The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 05: Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English
Philosophy
The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Volume 05: Masterpieces of German Literature Translated into English
German literature -- 19th century -- Translations into English; German literature -- 20th century -- Translations into English
As a matter of fact, the work for which Chamisso is best known, a
work which has become international in popularity, _Peter Schlemihl_
(1813), is an early bit of such realistic prose. The tale of the
man who sells his shadow to the devil for the sake of the sack of
Fortunatus has become in Chamisso's hands a genuine folk-fairy-tale
in key-note and style. At the same time it is thoroughly Romantic
in subject-matter and treatment. The word Schlemihl is a Hebrew word
variously interpreted as "Lover of God," or as "awkward fellow." If
it mean the former, Schlemihl then becomes a Theophilus, that medieval
Faust who also made a compact with the devil; if the latter, one who
breaks his finger when sticking it into a custard pie; then Schlemihl
is Chamisso himself, "that dean of Schlemihls," feeling himself at a
loss in any environment. He may be the man without a country, he may
be the man who draws attention to himself by selling what seems of
little value to him, but which afterward proves indispensable for the
right conduct of life. The story in this way brings forward a bit
of popular ethics, or, rather, it examines an ethical note from the
popular point of view. Like Hoffmann, Chamisso takes his reader into
the midst of current life, but, unlike Hoffmann, his moods are not
the dissolving views which leave the reader in doubt as to whether
the whole is a phantasmagoria and a hallucination. _Schlemihl_ is
genuinely and consistently realistic. It is a story in the first
person and has a rigidly logical arrangement of episodes leading up to
its climax. It does not make mood--it has mood.
The brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm are the products of Romantic
scholarship; they represent the highest type of scholarly attainment
and of scholarly personality. They are always thought of together, for
they shared all possessions alike and were not drawn apart by the fact
that William married and Jacob remained a bachelor. Their fidelity to
each other is touching, and no more lovable story is told than that
of Jacob's breaking down in a lecture and crying, "My brother is so
sick!"
Jacob (1785-1863) was the philologist, the inductive gatherer of
scientific material, the close logical deducer of facts. He "presented
Germany with its mythology, with its history of legal antiquities,
with its grammar and its history of language." He is the author of
Grimm's law of consonant permutation which laid the foundations of
modern philological science and is the founder of philological science
in general.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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