Reappraising Johann Peter Hebel

This book reappraises Hebel's oeuvre for a contemporary English-speaking audience, shedding light on his underrated talent, locating his work in its historical context and repositioning it in relation to Romantic aesthetics. We show his stories to be more varied and cosmopolitan compared with the Grimm Brothers' contemporaneous fairy stories. We introduce readers to the range of genres in which Hebel wrote, including poetry, almanacs, stories, children's Bible stories, and letters. As a teacher, academic and prelate of the Lutheran Church, he unexpectedly wears his erudition lightly, communicating skilfully with all kinds of readers. His most popular work, the Little Treasure Chest (1811), consisting of stories selected from his almanac-calendar, The Rhineland Family Friend (1808-1815 and 1819), reveals him as a master storyteller. For readers interested in the poetry of this period, his dialect poems in Alemannic Poems (1803) use many dramatic voices, differing markedly from contemporary German Romantic poetry. It is telling that Goethe, in a literary review of 1805, described Hebel's dialect poems as "raising the presentation of art to a higher level", and that Franz Kafka carried a copy of the Little Treasure Chest around in his pocket.