The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 11

Still he considered: after all it was a storm-tide; only he himself had never seen such a one as that; his wife, his child, they were safe on the high mound, in the solid house; but his dike – and pride shot through his heart – the Hauke-Haien-Dike, as the people called it; now was the time for it to prove how dikes must be built!

But – what was this? He was at the angle between the two dikes; where were the men whom he had ordered here, whose work it was to watch this spot? He looked north up the old dike; for he had sent a few up there too. Neither here nor there could he see a soul; he rode out a piece; but still he was alone: only the soughing of the storm and the surging of the sea that filled the air to an immeasurable distance smote deafeningly on his ear. He turned his horse back; he came again to the deserted corner and let his eyes pass along the line of the new dike; he saw distinctly, the waves rolled up here more slowly, less violently; it almost seemed as if there were other water there. "It will stand, all right!" he murmured and felt a laugh rise within him.

But his inclination to laugh soon passed as his eyes glanced farther along the line of his dike: on the northwest corner – what was that? He saw a dark swarm of moving beings; he saw how industriously they stirred and hurried – there could be no doubt, they were men! What were they trying to do, what work were they doing on his dike now! And already his spurs were in the white horse's flanks and the animal was flying with him thither; the gale came from the broad side, at times the gusts came with such force that they were almost swept down from the dike into the new koog; but horse and rider knew where they were riding. Hauke already perceived that probably a few dozen men were working industriously there together and already he saw distinctly that a gutter was cut right across through the new dike. Violently he reined in his horse. "Stop!" he cried, "stop! What devil's work are you doing here?"

The men had ceased shoveling with a start when they suddenly perceived the dikegrave among them; the wind had carried his words to them and he saw that several were trying to answer him; but he only caught their vehement gestures, for they all stood at his left and what they said was carried away by the gale which was so violent out here that it hurled them against one another so that they were obliged to crowd together. Hauke measured with his quick eyes the gutter that had been dug and the height of the water which, in spite of the new profile, dashed up almost to the top of the dike and spattered horse and rider. Only ten minutes more work and then – he saw it distinctly – then the high tide would break through the gutter and the Hauke-Haien Koog would be buried by the sea!

The dikegrave beckoned one of the laborers to the other side of his horse. "Now, speak," he shouted, "what are you doing here, what is the meaning of this?"

And the man shouted back: "We've got to break through the new dike, sir! So that the old dike doesn't break."

"What have you got to do?"

"Break through the new dike!"

"And flood the koog? What devil ordered you to do that?"

"No, sir, no devil; the commissioner Ole Peters has been here; he gave the order!"

Anger flamed up into the rider's eyes: "Do you know me?" he shouted. "Where I am Ole Peters has no orders to give! Away with you! Back to your places where I left you."

And as they hesitated he dashed into the group with his horse: "Away, to your own or the devil's grandmother!"

"Be careful, sir," shouted one of the group and struck at the madly careering animal with his spade; but a kick from the horse knocked the spade from his hand, another fell to the ground. At that moment there suddenly arose a shriek from the rest of the group, a shriek such as only deathly terror wrests from the human throat; for a moment all, even the dikegrave and the horse, stood as if paralyzed; only one of the laborers had extended his arm like a sign-post; he pointed to the northwest corner of the two dikes, where the new one ran up to the old one. Only the raging of the wind and the surging of the water could be heard. Hauke turned in his saddle: what was that there? His eyes grew large: "By God! A breach! A breach in the old dike!"

"Your fault, dikegrave," shouted a voice from the group. "Your fault! Take it with you before God's throne!"

Hauke's face, first red with anger, had grown pale as death; the moon which shone on it could not make it whiter; his arms hung limp, he scarcely knew that he held the rein. But that too only lasted for a second; already he drew himself up, a hard groan broke from his mouth; then dumbly he turned his horse and with a snort it raced away with him to the east along the dike. The rider's glance flew sharply in all directions; thoughts were whirling in his head: What blame had he to bear before God's throne? The break through the new dike – perhaps they would have accomplished it if he had not called "stop!" But – there was another thing and his heart grew hot, he knew it only too well – the summer before, if only Ole Peters' evil mouth had not held him back then – that was where it lay! He alone had recognized the weakness of the old dike; he should have pushed on the new work in spite of everything: "Lord God, I confess it," he cried out suddenly aloud into the storm. "I have discharged my office badly."

At his left, close to his horse's hoofs, raged the sea; before him, now in complete darkness, lay the old koog with its mounds and homes; the moon's pale light on the sky had disappeared entirely; only at one spot did light shine through the darkness. And something like comfort crept into the man's heart; it must be shining over from his own house, it seemed to him like a message from his wife and child. Thank God, they were safe on the high mound! The others, certainly, they were already in the upland village; more light glimmered from there than he had ever seen before; yes, even high up in the air, probably from the church-tower, light shone out into the night. "They will all have gone away," said Hauke to himself; "to be sure, on more than one mound a house will lie in ruins, bad years will come for the flooded fens; drains and sluices to be repaired! We must bear it and I will help, those too who have done me harm; only, Lord, my God, be merciful to us men!"

He turned his eyes to the side, towards the new koog; about it foamed the sea; but in it lay the peace of night. Involuntarily triumphant rejoicing rose in the rider's breast: "The Hauke-Haien-Dike, it must stand; it will hold after more than a hundred years!"

A roar like thunder at his feet roused him from these dreams; the white horse did not want to go on. What was that? The horse jumped back and he felt how a piece of the dike in front of him plunged down into the depths. He opened his eyes wide and shook off all meditation: he had stopped close to the old dike, the horse's front feet had been on it. Involuntarily he jerked the horse back; at that moment the last veiling of clouds swept from the moon and the mild planet illumined the horror that seething and hissing rushed down before him into the old koog.

Hauke stared at it senselessly; it was a deluge, come to swallow up man and beast. Then a light shone again into his eyes; it was the same one that he had seen before; it was still burning on his mound; and now as, encouraged, he looked down into the koog he perceived that behind the confusing whirl that dashed down clamorously before him, only a breadth of about a hundred feet was inundated; beyond that he could clearly distinguish the way that led up from the koog. He saw still more: a carriage, no, a two-wheeled gig came driving madly up towards the dike; a woman, yes, and a child too, were sitting in it. And now – was not that the shrill bark of a little dog that was borne by on the wind? Almighty God! It was his wife, his child! They were already coming quite close and the foaming mass of water was rushing towards them. A shriek, a shriek of desperation broke from the rider's breast: "Elke!" he shouted; "Elke! Back! Back!"

But wind and sea were not merciful, their raging tossed his words away; only the wind had caught his cloak and nearly flung him from his horse; and the approaching vehicle flew on steadily towards the rushing flood. As he looked he saw his wife stretch out her arms as if up towards him: had she recognized him? Had longing, had deathly anxiety about him driven her out of her secure house? And now – was she shouting a last word to him? These questions shot through his mind; they remained unanswered: all words from her to him, from him to her were lost; only an uproar as if the world were coming to an end filled their ears and excluded all other sounds.

"My child! Oh Elke, Oh faithful Elke!" cried Hauke out into the storm. Another large piece of the dike in front of him gave way and thunderingly the sea plunged in after it; once more he saw below the horse's head the wheels of the conveyance rise up out of the chaotic horror and then disappear in a whirl. The fixed eyes of the rider who stood so solitary on the dike saw nothing further. "The end!" he said softly to himself; then he rode to the edge of the abyss where, below him, the waters rushing uncannily were beginning to flood his home village; he still saw the light shining from his house; he felt that the soul had gone out of it. He raised himself high in the saddle and drove his spurs into the white horse's flanks; the animal reared and nearly fell over backwards; but the man's strength forced it down again. "Forward!" he cried once more as he had so often urged it on to a steady ride. "Take me, God; spare the others!"

Another pressure of the spurs; a shriek from the white horse that rose above the gale and the roar of the waves; then from the plunging stream below a dull splash, a brief struggle.

The moon looked down from above and illumined the scene; but on the dike beneath there was no longer any life save that of the savage waters which soon had almost completely covered the old koog. But still the mound where stood Hauke Haien's home rose up out of the swelling flood, the light still shone from there; and from the upland where the houses gradually grew dark, the solitary light from the church steeple threw its wavering beams across the seething waves.

The narrator ceased; I reached out for the filled glass that had long been standing before me; but I did not put it to my mouth; my hand remained lying on the table.

"That is the story of Hauke Haien," my host began again, "as I had to tell it according to my best knowledge. Our dikegrave's housekeeper, of course, would have made another tale; for this too people have to report: after the flood the white skeleton of the horse was to be seen again in the moonlight on Jevershallig as before; everyone in the village believed he saw it. So much is certain: Hauke Haien with his wife and child went down in that flood; I have not been able to find even their graves up in the churchyard; the dead bodies were undoubtedly carried back through the breach by the receding water out to sea, at the bottom of which they gradually were dissolved into their original component parts – thus they had peace from men. But the Hauke Haien Dike still stands now after a hundred years, and tomorrow if you ride to town and don't mind going half an hour out of your way you will have it beneath your horse's hoofs.

"The thanks Jewe Manners once promised the builder that the grandchildren should give have not come, as you have seen; for thus it is, sir: they gave Socrates poison to drink and our Lord Jesus Christ they nailed to the cross! It is not so easy to do such things as that any longer; but – to make a saint of a man of violence or a malicious bull-necked priest, or to make a ghost or a phantom of night of an able fellow just because he is a whole head above the rest of us – that can be done any day."

When the earnest little man had said that he got up and listened at the window. "It is different out there now," he said, and drew the woolen curtain back; it was bright moonlight. "See," he continued, "there are the commissioners coming back, but they are separating, they are going home; there must have been a break over on the other side; the water has fallen."

I looked out beside him; the windows upstairs, where we were, lay above the edge of the dike; it was as he had said. I took my glass and finished it: "I thank you for this evening," I said; "I think we can sleep in peace!"

"That we can," replied the little man; "I wish you a good night's sleep from my heart!"

In going down I met the dikegrave below in the hall; he wanted to take home with him a map that he had left in the tap-room. "It's all over," he said. "But our schoolmaster has told you a story of his own, I suppose; he belongs to the rationalists!"

"He seems to be a sensible man."

"Oh yes, certainly; but you can't mistrust your own eyes after all. And over on the other side, just as I said it would be, the dike is broken!"

I shrugged my shoulders: "We will have to take counsel with our pillows about that! Good night, dikegrave!"

He laughed. "Good night!"

The next morning, in the most golden of sunlights, which had risen on a wide devastation, I rode along the Hauke Haien Dike down to the town.

TO A DECEASED2

But this is more than I can bear,That still the laughing sun is bright,As in the days when you were there,That clocks are striking, unaware,And mark the change of day and night —That we, as twilight dims the air,Assemble when the day is done,And that the place where stood your chairAlready many others share,And that you seem thus missed by none;When meanwhile from the gate belowThe narrow strips of moonlight spareInto your vault down deeply goAnd with a ghostly pallid glowAre stealing o'er your coffin there.

THE CITY3

The shore is gray, the sea is gray,And there the city stands;The mists upon the houses weighAnd through the calm, the ocean grayRoars dully on the strands.There are no rustling woods, there flyNo birds at all in May,The wild goose with its callous cryAlone on autumn nights soars by,The wind-blown grasses sway.And yet my whole heart clings to thee,Gray city by the sea;And e'er the spell of youth for meDoth smiling rest on thee, on theeGray city by the sea.

THE HEATH 4

It is so quiet here. There liesThe heath in noon's warm sunshine gold.A gleam of light, all rosy, fliesAnd hovers round the mounds of old.The herbs are blooming; fragrance fairNow fills the bluish summer air.The beetles rush through bush and trees,In little golden coats of mail;And on the heather-bells the beesAlight on all its branches frail.From out the grass there starts a throngOf larks and fills the air with song.A lonely house, half-crumbled, low:The farmer, in the doorway bent,Stands watching in the sunlight's glowThe busy bees in sweet content.And on a stone near by his boyIs carving pipes from reeds with joy.Scarce trembling through the peace of noonThe town-clock strikes – from far, it seems.The old man's eye-lids droop right soon,And of his honey crops he dreams. —The sounds that tell our time of stressHave not yet reached this loneliness.

CONSOLATION 5

Let come to me whatever may,While you are with me it is day.Though in the world I wander far,My home is ever – where you are.Your face is all in all to me,The future's frown I do not see.

WILHELM RAABE

By Ewald Eiserhardt, Ph.DAssistant Professor of German, University of Rochester

Wilhelm Raabe was born on the eighth of September, 1831, in the little town of Eschershausen in the Duchy of Braunschweig. He received his schooling at the Gymnasiums in Holzminden and Wolfenbüttel; from 1849-53 he was employed in a bookstore in Magdeburg; then, while living with his mother in Wolfenbüttel, he prepared for the university, and later went to Berlin, where he studied chiefly history, philosophy, and literature. After the success of his first book, Records of Sparrow Lane (1857), he turned entirely to authorship. In 1862 he married and moved to Stuttgart, where he remained till 1870. From then on until his death in 1910 he lived in Braunschweig. Raabe was an extraordinarily productive writer, yet during the last ten years of his life he entirely gave up all literary activity, and left his last work, Old Folks in the Old Home, unfinished.

The underlying theme of Raabe's writings is the inner life of the individual man and his specifically human sphere of family, society, community, nation. With this he combines a strong preference for what is characteristically German, which he loves just as much where it is merely German, in fact, German to the point of being odd and bizarre, as where it merges into the universally human. Raabe believes, however, that both the peculiarly German and the broadly human types are found with greater richness and depth among the Germans of the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century than among those of the last third. The period before the development of modern Germany is that in which he loves best to linger. When he forsakes it, he does so to go still farther back, into the realm of history proper.

What was it that interested Raabe in history? Not so much the causal connection of events; not so much historical growth, as historical conditions. And, moreover, to him the outward circumstances are merely the necessary premises for what he really wishes to grasp, the spirit of a period, the constitution of the folk-soul. The great historical figures who led up to a period and stand out prominently in it he pushes into the background. It is the forgotten men and women that he seeks, and he pictures how circumstances or events ordered their lives, whether the individual lived apart from his age and contrasted with the mass, or whether the "milieu" wrought in him a particular condition of mind and heart, so that he was drawn into situations and events, into the "Zeitgeist," without actually exercising any decisive influence. In Else von der Tanne the German peasants, at the end of the Thirty Years' War, are sunk in "brutish stupor," inwardly and outwardly coarsened and demoralized, filled with boundless suspicion. When Else, "the purest, holiest flower in the horrible devastation of the earth," appears among them, they look upon her as something monstrous, they make a witch of her, and under their stoning the gentle miracle falls stricken at the threshold of the house of God. In Sankt Thomas the struggle between Spain and the Netherlands kindles heroism in the heart of a woman who, like a phenomenon, interposes in the fight, in which she perishes after all, without being able to give its course a favorable turn. "That was no longer that Camilla who had swung in the hammock. * * * She now appeared as the beautiful but deadly genius of this island; it was as if the destructive power of the tropical sun had become embodied in her. * * * Camilla Drago, in league with the fire from heaven, defended the castell Pavaosa." In The Crown of the Realm the heroine feels the necessity of making her lover go through the campaigns in Bohemia and Hungary from where he returns afflicted with leprosy. He gives up his happiness for lost, but the girl, from whom he has hidden, finds him, acknowledges her love for him, nurses him until his death and becomes in the end the mother-nurse of the exiled lepers.

We do not really feel this last story to be historical; for the spirit of the age, all the events and even the fate of the hero and heroine are far eclipsed by the triumphant strength of those powers that, standing above all time, are able to determine human life. The Crown of the Realm was indeed written after Raabe had tried in The People of the Forest and in his trilogy The Hunger Pastor, Abu Telfan, and The Dead-Wagon– works round which all Raabe's writings circle as round a pole – to comprehend the eternally problematical in human life and to take up some attitude toward it.

"Gib Acht auf die Gassen!" (Watch the Streets), and "Blick auf zu den Sternen!" (Look up to the Stars), are the mottos at whose point of intersection lies the life-wisdom of The People of the Forest. To wrestle with the factors of every-day life, to have a clear eye for the different values of these factors, and in general to respect the dignity of the common are indispensable to every real human life. But, if one is to attain the goals that lie in the land of promise, one's gaze must not remain fixed on the ground. For the universe and the human soul are, in themselves, dark, and receive their light only from the shining spheres that we call stars. In man's sky these are love, friendship, faith, patience, mercy, courage, humility, honor. Still more wonderful, however, than the existence of these stars is perhaps the fact that originally we did not possess them at all, but have only found them in the course of thousands of years. And how did they become ours? Through life's suffering and distress and infamy. Here, indeed, we arrive at the centre of Raabe's thought and work. All that is high in the world has developed through friction with what is low, all that is high requires the low. For just as white is seen in all its intensity only in contrast with black, so, too, depth of love, nobility of mind, strength to aspire are best manifested and unfolded in the conflict with selfishness, baseness, indifference, and every kind of distress and pain. That is why Hans Unwirrsch has Moses Freudenstein for a companion; that is why the author lays so many and such different obstacles in his way; that is why he allows him to attain only to such a modest happiness at last; for the satisfied do not hunger, and hunger for all that is noble is the meaning of our existence. That is why, too, a book like The Hunger Pastor exercises, on the whole, no liberative influence; it does, however, strengthen and edify our souls and warms our hearts with its inner glow.

But how is it? If the antagonism of those elements that increase life and those that weaken it is necessary, must they therefore exist eternally beside each other, and to which side will the final victory incline? "If ye knew what I know, ye would weep much and laugh little: " with these words of Mohammed's Abu Telfan closes. Accordingly the ideal, symbolized in The Hunger Pastor by the cobbler's luminous ball that accompanies Hans Unwirrsch everywhere, here finds only a place of refuge in the secluded "Katzenmühle" (cat's mill). Deep resignation is the predominant mood of this work. And in the The Dead-Wagon the place of the shining ball is taken even by the hearse, and the motto of this book is, "The Canaille is lord and remains lord." Antonie Häusler falls into the power of her rascally grandfather, and attempts to rescue her fail. Nevertheless chevalier von Gläubigern reports to Jane Warwolf: "I got there in time, she is happy! Believe no one who tries to tell you that she died in misery. * * * Pay no attention to Hennig and those others about us, they know nothing * * *" The chevalier is right. Antonie died, but in the triumph of martyrdom, and this triumph, still and unnoticed as it was, continues to burn in the hearts of the three old people whom we leave at the end of the novel in the home for the old and sick in Krodebeck.

The circle of our trilogy is closed. Light and darkness war against each other in all three parts. In The Hunger Pastor love and work finally win both external and internal victory; in Abu Telfan we are left full of worry that light is diminishing more and more; in the The Dead-Wagon the deepest shadows prevail, the noble and the life-affirming forces experience external defeat, but they remain unconquerable in themselves.

Further than in the The Dead-Wagon a wise author who is just to the world may not go in his pessimism, in spite of his study of Schopenhauer, if he would not appear to indulge in mannerism, to be one-sided. Raabe does not fall a victim to his deep penetration into the hardship and infamy of life; it finally becomes to him merely the means to an end. For he thus obtains from his strict conscience the right from now on to develop for its own sake a side of his talent which had already flashed through almost all his works – his humor. In whatever relation good and evil, happiness and suffering may stand to one another, man can not entirely get rid of either of these sides of life. The idealist or pessimist seeks to emphasize one of the two sides, the realist simply takes them as they are and bears them, the humorist tries to reconcile one with the other. This reconciliation must, of course, be subjective in its nature. It takes place in the mind and heart of the man. A humorist like Raabe allows the oppressive a place within him, and is untroubled because he recognizes that it is an integral part of his lot, of humanity's lot. He does not bear it with ridicule or bitterness, indifference or resignation, because he knows he must, but rather he rejoices in the strength of his soul, he rejoices that he can do it. In the consciousness of this ability he has cast away "the fear of the earthly" and looks down smiling on the mysterious play of the forces of life. He smiles at those who allow themselves to be consumed by distress, he smiles at his own distress which he has to overcome again and again, and is yet affected by grief, is full of the deepest sympathy for all creation, for he knows that he is fighting a common battle with it all. Humor is hearty, humor is brave, humor is full of sunny, smiling wisdom. We have works and characters in German literature that are more pronouncedly and purely humorous than Raabe's. But probably in no other German writer has humor become such a controlling mood of life as in him. With no one else do we feel the faithful humorous personality of the author behind and in his works as we do with Raabe. Horacker (1876), Old Familiar Corners (1879), The Hold-All (1890) may be quoted here.