The Treasure Chest
THE TREASURE CHEST
JOHANN PETER HEBEL (1760–1826) was born in Basel, where his German parents were in service to a Swiss family. Orphaned at the age of thirteen, he was given an education by his parents’ employers and studied theology. He qualified for the ministry but spent most of his life as a teacher, becoming headmaster of his old school in Karlsruhe in the liberal state of Baden in south-west Germany. His poetry, written in Alemannic dialect, was highly praised by Goethe, among others. His prose stories were written for a regional almanac edited and mostly written by himself.
JOHN HIBBERD is Reader in German at the University of Bristol. He is the author of works on eighteenth-century German literature, on Kafka and on Wedekind.
JOHANN PETER HEBEL
THE TREASURE CHEST
STORIES, ILLUSTRATED WITH CONTEMPORARY WOODCUTS
INTRODUCED AND TRANSLATED BY JOHN HIBBERD
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Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England
Stories by J. P. Hebel mostly selected from Schatzkästlein des rheinischen Hausfreunde, first published in 1811
This translation first published in Great Britain by Libris 1994
Published in Penguin Books 1995
5
Introduction and translation copyright © John Hibberd, 1994
All rights reserved
The moral right of the translator has been asserted
The illustrations in this edition are mostly taken from Der Rheinländische Hausfreund, where the stories were first published (courtesy Badische Landesbibliothek, Karlsruhe)
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-196053-1
Contents
Introduction by John Hibberd
Further Reading
A Note on Currency
The Treasure Chest
What a Strange Creature is Man
The Silver Spoon
The Cheap Meal
Dinner Outside
The Clever Judge
The Artful Hussar
The Mole
The Dentist
Two Stories
Settling Accounts with a Ghost
A Short Stage
The Careful Dreamer
A Bad Win
Strange Reckoning at the Inn
A Strange Walk and Ride
An Unusual Apology
Unexpected Reunion
The Great Sanhedrin in Paris
The Sly Pilgrim
Treachery Gets its Just Reward
Mixed Fortunes
The Commandant and the Light Infantry in Hersfeld
Kannitverstan
A Poor Reward
He Speaks German!
Suvorov
The Stranger in Memel
An Odd Prescription
The Barber’s Boy at Segringen
A Curious Ghost Story
The Hussar in Neisse
One Word Leads to Another
Moses Mendelssohn
A Dear Head and a Cheap One
Expensive Eggs
The Three Thieves
The Emperor Napoleon and the Fruit Woman in Brienne
The Bombardment of Copenhagen
The Strange Fortunes of a Young Englishman
Innocence is Hanged
A Bad Bargain
A Profitable Game of Riddles
The Recruit
The Ropemaker’s Reply
The Cure
How Freddy Tinder and his Brother Played Another Trick on Carrot-Top Jack
The Clever Sultan
A Shave as an Act of Charity
A Secret Beheading
The Starling from Segringen
You get as much as you give
Well Replied
The Mistaken Reckoning
The Last Word
Well Spoken, Badly Behaved
The Patient Husband
The Cunning Husband
Harry and the Miller from Brassenheim
The Fake Gem
The Cunning Girl
A Good Prescription
Terrible Disasters in Switzerland
How a Ghastly Story was Brought to Light by a Common or Garden Butcher’s Dog
A Strange Divorce
The Cunning Styrian
A Report from Turkey
How One Day Freddy Tinder Escaped from Prison and Came Safely over the Border
The Cosy Sentry Box
The Lightest Death Sentence
The Strange Gent
Field Marshal Suvorov
A Stallholder is Duped
An Officer’s Wife is Saved
Andreas Hofer
Patience Rewarded
The Miser
The Thief’s Reply
The Apprentice Boy
The Snuffbox
How Freddy Tinder Got Himself a Horse to Ride
The Champion Swimmer
How a Fine Horse was Offered for Sale for Five of the Best
Franziska
Married on Sentry Duty
Two Honest Tradesmen
Cunning Meets its Match
A Willing Justice
Pious Advice
The Weather Man
The Tailor at Penza
Tit for Tat
Mister Charles
The Glove Merchant
Alphabetical List of German titles (with English translation)
Notes
Introduction
Elias Canetti tells in his autobiography of his delight at discovering that Franz Kafka had called one famous piece from Hebel’s The Treasure Chest (‘Unexpected Reunion’, p. 25) ‘the most wonderful story in the world’. Canetti’s own reaction to Hebel was thus confirmed by a fellow twentieth-century writer, and for him that was important. He knew that generations of ordinary Germans had loved Hebel’s stories since their appearance in 1811. Yet the schoolmaster and cleric Hebel scarcely fitted modern notions of the literary genius. Might the common reader have been too easily pleased? Kafka and Canetti, and others with high demands of literature, thought not. They, like Goethe in Hebe’ls own time, recognized that Hebels collection of tales lives up to its title: it contains real gems of imaginative fiction. Great discoveries await the English reader who comes across it for the first time.
This treasure trove is not unlike a child’s box of treasures, and that is part of its charm. It inspires uncommon fondness. Some of its contents are unpretentious, consolation prizes, it might seem, in the treasure hunt Hebel invites us to enjoy; but they are presented with such charm that even the most sophisticated of readers may accept them too with a smile of pleasure. They grow in value with familiarity. The great prizes can, of course, be hunted systematically, by reading the collection through from beginning to end, even if in his original foreword the author himself, in characteristically teasing fashion, advised his readers that the best items might not be found at the beginning, but towards the middle or end of his volume. The Treasure Chest is, however, also there to be dipped into in the expectation of turning up something amusing or sad, curious, instructive or consoling, whatever suits a personal taste or a particular mood. It has something for almost everybody, things which invite repeated reading, prove unforgettable and give lasting enjoyment.
The sheer variety of the pieces and their brevity makes this book very unlike what the modern reader expects to find on the fiction shelves of the bookshop or library. Clearly the collection would be comparable to a Readers’ Digest, were it not the creation of one person, bearing the unmistakable unifying stamp of his personality. Because it also has the marked and intriguing flavour of a particular time and place and because it is eminently suitable for the young and for reading aloud to others it might just be grouped with something like Uncle Remus’s Brer Rabbit stories. Yet any such comparison is likely to be misleading. Hebel’s delightful mixture of sentiment and humour is, for instance, similar to the quality which has made A Christmas Carol favourite reading down the ages. Yet his prose is unique. And unlike any Digest The Treasure Chest has become an enduring popular classic. Why was this? Who was the author Hebel, and how did he come to write the stories or articles, the anecdotes, vignettes, reports and jokes found in this volume? In answering these questions and attempting to explain the impact of his work, which some (paradoxically perhaps, given Hebel’s down-to-earth attitudes) have understandably called quite magical, we shall see that Hebel the man and Hebel the writer were very much of one piece.
Johann Peter Hebel rose from very humble origins to become a schoolmaster and leading churchman; he knew the mind and the language of the ordinary people for whom he wrote the pieces he put into The Treasure Chest. His father (Johann Jakob Hebel, 1720–61) trained as a weaver before economic circumstances led him in 1747 to leave his native Palatinate in south-west Germany. Johann Jakob entered the service of a well-to-do citizen of Basel in Switzerland who as a major in the French army took him with him as batman on his campaigns.
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