Reviews for Schatzkastlein Des Rheinischen Hausfreundes

The average rating for Schatzkastlein Des Rheinischen Hausfreundes based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-03-31 00:00:00 Bonnie Baize JOHANN PETER HEBEL: THE STORY TELLER FOR ETERNITY Let me pose a challenge question. Can any GR reader here suggest me a classic story collection better than the one hundred delightful stories condensed in 160 pages of Johann Peter Hebel’s Treasure Chest ? If you measure the quality and the quantity, I doubt whether anything as entertaining as ‘The Treasure Chest’ exists in literature. I am surprised that not a single review of this wonderful German masterpiece has so far appeared in GR and hence, at least for once, let me be the champion here to promote this great classic, one that has solidly stayed with me for more than a decade as my best bedtime book. Many years ago, while reading Elias Canetti’s (1981 Nobel Prize Winner for Literature) autobiography, The tongue set free, I came across the mention of the story Unexpected Reunion that Franz Kafka had hailed as ‘most wonderful story in the world’. It took me a while get the book it wasn’t available anywhere in India though it was printed in the popular penguin edition. I am glad that I lived to read this great story (and many more in this collection) which I too consider as one of the rare gems in literature. Johann Peter Hebel (1760-1826) was born to humble parents at Basel in Switzerland. Tragedy struck him at an early age when his father, a mercenary soldier and a self-taught scholar of some attainment, died when Hebel was at the age of two. Soon his sister died and his mother too succumbed to an epidemic when he was thirteen. Being of brilliant promise, he found friends who enabled him to complete his school education and to study theology at Erlangen. At the end of his university course, he worked as a private tutor, then became headmaster at the Gymnasium in Karlsruhe. The whole genesis of The Treasure Chest started when fate destined this Lutheran pastor and headmaster to revamp a community Newsletter and improve its circulation. He changed the Newsletter and along with church matters, he started inserting sensible good humoured stories and anecdotes to entertain the ordinary readers in the community. The clarity, precision, pleasingly moral tone, humaneness, concrete imagery and wit of his stories soon surpassed the boundaries of Lutheran world and the pastor soon became one of the most admired story tellers of his time. Hebel was also a poet and his poetical narratives and lyric poems, written in the "Alemanic" dialect, are also equally "popular" though not much has yet been translated into English. Few modern German writers can surpass Hebel as a story teller in fidelity, naiveté, humour, and in the freshness and vigour of his descriptions. His stories were deeply admired by acclaimed poets and writers like Goethe, Herman Hesse, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno. Tolstoy was able to recite some of his stories by heart. Hermann Hesse called Hebel’s book The Treasure Chest , ‘a summit and jewel of German narrative prose’; and Elias Canetti said ‘I don’t believe there’s a book in the world that engraved itself on my mind as perfectly and as minutely as this one.’ He “secretly” measured each of his books against Hebel’s style. The Treasure Chest is not unlike a child’s box of treasures, and that is part of its charm. It inspires uncommon fondness in the first reading itself. Its contents are unpretentious and they are presented with such an allure that even the most sophisticated of readers may accept them with a smile of pleasure. Hebel is a writer of classical stature and a stylist of the highest order. His simple syntax, pithy phrases, usage of concrete rather than abstract images, jumbling of words, usage of ordinary language, unorthodox punctuation remarks are powerful and impactful techniques that lend a special charm. His resource bin is inexhaustible and his best stories are drawn from fables, historical events, news reports, disasters, anecdotes, jokes, mysteries and tales he had read or heard. His prose, as the translator John Hebberd says in his wonderful introduction, is meant for the ear and not eyes. Ear is the sole witness to the colourful kaleidoscope of his stories. His triumph lies is in cultivating and propagating an oral tradition of stories. He is someone who knew what readers wanted and entertained them with stories palatable to their tastes considering the community around and the epoch he lived in. Heroes of his stories are drawn from the society around him and they included criminals, peasants, cunning traders, wayfarers, soldiers, Kings, Sultans. His heroes are humans with their own failings. Yet, there is an element of goodness that shines in them and it is this saving grace that Habel focuses and perfects. He loves and relishes in the comedy of life and all that he witnesses are embraced without malice. As mentioned in the story, The Glove merchant, about a cunning merchant who smuggled the left handed gloves across Rhine and cheated customs by offering the right handed ones , he loves the philosophy What the eye doesn't see, the heart doesn't grieve. Just the hearing of a strange name, and its associated mystery, can trigger Hebel’s imagination and that is what Hebel capitalizes in a marvelous masterpiece in this collection titled ‘Kannitverstan’. The ingenuity, cunningness and fate of some of the ordinary folks in these tales will pleasure the heart and soul of any reader. I won’t tell anything about it here. I think his training as a pastor helped him to weave parables effortlessly and make a point without beating the bush. For the readers, I have keyed in three stories here to illustrate his variety, including Kafka's favorite story of Hebel. THE PATIENT HUSBAND A man came home tired one evening and was looking forward to a piece of bread and butter with chives on it or a bit of smoked shoulder. But his wife, who wore the trousers in their house and especially in the kitchen, had the key to the larder in her pocket and was out visiting a friend. So he sent first the maid and then the lad to ask his wife to come home or send him the key. Each time she said, ‘I’m coming, tell him to wait just a moment!’. But then, as his hunger grew and his patience dwindled within him, he and the lad carried the locked larder cupboard over to the friend’s house where his wife was and he said to her, ‘Wife, kindly unlock the cupboard so that I can have something for supper, I can’t hold out any longer!’. So his wife laughed and cut him off a hunk of bread and a piece of shoulder. THE THIEF’S REPLY A thief who gave himself airs was asked, ‘Who do you think you are? You can’t go back where you come from and should be glad that we put up with you here!’. ‘That is what you think! ‘ said the thief, ‘My masters back home are so fond of me that I know for certain if I went home they would never let me leave again’. UNEXPECTED REUNION At Falun in Sweden, a good fifty years ago, a young miner kissed his pretty young bride-to-be and said, ‘On the feast of Saint Lucia the parson will bless our love and we shall become man and wife and start a home of our own’. ‘And may peace and love dwell there with us’, said his lovely bride, and smiled sweetly, ‘for if you are everything to me, and without you I‘d sooner be in the grave than anywhere else’. ‘When however, before the feast of Saint Lucia, the parson had called out their names in the church for the second time: ‘If any of you know cause, or just hindrance, why these two persons should not get joined together in holy Matrimony’ -Death paid a call. For the next day when the young man passed her house in his black miner’s suit (a miner is always dressed ready for the funeral), he tapped at the window as usual and wished her good morning all right, but he did not wish her good evening. He did not return from the mine, and in vain that same morning she sewed a red border on a black neckerchief for him to wear on their wedding day, and when he did not come back she put it away, and she wept for him, and never forgot him. 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 the Gibraltar. The Turks cooped up General Stein in the Veterane Cave in Hungary, and the Emperor Joseph died too. King Gustavus of Sweden conquered Russian Finland ,the French Revolution came and the long war began, and the Emperor Leopold II was buried. Napoleon defeated Prussia, the English bombarded Copenhagen, and the farmers sowed and reaped. The millers ground the corn, the blacksmiths wielded their hammers, and the miners dug for seams of metal in their workplace under the ground. But in 1809, within a day or two of the feast of Saint John, when the miners at Falun were trying to open up a passage between two shafts, they dug out from the rubble and the vitriol water, a good three hundred yards below the ground, 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. Yet when they brought him to the surface his father and mother and friends and acquaintances were all long since dead, and no one claimed to know the sleeping youth or to remember his misadventure, until the woman came who had once been promised to the miner who one day had gone below and had not returned. Grey and bent, she hobbled up on a crutch to where he lay and recognized her bridegroom, and more in joyous rapture than in grief, she sank down over the beloved corpse, and it was some time before she had recovered from her fervent emotion. ‘It is my betrothed’, she said at last, ‘whom I have mourned these past fifty years, and now God grants that I see him once more before I die. A week before our wedding, he went under ground and never came up again’. The hearts of all those there were moved to sadness and tears when they saw the former bride-to-be as an old woman whose beauty and strength had left her, and the groom still in the flower of his youth; and how the flame of young love was rekindled in her breast after fifty years, yet he did not open his mouth to smile , nor his eyes to recognize her; and how finally she, as the sole relative and the only person who had claim to him, had the miners carry him into her house until the grave was made ready for him in the churchyard. The next day when the grave lay ready in the churchyard and the miners came to fetch him she opened a casket and put the black silk kerchief and red stripes on him, and then she went with him in her best Sunday dress, as if it were her wedding day, not the day of his burial. You see, as they lowered him into his grave in the churchyard she said, “Sleep well for another day or a week or so longer in your cold wedding bed, and don’t let time weigh heavy on you! I have only a few things left to do, and I shall join you soon, and soon the day will dawn’. ‘What the earth has given back once it will not withhold again at the final call’, she said as she went away and looked back over her shoulder once more. .............................................................................. Walter Benjamin once made the striking claim, when writing about Hebel, that "death is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death." He was referring particularly to the story "Unexpected Reunion”. There is a secure naturalness in this story that must have appealed to Kafka in contrast to his own abysses of uncertainties. Perhaps the switch from private to public and back, and the enormously telescoped time scheme could be another reason. The second para of Unexpected Reunion is simply brilliant and that shows his craft. When Hebel, in the course of the story, is confronted with the necessity of the fifty years gap graphic, he does it brilliantly in that paragraph beginning with 'In the meantime the city of Lisbon'. Probably never has a writer embedded his report deeper in natural history than Hebel manages to do in this chronology. If we read that paragraph carefully, death in it appears with regularity I think Hebel does extreme linguistic compression on an extraordinary event (Perhaps Post modern German writers like Peter Handke adopted this technique from Hebel). Thus, to punctuate the lapse of fifty years, Hebel frames the story of village love affair coupled with World historical events. The craft has ingenuousness and it attracts even an ordinary reader to immerse in it. By integrating the constants of sowing and reaping, with significant world historic events, Hebel poignantly dovetails our daily concerns into the larger framework of political time , situating individual experience with the larger ‘collective singular’ history . Hebel is extremely terse in word usage, not a word more anywhere. This piece is also devoid of sentimentality but its human drama tugs our heart forever and I remember that my first reading was unforgettable. The dead one emerges as youthful and uncorrupted while the living is in decay. The funeral is the celebration of wedding...and finally that very poignant sentence, ‘What the earth has given back once it will not withhold again at the final call’...Tell me, what more you need from a beautiful story? The sheer variety and brevity of stories in this collection (some as brief as a paragraph) are amazing. They are simple and agreeable to even a casual reader. As said, they include weird, funny, touching and good-humoured ones too. Hebel had as sure a grasp of the world as he had of the way to amuse his readers. Nearly two hundred years after he wrote his stories, you’ll get the point of Hebel in about a minute. To conclude, Hebel possessed unique style and aesthetic tricks. The key point is that he succeeded in describing simple people and made a meaningful order of the world shine through their everyday actions. In every detail, he had the whole in view. This “holistic” trait of his writings is what makes this great writer a contemporary one. The Treasure Chest lives by its name as a treasure trove of stories that will hold eternal appeal for readers of all generations.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-09-01 00:00:00 Lois Neal In occasione del centenario della morte di Hebel nel 1926, Walter Benjamin disse che il Tesoretto dell'amico di casa renano è una delle più genuine opere in prosa della letteratura tedesca. E W.G. Sebald, per il cui tramite giungo alla lettura di questa opera, dice: "Oggi non mi stanco mai di leggere e rileggere le storie del suo Almanacco, forse perché il suggello della loro perfezione - come osservava anche Benjamin - è proprio la facilità con cui le dimentichiamo". Se trovate una copia del Tesoretto compratelo, anche se non avete intenzione di leggerlo subito. Ogni tanto sfogliatelo e leggetene qualche racconto, una breve cronaca, una storiella edificante: le pagine di Hebel, come una piccola e inaspettata madeleine, vi riporteranno indietro nel tempo e riproverete lo stupore disarmato di quando, bambini, sognavate sulle pagine del Sussidiario e ascoltavate rapiti le spiegazioni della maestra.