The narratives of Theodor Storm are among the outstanding achievements of classic German fiction. He has recently been described as "a master of atmosphere, unique in his ability to endow the details of realistic description with the fragile aura of transience." This third selection in Denis Jackson's pioneering series of translations contains three major works written in the 1870s:

Paul the Puppeteer is a magical portrayal of the vanishing world of the marionette theatre; it also contains sharp social comment in its contrast between solid, guild-dominated society and the gypsy-like travelling puppeteers.

The Village on the Moor is an account, told through an investigating lawyer's eyes, of the case of a mysterious death out on the moor, the chief suspect being a girl of sinister aura with whom the young deceased was in love.

The historical tale Renate, one of the most moving of all Storm's narratives, records the memories of an eighteenth-century Lutheran pastor and his love for a farmer's daughter who is persecuted by the local community for alleged witchcraft.

COVER ILLUSTRATION:
‘Der Puppenspieler’ by Rudolf Hans Hartmann, 1932.

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Paul the Puppeteer Selected text:

Scene from “Dr. Faustus”, with prince and princess of Parma, Faust and Kasper. Courtesy of Fritz Frey, Theaterfiguren-Museum, Lübeck.

It was an overcast autumn day; occasional golden leaves had already fallen to the ground; overhead a few shore-birds screeched in the sky as they flew out to sea over the tidal flats; there was no one to be seen or heard. I walked slowly through the weeds which grew rampant over the narrow paths until I reached a small paved courtyard that separated the garden from the house. I was right! Two large upper windows above looked down on to it; but behind the small leaded window-panes it was dark and empty, no puppet was to be seen. I stood for a while; it felt eerie in the surrounding stillness.
Then I saw the heavy back door below being opened a hand’s width from the inside, and at the same instant a small head of black hair peered out.
“Lisei!” I cried.
Her dark eyes opened wide at me in surprise. “God forbid!” she said, “I’d no idea who was rummaging about out here! Where’ve you come from?”
“Me? -- I’m out for a walk, Lisei! -- But tell me, is your play on at the moment?”
She shook her head, laughing.
“Then what are you doing here?” I asked, as I crossed the paved courtyard towards her.
“Waiting for father,” she said. “he’s gone to fetch some string and nails from the hostel; he’s getting things ready for this evening.”
“Then you’re all on your own here, Lisei?”
“No -- you’re here too, silly!”
“I mean,” I said, “is your mother up in the assembly room?”

Kasperle. Holzschnitt, 1850. Courtesy of Verlag Boyens & Co. Heide.

No, her mother was still in the hostel mending the puppets’ clothes; Lisei was here all alone.
“Listen,” I continued, “you can do me a favour; there’s a puppet called Kasperl in your collection; I’d just love to see him really close up.”
“You mean little Hans Wurstl?” said Lisei, and appeared to be thinking it over for a while. “Well, all right; but you’ll have to be gone before father gets back!”
We entered the house and quickly ran up the steep spiral staircase. It was almost dark in the large assembly room; for the windows which all looked out on to the courtyard were blocked by the stage; just a few rays of light fell through the gaps in the curtain.
“Come on!” said Lisei, pulling aside a screen of old carpet that hung by the wall; we slipped through, and there I stood in the temple of wonders. Viewed from the rear, however, and now in the light of day, it looked rather shabby; a framework of bars and planks over which hung some pieces of canvas daubed with paint; this was the set on which Saint Genovieve’s life had so strikingly left its mark on me.

"The Enchanted Castle” from Pandaemonium by Richard Bovet (1684). Reproduced by kind permission of the British Library (719.d.24).

While I was cautiously walking round the lonely farmhouse, first looking up at its begrimed windows, then up into the branches of the old trees where a pair of magpies screeched from their nest, an old woman came round the corner gathering fallen twigs in her apron. When I peered under the rough straw bonnet I recognised the sharp brown face of the well-known ‘Mother Pottsacksch’ who went from door to door in the town selling lilies of the valley and posies of woodruff or nuts and bilberries according to the season.
‘ Mother Pottsacksch!’ I cried, ‘do you live here in this big house?’
‘ Aye, young man,’ the old woman replied in her broad dialect. ‘I keep an eye on things around here!’
And on further questioning I learned the house had once been attached to a large farm, but that the land had been separated from it some hundred years ago, and before long, it was said, the farmstead itself -- as it was still called today -- was also to be sold for demolition and the trees felled.
I was sorry for the poor magpies which had carefully built their nest up in the trees. Then I asked her: ‘And who was it who lived here then, a hundred years ago?’
‘Then?’ exclaimed the old woman, pressing her free hand against her hip. ‘The witch, she lived here then!’
‘The witch?’ I repeated. ‘Were there witches here then?’
The old woman waved a hand at me. ‘Oho! The gentleman should mind his words.’ By which she implied that I should tread carefully, that there was still something sinister about the place even today.
When I asked if the witch had been burned, she shook her old head violently. ‘Oho! Oho!’ she cried again and gave me to understand that the Amtmann and the Landvogt had simply wanted to avoid the issue; for -- well, I was sure to understand; and amid meaningful nods of the head, she now made the gesture of counting money. The estate, in fact, had not been broken up until after the witch’s death; she had run it herself with a firm hand, and had been a capable farmer.
How this witch had actually practised witchcraft, Mother Pottsacksch appeared not to know. ‘The Devil’s work, sir!’ she said. ‘What such-a-folk do!’ This much however was certain: on Sundays, when other Christian folk had seated themselves in church to hear the Word of God, she had mounted a horse and ridden north into the heath and moorland; what she might have done there had given rise to many a dark speculation. But suddenly this had ceased, and she never again left her large gloomy room on Sundays; Mother Pottsack’s great-grandmother had seen her pale face with large burning eyes as she sat behind the small window panes.
More I could not get out of the old woman.
‘ And was the horse she rode black?’ I eventually asked, to complete the rapidly sketched picture in my mind.
‘ Black?’ shrieked Mother Pottsacksch, as though indignant at such a needless question. ‘Black as pitch! The gentleman can be sure of it!’

The Moor

I at once decided to inquire into the matter that very afternoon. In order to be less restricted I did without a clerk of the court and simply took the court messenger for company. We drove in an open carriage; for it was a mild autumn day, the kind that our region is always granted before the final onset of winter. The sturdy hedgerows, which we had on both sides of the road during the first hour, still bore some of their foliage; here and there between hazel and oak bushes a spindle-tree pushed itself forward, the graceful red priest’s-hood seedcases still hanging on its slender branches. As we drove on, my eyes took in a scene that was both peaceful and sad; yellow leaves, beneath the still warm rays of the sun, continually broke loose and sank to the ground, and from time to time a late thrush, shrieking in alarm, would flutter through the bushes away from the snorting of our horses.
But the landscape changed; the low hedgerows with cultivated fields behind them ceased. Instead we were driving along by the edge of the so-called ‘Wild Moor’, which at that time stretched to the north as far as the eye could see. It seemed as though the last rays of the sun remaining on earth had suddenly been swallowed up by this gloomy steppe. Amongst the dark-brown heather, often beside large or small pools, single stacks of peat loomed out of the barren expanse over which the occasionally melancholy call of a solitary plover would sound out of the sky. That was all that could be seen or heard.
I was reminded of something I had once read -- I think about the original Slav settler tribes that still populated the steppe of the lower Danube. At dusk a thing would rise up out of the moor there resembling a white thread, which they called the ‘white demon’. It would move towards the villages, steal into the houses, and when night came, rest on the open mouths of sleeping persons; then the initially thin thread would swell and grow to a monstrous shape. There would be no sign of it the next morning; but when a sleeper opened his eyes, he had become an imbecile in the night; the white demon had drunk the soul from his body. It would never return to him; the dreadful thing had carried it far off into the moor into the dank deep ditches between the heathland and the peat bog.
Not that the white demon was found in these parts; but the mists of these moors would thicken into no less eerie things that sought to confront many a villager, especially the older ones, at night and at twilight