The Black Spider

The Black Spider

Jeremias Gotthelf

Translated by H.M. Waidson

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The Black Spider first published in 1842

This translation first published by John Calder (Publishers) Ltd in 1958
Reprinted by John Calder (Publishers) Ltd in 1980
First published in the USA in 1980 by Riverrun Press Inc.
This edition first published by Oneworld Classics Limited in 2009
Translation © John Calder (Publishers) Limited, 1958, 1980

Front cover image © Getty Images

Printed in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe

ISBN: 978-1-84749-108-4

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Contents

Introduction

Chronology

The Black Spider

Introduction

JEREMIAS GOTTHELF was the pseudonym by which the Swiss pastor Albert Bitzius, who died in 1854, was known as a writer of prose fiction. When his first novel Der Bauernspiegel (The Peasants’ Mirror) appeared, he was thirty-nine years old, a married man with three children, and Protestant minister in the quiet village of Lützelflüh, some twenty miles to the east of Berne. His was, or appeared to be, essentially a practical temperament. He was indifferent to theoretical theology, and saw religion as something to be experienced and to be lived. Keenly interested in education, social welfare and politics, settled and happy in his family life, with a first-hand intimate knowledge of the farming community in which he worked, it might seem strange that he should turn to novel-writing and, after the publication of his first novel, pour out during the next sixteen years a varied succession of imaginative writings with a power and fluency that only ceased with his death. A man of immense vitality, he continued to be pastor of his large and scattered parish as well as to be an educationist and freelance journalist during these years, when he wrote his twelve long novels and some forty shorter tales, and in addition one extensive novel fragment, some essays and briefer works. In a letter of December 1838, Gotthelf describes the breakthrough of his creative writing in the following terms:

Thus I was hemmed in and kept down on all sides, I could express myself nowhere in free action. I couldn’t even tire myself out riding, and if I had been able to go riding every other day, I should never have written. You must realize now that a wild life was moving within me of which no one suspected the existence, and if a few expressions forced their way out of my mouth, they were taken as mere insolent words. This life had either to consume itself or to break forth in some way or other. It did so in writing. And people naturally don’t realize that it is indeed a regular breaking-out of a long pent-up force, like the bursting-forth of a mountain lake. Such a lake bursts out in wild floods until it finds its own path, and sweeps mud and rocks along in its wild flight. Then it gets cleaner, and may become quite a pretty little stream. My writing too has broken its own path in the same way, a wild hitting-out in all directions where I have been constricted, in order to make space for myself. How I came to writing was on the one hand an instinctive compulsion, on the other hand I really had to write like that if I wanted to make any impression on the people.

When first published in 1842, Die schwarze Spinne (The Black Spider) aroused relatively little interest; the novel Uli der Knecht (Uli the Farmhand), which had appeared a year earlier, with its realism, humour and contemporary setting, was the work by which Gotthelf was first to become at all generally known outside Switzerland. It was not until the twentieth century that The Black Spider became the most widely read of its author’s works. In 1949, Thomas Mann wrote that there was scarcely a work in world literature that he admired more than The Black Spider, and its position as one of the outstanding examples of narrative fiction in the German language is now generally recognized. Perhaps the psychological theories of Freud and Jung and the nightmare fantasies of Kafka had to be absorbed before the European imagination was ready for Gotthelf’s The Black Spider.

The story opens idyllically, a conscious idealization of the peasant-farming way of life. The christening celebration in a farmer’s family would be a homely scene of a type in which Gotthelf must frequently have taken part. Indeed the farm itself was about ten miles from Gotthelf’s house and church at Lützelflüh, and the present Hornbachhof near Wasen is built on the site of the farm which he knew. The little valley of the river Grüne, with its darker patches of forest mingled with the brighter colours of the cultivated land and the scattered red-roofed farmsteads, presents a friendly, peaceful atmosphere now, as no doubt in Gotthelf’s day. It is not an Alpine landscape; to the north can be seen the blue line of the Jura, and from vantage points in the district the peaks of the Bernese Oberland are on a clear day distantly visible to the south. But the valley itself is enclosed by green hills rather than high, rocky mountains. The localities named in the tale are not fictitious. The Bärhegenhubel is a hilltop some 770 feet above the valley. It is about three miles to the east of Sumiswald, with its “Bear” Inn and round table, and its nearby Kilchstalden, or “church slope”; the tree-clad Münneberg rises a little further beyond to the west of the village.

The humour and everyday realism of the framing narrative are more typical of Gotthelf’s writing generally than is the legend of the black spider which forms the central interest of the tale.