poet in a manner seemingly calculated to discourage readers, for he wrote exclusively in his own Alemannic dialect. Even if you know German well, you’ll need a glossary to figure out his meanings, and then, let’s face it, Alemannic isn’t the most euphonious form of German. But the self-imposed constraint is the clue to his work.He was an intimate writer who wrote for everyone. Under his spell, we all become familiars. He wrote not to achieve renown, but to amuse, to delight, and to instruct. “The Treasure Chest” is an unclassifiable melange of stories, jokes, observations on nature and history, and chatty discourse on everything under the sun. Hebel was pious, as befits a member of the clergy, but he also had a mischievous love of swindlers, mountebanks, and nogoodniks of all stripes, whose antics and misadventures he took great relish in recounting.When he took over the publication of a failing parish almanac, around 1805, he changed the title to “The Rhineland House-Friend,” and it is the voice of a friend – affable, gossipy, and pleasantly eccentric – that sounds through its unpredictable pages. This confiding accent was the key to Hebel’s success – Goethe, first reading the new almanac, took out a subscription at once.For lack of good translations Hebel has remained obscure in the English-speaking world. Some five years after he began his almanac, a collection of his best anecdotes and little essays was gathered together under the title “The Treasure Chest of the Rhineland House-Friend”; it is this on which his just claim to immortality rests. A good representative selection is available from Penguin Classics in “The Treasure Chest,” translated by John Hibberd, illustrated by charming woodcuts.“The Treasure Chest” (or “Schatzkastlein” in German) is a kind of “Prairie Home Companion” of its day – pungent and ironic, funny, tender, and hard-headed all at once. But it’s also much more than that: Hebel, when he wasn’t indulging his propensity for verbal tomfoolery and Katzenjammer humor (some of his jokes are pretty awful), was a narrator second to none.The story Kafka thought “the most wonderful” in the world appears here under the title “Unexpected Reunion.” This little tale, barely three pages long, compresses an entire lifetime into a single moment of magical recognition. The plot is simplicity itself. A young man kisses his fiancée goodbye as he heads off to work in the mines; he is dressed in black, for “a miner is always dressed ready for his own funeral.” He never returns; the bride “wept for him and never forgot him.” Simple enough so far, but then the story furls outward:In the meantime the city of Lisbon in Portugal was destroyed by an earthquake, the Seven Years War came and went, the Emperor Francis I died, the Jesuits were dissolved, Poland was partitioned, the Empress Maria Theresa died, and Struensee was executed, and America became independent, and the combined French and Spanish force failed to take Gibraltar.Hebel lists other momentous events, not once mentioning the bereaved bride, and concludes his inventory by remarking, “The millers ground the corn, the blacksmiths wielded their 968 2174 1078 2185hammers, and the miners dug for seams of metal in their workplace under the ground.”It is the miners themselves who decades later discover “the body of a young man soaked in ferrous vitriol but otherwise untouched by decay and unchanged, so that all his features and his age were still clearly recognizable, as if he had died only an hour before or had just nodded off at work.” No one alive can recognize the dead man except for his bride. She sees his face again, exactly as it had looked 50 years before, on the eve of their wedding day; she herself has grown old and gray and lame.The “unexpected reunion” is between the bride, bent by age, and the bridegroom, eerily unchanged. And we realize, though Hebel only hints at it, that all the life together they might have led, under the shadow of those huge and epochal events, has been impacted into a single, and final, instant of recognition; and even more, that in some mysterious fashion, those great historical cataclysms have faded into sudden insignificance by comparison. She has the young man’s body brought into her house. When the grave is ready and he is laid in his casket, she fastens upon him the black silk scarf sewn with red stripes that she had made for him for their wedding day. She dresses in her own Sunday best and follows his body to the cemetery “as if it were her wedding day.”By the sparest of devices, Hebel plants in our imagination a sense of the enormity of time. When the withered bride tells her unblemished bridegroom, arrested forever in his youth, “don’t let time weigh heavy on you! I have only a few things left to do, and I shall join you soon,” we no longer know which of the two has suffered more under the heaviness of time.eormsby@nysun.com

The Most Wonderful Story in the World

The Most Wonderful Story in the World

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