Discussing "The Rider On The White Horse" By Theodor Storm

In this episode of Canonball we discuss "The Rider On The White Horse" and other novellas by Theodor Storm published between 1848 and 1888.

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Transcript

Theodor Sturm was born in 1817 in the town of Husum in what is today Germany, but at the time was an independent duchy ruled by the king of Denmark. Sturm was German and Frisian. Today there are 500,000 Frisian people who live in the Netherlands and northern Germany and they speak a related group of languages that are called the Frisian languages. The Frisian languages are the oldest living language group to the Anglic languages, which are Old English and all of the languages that descended from it, including Middle and Modern English as well as Early, Middle and Modern Scots, which of course today Scottish is thought of as an accent of English, but if you go backwards in Scottish writing, even just to Robert Burns, which is only 18th century, it becomes very quickly quite difficult to read, much faster than English becomes difficult if you go backwards. But anyway, the Frisian languages are the closest language to Old English that is still spoken today, though Modern English and the Frisian languages are not mutually intelligible and the Frisian languages are not even mutually intelligible among themselves. If you speak one, you don't necessarily understand the other one, but that's not too surprising. It's what typically happens when you have small local languages developing independently, and that's a detail about a subgroup within Germany and the Netherlands, but also Theodor Sturm was part of this Germanic ethnic group. He also studied law in Berlin and in the German city of Kiel, and he published his first volume of poetry together with his brothers in 1843 when he was still a law student. He would have been about 25 or 26 at the time. He was involved in the 1848 revolutions, which are a whole complicated thing we'll have to look at someday, and he was a liberal in that he aimed for a Germany united under a constitutional monarchy in which every class participated in the political process. And he must have graduated around 1843 because he had published this book of poetry, but then I also read that in the same year he moved back to Husum, his hometown, and worked as a lawyer there for nine years until 1852 when the Danish government identified him as an enemy and revoked his legal license. I couldn't find details of why they decided he was an enemy, but if you notice, that was a few years after 1848, and it's possible that his view of a unified Germany may have involved some territory that was at the time under Danish control. I'm not sure though. And the town of Husum is in the German province of Schleswig-Holstein, which today is part of Germany, but throughout the 19th century was this area contested between Denmark and the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia, and there were two wars fought over this area, one between 1848 and 1852 and the second between February and October of 1864. And for our purposes, we don't need to go into the details of that. It's enough to say that Storm was living in a contested area and he favored the German side. But in 1853, after he lost his legal license, he moved to Potsdam, and then three years later he moved to Thuringia, so he's in different parts of what are today Germany. And then something a little unusual happened, and because there are not a lot of resources on this topic in English, on Storm's life in general, or on this particular event, I'm going to read a section from the introduction of the edition of Storm's novellas that I read. And these novellas were translated by the American poet James Wright, and he also wrote this introduction. And this is in the context of that second war over Schleswig-Holstein. In February of 1864, the Prussian and Austrian armies invaded, and then Wright writes of Storm, quote, he was immediately appointed by spontaneous acclamation to the office of Landvucht, or district magistrate, in his native city. He was responsible for the administration of civil order and civil justice. That is, he somehow got away with one of the most incredible feats of survival in all the long and idiotic history of the relations between the poet and society. Theodor Storm, one of the finest German lyric poets of the 19th century, returned to his home and effortlessly assumed powers of great civic importance. Skipping ahead. Accounts of Storm's life and work, no matter how automatically pedantic or encrusted with fear of the imagination, contain in his homecoming a fact so absorbingly strange that even a hundred years of academic repetition has not succeeded in killing its powers of evocativeness. He dropped everything for the sake of getting back home. A man who has struggled against unusually adverse circumstances and achieved distinction in his chosen career cannot reasonably be scorned for deciding in favor of enjoying the benefits of his honestly earned success. But Storm decided to treat just such benefits as if they were literally nothing but a temporary inconvenience. Indeed, it is probably moreaccurate to say that his decision had been made beforehand. Storm understood that the main thing was not to make a successful career, but to live one's life. Skipping ahead again. His fellow townsmen shared this knowledge, for they welcomed him home by asking him to accept the highest position of civil authority in their community. The city of Husum needed a mayor who could maintain order, but they preferred a man whose public abilities were based upon private devotion to the city itself. For once, such a leader was found. Storm had for many years demonstrated his qualifications for the position. He served satisfactorily until 1866, when the Prussian liberators annexed Schleswig-Holstein, but Storm's tenure of office, however brief, reveals his artistic and judicial mastery developed and deepened side by side throughout his life." End quote. So James Wright says that Storm was mayor or district magistrate of Husum from the spring of 1864 until 1866. He doesn't give the month, but that puts it at roughly a year and a half to two years. A source online says that he started not in 1864, but in 1865, so maybe it was about a year. The exact dates don't matter too much. What's interesting about this is, one, Storm was mayor of his hometown for a while. He had worked as a lawyer, and when the German armies took over his hometown, the people there wanted him to be the head of the government there, which says something about his reputation, but it also says something about his abilities. He wasn't only a writer. He was also a capable administrator, at least in a limited way. He was able to manage this town for a while. And I'm always interested in seeing how writers live their lives outside of their writing. Not that somebody who really was purely only a writer throughout their whole lives can't also be a great writer or an interesting person or whatever, but it's interesting when they've had a different kind of life experience, because then we might see how some of their views about the world that might have been informed by that experience may be reflected in their writing. And his stint as district magistrate was relatively early in his life. It was between 1864 and 1866, roughly. And as we'll see, he both lived and was writing for a while after that time. In the summer of 1864, his friend, the author and painter Ludwig Piech, P-I-E-T-S-C-H, who has some nice paintings of the countryside, presumably in Germany. You can pull them up easily if you search for them. Invited Storm to come visit him in Baden-Baden. And during that visit, Storm became friends with the great Russian writer, Ivan Turgenev. And in the subsequent years, Turgenev and Storm exchanged letters and sent each other copies of their writing. And they were very close in age. Storm was only a year older than Turgenev. And then in 1888, so now we've skipped ahead 24 years, Storm died in Hadamarschen, which at the time was part of the German empire and is today part of Germany. Storm's house in Husum is now a museum to him and his work. He's considered one of the most important authors of 19th century German realism in literature. He wrote many poems, many stories and novellas, as we'll see. The edition that I read from is titled The Rider on the White Horse, but that's only one of the novellas in it, though it's the longest and the last one. And it's the last thing that Storm wrote, or at least the last novella that he wrote. And Storm valued the novella in particular as a form, something roughly longer than a short story, but shorter than a novel. And again, taking from the intro, Wright quotes him in an 1881 letter to the Swiss writer Gottfried Keller as saying about the novella, quote, The novella, as it is developed in modern times, more especially in the last decades and as it now appears in individual works as a more or less finished achievement, can deal with the most significant subject matter, and it only depends upon the poet for the highest achievements of poetry to be attained even in this form. The novella is no longer what it once was, the succinct presentation of an event which attracts by its unusual nature and reveals an unexpected turning point. The novella of today is the sister of the drama and the severest form of prose fiction. Like the drama, it treats of the profoundest problems of human life. Like the drama, it demands for the perfection of its form, a central conflict from which the whole is organized, and in consequence, the most succinct form and the exclusion of all that is unessential. It not only accepts, but actually makes the biggest demands of art, end quote. And I guess the eight stories in the edition that I read, of which The Rider on the White Horse is one, they would all be considered novellas, though if I hadn't been prompted, I might have called them short stories, though the last two in particular are a little bit longer. I think The Rider on the White Horse is 80 pages or so, so that is a bit longer than a short story. Without exception, I think all eight of them are told as stories framed by a character telling a story to someone else.All of them involve somebody talking to somebody and then the other person starts telling a story and the main bulk of the story is that. So I don't know if he framed all of his novellas in that way, but these eight have that element in them. Or if they're not that, at least one of them is told as a flashback. A guy is in his room and he's looking at a picture of a woman and then it tells the story of him and the woman when they were younger. And there was one that I liked in particular that was set in the 17th century in Germany. It's in the aftermath of the 30 Years War and it emphasizes two mysteries that we encounter sometimes. One is the story of how a painting was painted. In particular, a portrait. When you see any painting, you wonder about the process of how the painter did it, what the circumstances were like, how did he work on it, how long did it take him, what else was going on at the time. But when I look at a portrait from, for example, the 17th century, I wonder more about the world that that person was living in and the story of their life and what was going on with them. Because the further you go back in history, the harder it is to know about the life of those people. We have less and less information. It's increasingly different from how life is today in certain ways. And so on the one hand, it's sort of hard to know what the life of a German nobleman in the 17th century was like. But on the other hand, you have this very clear, realistic image of the person. You have really a snapshot, just a moment. Of course, it took a long time for them to paint the painting, but it looks like a photograph in that it's very realistic and it depicts just them sitting there or standing there or whatever they might be doing. And that is so clear, you can almost imagine the person starting to talk, the image is so clear. And yet at the same time, the rest of their life is totally invisible. You wanna step into the painting, into the room that they're in and look around, but you can't. Or to turn around and look at what the painter was doing. What was he experiencing? And so there's this nice story that deals with that on the one hand. It tells the story of how this painting came to be how it was. And also at the beginning of the story, part of the frame is that in modern times or modern times for when Storm was writing. So in the 19th century, some guys are looking at this painting and they say, look, there are these four letters here. What do you think those letters mean? And they speak Latin and so they're trying to figure out what the Latin might be. These two letters probably mean that. These two other letters are not as easy. It could mean this or that or whatever. And in the course of the story, the meaning of the four letters becomes clear. And that's another thing that when you go to a museum or if you even just look carefully at the buildings and the architecture and the engravings in your surroundings, you can see things like that. You can see details, the meaning of which is not immediately obvious, but somebody put that detail there for some reason. It means something. It's not random. Somebody put it there intentionally and we can ignore it assuming that it's not very interesting or there's probably nothing behind it. Or sometimes when you chase something like that down, there is some cool detail, some discovery to be made behind it. And in case you're wondering, the story that I'm talking about there is titled Aquis Submersus, which in Latin means something like underwater or beneath the flood in case you wanna look it up. And in case you hadn't heard of Theodore Storm, maybe you had, but I hadn't until in looking for books to read, I encountered a section of 19th century German writers who are considered part of the canon. And there were an easy 12 names in a row that I'd never heard of. And this was on a list with a bunch of other names that everyone has heard of even if you haven't read them. But there were a dozen names in a row that I'd never heard of and that troubled me a little bit. So I've put on my list for this year a number of 19th century German authors. And I'm really excited about those in particular because they, again, feel like truly uncharted territory. Obviously, German speakers probably know Theodore Storm very well, and maybe plenty of English speakers do too, but I had never heard of him and I had never heard of some of the other similar writers that we're gonna be looking at later, though I won't do them all in a row, I'm gonna spread them out. And I partially did this after looking at what I had read throughout the year and seeing that I had, for example, a lot of English literature. And that's not too surprising because it is always a tiny bit better to read writing in its original language. It's different to read a translation, but it's still valuable to read translations. We've talked about that before. But then there was a lot of French, which I'm very happy about. I'm glad to read more French this year. Nothing wrong with that. Some Russian, some Italian, but very little German. And so I wanted to lean a little bit more in that direction this year, and this is one of the ways that we're gonna do it. So now we can get into some passages from novellas by Theodore Storm. The first one we're gonna look at is a passage that reflects a little bit about the changing view of the position of ordinary people relative to politics at the time. And in this story, an older woman is talking about her.life and she's talking to some younger people, and she says, quote, Those times were certainly quiet and modest. We didn't claim to know everything better than our rulers and their ministers, and if anyone stuck his nose into politics we called him a tinker, and if he was a cobbler we went to his competitor for our shoes. The maids were just ordinary Trina and Steena, and we dressed according to our station. Why, today you even wear mustaches, like squires and aristocrats. What is it you want? Do you all want to be rulers of the country? Certainly, said the grandson. And what about persons of rank and aristocrats who are born to their station? What's to become of them? Oh, the aristocrats, said the young mother, looking at her husband with love and pride. He merely sighed and said, Get rid of them, grandmother, or else let us all be aristocrats, all over Germany, every single one of us. I don't see any other alternative, end quote. So the older woman is saying that in our day, if an ordinary person tried to get involved in politics, we snuffed him, we boycotted his business, and we called him a name, we called him a tinker. And this reminds me of a passage, at least in Rousseau, there's definitely a passage in The Social Contract where he's explaining why he's commenting on politics. He says something like, to those who would say, why are you talking about this kind of thing, he says, I'm talking about it because that's all I can do. If I were a practitioner, I wouldn't have to talk about it, I would just do it. But I can't do that, so I'm just going to talk about it. But when Rousseau was writing, it was a little bit unusual for somebody who wasn't in politics to be writing so broadly about it. And there's another passage somewhere and it's either Descartes or Hobbes, now I think it must be Hobbes because Descartes doesn't say too much about politics. But one of them is roughly reflecting this same view that ordinary people shouldn't get mixed up in politics, that's not your responsibility, that's for the nobles to deal with. And this passage here from Storm where you have the grandmother saying, in my day, we didn't do that. And then you have the younger guy opposing that view. You have a couple generations where that transition is happening, at least in Germany, that the view is changing. And there's another cultural detail here. The older woman says, why today you even wear mustaches like squires and aristocrats. And that's an example of how presentation signaled social class somehow, that in her day, the only people who had mustaches were upper class people, squires and aristocrats. And the common people wouldn't do that because that would be reflecting something that was outside of their station. And then she asks, what's to be done with these people who are born into their station? If you guys want to be the governors, what about these other guys? And he says, well, either we have to get rid of them or we have to all be part of that class. And last week we were looking at 93, we were looking at the French revolution. And here we have writing along similar lines from the German context. And this was again going on in the half century after the French revolution and certainly in its aftermath. These next ones would have been nice to read before Christmas, but we're getting to them now and that's fine. I'll read them first and we can talk about them a little bit. In another story, Storm writes, quote, then the fiddler concluded with a jaunty tune and a new guest joined the students. I stopped to see you, Reinhardt, he said. You were already gone, but Santa Claus had been there. Santa Claus? Asked Reinhardt. Santa Claus never visits me these days. But he was there, I tell you. Your whole room smelled like Christmas trees and cookies. Skipping ahead. Complete darkness had fallen on the street outside. He felt the sharp winter breeze on his flushed face. The lights of the Christmas trees shone from a few windows, and occasionally he could hear the sound of small pipes and horns in the midst of children's loud, happy laughter. And skipping ahead again. Abruptly he stepped over to his desk, found some money, and hurried downstairs to the street. It had become quiet while he was in his room. The Christmas lights were extinguished and all the children gone. Wind swept down the empty streets. Old people and young people were huddling together at family parties in their homes. The second phase of Christmas Eve had arrived." End quote. Those are taken from a story called Immensee, and they mention Christmas trees, Christmas cookies, small pipes and horns, which maybe is a reference to Christmas music. It certainly means they were playing music in part to celebrate Christmas. And it also says the Christmas lights were extinguished, which of course suggests that they were candles. They weren't electric lights because the story is from 1849 and 1851. I think it was published and then republished. So there we have certainly Christmas trees, cookies, and lights, and maybe also Christmas music in this German context in 1849 and 1851. And you can compare that with a Christmas carol, which is 1843 in London. And I haven't read that for a few years, but I can't remember in a Christmas carol that there's any mention of any of those things except Christmas carols, singing. But I can't remember any mention of trees, lights, or cookies. So it's possible that at least those three, and maybe instrumental Christmas music, though that's sort of secondary, are German traditions. Oh, and also, of course, how did I leave this out? The mention of Santa Claus. That's the most important part. Santa Claus is not mentioned in a Christmas carol at all, but he's another part of this mid-19th century.German image of Christmas. And it's possible that these spread widely in the United States because of the significant German population of the United States, ethnic German. Apparently to this day, Germans make up the largest self-reported ancestry group in the United States, accounting for about 49 million people, or 17% of the population. And that's significant because it's larger than the percentage that claims English ancestry. And we can talk about, of course, how English ancestry is, to a great extent, Anglo-Saxon, which are regions of Germany, but that's a separate thing. When you put in this massive German population in the United States, paired with how these traditions are noted in this German writing, but absent from the English writing in the mid-19th century, it seems likely that they came here as German traditions. And I'm always interested in the history of memes and traditions like that. And it can be hard to find data points on them. It's often not very carefully researched. So when we have an example like this, it's worth it to take note. In another part of the same story, one character asks another where a certain location is, and the other says, it's in that direction, and the first asks him how far it is, and the second says, quote, not very, sir. You'll be at the lake by the time it takes to smoke less than half a pipe, and the manor is right next to it, end quote. So he gives an estimation of distance in terms of units of pipes smoked in that time. And I like this because it's an example of the details of everyday life before there was timekeeping, before everybody had a watch, much less a cell phone. And he's in kind of a rural setting, so maybe in the city they wouldn't have used pipes smoked as a unit of time, but it's interesting that that's how this guy did it, because people know approximately how long it takes to smoke a pipe, and that's how he conveys the information to the guy. In another passage, there's a group of friends who are hanging out, and one of them starts to sing some songs to pass the time, and the others are listening. And this passage is interesting because it touches on folk culture, on, in this case, songs, but it could just as easily apply to stories or to folk dances or certain other memes that spread in rural society or that spread in rural society before the widespread proliferation of industrial technology, though it applies best to folk songs, which is the example that Storm uses. And I think he describes this really well. Storm writes, quote, the entire group grew gradually more and more cheerful. I wonder who it was that wrote all these lovely songs, said Elizabeth. Oh, said Eric, you can tell just by listening to them. They're just junk. They were written by scum like tailors, apprentices, and barbers, and people of that kind. They weren't just written, murmured Reinhardt. Things like this grow, or they fall down from the cloud. They float over the countryside and sometimes just settle and drift and fall down this way and that, and they are sung in 1,000 different places at the very same moment. In songs of this kind, we find our inner life and what we suffer there. Sometimes I think we all help to write them. He turned to another page. I stood on the top of a mountain. I know that song, cried Elizabeth. Sing it, sing it, Reinhardt, and I'll sing with you. So together they sang that famous song, so secret and dark that it is hard to believe that it was ever composed by a human being at all, end quote. In another story, there's an effective moment, and this is probably one of those things that's more effective when you read it in context, but I wanted to show you because it's nice writing even in translation. In this story, there's a girl named Regine. Storm writes, quote, "'Goodbye then, Regine,' he said, and gave her his hand. But she stepped in front of him again and spoke hesitantly. "'Tell me one more thing. "'Why do you have to go to the war? "'Don't you know, Regine?' She shook her head. "'Grandfather never talks about it,' she said, and looked up at him like a child. He lost himself wordlessly in her eyes. A nightingale sang suddenly out of the bushes near them. The leaves rustled. She stood facing him, motionless, scarcely touched into life by her own gentle breathing. Only in her eyes, in the deepest place, her soul stirred. He did not know what it was that gazed out at him. "'Say something to me,' she said at last. He grasped a twig that hung above their heads and broke off a leaf. "'It's for this earth,' he said. "'For you, for these woods, "'so that nothing alien might walk here, "'so that no sound might come to you "'that you can't understand, "'so that things will remain as they are, "'as they have to be as long as we live. "'Uncorrupt, sweet, the marvelous air of home.'" In another story, a guy is going to meet a girl in a clock tower. Storm writes, "'Now the familiar oaken door was standing open. "'Involuntarily, I walked in, "'and in the darkness that suddenly surrounded me, "'I went slowly up the steps, "'and where these ended, "'on up the other narrow, ladder-like stairway. "'I heard nothing except the rattling "'of the great tower clock, "'which carried on its existence here "'in complete solitude. "'I can still recall the feeling of dread "'that I had for this dead thing. "'As I walked past it, "'I would have liked to reach into those iron wheels "'and make them be still.'" And then later, when he's talking to the girl, Agnes, Storm writes, "'The future spread before me in confusion, "'but I knew that I was not alone.'But I seized upon a plan. I had already done some business at a piano factory. Now I wanted to do this kind of work again, and with the income I could reasonably expect, sooner or later, establish a business of my own, for that instrument was already beginning to be used rather widely in those days. I told all this to Agnes, and I also explained just where it was that I intended to go first of all. She had been listening against the iron railing, and she gazed absently into the empty spaces of the sky. Now she slowly turned her head and looked at me. Harri, she said softly, don't go Harri. As I looked at her without answering, she suddenly explained, no don't listen to me, I'm a child, I don't know what I'm saying. The morning wind had blown some of her blonde hair loose, and it strayed over the pale face that she now patiently turned to me. We must wait, Agnes, I said, happiness is far away for the time being. I want to see if I can bring it close to us again. I won't write to you, I'll come back myself when it's time. For a while she looked at me with her large eyes, then she pressed her hand. I'll wait, she said in a firm voice, go and God bless you Harri. I still lingered. The tower, which held us both, rose up so lonely into the blue heavens. The swallows, upon whose steel blue wings the sunlight glanced like sparks, hovered around us and bathed in the sea of air and light. I stood there, holding her hand. It seemed to me as though I could not bring myself to leave this place. As though the two of us, she and I, were already lifted above all the sorrow of the world. But time pressed on. Below us, the quarter hour struck its echoes. Then as the waves of sound flooded around the tower, a swallow came flying so close that it almost stroked us with its wings, fearlessly, only an arm's length away. And while we gazed as if charmed into the tiny glittering eyes, it warbled suddenly out of a swelling throat and poured its spring music into the air. Agnes flung herself on my bosom. You mustn't forget to come back, she cried. Then the bird spread its wings and flew off." In another story, a guy is being chased by some other guys with dogs and he climbs a tree to escape and by coincidence he has ended up in a tree outside the window of the girl he loves. And I like these scenes really just for their aesthetic beauty, I don't have any comment on them really. But Storm is very good at creating this kind of tense, somehow bittersweet scene. He writes, quote, Before I had finished speaking, a small trembling hand reached down and helped me toward the open window, and I gazed directly into her eyes, which were staring, full of alarm, into the deep darkness below me. Come, she said. They'd tear you apart, so I sprang lightly into her chamber. But as soon as I stood safe within, the small hand released me. Katharina sank softly into an armchair near the window, and I saw she had closed her eyes very tightly. The thick braids of her hair lay richly over her white nightgown and reached to her lap. The moon, which had by now climbed over the garden hedge outside, shone full into the chamber and made everything clear to me. I stood before her as though fixed there by a powerful magic. She seemed so beloved, so strange and improbable, and yet wholly my own love. My eyes filled again and again with that beauty which is everything. It was only when a sigh finally rose from her breast that I ventured to speak. Katharina, dear Katharina, are you dreaming? Then a smile of pain fluttered across her face. I think I almost was dreaming, Johannes. This life is so harsh. A dream is sweet. End quote. And he ends up staying the night in her room, but he then sneaks out in the morning, and I was reminded by this scene of when we were looking at Wolfram von Eschenbach and Parzival. We talked about the Tagelied, the day song or the dawn song, which was a kind of German poetry that was written about two lovers separating at dawn. Everyone is waking up, and so then the guy has to abscond. And Eschenbach wrote some of that kind of poetry. And this scene is very similar. It's by a German writer. It's about this topic, and though Storm is writing in prose, he's remembered as a very lyrical writer, and his writing, as we've seen, is very lyrical, very poetic. I don't know how well-known the concept of Tagelied would have been to Storm. Maybe it would have been well-known. Maybe it was a living tradition at the time, and all of his readers would have immediately seen that connection. Or maybe it's just a coincidence. But we might look at this section as a kind of Tagelied, a dawn song. Storm writes, quote, there was no further sound except rising from the garden the chords of the nightingale and a little farther off the whispering of the little brook that flowed behind the hedges. And as the old songs sing, the beautiful pagan Venus rises and walks among us by night, causing terrible confusion in the hearts of ordinary human beings, such a night was ours. The moon had undressed in the heavens, the sultry scent of the flowers wafted through the window, and in the woods beyond, the night played like lightning that does not make a sound. Oh, sentinel, sentinel, was your warning cry so far away? All I know is that suddenly, sharply, the cocks crowed in the courtyard and I held in my arms a pale and weeping woman who did not want to let me go, who would pay no heed to the morning that gathered its early twilight over the garden and toss its red glow into our chamber. But when the light had fully entered, she hastened me away as though she were terrified of death. or rather a hundred more, a quick word. When the noon bell was rung for the servants, then we would meet among the fir trees. And then, I scarcely imagined how it had happened to me. I was standing alone down in the garden feeling the cool morning air. Once again, as I was holding my coat together, which had been virtually rent to pieces by the dogs, I looked up and made out a small, pale hand waving goodbye to me. But then I nearly fainted when I glanced back from the garden path to the window just beneath hers next to the tower. It seemed to me as though, almost simultaneously, I had seen yet another hand behind the curtain of the lower window. It wagged threateningly at me with an upraised finger, and it looked colorless and bony, like the very hand of death. The whole scene had flashed across my eyes very rapidly. The first thing that occurred to me was the old rumor about the ghost of the hideous woman in the painting, who was alleged to walk abroad sometimes. But then I persuaded myself that it was only my overwrought senses that had tricked me with such a vision." End quote. And a line in particular there that to me seems to suggest the tagalid or vestalid, which is the watchman's song or a watcher's song, which is a type of tagalid that is told from the perspective of the trusted watchman, whom the knight has standing guard to warn him if anybody's coming. Is that line, "'O sentinel, sentinel, was your warning cry so far away?' There's no sentinel in the story. There's no other character who was supposed to warn this character. So that seems to suggest that it is a reference to this medieval form of poetry. Later in the story, Storm writes, quote, just about the time that the waffle booths were opening in all the public squares for the Christmas holidays, my illness began and it chained me to my bed for a good deal longer than the first time." End quote. And I marked that one just to note the cultural connection between waffles and Christmas, which at least in North America, we have waffles, but they're not particularly associated with Christmas. They're a breakfast food. But in this story, in which Storm is writing about the 17th century, there is that connection. This next passage deals with art and religion. Here, the main character is talking to a religious leader and asking him about a certain woodcut in the church. And the guy says that that woodcut is gone. And the main character of the story, who happens to be an artist himself, he's a painter, asks him why he can't tolerate images in his church. And the guy gives him a clear answer. And the position is that the guy is a Protestant. He doesn't use that word, obviously. And he views these kinds of woodcuts or visual arts in the church as papal, as being heretical and impermissible. And for myself, having grown up in a Protestant environment, whenever we went to church growing up, it was, of course, never in a Catholic church. And so those kinds of sculptures and icons in a Catholic church to this day look a little bit out of place to me. They're beautiful, of course, but the ornateness of Catholic churches and the austerity of Protestant churches is something that's visible to this day. And this passage touches on that division. And it's interesting to see here the Protestant depicted as a little bit of a villain. He's not really a villain, but he's a little antagonistic to the main character. Storm writes, quote, "'This dark man's face had immediately appealed to me "'for the sake of my art. "'After I promised to do my best according to his wishes, "'I asked him about a certain famous woodcut "'of the Virgin Mary of which my brother had told me. "'An almost disdainful smile "'passed over the minister's face. "'I'm afraid you've come too late,' he said. "'That woodcut fell to pieces "'when I let it be taken out of the church. "'I stared at him in dismay. "'Can't you put up with having "'the Holy Mother of God in your church? "'The other drawings of the Holy Mother of God "'are not going to be displayed to anybody. "'For a while, he gazed down at me darkly, silently. "'I say, gaze down, "'because although I was never considered a short person, "'he towered almost a whole head above me. "'Then he spoke with great force. "'Did not the Lord summon all the Dutch Papists "'to live on that island that is now destroyed "'in order that the vain human labor of the dyke "'might teach men to trust only in the highest judgment? "'In the city beyond us there, "'haven't the vestrymen just recently allowed "'the portraits of two of the saints "'to be made in their ecclesiastical sea? "'Watch and pray, for even here, "'Satan still creeps from house to house. "'These images of Mary are nothing but wet nurses "'of voluptuousness and papism. "'Art has always been in danger "'of playing the wanton with this world.'" And now we've gotten to the passages that I've marked off from The Rider on the White Horse. And before getting into those, it's worth mentioning a few things about this story. One is that it was published in April of 1888, and Storm died in July of that year. It is the last of his 50 novellas, and it's generally considered his masterpiece. The setting of the story is the shore of the North Sea, which is the sea between Northern Europe, being Norway, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, and Great Britain. And the main character of the story is a dyke master, that is, the guy who's responsible for building and maintaining the dykes in this coastal town. If it isn't done carefully, the whole town or parts of it could flood, and if a dyke master can find an opening, find an opportunity, then he might be able to recover land that's currently underwater.and thereby expand the size of the town or the Pasturage for the animals in the town if nothing else animals could graze on that land So a destructive force of nature is another main character in the story these floods that could potentially overrun the town are always Looming in the background and throughout the story you have this ominous sense that something is going to break and that's intertwined with Passages like this which is only on the second page of the story storm writes quote But now something came toward me on the dike I heard nothing but ever more clearly as the light of the half-moon grew sharper I thought I could make out a dark shape and soon as it came nearer I saw it it sat on a horse a high-boned haggard white horse a dark mantle fluttered across the figures shoulders And as he flew past two burning eyes stared at me out of a pale face. Who was that? What did he want and now I suddenly realized that I had heard no hoof beats No panting of the horse and yet horse and rider had galloped past me and quote and the main character of this story's name is Hauka and this next passage gives some really nice descriptions of the landscape in that area and also touches again on this Supernatural element of the story and before this passage some corpses have washed up on the shore near where they are Storm writes quote Hauka stood nearby silent at the first opportunity However, he slipped out and returned to the dike whether he wanted to look for more bodies or whether he was drawn by the gasliness That still hovered over the abandoned place where the others had been washed ashore It was impossible to say he ran on and on till he stood entirely alone amid the desolation Where only the wind blew across the dike where there was now nothing But the grieving voices of the huge birds that soared rapidly past him on his left hand the empty broad Marsh on the other the shore that stretched on out of sight and always and everywhere the glittering shoals still covered with ice The whole world seemed to lie there in a white death Hauka stood for a while on the dike and his sharp eyes swept in all directions But there were no more dead to be seen only the planes of ice rose and fell like a stream whenever the currents pressed them Strongly from beneath he ran home then but on one of the following evenings He returned to the bleak spot by this time the ice in several places had started to break up Smoky clouds were rising through the openings and over the entire surface He could see a network of steam and fog spreading a dusk strangely confused with the descending evening Hauka stared attentively into the dusk for dark shapes were creeping back and forth in the fog Figures as large as men the dark ones moved with dignity, but they made strange disturbing gestures They had long noses and necks and he could see them in the distance walking up and down beside the steaming cracks in the ice suddenly Mysteriously they began to leap up and down like demons The large ones jumping over the small ones and the small leaping toward the large then they thinned out and disappeared What do they want? Are they the ghosts of those drowned people thought Hauka? What do you want? He cried aloud to the night But the dark shapes out there paid no attention to his cry and simply went about their own strange ways Then there rose in his mind the fearsome Norwegian ghosts of the sea whom an old sea captain had once told him about He remembered how they were supposed to carry a great tangle of seaweed on their shoulders instead of a face Nevertheless Hauka did not run home this time But pressed his heels firmly into the clay of the dike and squinted intensely until once again He caught sight of the weird creatures neither dead nor yet alive that played here and there in the deepening twilight I would not at all say that this is primarily a horror story But there's plenty of material in it to make an excellent horror movie from alongside an interesting plot For example, there's a theme in the story that shows up in a couple places which is this notion of something or someone needing to die in the process of the Dam of the dike being built there's a mention of how in the building of the previous dike they had bought a child from a gypsy woman and Buried it in the dike or there's a legend that that was done It's not clear whether it was done or not and there was another section I might have marked it off where when some guys are working on the dike They say they ought to bury a dog in it for good measure for good fortune and Hauka the dike master Calls them heathens for suggesting such a thing and this is interesting because I know that Muslims when citing some of the practices that apparently Pagans in pre-muslim Arabia, one of the things they talk about is burying children alive And they say Mohammed came along and put a stop to this among other bad practices of the pagans But this is the only other place I've ever heard of that practice and here we have it in northern Europe somewhere Obviously not that they were doing this in the 19th century or even that they were doing it in the 18th century But it's a reference to that practice as a heathen practice as a non Monotheistic practice which is interesting. This next passage has a couple things in it. One is that it mentions his wife whose name is ElisabethAnd she has a fever and she's hallucinating, but then he also prays and he prays in a kind of strange way He prays in a way that seems to deny that God is all-powerful That he can do absolutely anything and instead suggests that God sometimes can't do exactly what he wants Because that might disrupt something else or something. It's a little unclear, but someone overhears him praying in this way And she is a member of what Storm calls the dissenters, and I was unable to figure out what they are either But they're some kind of Protestant. I mean in England the dissenters were basically Protestants But she overhears Hauka praying in this way And then she tells everybody and word gets around and it's another strange layer of tension that Storm is laying throughout this story. Storm writes, quote, when the old doctor had gone Hauka stood at the window staring out into the winter daylight and while Elka screamed in her delirium He gripped his hands tightly together He did not know whether he was performing an act of devotion or summoning up strength against his fear of losing control Water, water moaned Elka. Hold me, hold me Hauka. Then her voice diminished It sounded as if she were crying. Into the sea, out into the sea. Oh my god. Oh my god I'll never see him again. At these words Hauka turned quickly and pushed the old nurse away from the bed He sank to his knees put his arms around his wife and clutched her to him. Elka, Elka I'm here with you Elka But she merely opened her eyes wide burning with fever and looked around as if she were lost and utterly helpless He laid her back on the pillow then twisting his hands. He cried out. Oh lord. Oh god. Don't take her away from me I can't do without her and you know it. He seemed to get a grip on himself then and added gently I know you can't always do just what you want to do. Not even you can do that. You know everything Well, lord speak to me speak to me just a breath. Silence suddenly came over him He heard only a soft breathing. He turned back to the bed. His wife lay there in a calm sleep He heard the door. Who's that? He asked. That was the maid, Angretta, sir. She just went out to get the basket for the child Mrs. Levka, why are you staring at me in such confusion? I? I was frightened by your prayer It's no way to keep anyone from dying. Hauka glared right through her Have you been going with Angretta to that conventicle where the Dutchman Jantje holds forth? Yes, sir We both believe in the true faith. Hauka said nothing. The dissenting movement was in great fashion at that particular time, even among the Frisians Artisans who had sunk a bit in status, school masters who had been dismissed for drinking and others of that sort were chiefly responsible for the success of the movement. The meetings were also attended by girls, young and old women, loafers and others afflicted with loneliness, all of them eager to play the part of the priest. From the dyke masters household, Angretta and the stable boy who was in love with her went all their free evenings to the meetings. Elke had indicated her uneasiness to Hauka, but he had felt that no one should interfere in matters of religious faith. The dissenters wouldn't hurt anybody and at least their meetings were better than the parties at the tavern. That was the way things stood and so he kept silent this time too, but other people certainly didn't keep silent about him. In no time the very words of his prayer were flying from one house to the next. He had denied the omnipotence of the Almighty and after all, what was the use of a God who wasn't omnipotent? No, Hauka Hainen was an outright atheist. Maybe all the stories about the devil horse were true at that." And meanwhile, there are other signs that Hauka is slowly coming loose. Storm writes, Curiously combined with a certain aloofness, steadily took possession of his heart. It was only in Elke's presence that he seemed his old self and he knelt beside his child's cradle morning and evening as if it were the place of eternal salvation. However, he grew steadily harsher in his treatment of the household servants and the workers. Previously, he had gently admonished those who labored clumsily or carelessly, but now he often astounded them, even shocked them by the abrupt harshness of his orders and Elke frequently had to interpose quietly and set things right again." And as usual, I'm not trying to give you an outline of the plot of this story. I'm giving some samples of, in this case, the kind of atmosphere that Storm creates in his writing. That, as I said, even comes through very strong in translation, which is not always the case. And here's another one quote, But now, once again, a fiercely brilliant sky had spread out over the sea in the marshes and the nearby fields were spotted with sturdy cattle whose lowing frequently broke the vast silence. High up in the heavens, the larks sang ceaselessly. One seemed not to hear them at all until the rare moments when their music paused for the length of a single breath." And at one point, an old woman is telling a weird story to a little girl. The little girl is somehow disabled. They say she's feeble-minded, but she's slow in some way. It's not clear exactly how. The old woman says, One night, the moon wasstill shining, and they closed the outer sluice, and she just couldn't get back into the sea. Oh my, how she shrieked, how she tore her hair, her stiff and shaggy hair with her little fish hands. Oh yes, child, I saw it all, and I heard her screaming myself. All the ditches between the fens were flooded, and the moonlight made them glitter like silver, and she swam from one ditch to the next, and she held her arms up and slapped together those things she had instead of hands till you could hear the sound from far off, and she seemed to be trying to pray. But they can't pray, child, not creatures of that kind. At the time, I was sitting on some boards that they'd brought up there in front of the door when the construction was going on, and I was looking out far across the marshes. I could see the water woman flopping about in the ditches, and every time she held up her arms, they shone like silver and jewels. She finally disappeared, and then all the wild geese and seagulls started hissing and squawking through the air once more, and I remembered that I hadn't heard them make a single sound all the time the water woman was there. The old woman paused. The child still clung to one phrase. Couldn't pray? What was that? Who? Now, child, said the old woman, that was the water woman. She's one of those creatures that are cursed and can't ever be saved." And I don't think I mentioned that this story is framed as there being a guy who's traveling, and he sees the rider on the white horse, that's the very first passage that I read, and then he reaches, I think it's an inn, and there are some guys talking, and he describes what he saw, and they say, oh, that was the rider on the white horse, and he says, what are you talking about? And a schoolmaster says, well, I'll tell you this story. I've put it together over 40 years asking different people and talking to them, but you have to know that in my story, there are some superstitious things, and I don't account for the veracity of them. I don't say that they're all true. I just say what was told to me, and the guy who had just arrived says, yeah, tell me all of it, and I'll sort out what I think is true or not. And so this story has that ambiguity in it also, is that it has these supernatural things, and even within the story, sometimes the story includes an explanation, like it being a trick of the eye, it being too dark, they thought they saw something that they didn't see. But sometimes it's not explained like that, and also you have weird examples like this of an old woman telling a story of a water woman, whatever that is, and speaking through the schoolmaster, Storm leaves it ambiguous whether he's really saying that that happened or not. But even within the story, is he saying this was real or these are folk stories? And that ambiguity adds something as well, and at one point, there's a very short line that I think is central to the story. Hauka says in passing when he's talking to Elka, quote, it's still a terrible responsibility to protect the community against God's sea, end quote. And while dyke masters or dykes generally are not often the heroes of stories, it is a powerful metaphor for the security of a community. The dykes are something that you mostly don't think about, certainly the people in town don't think about them very much. I guess if you live in an area where the dykes are important, you might be more aware of them than if you live in the mountains, you don't think about dykes at all. But probably even the ordinary townspeople in that area don't think about the dykes every day. And the dyke master has this strange job where a dyke might go for years and be both inadequate, it's not built properly, there's some flaw in it somewhere, but there's never a storm big enough to expose that flaw. So you might be operating under an illusion. Just because nothing has happened so far doesn't mean that nothing could happen. So even though many of a dyke master's days might be a little uneventful, he has to constantly be checking everything and imagining possibilities and thinking about what he didn't think of. And this is a kind of intense example. Very few people have this kind of responsibility. Even policemen, who have one of the first rules that we think of when we think of the security of a community, do not have the kind of responsibility that a dyke master has in a low-lying coastal area. A crime might be committed that a policeman or a detective might have been able to prevent if they'd been a bit more tenacious in breaking up whatever crime ring they're going after, whatever it might be. But if a dyke fails, you might suddenly have the whole town be flooded, and a bunch of people could be killed, and a bunch of property destroyed, and it might take years for the community to get back to where it was. And the dyke master's only job every day is to ensure that that never happens. And that's why Storm wrote, It's still a terrible responsibility to protect the community against God's sea. And I had a few more passages marked, but I'm going to skip them to avoid giving anything away. I'll close out with this one, with no context. Quote, He stood there face to face with sheer mountains of water that reared against the night sky, clambered up over one another's shoulders in the terrible twilight, and rushed one white-crowned avalanche after another against the shore. They howled like savage animals at the wilderness. The white horse pawed the ground and snorted into the storm, but the rider felt that here at last human strength had reached its limit. Now it was time for nightfall.to fall and chaos and death." And those are the passages that I wanted to read you from The Rider on the White Horse and other novellas by Theodore Storm. I was very pleased with these. Sometimes when you go looking into something that you've never heard of, you realize that there's a reason that you've never heard of it, but that was certainly not the case here. These somehow really did read like poetry, and I'm very pleased with how this entrance into 19th century German fiction started, and I'm looking forward to the other writers. Though, as I mentioned, there are plenty of other writers on the list as well, not only German ones. But thank you very much for listening. If you enjoyed this podcast, I hope you'll go over to my website, vollrathpublishing.com, the link is in the description, and order a copy of the edition of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein that I printed. I have it with original cover art, 97 foot notes, excellent print quality, a good price, and free shipping. And by ordering yourself a copy, you will be supporting independent book publishing, which is tremendously important not only because I'm in it, but it's a vital and largely uncontrolled mechanism for free speech. And by doing your part to keep that channel open, you will have done one good deed for the day, and you'll get a nice book in the process. So go over and get yourself a copy right now. I'll put it in the mail today. Farewell until next time. Take care, and happy reading.