He found release for his imagination in this cult and a temporary escape from philistinism in the tiny secret society of friends with its own secret language. He was able to sympathize with the polytheism that sees nature full of spirits. His Christianity was always to have a pantheistic tinge.

In 1791 Hebel, now thirty-one, moved back to his old school in Karlsruhe as a teacher. He was simultaneously appointed to the position of subdeacon, which meant he preached once a month before the Margrave and his court. That was not a task he relished, he would have preferred a congregation of farmers, but he was valued for the feeling and the wit he put into his sermons. He was appreciated as an outstanding teacher too. He prepared his lessons thoroughly and had a special gift for clear exposition. His subjects were Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and geography; he also taught mathematics and nature studies. In 1793 when French Revolutionary forces approached the capital of Baden he took over the duties of the distinguished teacher of botany and biology, Gmelin, when Gmelin left Karlsruhe together with the Margrave and his entourage who sought safety further east. Hebel protested his incompetence as a natural scientist, but within a few years he had been invited to join leading German scientific societies. In 1798 he was promoted, with the title of Professor of Theology and Hebrew. He was drawing a good salary. He was entrusted with important tasks within the Church: composing prayers for regular use in services and revising the catechism. Yet he yearned to return to the Black Forest region. Even after thirty years in Karlsruhe he was still to write to his best friend in Lörrach that he felt a foreigner in the town on the plain and was moved to tears when he set eyes on a young soldier from his native valleys.

It was five years before Hebel visited what he regarded as his home country. From Karlsruhe he had gone on botanizing trips with Gmelin, who was to name a plant family after him (in vain, for it had already been named by William Hudson). He had made two longish journeys in 1794 and 1795. But not until the autumn of 1796 did he go back to the Black Forest and Basel. On this holiday trip he witnessed the French under General Moreau retreating over the Rhine and the effects of war on the civilian population who suffered from the requisitioning and looting by both sides. The cannon were still ringing in his ears when he arrived back in Karlsruhe. (No wonder that so many of his stories, written during or just after the exploits of Napoleon, tell of such times of war.) In the spring of 1799 and the autumn of 1801 he went ‘home’ again. It was in the months before and after the visit in 1801 that he wrote his Alemannische Gedichte, the most famous volume of dialect poetry in German.

He had become interested in medieval German, the history of the

language and the place of Alemannic in that development. He hoped to persuade others that the dialect of his native region was not a deformed version of standard modern German but a language with great merits of its own and a distinguished pedigree. According to contemporary experts it shared the name Alemannic with the language of the great medieval poets, the Minnesänger. His stated aim in the Alemannische Gedichte was to ennoble the language he had spoken before coming to Karlsruhe, to put it to edifying purpose and reveal its inherent ‘poetry’. But his real inspiration was simply his nostalgic love for his favourite countryside and its inhabitants. His loving imagination transfigured the landscape and the people. In these poems he anthropomorphizes the whole of nature. The river Wiese becomes a Black Forest girl who falls into the arms of the handsome Rhine. He invents his own mythology,

drawing on local superstition and on the make-believe world of his earlier cult of Protean nature.