- 175 + xxixpp frontispiece and 13 woodcuts
- 1 870352 43 2 cloth £ 19.95
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‘Unexpected Reunion’ and Other Stories
Franz Kafka habitually carried a copy of this book in his pocket and called ‘Unexpected Reunion’ (the subtitle story) ‘the most wonderful story in the world’.
Set down at the turn of the eighteenth into the nineteenth century, for the ordinary citizens, many of them peasants, of South Western Germany, The Treasure Chest is a genial, collection of stories, cautionary tales, riddles, jokes, and sometimes uncanny and sinister reports. It was the favourite reading, not only of Kafka, but of Tolstoy, Canetti, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Martin Heidegger.
JOHANN PETER HEBEL (1760–1826) qualified for the Lutheran ministry but spent most of his time as a teacher, writer and compiler of almanacs.
JOHN HIBBERD is Senior Lecturer in German at Bristol University.
‘weird, funny, touching, good-humoured … Hebel has as sure a grasp of the world as he has of the way to amuse his readers. Nearly two hundred years after he wrote [his stories], you’ll get the point of Hebel in about a minute’
Nicholas Lezard’s Choice – Guardian
‘A summit and jewel of German narrative prose’
Hermann Hesse
‘In Hebel pure Enlightenment humanism is saturated with humour… His morality is the continuation of narrative by other means, his humour execution without condemnation’
Walter Benjamin
‘Only very few Germans – some of their noblest spirits, to be sure – possesed that pristine open-mindedness that allowed them to see and accept the Jew as a Jew. One of them was Johann Peter Hebel …’
Gershom Scholem
‘Hardly any other book allows the reader to turn off the light so peacefully and contentedly at the end of each piece, and to sink into a sound sleep with the feeling that all shall be well and all manner of things shall be well’
Ernst Bloch
‘Beautifully produced … with intriguing woodcuts. John Hibberd has done his work so well that he can justly claim that “here great discoveries await the English reader”’
The Times Literary Supplement